Television Station General Manager

So I was telling you a couple of self-inflicted wounds (laughter), 'cause you were asking about how I felt people at ABC treated me and I really was talking just in general about some experience in Corporate America, but back to that period of time, I was, 'cause I was making very little money, was also selling suits at night at a store called Barneys [Barneys New York], so I, I, after saving Barneys discount, I bought a silk tan jacket. I was sharp and proud. It was the first time, other than a blue blazer that I bought at Bloomingdale's that I actually bought something and I rode down the elevator with the president of the division at that time. And I had on some dress sandals. I don't know if you recall the type that where, you had kind of slits in 'em but I was looking sharp.$$Huaraches they're called, I think, or something like that.$$Not huaraches, but a little more dressy than that and I was, I thought I was looking bad, so, up in the elevator with him. Riding down the elevator, he says, looks over at me and says something about the jacket. And I said, "You like it? Well come on down to Barney's, I'll hook you up. I'll give you a little discount," et cetera. The next day, the next day, there was a memo that came out that all account managers, salespeople who worked for ABC will wear suits or at the--in casual moments, blue blazers, so, so should I have been smarter? Probably. Had I been there longer, maybe the outcome would have been different. But it clearly was, we were on different pages. Had I worked at the time for a different company maybe the outlook would have been different.$$You were actually thinking that he wanted one of 'em.$$Oh, absolutely. I, and I was gonna hook him up. And he was looking at me as, who is this crazy fool riding down the elevator, thinking he's looking sharp, et cetera, et cetera. There haven't been many situations like this, but I remember distinctly one that I know, as I was doing it, it was not the smartest thing to do, but I wonder had the same conversation happened between two white males, if the outcome had been the same, so. Not a bad outcome 'cause I didn't get fired, but we were at a dinner, I can't remember if it was a client dinner or one of just ABC personnel at the time, and one of the guys who happens to have the job that I now have, was sitting at the table with me, along with, I think it was the president of the division, another guy at the time. This is a number of years later, and the conversation came up about country clubs, and we got into this debate about why he thought it appropriate that you could exclude African Americans from country clubs. And I, I just, his rationale was, well because it's private. And I remember distinctly saying, and it stopped the conversation. "So, let me understand this, so it's okay to discriminate in public--in private, but not in public? Is that what you're saying?" So, all in all this world is comprised of people who, despite seeing color as the first thing that walks in the door, is how we deal with each other. Some people never get past that initial reaction and some people do, so, to generalize, I've been successful. Could I have been more successful earlier if I had been evaluated only for the things that hopefully I am evaluating individuals for, competency and performance and those kinds of things, maybe, probably, but this is America.$We were talking off camera about the nature of what you're doing, you were saying that in terms of my concern about public affairs programming, that only 7 percent of the programming nowadays is on the air.$$Is over the air (simultaneous).$$(Simultaneous) Is over the air. That rest is cable, right?$$That people receive via the antenna, in this area, and there are some areas that are even less, the Bay Area [San Francisco Bay Area, California] for instance. Everybody's wired there.$$Okay, so then the presumption is that people would get, would have access to, well cable access channels who carry public affairs shows and then any other niche you kind of--programing would be carried on some other cable channel. Is that pretty much it?$$I mean, I think that's somewhat of a generalization but that's relatively fair. People, people unfortunately don't watch a lot of that programming either (laughter). We do some shows here, one called 'A Reporter's Notebook' [sic. 'Reporter's Notebook'] and another called 'Viewpoint' about a single topic with folks within the community talking about issues that are important here the Washington [D.C.] area, so we do give a voice to it. And the good news is we've locked it in between Sunday morning programming and what's happening in the world is people are waking up earlier and those now become very highly rated areas, but beyond that, you know, I think the domain of public affairs programming is no different than the domain of any other programming you know. People, there are so many different things that people are doing, so many distractions, so many multitask these days that finding audiences for programming is difficult in the broadcast business, but a lot of it's going online. We talk all the time. Our competition is not ABC and CBS and FOX, its Google [Google Inc.] and Yahoo and that's where the world is today. I spent a lot of time talking about how to grow our business on all the multiplatforms that exist. We're content providers but we've got to have the content where people want to watch it and we're, watch and use it. It's a different world than it was thirty years ago.$$We were discussing too that NBC 4 [WRC-TV, Washington, D.C.] here is not a superstation like WGN [WGN-TV, Chicago, Illinois] or WOR [WOR-TV; WWOR-TV, Secaucus, New Jersey] used to be or TBS [Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.], but what you do here, you do, you shoot programs for national distribution here like 'George Michael Sports Machine' ['The George Michael Sports Machine'] used to. Is that still being produced here?$$That was cancelled in March of this year.$$Okay.$$We took it off the air. It had been on for twenty-five years, but we do do here, of course, 'Matthews Show' ['The Chris Matthews Show'], 'Meet the Press,' a show called 'It's Academic' that has a regional place. It's a high school--kind of like 'Jeopardy' for high school competitions. We do--$$'McLaughlin' ['The McLaughlin Group'] is here.$$'McLaughlin' is done out of here, done out of our studios, yeah, downstairs.$$Okay, all right, so, yeah this was like, you know, once we drove up here I mean, I, I been to a few stations, but I've never seen as many antennas, and (laughter)--$$Yeah, right, right. We also have a few MSNBC shows and CNBC down here. It's also the network news bureau, so Tim Russert is the managing editor of NBC News in Washington, so we share the same building.