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...best strategy is often to go deep and hope something good happens. And that's exactly what three television networks did last week, reaching deep into their pockets to pay $17.6 billion for the right to broadcast National Football League games until 2005. Says Robert Iger, president of ABC Inc., the Walt Disney Co.-owned media firm, which spent $9.2 billion on both network and cable-television rights: "Losing would have been devastating...
Winning might not be much better. Although the entertainment business often makes deals that seem right out of Fantasyland, the money that ABC, CBS and Fox are paying demonstrates just how desperate the network-television business has become. CBS paid $4 billion to get back in the game, intercepting rights to the American Football Conference previously held by NBC. A day later ABC, the No. 3 network, outbid NBC with a $4.4 billion deal to retain Monday Night Football. Its cable unit, ESPN (which shared Sunday-night games with Turner Broadcasting's TNT for eight years), dropped $4.8 billion...
...networks essentially paid double the previous contract for programming that is steadily losing viewership. NFL ratings have tumbled about 33% since their peak in the early 1980s. And overall network viewership continues to dwindle: the prime-time ratings on ABC, CBS and NBC have fallen 47% over the same period. "What this shows you is that it's not football that is the draw," says Porter Bibb, a media analyst with Ladenburg, Thalmann & Co., "but that the networks are struggling for survival...
...logic that compelled ABC to pay so much for Monday Night Football is also expansive. Without its "crown jewel," ABC would have a serious programming hole on Monday night--try coming up with half a dozen new shows. And even with diminished ratings, football still delivers eyeballs, particularly those of the young male viewers whom advertisers of cars, beer and other guy stuff want to reach. Although Monday Night's ratings are at an all-time low, the program ranked fifth among prime-time shows...
...Encouragingly for the President, an ABC poll found that no more women than men expressed reservations over his possible dalliances. "If he did it, so what?" Kansas City resident Sherri Ford told the AP. At the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Meredith Oakley merely shrugs. This, she says, is why Clinton's home state called him Slick Willie all along...