The Kansas City Times from Kansas City, Missouri • 24

A-24 The Kansas City Times Saturday February 6 1988 Indecency charge is just the latest setback to hit KZKC was just the type of programming we run" said Phil Jones general manager at Channel 5 Still Channel 62 saw its audience increase from its early share of 2 percent of the homes with televisions to around 4 percent and at one point 5 percent according to Arbitron figures As Friedheim pushed to improve sales for a while the members of the sales staff whenever they called on advertisers promoted the policy of running uncut R-rated movies In fact salesmen carried photocopied newspaper articles and showed them to clients Friedheim said pointing out that Channel 62 was attracting attention for its primetime films Though advertising sales improved under Friedheim the station and Media Central kept sinking deeper on the critical list Checks bounced creditors hollered Then another form of trouble came early last summer when Channel 62 broadcast the movie that has landed it in hot water with the FCC The film was about a 15-year-boy seduced by a family maid and was broadcast at 8 pm last May 26 A Northland middle school teacher complained to the FCC It is the first time that the FCC has considered sanctions against a television station for broadcasting an allegedly indecent movie at hours when children were likely to have been in the audience Several other stations across the country ran the movie about the same date but they have not been singled out by the FCC If the FCC concludes that the movie violated laws the station could lose its license in the worst case face of a maximum fine of 10000 or simply be reprimanded The main offices in Chattanooga bought the unedited movie as part of a package of films Kent said and also scheduled the time and date the movie was to run which was customary under Media centralized management The movie was edited at Channel 62 Friedheim maintains that even though the movie was edited at Channel 62 Media Central bears full responsibility for what was broadcast because executives at the headquarters chose to broadcast it in prime time the licensee not me" Friedheim said owner of the company is Kent said not pointing fingers at whose fault it is but it will not happen again" The movie he said did not not get edited in good taste or with good He said further that Media Central policy now prohibits such movies from being broadcast "I can assure the community that we will not have a recurrence of inappropriate he said In the meantime the station continues to battle for a share of the audience amid the turmoil of bankruptcy and the FCC investigation Three top employees at the station have resigned recently the general sales manager the program director and the national sales manager obviously got a lot of things to do at this current general manager Bob Harris said really anything much to say except: Watch us over the next few months and let the results speak for themselves" Soviets absolve leaders Stalin killed business in which his company acquired assets of more than $68 million according to federal bankruptcy papers filed by the company The trouble was the company also ran up liabilities totaling more than $50 million including large debts to such widely known movie and television distributors as 20th Century Fox Viacom Paramount MCA Warner Bros and MGM The financial woes showed daily at Channel 62 The station was so strapped for money Friedheim and others recalled that the front office urged Friedheim to trade free commercial time for goods and services whenever possible And trade the station did Friedheim said Channel 62 hundreds of thousands of dollars from landscaping in front of the building to cars and a van to restaurants where clients were entertained to the plaques used to honor employees of the month trading of air time to save cash is relatively Kent said However several general managers interviewed for this article said it usually occur on a large scale and mostly has faded as a practice you will check with other stations they have appropriate trades" Kent said He added that the percent of such trading at Media Central stations is the limits of the The Kansas City station like others at Media Central was built through the investments of limited partners who became part owners Channel 62 however remained under control of Kent and his sons as did its sister stations The Kansas City investors sank $34 million into Channel 62 In all 300 limited partners invested about $17 million in stations If Media Central were liquidated today those investments would be lost limited partners would receive said Bill Barbin chairman of the Joint Equity Security Holders Committee which represents the limited partners Under a reorganization plan that still must be approved by creditors Media Central has offered to repay its debts in 36 months to 10 years depending on whether the creditor is secured or unsecured The limited partners would get back just 34 percent of their investment Jack Cantril a Kansas City financial planner and investment adviser placed money into Channel 62 as did some of his clients a case of us just starting something with a pipe he said Media Central been involved with other stations They owned other stations We felt like potentially the cash flow looked very Six years after the FCC granted a license for a station construction finally began on Channel 62 It took just seven weeks to get Channel 62 on the air a former engineering manager said from building the studio to leasing tower space to setting up the offices Gary Liebling the first engineering manager at Channel 62 said Media Central outfitted the station with lower-grade equipment than the broadcast-quality gear found at most stations As a result he said the signal was weak To overcome that problem Channel 62 at one time sent technicians free to homes to rig their sets so that reception would improve can build a two-bit Mickey Mouse station in Cape Girardeau and it will be OK" Liebling said do that in Kansas Kent declined to comment about conditions or equipment at the station as did the current general manager Friedheim had never been general manager of a station before getting the job at Channel 62 One of the first steps he took was to persuade his bosses to upgrade programming he said and increase the ad budget by $500000 The station landed some popular reruns and broadcast some classic movies and films that drew big audiences at theaters At the same time the station broadcast movies with frontal nudity and edited only scenes with explicit sex Fnedheim in November 1986 announced that the policy would be changed though movies still appeared later containing some nudity Another step Friedheim took was to try changing the image He wanted to change the call letters from KEKR to KZKC-TV The move prompted Channel 5 KCTV to file a suit that Channel 5 won A federal judge ruled that Channel 62 had to drop the part of its call letters Channel 5 contended that viewers might confuse the call letters And in its suit Channel 5 declared that it did not want to be associated with Channel 62 because some movies on Channel 62 contained nudity that in the eyes of Channel 5 officials posed "great risk of damage" to Channel reputation Continued from Page A-l regulations and wanted advice his Media Central bosses refused to pay travel expenses for him to meet with the FCC lawyer was told it would cost money" Friedheim said Central feel it was a necessary Morton Kent board chairman at Media Central denied the assertion no basis for me to give any credibility to he said Moreover he said sales were up in January at Media Central stations and the company will emerge from bankruptcy are looking forward to he said are going very Ar The first program that Channel 62 beamed across the airwaves on Dec 7 1983 was a rerun of the police show The station continued feeding its audience a diet of second-rate reruns old cartoons a few sports events and some religious programming former employees say while competitors were running full-bore with popular shows In those days independent UHF stations like Channel 62 were sprouting up across the country as fast as new network comedies arrive each season The FCC had backed away from its rigid controls over television newcomers industry analysts say so investors with little or no background in television began to dabble in stations Since 1978 the number of independent stations has more than tripled to 310 at the start of this year according to the Association of Independent Television Stations Twenty-three of those have declared bankruptcy since 1986 has a certain amount of said Lawrence Laurent who has taught broadcasting at universities and works for the association biz attracts people to Kent himself was an insurance executive before getting into television in the early 1980s Quickly he built a chain of eight independent stations Kansas City was the last to become part of the Kent brigade The other stations owned and operated by Media Central are in Cape Girardeau Mo Columbus Ga Canton Ohio Honolulu Huntsville Ala Jackson Miss and Knoxville Tenn Kent amassed what he once boasted was the independent television chain in the country Indeed he capitalized on a kharin he said provides Gorbachev of Gorbachev himself has been rumored to be head of the commission but Gerasimov would not comment except to say the chairman was a very high Gerasimov said the issue of possible posthumous political rehabilitation within the Communist Party was an open issue He said the commission still was discussing his ideas Bukharin whom Lenin had once called favorite of the whole was falsely accused by Stalin of heading an anti-Soviet conspiracy of assassination and sabotage When Stalin came to power he put an end to the New Economic Policy calling it In 1929 he ousted Bukharin from the Communist Party for the crime of arguing against collectivization of agriculture and rapid industrialization For his relative moderation Bukharin was known as a Rykov who was commissar for internal affairs in the first Bolshevik government and later was prime minister also fell into disfavor for opposing collectivization a program that led to mass deportations famine and millions of deaths especially in the Ukraine To many European Communists and Soviet reformers Bukharin has traditionally represented a non-Stalinist alternative Although he never endorsed political democratization or a multiparty system Bukharin argued for a more gradual humane approach to socialism Roy Medvedev a leading Soviet historian and independent said Bukharin had headed our party after Lenin instead of Stalin neither collectivization in its Stalinist form nor the terror of the 1930s and 1940s would have In contrast to Stalin Bukharin advocated that the Soviet Union should into through limited private sector enterprises A learned man who lived in Western Europe and the United States in the six years before the revolution Bukharin befriended some of the intellectuals persecuted by Stalin Just before he was killed Bukharin wrote a that he instructed his wife Anna Larina to memorize and then destroy In it he appealed to future leaders for exoneration saying comrades that on the banner you will carry in your victorious march to communism there is a drop of my Continued from Page A-l charges is considered especially important to economic reform program and his effort to de-Stalinize the political system After the civil war that followed the 1917 revolution Bukharin was a prominent supporter of the New Economic Policy a program of limited private enterprise that resembles many of own plans The process of rehabilitating leaders from the past will continue Gerasimov said and according to historian Yuri Afanasyev it may even include such long-forbidden names as Leon Trotsky It is Bukharin though who has the most immediate value for the Soviet leadership views are probably the closest thing to providing a 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