The Fourth Network by Daniel M. Kimmel

Author:Daniel M. Kimmel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781566639514
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee

While The X-Files would eventually be an enormously important network hit, that was still in the future. More important things were happening in the present. If there was a single turning point in the history of the FOX network, a moment when the Big Three became the Big Four, it occurred in December 1993 with the simple announcement that NFL football was coming to FOX the following season. While to the public it was another instance of Rupert Murdoch whipping out his magic checkbook and outbidding his competitors, the behind-the-scenes story was much more complicated.

“First of all you have to give Barry Diller and Jamie Kellner the credit, because they were the ones who started talking to the NFL. Jamie went into the NFL long before anyone of the new regime,” explained Lucie Salhany. Talks had continued after their departures, and Salhany was not in the loop at first because she didn’t know much about sports. What she did know was television, which would prove to be just as important.

“The league’s perspective was that the ratings [for network football broadcasts] were going down—not horribly, but they were going down,” recalled Ken Ziffren, one of the attorneys representing the NFL at the time. Baseball and hockey license fees for the broadcast TV rights to games had suffered in recent years, and team owners were convinced that football would be next. “What FOX offered us, the league, was the potential of having a bidder who needed the games, wanted the games, and was willing—in a sense—to overpay for them. The issue was whether they were qualified.”

Lucie Salhany and Chase Carey led the FOX delegation to make the case to the NFL. The football league was divided into two divisions, or conferences, and suggested that FOX might be interested in the rights to their American Football Conference (AFC), whose games were then on NBC. “I didn’t know that much about football, candidly,” said Salhany. “So I kept thinking about it and I went back and researched it. I looked at all the markets [that had AFC teams], and I looked at where all the strength was, and it was really the NFC that was stronger.” The National Football Conference (NFC) teams were located in the major markets, which was where FOX was strongest. Salhany figured they would be better off pulling in viewers already committed to their local team than in running games with out-of-town teams where viewers might feel they had no stake.

She told the NFL that if the league were really smart they’d pull the NFC games off of CBS and give them to FOX instead. “I went through all of the ratings. It was losing audience. It was dropping. And they [the NFL] had no idea about this,” she said.

Ziffren noted that Murdoch, Carey, and Salhany made an impressively strong case for FOX. “I remember we had at least two sessions where all of them appeared before the owners to make presentations. [They] did an extremely effective job and tried to show the owners that they were bona fide contenders and deserved to be considered on the merits.

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