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MEDIA Sex at 6 and 10

How Channel 5 is trying to catch up in the ratings race.
By Rowland Stiteler |

The production wasn’t subtle, but then it was never intended to be. The setting was a disco. There in the midst of all the pulsating lights and gyrating bodies was Chip Moody, KXAS-TV’s $30,000-plus annual investment in media macho. Surrounding Channel 5’s top anchorman were several pretty young women, all making visual passes at Moody while the music throbbed. The 30-sec-ond video vignette might have been suitable for viewing at the KXAS office Christmas party, but its producers had a much larger audience in mind. The scene was a promotional advertisement for the “Texas News,” specifically projecting Moody’s personality. There was only one element of his personality, of course, which the producers wished to project: sex appeal.

Several years ago, television programming researchers determined that the most important component of the viewing audience is 18-to-49-year-old women. They control a large portion of the American family’s spendable income, and usually its viewing habits as well. With that point in mind, it becomes a little easier to understand how someone in the KXAS-TV promotion department spawned the idea for one of the most mindless pieces of video-taped fluff in local programming history. The idea was simple. Why not go straight for the heart of the issue? Why mess around with ancillary elements of television news, like reporting, aggressiveness, and news judgment? Why not make a commercial that will tell the audience, and the advertisers as well, that Chip Moody appeals to the 18-to-49-year-old woman? He can’t even walk into a disco without being attacked; the evidence is right there on your screen.

Moody saw the disco commercial before it was to be aired on Channel 5, and to his credit, went through the roof. Moody reminded his employers that he was a married man with two children. Channel 5 had shown his family to its audience in previous commercials. Did the station really want people to think that when Moody leaves the anchor desk of the “Texas News” each night, he chases women in a disco? His logic prevailed. The original version of the commercial was killed before it hit the air. In order to salvage some of the several thousand dollars spent producing the scene, a modified version began airing this spring. No women swoon over Chip this time. He just walks around a disco for 30 seconds, giving the audience mysterious looks. The commercial makes absolutely no sense, unless you know about the version that never made it. But the story makes more than a good inside joke for the KXAS staff. It is an indication of things to come, as Channel 5 tries to regain the ratings summit for local news.What makes the ratings battle par-ticularly unpleasant for the staff at KXAS is that WFAA, Channel 8, is winning itoverwhelmingly. The most recent local ratings showed that in the 10 p.m. news slot – the news program time with the largest audience – Channel 8 had 45 percent of the viewers, compared with 25 for Channel 5 and 21 for Channel 4. In the industry, anything over 40 percent is considered a stranglehold on the audience.

“After months and months of getting buried by Channel 8,” says one KXAS news staff member, “we stopped thinking we had a chance against them. It’s as if we developed a group inferiority complex, because we knew damn well that nobody was really watching our newscasts. They were all watching Channel 8.”

What is at stake every evening in the ratings game is more than what WFAA’s promotional spots euphemistically call “Channel 8 Pride.” It’s Channel 8 money. And Channel 5 money. And Channel 4 money. Rating points mean big dollars. There was a time inthe early days of television when news was aired as a ’ public service. Those days are long gone. Television news is a money-making operation, and rating points determine just how lucrative a local news operation can be.

There is a direct correlation between Channel 8’s news ratings supremacy and Channel 8’s news advertising rate supremacy. A 30-second advertising spot on Channel 8 news currently costs from $1500 to $3300, depending on the time the commercial runs and the backlog of ads in the station’s inventory. The same spot on Channel 5 costs from $900 to $1500. Channel 4, number three in the ratings, will sell you 30 seconds in the news slot for $600 to $1000. It doesn’t take much calculating to see how vital these figures are to station management. There are roughly 10 to 12 commercials in a 30-minute newscast. Each station broadcasts a minimum of 19 newscasts a week. That means more than 200 of the 30-second spots will be aired by each station each week. Multiply that by Channel 8’s bare minimum $1500 commercial rate and you’ll find that news programming alone will produce a gross revenue of at least $300,000 per week. When you consider that Channel 8’s cheapest 30-second spot costs as much as Channel 5’s most expensive, it it not difficult to see why management at Channel 5 has become so acutely interested in ratings.

FCC statistics released last summer show that the four major commercial stations in the Dallas-Fort Worth market netted a combined total profit of about $36.2 million in 1977 (the most recent reporting year.) That represents 54 percent of their gross revenues. Ratings, of course, are the determining factor in who earns the largest portion of that huge pie. That fact is not lost on Blake Byrne, president and general manager of KXAS. He knows his news ratings are sagging, and he has taken steps to see that they go up – no matter what it takes.



The ratings war at Channel 5 has produced great pressures and a number of significant casualties in recent months. In March, Russ Bloxom, who had the distinction of being the 10 o’clock anchor man for 10 years (longer than anyone else in this market), walked out. The next day Frank Healer, anchor of the recently cancelled “Texas News” at noon, resigned. Shortly after that, John Gross, the sports director, said he was leaving for Detroit. A few days later it was announced that Frank Glieber, who had been doing 5 and 6 p.m. sports casts and was considered the station’s top sports figure, was leaving as soon as a new sports director could be found. After that, periodic anchorman Willie Monroe resigned. A few months earlier, Lee Elsessor, who had risen through the ranks at KXAS to become news director, was removed from his job. Reason: news ratings.

“It’s going to be difficult for you to write anything comprehensive about all the resignations,” a KXAS news staff member told me one afternoon in an East Fort Worth coffee shop, “because by the time you get your article in print there will be a lot of new resignations.” There is no doubt that it is house-cleaning time at Channel 5.

Some of the old-timers like Blox-om – in television, 40 is ancient – like to remember when things were much more pleasant at Channel 5, back in 1974. The station, then called WBAP-TV, belonged to Carter Publications, Inc., the legacy of Amon G. Carter Sr. The pace was slow; Channel 5’s newscast exuded down-home Texana. News directors followed a simple creed: “We don’t care about pretty faces; we just want good reporters.” There was no particular emphasis on style. A newscast just kind of happened. It was apparently what the viewers wanted, because in the early and mid-Seventies, Channel 5 was number one at 6 and 10 p.m. WBAP won the ratings contest by breaking even in Dallas and piling up an overwhelming lead in Fort Worth. Channel 5 was a Fort Worth institution. But all that was to change drastically in a few short years.

In 1974 Carter Publications sold Channel 5 for $35 million to LIN Broadcasting, a New York-based media corporation with a reputation for knowing how to make properties pay. It was the beginning of the end of an era.

“I’ll never forget my first real encounter with the people from LIN Broadcasting,” Bloxom told me recently as he sat reflecting on the abrupt end of his television career. “Shortly after the sale was completed in ’74, all the big shots from LIN hosted a get-acquainted dinner at the Colonial Country Club. They invited the key people from Channel 5, as well as the anchor team. I sat at a table with one of their vice presidents for marketing. He told me, ’Russ, the name of the game in television is share points, dollars, and demos.’ I didn’t even know what ’demos’ were. But I was later to learn very, very clearly. It’s audience demographics, specifically, the number of 18-to-49-year-old women who watch your program each night.”

The share points, dollars, and demos did not spell trouble for anyone on the Channel 5 staff when LIN first took over. LIN had purchased the number-one-rated station in one of the country’s fastest-growing media markets for what now has to be considered a good price: $12.5 million in cash and $22.5 million in notes. It was a fine deal for LIN. The KXAS broadcast license was, as one local television veteran put it, “tantamount to having a license to print money. On slow days, a mint can’t turn out as many bucks as Channel 5.”

But trouble was brewing at the other end of the turnpike. WFAA-TV was building its news staff and pumping up its image. At about the same time LIN was busy acquiring Channel 5, WFAA’s new news director Marty Haag was busy acquiring as many good reporters as he could find. He was building a reporting base for Channel 8’s ascent from number three to number one. And he was indulging in a little show biz.

In July of 1975 a consultant firm hired by Channel 8, Entertainment Research Analysis of San Francisco, ran a rather curious test to determine who the anchor people should be. A sample audience of 45 people was given a galvanic skin response test – a measurement of arousal – while watching films of local news personalities. Tracy Rowlett and Iola Johnson made the audience more aroused than the other applicants did. Channel 8 management made the decision to put Rowlett and Johnson on the anchor desk and stick with them. Channel 8’s audience research showed that about 40 percent of the people who watch television news watch because they are interested in the content and about 35 percent watch because of the personalities of the newscasters. The station made a strong bid for both audiences, and by 1977, it was number one at 10 p.m.

“They were playing big league ball over there,” Channel 5’s Joe Stroop recalls, “while we were still playing bush league.”

Channel 5’s troubles came from other places than Dallas, however. At the same time Channel 8 was building its news department, ABC, the network WFAA carries, was building up its prime-time programming dominance. Channel 5 news was faced with a shortage of “lead-in” viewers, the audience watching the programming just before the newscast. The most recent ratings book shows that on Friday nights, for instance, Channel 8 has a lead-in audience for its 10 p.m. news of 287,000 viewers, compared to 81,000 for Channel 5. Television research shows that one of the principal laws governing viewing habits is inertia: The viewer has to have something to make her turn away from a channel, or she will usually leave her dial alone when the programs change.

It did not take Channel 5 management long to realize that it had to do something to get back in the game. About two years ago, the station hired the services of Frank N. Magid and Associates, the most widely known (and most controversial) television programming consultants in the business. For about $25,000 a year, Magid will tell you what’s wrong with the way your news program looks and sounds. He will tell you what’s wrong with your anchor people’s style, delivery, and faces. He will tell you what types of stories your audiences want to hear. And he will tell you how to get your rating points up.

Magid, more than any other consultant, has been given credit in the industry for inventing “happy talk” news, a format designed to entertain and reassure the viewer, more than to inform her. Magid laid the groundwork for shows like “Good Morning America” with his research for ABC-TV. It is Magid who, according to a recent book called The Newscasters, by Ron Powers, advised radio station WMAQ in Chicago that “research indicates ratings rise when the broadcaster is successful in exposing the listener to what he wants to hear, in the very personal way he wants to hear it. In terms of news, this means ratings are improved not when listeners are told what they should know, but what they want to hear.” News directors all over the country have followed that advice. Their share points, dollars, and demos have flourished. That has won Frank Magid many a follower.

It has also gained him some enemies. “I may be old-fashioned,” says KXAS’s former anchorman, Frank Healer, “but I never could bring myself to think of news as entertainment. It’s not entertainment; it’s more important than that. . . .A lot of us old-timers have developed the opinion that consultants should be treated the way you treat a rabid animal – taken out and shot.”

After Channel 5 signed up with Magid, the station began to re-evaluate various elements of its “look.” About a year ago, management determined that the women the “Texas News” put on camera were, in a word, ugly. “Blake formed the opinion that our women were a bunch of dogs,” says one former KXAS employee. “I think he decided that we either ought to get them enrolled in a kennel club or get something done about the way they looked on camera.”

Three of the women, Pat Couch, Mary Ruth Carleton, and Vernell Jessie, were sent to New York for a revamp by former opera singer Dorothy Sarnoff, who is now, oddly enough, a television news consultant.

Ms. Sarnoff was most unflattering about Miss Couch, the only one of the three who remains at Channel 5.

“She jumped on Pat about her hair. She jumped on Pat about her glasses,” the former employee told me. “She even told Pat that her bra was all wrong for television.” Some bras, apparently, just aren’t good journalism.

Miss Couch was a little hurt by Ms. Sar-noff’s evaluation, but she followed her advice. Now she never wears her glasses on camera. “When she’s anchoring the weekend news,” a Channel 5 staffer told me, “it presents a problem. Pat can’t read the teleprompter. 1 don’t think she can even see the teleprompter. She has to hold her copy right up under her face to read it.” Next time you watch the Channel 5 weekend news, look at the bottom of the television screen. You’ll see the edge of Pat Couch’s news copy.

The personnel makeover process at Channel 5 was not limited to the women. One by one, the anchormen went north to Marion, Iowa, to spend a day in front of a television camera and a Magid consultant.

“They had me do a newscast in my normal style,” recalls Bloxom. “They taped it. And then a Magid staff member sat down and watched it with me. . . I remember that she didn’t like the way I held my hands. She said my hands were too angelic-looking. She told me that I wasn’t threatening enough. She talked about my phraseology, my facial expressions, my ability to project emotion.” Then Bloxom was sent back to the drawing board. He re-did his mock newscast. More evaluation.

“The lady who evaluated me sent a follow-up letter to Elsessor [then the news director]. When I saw it, I found it to be very negative. . . .I think there is some irony in the fact that Elsessor showed me the letter and told me what my annual raise was going to be at the same time.” Bloxom got 7 percent that year.

Chip Moody had a similar experience. He was called into Blake Byrne’s office. Byrne, Moody, and a Magid staff member in Iowa got on a conference call together and talked about Moody’s weak points and strong points. After the evaluation was over, Moody was given his raise.

While Channel 5 was telling its newscasters how to be news personalities, it was busy producing promotional material for the viewers. About a year ago, Channel 5 commissioned a company from Pittsburgh to film a series of 30-second commercials with the theme “Come on Home to Texas News.”

“A lot of people in the news department had mixed emotions about that concept,” said one staff member, “because we were admitting, on the face of the message, that we had lost the audience. It was as if we were begging them to come back to us for sentimental reasons.”

But KXAS management apparently felt strongly enough about the concept to fork over about $30,000 for three 30-second promotional spots. They told the viewers that Channel 5 newscasters were real people. That, of course, took some packaging.

A cameraman, sound man, and field producer followed Bloxom to a hayfield and had him shoot his shotgun in the air. It was to be 15 seconds or so of Bloxom the Great Hunter. It never made the air. What did was a segment shot of Bloxom at Whiskey River. Bloxom did some country-western dancing with his wife and several other people. The portion of the scene that was shown on television showed him in the act of moving away from his wife and reaching for another woman.

“It puzzles me why they did it that way,” Bloxom says. “After that commercial aired, people would come up to me on the street and ask me who that other woman was that I was dancing with on television.”

There were other scenes in the campaign designed to bring across some kind of message. One showed Frank Healer sharing a soft drink with a black railroad worker. Another showed Moody reaching across a picnic table to offer his son a bite of a hot dog. The scenes were all staged, of course. There were re-take soft drinks and re-take barbecue sandwiches and retake softball pitches. Spontaneity and sincerity are rarely captured on the first take.

There is irony in the “Come on Home” jingle. One of its lines goes, “We’re not just passing through.” Ultimately, however, the film spots had to be taken off the air because too many of the staff members featured in the commercial were gone.

The promotional campaign did not have much impact on Channel 5’s news ratings. As 1978 rolled along, the share points and demos began to look bleaker and bleaker for the “Texas News.”

Early this year, general manager Blake Byrne took stronger action. He called in Lee Elsessor and removed him from his duties as news director. Maybe someone else could do what Elsessor couldn’t – put the station back in contention.

For this task, Byrne selected Bill Vance, news director at WBNS-TV in Columbus, Ohio. Vance had a good record. WBNS, which is a CBS affiliate and therefore has the same lead-in problems any non-ABC station would have, garnered a 51 percent audience share for its 6 p.m. news and a 48 percent share for its 10 p.m. telecast under Vance. He knew how to get those share points in order. And at WBNS, he had worked with Frank Magid.

It did not take Vance long to make his presence known among the “Texas News” staff. He arrived in town one Sunday in late February. At 10:30 that evening, right after the 10 p.m. newscast, he summoned his new staff for a little chat.

“He told us, very quickly, that we were a very poor number two and that Frank Magid market surveys proved it,”Bloxom recalls. “He said that there were going to be some changes. He said that no one on staff was a marked man, but that no one was sacred, either.”

Five days later Vance approached Blox-om right after he finished the 10 p.m. news.

“I’ll never forget what he said to me,” Bloxom says. “He said, ’Russ, you’re going to have to pump more blood into it or you’re just not going to make it. When I watch you, I see Mt. Rushmore. That’s not bad company, but it’s not good for television. You’ve got a little Brinkley in you, but you need to be doing Bloxom.’

“The funny thing is,” Bloxom told me as he recalled the incident, “I always thought I was Russ Bloxom. Whatever I was doing was good enough to keep me in front of an audience for 10 years.”

As Vance talked to Bloxom after that early March newscast, he laid out some signs which Bloxom knew meant trouble.

“He told me, ’You need to get more excitement and vitality into your style. . . . You’re just not getting through to the 18-to-49-year-old woman.’ ” Bloxom knew he was hearing the beginning of his television obituary: share points, dollars, and demos. Bloxom decided to get out while he was still on top. He did not want his career to end in a pathetic trail from field reporting to unemployed obscurity. A few days later, he presented Byrne with a letter of resignation.

The next day Frank Healer quit. “I was gonna quit the same day Bloxom did,” Healer told me as we stood in the parking lot of a Fort Worth barbecue cafe, both of us staring at the tops of Healer’s calfskin cowboy boots. “By then I was just as fed up as I think Russ was. This may sound corny,” Healer said, “but there are too many people around there now who can smile at you and then stick you. It’s just not the Texas way to do things. I quit with no job to go to; that should tell you something.”



Blake Byrne was smiling when I walked into his office at Channel 5 headquarters. He was smiling when 1 left. There was very little I could say during our interview to interrupt that smile. I shared the general manager’s attention with a bank of three television screens playing opposite his desk, over my shoulder.

What, Byrne asked me, trouble at Channel 5? The reports in the Dallas Morning News and Times Herald had just gotten out of hand, he said; things were not nearly as bad at Channel 5 as the columnists might make it appear. Bloxom had left to open a travel agency, Byrne said, and Healer had left because his wife had inherited some land in West Texas. No hard feelings on anyone’s part.

“What about the departure of Frank Glieber?” I asked. “I understand he’s leaving as soon as you find a new sports anchor.”

“That’s news to me,” Byrne told me. “That’s certainly not anything I know about.” (Vance told me the next day that Glieber was leaving and that Vance and Byrne had both talked to him at length about his decision.)

“If I don’t get you to answer another question at all,” I told Byrne, “I would sure like to get an answer to this: Why are the ratings so important to Channel 5? Every indication is that you are perhaps winning the money battle, making more money than the competition, and that’s a lot. Why do you worry about the ratings game?”

“Because I want to win all the games, okay?” Byrne responded. “Hey, that’s just the kind of a guy I am. 1 don’t like to be number two at anything.”

As 1 watched Byrne, I wondered why he wasn’t on the screen himself. He certainly pumps blood better than his employees. He has good gestures. Excellent eye contact. He looks 10 years younger than his 43 years. If Byrne’s news staff only had his stage presence, Byrne’s share points, dollars, and demos would be in much better shape.

“Some of your employees tell me that Channel 5 is the major profit-making element for LIN Broadcasting, that Channel 5 sent $4 million to New York last year. I also understand that you have a huge note to pay off for the purchase of this station, that you are more or less against the wall. How much of that is true?”

“Hey,” says Byrne. “What if you’re paying off a $50,000 house note and the guy sitting next to you got his house as a gift from his parents? You gotta run harder, right? Sure we got a note to pay off. We’ve got to run harder. . . .Why do journalists all seem to think that there is something wrong with making a profit? We’ve got no apologies to make for making a profit.”

I never got an exact accounting of just how much money Channel 5 is making, but there are indicators that the profits are very good. KXAS is far and away the biggest of the three television properties LIN owns; Standard & Poor market reports show that in 1977, 64 percent of LIN’s broadcast revenues came from its television properties. In 1974, LIN, a public company, had a net income of $2.17 million. In 1975, the first full year that KXAS was under LIN ownership, the corporation’s net income after taxes jumped to $4.2 million. Last year, LIN netted $11.5 million. No one will dispute that KXAS-TV is a gold mine, and the LIN Broadcasting management cadre are all experienced with picks and shovels.

One of the more capable members of that management cadre is Bill Vance. He makes it very clear that he knows his business and that he will not settle for anything less than a surge in the news ratings.

“I didn’t come here from a good job at another station to be number two,” Vance told me one afternoon in his office, where he was working feverishly behind a desk cluttered with demonstration tapes from new job applicants.

“It appears to me that down-home Texana is dead at Channel 5,” I tell him. “It appears that there will probably be a lot of changes around here. Right?”

“Maybe so,” he responds, looking at the memo he is writing. “Our research shows us that we aren’t even winning in Tarrant County anymore. Our research shows that people are tired of that old down-home image. They think of themselves as a lot more sophisticated than they used to be. . . .They want quality. There is no substitute for a quality product.”

“But what of the Bloxoms and the Healers that are being shaken off here? What are your feelings about their departure?”

“Did me a favor,” Vance says. “I guess that just gives me a lot more latitude in hiring my own people, doesn’t it?”

“What about your consultant Frank Magid?” I ask. “He has a reputation for promoting happy talk news. Does that say something about what we are going to see at Channel 5?”

“I used Frank Magid at Columbus,” says Vance. “He was hired against my recommendation and his contract was renewed with my recommendation. I am going to use any resource available to me to make us number one… But packaging will only get you so far. People stop watching if they find out the pretty package doesn’t contain anything.”

Right.

One of the principal complaints about Channel 5, I tell Vance, is that LIN is so profit-hungry that it is cheap with its employees. Isn’t it true that anchor people like Moody make anywhere from one half to one third of what their counterparts at Channel 8 earn?

“I guess I could say that their ratingsare anywhere from one half to a third ofChannel 8’s ratings, couldn’t I?” Vanceresponds. “If those ratings come up, I’msure we can get those salaries up there. Ican’t see top management quibbling overa few thousand dollars when the ratingsare concerned. There is just too much bigmoney at stake.”

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