The Crying Nuns

-- Broadcasting & Cable, 12/4/2000

Consumers won't go long without their TV. This point was made in earnest by Disney VP Preston Padden at a conference on digital TV in Washington last month. Explaining how he knows Congress will never be able to do anything that makes TV sets go dark, Padden harked back to the period this year when Time Warner Cable turned off ABC's signal on some systems. Some viewers considered the situation so dire, he said, that The New York Times ran a photo of nuns who were crying because they couldn't watch last year's fave show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (They had a habit.) "You can't do better than crying nuns in The New York Times," he glowed.