Broadcasting Telecasting (Jul-Sep 1958)

EDITORIALS Quizzical IT is not surprising that the newspapers are having a field day with all the charges and insinuations that are being batted back and forth in the current quiz show "scandal." Perhaps television is lucky that some such episode didn't come sooner. It's also conceivable that television is lucky to have the episode come now instead of later. For whether any given quiz show is rigged or not. this bright glare of publicity should also illuminate two points that are so obvious that broadcasters may have tended to take them for granted. First is the need to be circumspect — not just cursorily attentive, but actively, aggressively proper. Any bobble is going to be magnified out of proportion, just as the newspapers are blowing up the to-do over quiz shows. Beyond that, the incident emphasizes the fundamental need for broadcasters to take responsibility for the programs they broadcast. The fact that a show is owned and/or produced by an independent packager does not absolve the network or station of its responsibility in carrying the program. Getting to the key question in the investigation, it would be naive to think that producers of quiz programs do not take pains to pick, and would like to keep, contestants who are audiencebuilders. Moreover it is possible to favor one contestant over another in little ways far short of furnishing questions or answers in advance, and no doubt this has been done on occasion. But the producers themselves would be unbelievably naive to think that the audiences — at least till now — have not watched in the belief that the contests are on the level. They must know, too, that viewers would not be apt to watch with such ardor if they knew a quiz was rigged. Hence to rig one would be to risk disillusioning and alienating the audience and, whether it's illegal or not, would show incredibly poor business judgment. The Hardest Sell: Self-Help VACATION season is over. The sound of the gavel supplants the splash of the surf. NAB fall conferences get under way next week. State meetings are upcoming everywhere. The Radio Advertising Bureau and Television Bureau of Advertising have scheduled clinics and meetings. And the various city radio-tv clubs and societies return to normal luncheon procedures after the normal summer hiatus. There's plenty to talk about. Almost everybody learns something at these meetings. They're far better than they used to be, although even more streamlining and consolidating is desirable. Broadcasters benefit from the interchanges, and so do broadcasting's immediate customers among advertisers and agencies. But what about the customers of the advertisers — the listening and viewing public? Patently, anything that helps the broadcaster logically inures to the benefit of the consumer. Yet he seems to be the forgotten man on most of the meeting agendas. The complaint often made — and with validity — is that broadcasters, who do a magnificent job of selling the potency of their media to others, have never really sold themselves. Obviously, there's a nuts and bolts job to be done. Both radio and tv need it; tv perhaps more than radio. Fundamentally, the fight is over the advertising dollar. If broadcasters can effectively sell for others, why not for themselves? Two tv stations recently reported [Editorials, Aug. 4] that they found on-the-air promotion more effective for audience development than use of display space in their local newspapers. One tv station buys spots on two radio stations in its market for the same purpose. C. Wrede Petersmeyer, the energetic head of the Corinthian stations, has proposed to the NAB tv board of which he is a member that NAB and TvB get together on a promotion campaign for tv, on tv. He believes $100,000 judiciously spent for a professional campaign of filmed "commercials" would sell the medium as no other promotion could. He regards such a campaign articulating the values of tv as a pressing and immediate need. And he is joined in this view by other tv leaders. To date an ad hoc committee is studying the idea. Mr. Petersmeyer wanted it to get under way last April — in time for the buying season now upon us. Tv broadcasters are the TvB and something akin to an undivided half of the NAB. Radio broadcasters are the RAB and have a simi Page 110 • September 8, 1958 Drawn for BROADCASTING by Sid Hlx "Look, Al. First time on tv — a liquor commercial." lar proprietary relationship with NAB. It is their money and their right to call the shots. At all these meetings upcoming certainly the pros (we can't conceive of any cons) of self-promotion and perhaps cross-pollination between radio and tv, deserve highlighted billing — and action. Expertly contrived on-the-air spot campaigns are bound to sell the virtues of broadcasting just as they sell goods for advertisers. The organizations are there. The time is there. The money is there, or easily raised. All that's needed is organized action. Double Play TT is now clear that professional baseball is determined to obtain A the legal means of conspiring to install itself as the first main attraction, indeed the motivating force, of subscription television. As reported in this publication over the past two months, the moguls of baseball almost succeeded in beguiling the 85th Congress into passing a law exempting them from antitrust prosecution. If their lobbying — as skillful and intense as any in recent legislative history — had prevailed, the club owners would have been free to withhold all games from tv until a pay system came along. Subscription television, in the belief of the baseball trust, offers the biggest money-making opportunity for baseball since the discovery of Babe Ruth. As authority for the eagerness with which the club owners anticipate the arrival of pay tv, we quote Paul McNamara, vice president of International Telemeter, a leading pay tv promoter. In a letter to Rep. Emanuel Celler (D-N.Y.), a foe of subscription tv and of the proposal to liberate baseball from the antitrust laws, Mr. McNamara acknowledged that officials of both big leagues had assured him they wanted subscription television. Mr. McNamara's letter to Mr. Celler [Government, Aug. 25] confirmed what until then was only a logical suspicion of a conspiracy between baseball and subscription tv. The suspicion had been based on such perhaps circumstantial evidence as the fact that Paul Porter, attorney for baseball, is also the attorney for International Telemeter. But the connection of baseball and pay tv is now a matter of record. Together, they constitute a powerful lobby with great influence at its command. Not the least of that influence comes from the emotionalism which the U. S. public and its elected representatives attach to the "national sport." Not giving baseball what it wants is, to a good many fans, like not giving milk to a baby. The baseball-pay tv interests will trade on that emotional appeal. At the next Congress they will go to bat again. Meanwhile, free television cannot afford to sit idle. The true purposes of baseball's legislative gambit must be made clear to those who will sit in the 86th Congress. The more the leagues and club owners maneuver around Washington, the less claim they have to be engaged in a clean-cut, ailAmerican game. To judge by its present aspirations and activities, if baseball is a sport, so is the Mafia. Broadcasting