Word: boycotts
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...senior vice president of programs and talent on the West Coast. "But he encountered a string of bad luck-a crucial ingredient in this business. He had to cope with an actors' strike, a writers' strike and the loss of the Moscow Olympics last year." The Olympics boycott cost NBC a write-off of $33.7 million-and an invaluable opportunity to promote its upcoming fall shows. First Silverman promised that NBC would show significant improvement in the ratings by the end of 1980, then by May of this year, then by next fall. Too late...
...television's Armageddon, previously announced for last week, has been postponed until further notice. After threatening for months to produce a list naming the sponsors most responsible for supporting sex, profanity and violence on TV, the Mississippi-based Coalition for Better Television abruptly announced that its proposed consumer boycott of the offending advertisers was off-for the moment. Appearing at a Washington press conference with Anti-Feminist Phyllis Schlafly and Moral Majority guru, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, CBTV head, the Rev. Donald Wildmon, explained that productive discussions with executives of the companies in question had made a boycott unnecessary...
...recent ABC poll of 1,400 people chosen at random showed that only 13% supported a lobbying campaign to change TV content. Only about 2% said they would support a boycott to serve the coalition goals and had boycotted products in the past. Moreover, avowed members of the Moral Majority (6.6% of the sample) had the same program preferences as other Americans...
...means sympathetic to the Moral Majority, feel that TV needs to be cleaned up. Who is to do it? In deference to the First Amendment, the Federal Communications Commission, Congress and the courts are either unwilling or unable to censor program content. If CBTV does it through a sponsor boycott, some who are sympathetic to the goals will oppose the tactic, or worry about the ramifications. Says Alan Reitman of the American Civil Liberties Union: "While every group has a right to protest, there's countervailing civil liberties concern that what the coalition is calling for is also...
Wildmon says he would welcome strange bedfellows. "If the A.C.L.U. wanted to cooperate with us in this television area," he says, "I'd be tickled to death." His rationale for the sponsor boycott is simple: "The clearest expression of the First Amendment is the right of a person to spend his money where he so desires. The networks can show what they want. Sponsors can sponsor what they want. It's the marketplace taking care of itself...