Word: station
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Many links in a chain must be completed, however, before sound can start bouncing off the living-room walls. In order to pick up a network stereo broadcast, a local station must first be adapted for stereo. Some 200 stations have made the technical conversion, and 300 more plan to do so this year. Then, of course, the home viewer must either have a stereo TV or convert his conventional set to stereo with an adapting device (average cost: $150). Once a set is stereo-ready, more sophisticated audio gear can be connected to it. Bill Artope, a producer...
...boycott was sparked last October by the demotion of Harry Porterfield, a black newsman who co-anchored WBBM's 6 p.m. weekday program. The station moved Porterfield to weekend anchor chores to make room for the returning Bill Kurtis, a former WBBM anchor who had left his post in 1982 to join the CBS Morning News. When the disaffected Porterfield was wooed by rival WLS-TV, WBBM offered to boost his salary to $300,000. After WLS again raised the ante, reportedly to a five-year contract worth more than $2 million, Porterfield opted to join WLS as a reporter...
Porterfield's case hardly suffices as a rallying cry to storm the barriers of discrimination. As Chicago Tribune Columnist Mike Royko put it, "I might understand PUSH's concern for Porterfield if he had been flung out of the station door and forced to cadge quarters on a street corner . . . (but) he hasn't exactly become a member of America's underclass...
Nonetheless, PUSH started picketing WBBM's offices twice a week and urged black viewers to tune out. In December the organization presented a proposed agreement to the station. The document called upon WBBM to hire two male black or Hispanic anchors and establish a 40% employment quota for minorities. It said the station should conduct 35% of its banking with black-owned institutions and assign 25% of its legal business to minority lawyers. WBBM also was asked to donate $10 million to the United Negro College Fund and $1 million to "black organizations designated by PUSH...
...boycott hurt the station's news shows? It is impossible to say. WBBM's news broadcasts, once ranked No. 1, have slipped to second place behind ABC-owned WLS. But the decline began several years ago, when Kurtis left for the CBS Morning News. WLS's potent schedule (the hugely popular Wheel of Fortune appears opposite the second half-hour of WBBM's 6 p.m. news show) and its vastly improved news programs have further siphoned off WBBM's audience. The CBS station has also been bedeviled by internal squabbling so severe that a shoving match once broke...