p3ge4
friday, October 7,1977
daily nebraskan
O.
U VJV2U UJU
Anybody got a hundred bucks?
That and more is what major Lincoln banks
now require for free checking privileges. And that
means tough luck for many students.
Some of the smaller banks in the area still
plan to offer free checking-at least for a while.
The rest of the banks offer a variety of deals.
Several of the plans are quite complex. One offers
for an earnings allowance on the account's aver
age balance during the month. Non-accounting
majors may find it fun to balance their books
with that deal.
Other plans are somewhat simpler: your balance
is that much so you pay this much; each check
costs this much to write and it costs that much
per month, ?
From the bank's point of view, free checking
apparently is a bad deal. It posts, money to service
a checking account and apparently there were not
enough deposits'in return to justify the deal.
From the check writer's viewpoint, however
free checking was a great deal. Most students
seem to live on what a quick Bic and a piece
of paper with a bank's name provide.
And it seems that students live by the check
even more than other segments of the society.
Therefore, it's an even bigger shame that in this
university town, students have to search to find
free checking. In Omahaa town not swamped by
universities, students and others still qualify for
free checking.
What can be done? It might not be a bad idea
for the ASUN Senate and the university adminis
tration, to get together to urge bankers to give
students a break.
Much downtown business depends on students
and it would be a good idea for businessmen to
appeal to students.
Who knows, there may be a warm heart among
the cold cash of the banks.
Unfortunately, there can be no guarantees of
increased student business for kind-hearted
banks. The National Bank of Commerce made a
point of advertising its free checking when the
campus bank, Gateway, began charging for
checks.
Now, too, NBC is going to charge. The indica
tion is that not enough business was drawn to the
bank to dissuade it from charging.
For thos& of us whose accounts drop below
the magic $300 or $ 1 00 level a kind heart would
be appreciated v Can't the university apply some
pressure in the interests of students.
If not, now seriously, does anybody out there
have a hundred bucks?
M TO
..... ... . .
Ratings are networks' key to boob tube bonanza
New York-.The three corporate headquarters of the
television networks stand along Sixth Avenue, two blocks
apart, Each appears different: NBC of gray concrete; CBS
of black glass and ABC of chocolate glass.
But they all stand on the same foundation: thin air,
. Recently, at the dawn of a brilliant fall day, the first
two buildings you looked at, NBC and CBS, appeared to
tremble.
. Upstairs, somebody had just done a nasty thing. They
had delivered the copies of Broadcasting magazine, whose
cover line said, "ABC starts pulling away from the pack"
which it was.
After about a month of the new television season,
ABC had a five and a half point lead in the ratings over
NBC, which was a tenth of a point ahead of CBS. As
far as the trailing managements were concerned, particu
larly at NBC, if the people placing losing programs on the
air had the least bit of true honor, they would now kill
themselves.
jimrmj
IB f
III
In business power, a rating point is one step before
nuclear. I never understood what ratings actually meant:
If ABC took a point lead, I figured they kicked the extra
point, But yesterday my friend Neil Faber of the Delia
Femina-Travisano advertising agency explained it.
"A show like 'Soap' on ABC gets from $22,500 to
$25,000 for 30 seconds," he said. "Now, take a show a
point behind it. Take 'One Day at a Time' on CBS.
That costs from $18,000 to $20,000 for 30 seconds.
So add up all the 30-second spots for the whole year and
one show makes a lot more money than the other.
"Then you figure all the shows that ABC has on every
night of the week, seven nights a week, for a whole year.
You're dealing with millions for a point."
Nielsen power
The ratings are put out by the Nielsen company,
which places black boxes on television sets of 1,200
families around the country. From this tiny sample all of
television is determined-it's shows, its impact on the
country. . .
. Nobody gainfully employed in television seems to
question the Nielsen ratings, although recent history sug-
rrtr. mulj. h.v
H L
.?r ? -
swetws 1
flu uxr in n
VOtiD fVLL OF
y
gests that when so few people are involved with this much
money and power there is a clear chance for larceny. If we
caught a president stealing and lying, why can't a ring of
people sit in their living rooms and sell out: "We love
"Barney Miller but we can't watch him tonight. You see,
we're dumping."
But the ratings are all that anybody in television lives
for. So Monday at ABC was a day of shining opportunity.
At the other two places, CBS and NBC, contracting flu
was a fine move. :
At NBC, for example, there have been four program
chiefs in the last four years. Yesterday, NBC was one
tenth of a point ahead of CBS. The NBC man in charge of
compiling the ratings couldn't be reached. The phone line
was busy all morning with people going over things with
him.
Falling man
, It seems that another set of figures was to be up soon,
and if anything happened to the one-tenth of a point, if
NBC would come up last, then you could bring fire
department training classes for rescue drills and catch'the
falling man out on the sidewalk.
. "The only reason they put on shows is for money "
a guy was explaining at lunch. "The safest thing to do,
then is to put on a lousy show. Why gamble on something
lousy that has a better chance to bring in all the money?
So imagine how bad you feel when you deliberately pick
a lousy show and it still doesn't go anywhere "
. The television season began in the first two weeks of
September, with the networks going for $8 million apiece
on shows ranging from ABC's "Washington: Behind
C osed Doors to expensive movies and prizefights on the
other two. It was an exhibition season, at the end of
which the ratings were cloudy.
Prime time
Then the regular run of prime-time shows began, and
ABC became the nation's chief purveyor of modern cul
ture. When the first flash from the people who handle
figures came on a Tuesday, the people at NBC and CBS
shuddered.
By Thursday of that week, Robert Wussler, the presi
dent of CBS, was howling that ABC was cheating.
"They are using junk!" Wussler said. This was like one
bust-out joint criticizing the other's whiskey. Wussler's
complaint surprised most people in television. Name
calling always has been considered bad for the game
MSUF. 7
HAUM
v
. .
JUST PUT mm AAfi
It I T-ltr fsAnrm III i If I I Irl m .
7 "ivo U Y'-
iH7 U
Two blocks away, over coffee, a guy at CBS was saying
that his place was not as nervous as NBC,
"We've got a class act," he said. "Paley's a class guy,
Our problem is that Freddy Silverman at ABC has a
stranglehold from 8 to 9 every night -Rotter,' 'Happy
Days,' 'Laverne and Shirley,' He gets all the kids. Now
you're an hour into the night and by that time you're in
a jam. To get somebody to change, you have to have him
get up, walk to the set and turn the dial. , :
"It's murder. But we're not worried. We started 'All
in the Family' last night. It did great. We got a 50 share
in New York. That's great. We weren't worried."
Numbers
"What time did you find out about the numbers?" he
was asked,
, "At 9:32 this morning."
He finished his coffee and went back to his business,
back to trying to catch "Charlie's Angels" and "Donny
and Marie." It is a business of haggling with half-formed
ideas, trying to shape them into something with the pres-
" sure of money determining everything.
on a creative level, to put together a show, even a
bad show, is work of the hardest sort. I've written every
thing from a paragraph to a novel and found that the job
of trying to write a script for a half-hour situation comedy
is work so frustrating that it pulls you out of sleep at
night. 1
What is disturbing, then, is why. if the work is so hard,
so delicate, do networks set out to deliberately aim at the
lowest public taste?
Once you ask it, the answer appears immediately;
tverytiiing is done for the money.
Another season
And so, this great instrument of our time is off on
another season, with 40 to 50 million people staring at
shows that come across the public sky in disdain of us all
a iarn hundreds Pf millions of dollars for the networks.
And have an effect on us that we still do not know how to
measure.
I was thinking of this the other night when ABC had
on its docu -drama about imaginary trial of Lee Harvey
uswald. The theme was that if Oswald had lived, this was
what rjis tnal would have been like. The show took an
Aat rhook lhc nation n 1963 and now, in J 977,
moved the facts around and ran it with headache commer
cials butting in.
V 'At Chat I 111 ntnm A .. n tt II. I. I
a a 7. 1 ru' raying uswaia. tie iookcu
uswald, winch automatically made him distasteful. You
Unn, ...J I . . r ...
aay
: an
nir . . mvvucu auiue nem. n neeaeu. say, ivwuv..
uiora in the part.
nJ? n kVlMOn 1,Icn yu wouJ have a captivating fee
i nl !r C Vk couU rearrange the facts of our time
5 minds Anv bus with at kind of
nnrl, . l? be basin itself on something more im
plant to our lives than their money.
n;.,, ! . . . cPyrisht. 1977, Jimmy Br til m
S,f,bu"d b lh Chicago Tf ibunt-fi York Wewi Syrdictt
uv,fcu, imwever, what it would be like if someD
m one 01 three buildings on Sixth Avenue decided that
vucu auiuc nejp. ji neeaeu, say,