Through the Wire

Contributors: Ted Hearn, Kent Gibbons, Tom Umstead.

Three-Day Weekend With a Purpose

The rest of the country may have been swapping valentines and checking out President's Day sales at the malls, but Lifetime Television president and CEO Carole Black and Meredith Wagner, the network's executive vice president of public affairs, spent their three-day weekend in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

No, the Lifetime ladies weren't on holiday — they were extending their support to a march advocating the end of violence against women.

Black and Wagner, along with such actresses as Jane Fonda, Sally Field and Christine Lahti, lent their voices to mothers who have been trying to raise attention for the estimated 400 unsolved disappearances of women there in the last 10 years.

Lifetime supported the march, held by Amnesty International and Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler's V-Day Foundation, as part of its Emmy Award-winning public-affairs campaign.

“It was one of the most heartbreaking and most moving experiences of my life,” Wagner said. “I looked up, and women were carrying crosses, and on them were their daughter's dresses, representing their missing lives.

“It was stunningly powerful,” she said. “These women are so brave.”

The executives said the march attracted a lot of media, so backers hope the women will finally get some official attention and action for their cause.

NAB-bing Support?

If Comcast Corp. ends up buying The Walt Disney Co., Comcast Corp. executives would have a long to-do list. For instance, what about the National Association of Broadcasters?

Disney pulled ABC from the NAB last June, becoming the last of the Big Four networks to bolt after the lobby group's independent affiliates refused to accept relaxation of the national broadcast-ownership limit.

Disney's top Washington official, Preston Padden, even floated the idea of forming a rival group.

Would Comcast, as the owner of the ABC Television Network and its 10 stations — as well as the largest U.S. cable company — even be invited to join the NAB?

NAB does not currently have a bylaw that bars entry to a cable company that also owns TV stations. Cox Broadcasting Inc. — a corporate cousin of cable MSO Cox Communications Inc. — is a potent NAB member. But trade groups have been known to restrict membership when outsiders start clawing at the gate.

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association several years ago adopted a bylaw that denies full-member status to an incumbent local phone company that also owns cable systems.”

Queasy Feelings

The Walt Disney Co. shareholder meeting on March 3 should be good for hotels in Philadelphia.

Comcast Corp., of course, always draws cable types to central Philly: Cable Television Laboratories Inc., for example, is holding a winter meeting Feb. 24-27 at the Loews Philadelphia Hotel on Market Street — the same hotel where rogue shareholders Roy Disney and Stanley Gold are hosting a “SaveDisney” rally on March 2.

So it should come as a relief that Loews is looking closely into why on Saturday, Feb. 7, “a number of guests” at the hotel “visited the hospital after experiencing flu-like symptoms,” as Loews president Jack Adler informed CableLabs recently. Also, no guests were actually admitted to the hospital, and no guests reported the same flu-like symptoms since Feb. 8. The symptoms lasted 12 to 24 hours at most, Adler wrote.

Given the swords hanging over Disney these days, there's more than enough for folks to feel queasy about without worrying about hotel germs.

Pre-Natal Debut

Talk about taking your work to the extreme: Discovery Networks U.S. vice president of live production and special projects Bob Sitrick took an hour out of overseeing Discovery Health Channel's live 10-hour programming event “Birth Day Live!” on Feb. 16.

Sitrick was beside his pregnant wife Mary Beth when she underwent a sonogram — live, and on Discovery Health's air — to determine the sex of their second child at Florida Hospital in Orlando. That was one of three facilities the network staked out to document the labor and delivery of 15 boys, 17 girls and a set of twins.

The couple — along with a national viewing audience — found out they'll soon be proud parents of a baby girl.

“She was in the perfect position before the sonogram, and in perfect position afterward, but she moved around a bit during the procedure,” says Sitrick. “But we know she's 100% healthy — and 100% girl!

A Record Deal

Coming soon to a remainder bin in a record store near you: the CD of American Idol oddity William Hung, “singing” his zealous but out-of-tune version of the Ricky Martin tune “She Bangs.”

The Fuse music network has used its relationship with Koch Entertainment to get a record deal for the tone-deaf wannabe. Following a recent performance by the civil-engineering student at a volleyball game at his college — the University of California at Berkeley — Fuse representatives gave Hung a check for $25,000, should he decide to accept the recording offer.

They also promised to cablecast his music video, if he makes one.