Video: Good Night, Tom

Charlotte cancels NBC’s news

Viewers in Charlotte, N.C., who turn the dial this week looking for Tom Brokaw and Roger Mudd at 6:30 p.m. may not believe their eyes: in place of the NBC network’s Nightly News, affiliate station WPCQ-TV will start airing Family Feud. And instead of the local evening-news lead-in, the station will offer Real People. Insists Lawrence Fraiberg, president of WPCQ’s parent, Westinghouse Group W TV, the nation’s biggest non-network station group: “This has nothing to do with our attitude toward news.”

Indeed not. The issue is money. Since buying WPCQ from Cable News Network Founder Ted Turner for $20 million in 1980, Group W has battled ineffectually to push its local and national evening-news ratings above a hopelessly unprofitable 1% to 2% of metropolitan Charlotte’s 236,000 TV households. By comparison, CBS-affiliated WBTV and ABC-linked WSOC-TV each draw ten times as many news viewers, albeit on VHP channels that are easier to tune in than WPCQ’s UHF signal, Channel 36. WPCQ’s troubles are compounded by three nearby NBC affiliates whose signals reach into the Charlotte market. Still, the station will offer NBC’s Today, a local newscast at noon and hourly bulletins at night.

In New York City, NBC dismissed WPCQ’s action as “an oddity of that particular market.” It should hope so: thus far, there has been scarcely a ripple of protest in Charlotte about WPCQ’s no-news-is-good-news policy.