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April 7, 2005 |
New York — Media mogul Rupert
Murdoch announced yesterday the launch of a new channel, and it could
be available on your cable provider as early as next spring.
Copying the successful business models applied to extremely narrow
niches such as The Weather Channel, The History Channel, Biography,
SciFi, and The Cartoon Network, the new channel will be called The
Deathwatch Channel, featuring 24-hour coverage of death and dying. "This is something I had
considered before," Murdoch mused, "shortly after Reagan died, but I
wasn't sure if the market was really there, thinking that perhaps the
interest in the ex-president's funeral was a fluke. The man was,
after all, one of the true intellects of the 20th century. That
the ratings at Fox News during the coverage of his funeral were
record-breaking was not only understandable, but expected." The
idea for a bold new channel devoted to such fare had germinated, but
Murdoch remained uncertain as to whether to proceed with the
venture. A real appeal for this sort of thing when it dealt with nonpolitical figures was not
definitely established. That is, not until Terry Schiavo's
14-day slide into the maw of death captured national attention.
Again, ratings were phenomenal, even higher than for the Reagan
funeral. "At that point, the germination really began to take
root, but I still harbored some reservations." Schiavo's death
had been heavily politicized, particularly by Murdoch's very own Fox
News. To Fox News viewers' delight, the Republicans had taken the
offensive and turned what was initially a private family matter into a
cage match and headlock between the political right and the left. Fox News
was there to assist in the charge and it equaled big dollars in
advertising fees. The final gleam to the idea of a channel devoted to celebrity moribundity was soon to come. Only hours after Terry Schiavo was pronounced dead, and the klieg lights and cameras were loaded into network vans — thus leaving protesters with no one to diplay their bad spelling for — fortune struck again. Suffering the ailments common to most octogenarians, and having more recently degenerated into persistent ill-health, Pope John Paul II took a turn for the worst. A kidney infection had driven up his temperature. Only one day after Schiavo breathed her last breath, the pontiff lost consciousness, and a new deathwatch was roundly underway. It was at this point that the concept for the new channel crystallized. "The ratings for the Pope's deathwatch were lower than for Terry's," Murdoch noted, "but only by a margin. Taking into account Terry's phenomenal ratings, the drop was meaningless, which means it still adds up to a lot of advertising revenue." Referencing his proven assessment of the his viewers' penchant for infusing politics into everything, Murdoch had an  explanation. He said,
"Pope John Paul died too soon. That's what the problem was, why there was a dip. Our viewers require shrill conflict. Had we gotten to the story sooner, we
could
have raised the question, for instance, of whether Catholicism is in
fact a Christian religion,
or is it some pagan, Mary-worshipping cult? We could have
brought in a couple of right-wing pundits capable of really stirring up
the rabble, like Ann Coulter or Michael Savage, and surely Falwell could have lent a hand, and it would have been
another battle royal." Clearly, it would have been a cinch. "I
know I can count on my viewers, I know what we can get out of
them. We just ran out of time," he said with sagacity. "We
could have made gold out of crap." |
Having only toyed
with the concept during the Reagan funeral, now as Murdoch watched the
ratings soar during the Schiavo coverage and then dip only slightly for the
death of the Pope, he began to design the channel in earnest.
Working through the weekend, he and a team of
 program directors and media consultants
brainstormed the idea, hammering out possible channel logos and what an
actual day of programming might look like. They were pleased with
the results. "We decided," he said, "that not
only
would it work, it would be another financial windfall. The idea
is far less limiting than I had originally conceived it. There's
a lot of room for some very creative programming." Murdoch
further delineated his vision. Taking a remote cue from C-SPAN — the primary goal of which is to cover the House of Representatives, then offsets the House's downtime with other programs of public interest — the primary objective of The Deathwatch Channel would be the coverage of some personage's demise, and when things got slow, spice up the schedule with various death-related reports and stories. "The deaths we cover wouldn't necessarily be those of just famous people. Hell, no. The idea would be to make them famous," Murdoch said with typical assurance. The ideal scenarios would lend themselves to controversy. An elderly person's death, for instance, could be skewed as a failure of some liberal program, such as Medicare.  The liberal bashing will automatically trigger
the right-wing base normally tuned in to Fox News or The 700 Club
or NASCAR (if they can
tear themselves away from a lap or two; the potential for death at the
race track definitely make it a competitor), bringing them over in
droves to The Deathwatch Channel. If the liberal bashing is
incessant, those same viewers will drop by every now and then just to
see who or what is on the hot plate. "Let me remind you," Murdoch
said with a dash of mirth, "Bill Clinton's been in and out of the
hospital a couple of times recently." He smiled and nodded
presciently, letting hang his appreciation of the ratings coup that
deathwatch would be. "The opportunities for revenue are bountiful," he beamed. The Deathwatch Channel would conduct various polls, allowing the viewers to answer via different 900 numbers. They'd be questions like: "Who do you think will make the deathwatch next? Pat Robertson, Billy Graham, or Barbara Bush?"; "Who do you wish would make the deathwatch next, Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, or Barbra Streisand?" Murdoch laughed. "Of course, we'd let you vote more than once. As you could imagine, with a question like that second one, at a dollar a call, I'll be able to add another few senators to my collection, and maybe even get an FCC chairmen or an anti-trust committee member or two." —Darla Hood
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