Television News Inc.
Overview
Television News Inc., known as TVN, was an American syndicated television news service that operated from May 14, 1973, to October 31, 1975, headquartered in New York, New York. Majority-owned by the Coors Brewing Company of Golden, Colorado, with the London-based agency Visnews holding a minority stake, it supplied daily feeds of newsfilm to subscribing television stations in the United States and Canada. It was among the first services built specifically for the growing number of independent stations that produced newscasts but lacked the networks' film-gathering apparatus. In a life of less than two and a half years it lost millions of dollars, failed to complete a pioneering plan for satellite distribution, and became a national controversy over the conservative purpose of its owner, Joseph Coors, a controversy that contributed to the United States Senate's rejection of Coors's nomination to the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1975.
Founding and Robert Pauley
The service was the project of Robert Pauley, a former network executive who became its chief executive. Pauley had previously been retained, after the failure of the United Network in late 1967, to explore relaunching that venture as a news and public affairs supplier, and in 1968 he had pitched a television news service of his own. He carried the idea to Joseph Coors, and the launch was announced in February 1973 with initial capital of about four million dollars, most of it from Coors. Ownership settled at ninety percent Coors Brewing Company and ten percent Visnews.
Pauley's premise addressed a genuine gap. Most non-network sources of newsfilm still sent material to clients by air express mail, days behind events. Pauley proposed a costlier system modelled on the networks, feeding film daily so that independent stations could build credible newscasts around national and world coverage they could obtain in no other way. TVN opened with bureaus at its New York headquarters, where it occupied offices on the twenty-first floor of a Manhattan building, and in Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington. Its first customer was Miami's WCIX-TV, then expanding its local news; the station's first cheque was framed in the TVN offices.
Launch, Trial and Early Growth
Service began on May 14, 1973, with a two-week trial taken by 32 stations, including WCIX and KTVU in San Francisco. TVN's pitch against the networks was that it held nothing back: networks reserved their best footage for their own newscasts and released lesser material to local stations, while TVN offered subscribers everything it gathered, supplemented by material from Visnews, its British minority partner. Early reviews from trial stations were warm; veteran Los Angeles newsman Stan Chambers of KTLA praised the service in terms quoted in later histories, calling the concept overdue. At the end of the trial TVN signed Chicago's WGN-TV and Metromedia's four stations, a breakthrough toward viability.
By April 1974 the service had 26 stations, adding major-market independents such as WOR-TV in New York and network affiliates including KYW-TV in Philadelphia, KSD-TV in St. Louis and WBTV in Charlotte. That year it bought the United States business of United Press International Television News, the competing film service owned by United Press International and ITN, eliminating its only direct rival in non-network newsfilm syndication. Because TVN sold non-exclusively, several cities had multiple subscribers: five stations in Los Angeles took the service, three in New York and four in Toronto.
The Satellite Plan
In January 1975 TVN announced that it would abandon distribution over AT&T long lines and move to the Westar satellite system. The economics of the landlines had turned against it: AT&T raised rates for occasional users such as TVN, and the cost of connecting affiliates often exceeded what TVN charged them. Company president Jack G. Wilson presented the satellite switch as the service's financial salvation. About eleven million dollars was to be set aside to build earth stations at affiliates, as many as 35 within seven months. Had it been completed, the plan would have made TVN the first full-time user of an American satellite for television program distribution, years before satellite feeds became the industry norm. By then TVN counted 37 subscribers in the United States and another 36 in Canada, mostly CBC affiliates, which could not have used the American satellite system. The conversion was never completed, and its cost and delay hung over the company's final year.
Conservative Purpose and Newsroom Conflict
From the start, TVN's journalism was shadowed by its owner's politics. Joseph Coors, whose family had a established reputation for conservatism and who provided seed money for new conservative institutions of the era including the Heritage Foundation, stated openly in an August 1974 newspaper interview that he had entered the business because he believed network news was slanted to the liberal left and did not give the public an objective view. Within TVN, the question was how directly that belief should shape the feed.
The first news leadership aimed for conventional, middle-of-the-road coverage, but in June 1973, within a month of launch, the board declared that its policy required a more balanced presentation than the service had so far shown, an early signal of owner intervention. Jack G. Wilson, a Coors assistant with a background in local television news in Illinois and Colorado and an association with the Heritage Foundation, reviewed output, proposed stories and pressed complaints that coverage remained too far left. The founding news director, Dick Graf, clashed with Wilson over unauthorised assignments and story selection, remained for a time in a weakened position, and was dismissed in February 1974 while on vacation; Wilson became president that June. Northeast bureau chief Pete Simmons, resigning in April 1974, summarised the departing journalists' view: professional newspeople had been hired to build a news organisation, but the owners, in his judgement, wanted a propaganda instrument. Under Wilson, disputes centred less on slanting individual stories than on selection, which stories were covered at all; one reporter was told the service did not want consumer advocate Ralph Nader on its air. In September 1974 Wilson imposed major cutbacks, leaving only two reporters and two staff cameramen across the Midwest and West combined, increasing reliance on stringers and affiliate material, and dismissed the news director, Tom Turley.
Roger Ailes at TVN
At the start of 1975 Roger Ailes joined TVN as vice president for news operations. Ailes, a former television adviser to President Richard Nixon who ran his own television consulting firm, was already a significant figure in Republican media strategy. Under him the company won a contract with the United States Information Agency to supply news clips and scripts for government use through a separate division. He resigned in September 1975, citing administrative disagreements with management. Historians of Ailes's later career have treated TVN as an early rehearsal for Fox News Channel, which he founded two decades later: the same strategy of routing around network gatekeepers by feeding sympathetic material directly to local outlets, and, in later retellings, an early association with the language of fair and balanced news. Ailes himself later minimised his role, describing himself as a consultant, although he had earlier acknowledged authority to hire and fire.
The Coors Nomination and National Scrutiny
TVN became a Washington issue through its owner. On August 8, 1974, the day before his resignation, President Nixon nominated Joseph Coors to the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the body overseeing federal support for public television; President Gerald Ford renewed the nomination. In March and April 1975 the Columbia Journalism Review put TVN on its cover, in Stanhope Gould's investigation of how Coors's organisation influenced the service, quoting Wilson's stated aim of putting the company's philosophy into the news gradually and subtly. A Washington Post profile that May added scrutiny of Coors's views on public broadcasting, including a letter he had written to the CPB chairman criticising a public television documentary.
Senate hearings on the nomination in September 1975 ran for two days rather than the few hours typical for such posts. Senator John Pastore, presiding, pressed Coors on whether he would resign from TVN if confirmed; Coors refused, citing his duty to Coors stockholders, though he briefly agreed to consider it. He also acknowledged contributing to, and broadly agreeing with, the John Birch Society. Pastore told him no nomination before the subcommittee had troubled him more. On September 29, 1975, the same day TVN announced its closure, the Senate Commerce Committee rejected the nomination by eleven votes to six, largely over the refusal to step down from TVN.
Closure and Losses
TVN announced on September 29, 1975, that it would cease operating on October 31, citing a continuing lack of revenues and insufficient subscriber interest in financing the satellite conversion; a film production unit, TVN Enterprises, was to continue. Contemporary estimates put its losses at about 50,000 dollars a month at the end, after years of low introductory rates designed to hook stations. Figures Coors itself filed in May 1975, in a prospectus ahead of a public offering, were larger: losses of 2.2 million dollars in 1973 and 3.2 million dollars in 1974, with a further three million projected for the third year. By those figures the experiment had consumed well over five million dollars without reaching a sustainable subscriber base.
People and Legacy
TVN's short life launched or redirected notable careers. Its Watergate hearings coverage was led by Charles Gibson, whose work drew the attention of ABC News, which hired him in 1975 as a Washington correspondent on his way to hosting Good Morning America and World News. Reese Schonfeld, who arrived with the UPITN purchase and proposed the satellite plan, spent what a later profile called an unhappy year at TVN before his dismissal in June 1975; after the closure, responding to stations that wanted the service to continue, he founded the Independent Television News Association, a cooperative based at WPIX in New York that fed news by satellite to seven charter subscribers, and he later co-founded CNN. Dennis Swanson, another TVN alumnus, went on to senior roles across all four major networks, including president of ABC Sports.
As an institution, TVN is remembered less for the news it delivered than for the questions it posed, questions that recurred throughout later American media history: whether a news service financed to correct alleged bias can remain a news service, whether story selection is itself a form of slant, and whether distribution technology, in TVN's case the satellite system it could not afford to finish, matters more than editorial intent. Its failure closed none of those questions; the satellite news era it anticipated arrived within a few years under other owners, from Conus Communications to CNN.
