31 Skidoo

31 SKIDOO
[SOURCE: The Huffington Post, AUTHOR: Marvin Kitman]
[Commentary] Everyone has their own reason, but Kitman won't be voting for Rudy Giuliani because of WNYC/31. Ch. 31 was the only municipally owned TV station in the nation. The Federal government built it in 1961 as an experiment to test how UHF would work in a crowded urban media environment, and then turned it over to the city in 1962. During the next decade or two, our other major public TV station, the famous WNET/13's, programming had grown highly forgettable. Suddenly in August 1995, Rudy G. decided to sell the station. The summer of that year, you might not remember, was the height of the media frenzy. Media barons were running amok buying and merging. Every day it seemed somebody was even buying CBS. In the auction Rudy mandated, the station went to a consortium of ITT and Dow-Jones for $207 million. Now this was a station on the UHF dial that was watched by two and a half people, whose ratings in the last Nielsen book for the New York City market were near Ch. 8 of New Haven and Ch. 10 in Philadelphia. $207 million? It was as if there was something in the water broadcasters were drinking. Rudy immediately went on the balcony to deliver one of his pronuncimentos crowing about the deal. It was, the folks were led to believe, the most brilliant coup in the history of municipal finance since Peter Minuet swindled the Indians out of Manhattan Island for $24. But by 1996, people realized that because of the digital TV transition, ITT and Dow-Jones had purchased six channels to program instead of one. By unloading the station for a crummy 207 million, Rudy G. bartered away the city's chance to make a real killing. Media sales were absolutely insane. A conservative estimate of six to ten times is, well, conservative.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marvin-kitman/31-skidoo_b_68031.html