T A B L E__T A L K Oprah vs. the beef industry: Yet another corporate challenge to First Amendment rights? Have your say in Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Bring me the head (and more important, the body) of Monica Lewinsky! By James Poniewozik Spending 120 hours in blabberspace as the networks roll out the greatest show on earth (01/26/97) Mommy Leerest By Gary Kamiya Monica Lewinsky's mother's gushy book on the Three Tenors' sex lives (01/23/97) Penisgate By Christopher Hitchens Don't cry for the president -- he's a hypocrite and a scoundrel (01/23/97) An ABC of ethical conflict By Doug Ireland Did Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz compromise himself when he accepted a freelance gig with ABC? (01/22/97) Under the Covers By James Poniewozik Sex tips for boys (01/21/97) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE MEDIA CIRCUS ARCHIVES

T H E $17.6_B I L L I O N _T O U C H D O W N MUY MACHO TV EXECS ARE PRANCING AND DANCING AFTER SIGNING EIGHT-YEAR CONTRACTS WITH THE NFL. BUT FOR VIEWERS -- ESPECIALLY WOMEN -- THE DEAL WILL FEEL MORE LIKE A FOREARM IN THE MOUTH. BY STEVEN STARK | Television, of course, made pro football. But in the aftermath of Super Bowl weekend, it's worth recalling that for much of its first 50 years, television profited widely from the association too. The game's structure fit the technical requirements of the medium far more than, say, baseball's open-ended field and lack of a clock -- a programmer's nightmare. Like most popular TV drama, football was violent, but in this case, acceptably so. Most important, pro football brought men to the small screen, and it usually did so in a time slot -- Sunday afternoons -- when the networks had been offering nothing anyone would watch. For a network executive, pro football literally wove straw into gold. By now, you undoubtedly know that era ended last week, when ABC, CBS, ESPN and Fox paid a combined $17.6 billion for the privilege of televising pro football for eight more years. To put this in perspective: In order to keep Monday Night Football at ABC, acquire the Sunday night package for ESPN and televise three Super Bowls, the Walt Disney Company (which owns both networks) paid the NFL almost half of what it spent less than three years ago to acquire all of ABC in the first place. Yet in the week following the deal, the sports and business pages have been full of "insider" hype justifying the fees the networks are paying. In an atomized era of 50 channels and the Internet, the reasoning goes, televised pro football still has a better chance of attracting a mass audience of men than anything else. So, if you're trying to sell beer, razors, trucks or the American military, the networks haven't developed anything comparable to reach your target audience. Advertisers won't pick up all of the bill for the NFL fee increase, but it's been proven more than once in the past that they will pick up some of it. To pay for all those "Be All That You Can Be" ads, President Clinton may have to start thinking about an increase in defense spending. What all those analysts didn't tell you is that no matter who makes or loses money, all television viewers will be the losers -- and not simply because sponsors will pass their increased costs on to consumers, and all those added commercials will make the games themselves only longer and worse. By pouring so much money into a resource that only runs for three-to-six hours a week, Fox, ABC and CBS will have far less cash to develop programming that appeals to everyone else the rest of the time. That, inevitably, dictates a network schedule with an ever-increasing array of cheap talk shows, news shows with no news and bottom-dollar sitcoms and dramas. Reruns will increase. Sadly, the network entertainment of tomorrow will resemble the bargain basement cable programming of today. To the extent these networks have to squeeze their owned-and-operated local stations for more cash, the locals are likely to have to cut staff and trim news-gathering costs, which means they will provide even worse local news broadcasts to their communities than they do now. In return, of course, viewers of CBS affiliates in places like Boston or New York will get wall-to-wall Patriots and Jets coverage. Who can bother to worry about politics or the economy when the Bills are in town? In part, the chieftains who run the networks chose to link their futures to the NFL because that's the way today's titans of industry operate. "The problem with all of these new mega-corporations that now own networks is that they don't know how to build things," one old television sage told me. "They only know how to buy them." Walking away from NFL football, as only NBC was willing to do, means having to develop something other than football or sports to attract men in today's world, and finding other ways to develop a distinct network identity. Better to make the NFL your crown jewel and get invited to a lot of Super Bowl parties. In the end, that was also a key part of the deal. All of these corporations and networks are still run by men, and it's hard to imagine a woman mortgaging Fox or CBS for a few hours of programming each week in what is still, for the most part, marginal television time. A broadcast network has to be a big tent: Define your network by a male product, as these networks will increasingly have to do to promote everything else, and you risk alienating both women and an increasing number of younger men who don't fit the old stereotype. Pro football ratings have been dropping, in part, because younger men don't have the same attachment to this video locker room as baby boomers and their fathers do. Stuck with football as its main promotional tool, a network has to start developing more shows of the sort that appeal to football watchers, which further drives away the young and women. Like the Republicans, CBS and Fox may increasingly face a gender gap. Yet boys will be boys. To pay these prices, there's obviously something about pro football that gets a man's blood running. After all, "ER" attracts just as many men as the highest-rated football games and far more women, yet NBC was able to "steal" the rights to that show for millions less per episode than ABC paid for Monday Night Football rights. Scholars and feminists have been writing for years about how football is our national game of manhood -- violently competitive and extravagantly rule-bound and hierarchical. Sunday afternoons and Monday nights in the fall are one of the few times left in American life when men can legitimately gather and exclude women to watch a form of entertainment that includes no women -- from the field to the booth. In an increasingly feminized world intent on cracking down on alcohol, steaks and the "sexism" of the military, an association with the anachronistic world of football thus becomes that much more valuable. "For most male baby boomers," one consultant told me, "their most meaningful contact with their fathers came while watching pro football on TV. How can you put a price on that?" Well, the NFL tried. And much to the league's amazement, it found the networks would apparently pay anything to try to relive the past one last time. SALON | Jan. 27, 1998 Steven Stark is the author of "Glued to the Set" (Free Press). His last piece for Salon was on Princess Diana's funeral.