Channeled Democracy Provides the Ultimate in User Friendliness

Let me tell you about the greatest television innovation since the mute switch.

First, a confession:

I like TV. I watch TV. I am not one of those snobs who won’t watch anything on the tube except six-part PBS specials made in Great Britain. I’m willing to watch the silliest things on TV--professional wrestling, “ALF,” even Sam Donaldson.

Yet, as with the network executives themselves, I am always looking for ways to improve the quality of TV.

That is why I am so delighted to tell you about this latest development. I haven’t been this excited since Bryant Gumbel made up with Willard Scott.

Have you heard what has been happening at WAVE-TV in Louisville?

No?

Well, the very wise people who run Channel 3 in that very nice Kentucky city have come up with a new system for watching professional football. And, if this thing catches on, Sunday will never be the same.

Every week during the National Football League season, WAVE-TV permits its viewers to vote on which game they would like to view.

You read that correctly.

Instead of picking up your daily TV listings to find out what NFL game is being shoved down your throat at a particular hour, Louisville viewers may telephone the station to cast votes for the game of their choice.

Whichever game wins, WAVE airs.

Channel 3 in Louisville happens to run American Football Conference games, the NBC network’s special province.

Now, on Sunday in Southern California, for example, viewers were exposed to the game between the Raiders and Denver Broncos, which happened to be the network’s game of choice. You can tell because its No. 1 broadcasting team of Dick Enberg and Bill Walsh handled the telecast.

As it happens, Louisville football fans also were tuned in to the Raider-Bronco game, but only because it won their election.

By one vote.

In the weekly phone poll, this game received exactly one more vote than the game between the Miami Dolphins and New York Jets. Democracy triumphed.

The week before, Channel 3 televised the Jets vs. the Cleveland Browns, which beat out Pittsburgh vs. Cincinnati and Miami vs. New England. More than 10,000 votes were cast.

This is a novel approach to TV viewing. Wouldn’t it be nice to have the privilege one of these days to not be forced to watch some particularly crummy NFL team--the Raiders, for instance--and instead watch somebody interesting, such as, oh, you know, anybody but the Raiders?

Naturally, there might be kinks in this system. First one that comes to mind is that your home team might always get the most votes, no matter what opponent it is playing that week.

This is where Louisville has it licked. Louisville has no home team.

Possibly this is why the WAVE-TV approach to watching football already has spread to two other fairly large markets, Albuquerque and Raleigh. Neither has pro football, either.

Shouldn’t some brave programmer try this stunt in, say, San Francisco or Philadelphia or Chicago? Even if these people did vote to watch their home teams, they might like some say-so about which AFC game they have to watch.

In the San Francisco area, I’ll bet they’d rather watch a bad Raider game than a good Denver-Cleveland game, even if the Broncos and Browns are unbeaten. Just a hunch.

I suppose there would be concerns about some form of ballot-box stuffing. You know, prank-playing kids flooding the station’s switchboard with votes for the Atlanta Falcons vs. the Green Bay Packers on the same day the San Francisco 49ers are playing the Rams.

But let’s cross that goal line when we come to it.

This could be the start of something swell. This could give us all an opportunity to be heard, to express ourselves, to become as angry as Howard Beale and tell the world that we just aren’t going to take Detroit Lion games anymore.

Boy, if this ever spread to regular network programming, we could all be in TV heaven.

I mean, what if we all got to vote on whether we wanted to watch “Masterpiece Theatre,” a George Bush state-of-the-union address or a Roseanne Barr rerun at a given hour? I doubt if Roseanne would win by more than a couple of million votes.