World View: It’s All in a Word

NEW YORK: Ahead of the American Film Market, Anna Carugati shares her thoughts on how the media business has become more global.

The television industry has coined its fair share of expressions and acronyms. We TiVo our favorite shows; channels strip programs across the week; producers create backdoor pilots; we look to VOD and SVOD, nonlinear platforms, to satisfy our on-demand viewing; and catch-up TV sites allow us to view what we missed on linear channels.

Many businesses create their own terminology—who would have known a few years ago that Google would become such a ubiquitous verb? I’ve noticed an interesting shift of late in television jargon—the one from “international” to “global.” This reminds me of when Ted Turner, the founder of Turner Broadcasting System and CNN, Cartoon Network, TBS and TNT, banned the use of the word “foreign” on CNN back in the mid-’80s, insisting that the word “international” be used instead by all anchors and on-air correspondents.

The way Turner saw it, the word “foreign” focused on the point of view of the speakers and not that of the listeners. Therefore, since CNN was an international news-gathering organization, nothing and no one should be considered foreign. He was so adamant about this that he instituted a $100 fine for any CNN staffer who slipped and used the word “foreign.”

I had several friends at the time who worked for Turner Broadcasting and they told numerous stories of how difficult it actually was not to say “foreign.” It was, after all, a totally accepted term: foreign affairs, foreign relations. I remember one story in particular. One morning, a CNN anchor was interviewing the Russian foreign minister. Turner immediately called CNN’s head of news at the time, Eason Jordan; Turner went ballistic, screaming that no one should use the word “foreign.” When Jordan pointed out that the title of the person being interviewed was “foreign minister,” Turner was beside himself, and blurted out, “Damn it, you tell him to change his title!”

Word of the ban on “foreign” spread to other parts of Turner’s companies. He also owned the Atlanta Braves baseball team and one of the Braves’ sports announcers, Skip Caray, who also worked for Turner, was known for his dry, sarcastic sense of humor. He was doing the play-by-play commentary during a game, when a player up at bat suddenly stepped back. Caray deadpanned, “He appears to have an international object in his eye.” 

Turner certainly took to heart the word “international” in all of his businesses. Soon CNN and Cartoon Network were launching around the globe, and many other media companies were doing the same with channels like MTV, Discovery, ESPN, Nickelodeon, HISTORY and, years later, the FOX International Channels fanning out across multiple continents.

“International” became a key component of the media industry, often advancing at greater rates of growth than domestic businesses because of untapped demand and a thirst for movies and TV programming in so many markets. Here cropped up another set of words that quickly became the jargon du jour: “think global, act local.” This was one of the first sightings of the term “global.” I appreciate the concept at work behind the expression—international expansion is critical for growth, but you have to think of the local market and its specific needs before launching a channel in a given territory.

Looking at the entire world as their oyster is becoming second nature for many TV executives. It is essential to have a global strategy, and not only in the channel business. In the format industry, the holy grail for producers is to find an idea that has global appeal, and when they get it right, the rewards are huge.

For another side of the television business, program distribution, the global market has been indispensible for years. So many high-quality, high-budget shows rely on international sales to cover their budget deficits. If we look at Hollywood studios’ TV fare, numerous shows became global hits: the CSI and Law & Order franchises, Grey’s Anatomy, Lost, NCIS, The Simpsons and House, just to name a few. These shows were mega-hits first in their home market, but each contained story lines and characters that audiences in numerous countries found equally compelling.

Here we come to another much-used expression: “universal themes,” that quality that is intrinsic to shows that can travel. This applies to TV movies as much as to any other programming genre. TV movies and independent films, as we examine in our main feature, are a unique microcosm of the television business and exemplify all these forces at work: these movies have to work in their home markets but, at the same time, have plots and characters that viewers anywhere can relate to. On the financing side, made-for-television movies depend on license fees from international markets—there’s that word again. Turner would be proud.