NEWS FEATURE: Paxnet will offer viewers alternative to televised sex and violence

c. 1998 Religion News Service UNDATED _ Viewers who are fed up with televised sex, violence and crudity will have a new alternative this fall when PAX TV, the nation’s seventh national network, launches its slate of”pro-family”programming at noon on Monday, August 31. Network founder Lowell”Bud”Paxson has been buying up broadcast rights to popular shows […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Viewers who are fed up with televised sex, violence and crudity will have a new alternative this fall when PAX TV, the nation’s seventh national network, launches its slate of”pro-family”programming at noon on Monday, August 31.

Network founder Lowell”Bud”Paxson has been buying up broadcast rights to popular shows like”Touched By An Angel,””Promised Land,”and”Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.”Meanwhile he’s purchased more than 70 TV stations. That, along with deals he’s negotiated with cable companies, means PAX TV will be available to around three-fourths of American TV viewers.


At a time when the major networks are hemorrhaging viewers, some broadcast industry insiders are skeptical about the seventh network’s prospects. Even though the three-year-old WB network has a hit with its faith- and family-friendly”Seventh Heaven”show, both it and fellow fledgling network, UPN, are losing money. Still, Paxson remains convinced there’s a huge, underserved audience for positive programs.”Frankly, when I look at the deluge of trashy programming that’s flooding the market today, I don’t believe for a second we can fail,”he writes in his soon-to-be-released book,”Threading the Needle”(HarperBusiness).

But that’s not the only reason Paxson believes PAX TV will succeed. As he said in a phone interview from his West Palm Beach, Fla., headquarters,

higher powers are on his side.”This is very highly God-driven,”says the 62-year-old Paxson, who experienced a dramatic Christian conversion in 1986 after years of pursuing the deal at the expense of his family and his soul.”I wouldn’t have done this without knowing of His support and His blessing. I have no fear.” PAX TV is the latest in a series of bold moves for Paxson, a media maverick who began working as a radio disk jockey at age 14. He later revolutionized the cable industry by launching the Home Shopping Network, which like Paxson himself, is a classic American success story.

As a child, he knew he could do better than a friend who toiled long hours on a low-paying paper route. Instead, Paxson raised hamsters, which he sold for a dollar each.

In the late 1970s, he owned a Florida AM radio station. One day he didn’t have enough money to meet payroll, so he tried to collect from an appliance dealer who owed payment on a big advertising bill. Instead of a check, Paxson came back to the station with 112 can openers, which he hawked over the air. By noon he had enough money to pay his employees.

People laughed when he began selling vases and jewelry over TV in 1982, but by 1990, Home Shopping Network was moving a billion dollars of merchandise a year and inspiring copy-cat cable outfits.

Paxson was less successful as a husband and father, separating from his first wife on Christmas Day in 1986. The failure of his marriage forced him to take a hard look at his life, and what he saw wasn’t pretty. He felt, he said, like the character in Dudley Moore’s movie”Arthur,”which he has watched over two dozen times.”Even though he had every possession a man could ever want,


Arthur was miserable,”Paxson says.

Alone in a Las Vegas hotel room on New Year’s Eve, Paxson found a Gideon’s Bible, read from the story of Job, and gave his life to God. Ever since, he says he’s been trying to let God guide his business decisions. He says his role models are pioneering broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc, and Mother Teresa.

Paxson believes life consists of finding the proper balance between trusting God and accepting personal responsibility for your life, and he’s inspired by Jesus’ words to a wealthy young man:”It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” As Paxson sees it,”Each of us has three threads, or elements, of life we need to get through the needle’s eye: the business or career thread, the spiritual thread, and the family thread.” In PAX TV, Paxson says he has found a formula that combines all three: a profitable business which gives families positive TV alternatives while”planting the seed that God loves us.” But don’t dare call his network”Christian TV.””Christian television stinks,”he says.”Jesus is a prime example of what Christian television should be. He told about His Father in stories and parables. He only delivered one sermon, but that’s all that you see on most Christian TV. I think `Touched By An Angel’ does more for the kingdom of God than all of the televangelists combined.” Paxson is paying nearly $1 million per episode for reruns of the popular program, the anchor of the new network’s weekday evening prime time schedule, which also features”Dr. Quinn,””Diagnosis Murder,”and”Father Dowling Mysteries.”Daytime programming includes”I Love Lucy,””Love Boat”and”Eight Is Enough,”and new programs developed in partnership with Woman’s Day magazine and Universal Studios. From midnight to 5 a.m., the network will air”Worship,”a low-cost combination of on-screen Bible texts and Christian music.

Not even Paxson predicts the network will set any ratings records. But since his Paxson Communications owns the network’s stations, it gets to keep all the ad revenues. Even with a paltry”one”rating (which equals about 1 million viewers), he believes he can turn a profit.

Some critics, however, believe the network will find its niche.”There’s a hunger out there among Americans for a more traditionalist, more wholesome programming,”says Jewish media critic Michael Medved, who hosts the daily”Michael Medved Show,”which airs on the Christian Salem Radio network, and co-author of the forthcoming”Saving Childhood: Protecting Our Children from the National Assault on Innocence”(HarperCollins).”Will 40 percent of Americans embrace the agenda of PAX TV? Will 60 percent embrace it? Not necessarily, but they don’t need to,”Medved says.”We’ve gone from the era of broadcasting to the era of narrowcasting. And PAX TV can have a very successful TV network by serving a smaller audience.” Others aren’t so sure.”I wouldn’t call them a seventh network yet,”says Jenny Hontz, television editor for the trade publication Variety.”Their prospects are still very much up in the air, but they are making a lot of noise and raising a lot of eyebrows about a company that wasn’t even on anyone’s radar a year ago.”

DEA END RABEY

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