How embarrassed the regulators must be to observe that even this worst-case scenario--franchise-protected monopolists offering unregulated service at free-market prices--produced a bounty for consumers when compared to the regulated alternative. The 1984 Act deregulated rates as of December 29, 1986. Even though real prices for cable service rose 36.5 percent from 1987 to April 1991, operators added new channels and higher-quality programming so rapidly that consumers were better off. The proof is in TV customers' response to the new higher-priced but meatier package. Consumers responded positively: Whereas only 56.5 percent of households passed by a cable subscribed in 1984, that percentage jumped to 59.2 in 1988. And whereas basic cable networks garnered but a 17 share of television viewers (looking only at households with cable) in 1983-84, they recorded a 35 share in 1990-91. The quality of cable, spurred by huge increases in programming investments--basic cable network spending by operators surged from $325 million in 1984 to $1.72 billion in 1991--was rising faster than prices. That judgment was rendered not by cable operators or government regulators, but by the consuming public.
And just what was the public tuning in to watch? More movies, sports, police dramas, and sitcom re-runs on USA and the superstations such as WTBS and WGN. Recently released movies over HBO and Showtime. Blue movies on Playboy and adult movie channels. And more sports on ESPN and regional sports networks.
But there was something more on cable. There was CNN, considered impossible at its inception in 1981. Everyone knew that news was too expensive to program for small audiences, particularly 24-hour, around-the-globe news. It could never be profitable--that's why you needed the government to force broadcast licensees to provide this kind of stuff. But Ted Turner, a quirky roll-the-dice risk taker, figured out that by paying newscasters less and by spinning off news clips to nonaffiliated outlets, he could make money. By 1985, he did.
He does it both with his Headline News, a rapid-fire capsule format of major domestic and international stories, and with the original Cable News Network. CNN, beginning inauspiciously, became the TV network of record with its dramatic coverage of the 1991 Gulf War. Its ability to cover a story for hours on end allows it to provide a news product unique in the history of broadcasting. CNN, more than any other network, shows how the economics of television have fundamentally changed. It is cheap and easy for CNN to stay with a breaking story: It doesn't need to appeal to a mass audience. Indeed, while the three broadcast networks were routinely able each to get 30 percent of U.S. viewers to watch their shows in the late 1970s, CNN's brass is delighted if it gets 2 percent. A 5 percent share, and watch out: Ted's going to kiss his TV set!
Once CNN gets a news story with widespread popular interest, it can stay with it virtually forever. It doesn't have the opportunity cost the networks have--20 million or 30 million homes pining for some (Hollywood) cops-and-robbers. Suddenly it is Ted Turner's yacht--a brash, chaotic, and entrepreneurial vessel--setting the pace in the modern television market. The S.S. Minow, a government-issue junk, was shipwrecked back on Gilligan's desolate island, victim of a failed voyage and now but a distant memory in the new Information Age.
CNN isn't just news--it's diversity of expression. Evans & Novak, Capital Gang, and Both Sides with Jesse Jackson allow an idiosyncratic group of pundits to go their merry way on politics. Reliable Sources examines the role of the media, bringing in liberal and conservative journalists and media critics to debate the performance of the press. Larry King Live, Inside Politics, and Crossfire are daily shows dealing with political and cultural issues from opposing viewpoints. CNN & Company typically presents the viewpoints of three women and has a female moderator. Talk Back Live is an experiment in interactive television, allowing citizens to call, fax, or e-mail their views on the issues of the day.
When Larry King Live hosted the historic Ross Perot/Al Gore debate on NAFTA in late 1993, it gave us a textbook application of how television could advance First Amendment values. Similarly, the show played an integral role in the 1992 presidential election, providing the platform on which Ross Perot announced his independent presidential candidacy, while giving both Bill Clinton and George Bush the opportunity to interact via call-ins with American voters. This was a "town-hall" forum that never existed under the regulated broadcast structure. It simply didn't make economic sense under "the public interest."
The 1992 elections were a watershed in the CNN experiment. This unlicensed network, with no obligation for informational programming, without any equal-time requirements, subject to no Fairness Doctrine, without any public trusteeship responsibilities whatever, was the network to: a) be judged the "most believable" by U.S. television viewers, according to the Times Mirror Center for the People & Press; b) be deemed "best news source" and "best campaign coverage" among electronic networks by the American Journalism Review; and c) receive a $3.5 million grant from the Markle Foundation for news evaluation of presidential campaign advertising. This latter achievement was perhaps the most telling. The Markle Foundation is a very prestigious, nonpartisan, good-government institution that promotes research and public affairs to advance communications, particularly in the political realm. When setting about to fund an effort to monitor the claims made by candidates' ad spots, it attempted to do business with the Public Broadcasting Service. Talks broke down; Markle found PBS too political and bureaucratic.
The foundation then outraged many in the news business, and many more in the nonprofit sector, when it bestowed its generous grant upon a commercial enterprise--Turner Broadcasting. Rare is the foundation that tosses its cash around to profit-making businesses. But CNN performed beautifully, using the grant to create a weekly series during the 1992 presidential election cycle featuring objective analysis of the various campaign spots--CNN's "ad police." The underlying message was even more important: According to the revealed preference of America's communications scholars, the unlicensed, unregulated network was outperforming both the commercial networks and the subsidized public broadcasters in its public service.
In the international realm, the liberation of America's wireline press has had enormous impact. CNN, the world's first unlicensed, unregulated electronic news network, has destroyed old barriers and erased traditional borders with its low-cost, round-the-clock, real-time access to global events. Not only does CNN bring international news events to millions of Americans, it has injected American influence into the far nether reaches. Boris Yeltsin himself credits CNN's worldwide telecast of his dramatic lecture to the tank commander in the August 1991 coup as the defining moment in the Soviet Union's monumental crash and burn. Now there's a First Amendment value.
Other cable nets have arisen to fill out the program schedule on your local cable television dial, and the diversity of choice is astounding. Try CNBC for a host of political talk shows, including Equal Time--curiously, found on a network with no equal- time requirement. Pozner & Donahue, Tim Russert, and Cal Thomas provide Americans with news analysis from the socialist to the fundamentalist, with a batch of arrogant inside-the-Beltway types tossed in the middle. (Averaging just 173,000 viewing homes per night, the network is run so economically that it will make its owners $25 million this year.) Try Comedy Central for the clever and much-needed Politically Incorrect, Court TV for live coverage of a wide range of fascinating trials, complete with expert commentary. And check out C-SPAN and C-SPAN2 for a phenomenal plunge into wonk-heaven: nonstop, commercial-free public policy. Congressional sessions, think-tank conferences, political speeches, journalist roundtables--even re-enactments of all seven Lincoln-Douglas debates. And it is scrupulously bipartisan; indeed, the network makes repeated use of writers for such disparate think magazines as The Nation and National Review. On one November day, I switched from C-SPAN, televising an analysis of the GOP congressional sweep by political strategist William Kristol and noted political scientist Everett Carll Ladd, over to a hoary dismissal of everything American by the one-and-only Gore Vidal on C-SPAN2. To me, that's entertainment.
Beyond this rich mixture of information and public affairs, a broad range of special interests are also served by the unregulated media. Lifetime is a cable network devoted to women's perspectives, Black Entertainment Television to African Americans, Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Channel to children, Galavision and Telemundo to the Spanish-speaking, The Learning Channel and ME/U (Mind Extension University) to educational programs. Gay Entertainment Television is now available in 7 million of the 60 million U.S. cable homes, and scads of new specialty program services are on the launch pads.
The intellectual establishment in mass communications sees absolutely nothing to cheer about in this phenomenal new diversity. It furiously attacks the growth of the unregulated media, denounces the expansion of viewing choice on cable as so many sitcom reruns and home shopping bazaars, and pens diatribes against the alleged increasing concentration of media ownership. This is appallingly bad scholarship, as even the most casual investigation will show. Indeed, it is on the unregulated media such as C-SPAN that a rabble rouser such as Noam Chomsky roams free to expose the evil conspiracies that lurk all about his world.
The ironies are too rich for my diet. How delicious to catch Jesse Jackson on his CNN show denouncing market competition as so much "Reagan-era deregulation." At long last, to find one man in this materialistic world who is willing to so completely ignore his own self-interest. After all, the Reverend's previous show biz effort fizzled on syndicated broadcast TV, canceled as a ratings flop. He was snatched from talk-show oblivion by CNN, a network whose niche audience was tailor-made for a political man with a minority point of view. But the Rev. Jackson is influenced not a whit by his career windfall: He stands up for what he believes in.
Not so courageous, Jeff Cohen. When I debated Mr. Cohen, director of a left-wing media watchdog group called Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting some three years back, he dismissed my paean to competition, totally unconvinced that deregulation of cable television had had any positive impact. He did concede that CNN was, indeed, the one network that allowed him a platform from which to spout his out-of-the-mainstream views. "But that is not because of any commitment to free speech," he emphatically insisted, "but only because they have so much time to fill."
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