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Christian TV giant woos Phila. as it faces legal tiff
Allegations surfaced about founder of Trinity Broadcasting, which bought Ch. 48.
Kristin E. Holmes
Inquirer staff writer
Trinity Broadcasting Network had sought a station in the Philadelphia
market for more than 10 years. Last month, the Christian television behemoth
finally closed a deal.
California-based TBN paid $48 million for WGTW-TV (Channel 48), a UHF
station based in Manayunk. The old lineup of reruns, including The Rockford Files
and some local programming, has given way to televangelism and more televangelism,
featuring the Rev. Robert Schuller, Bishop T.D. Jakes, Paula White, and other
national figures.
With the Oct. 1 deal, TBN expanded its presence in the area beyond the
cable systems that already carried the station. But the purchase - from Dorothy
Brunson, one of the few African American women to own a television station
- came at a troubled time for the network.
Several weeks earlier, the Los Angeles Times published a series of stories
about TBN that included allegations that founder Paul Crouch Sr., 70, paid
$425,000 in 1998 to prevent a former employee from going public with assertions
of having a homosexual liaison with him two years earlier.
The employee, Enoch Lonnie Ford, reportedly had threatened to file a wrongful-termination
lawsuit. Crouch has denied the allegations, and his son, Paul Crouch Jr.,
told the newspaper his father settled after advisers told him it would be
cheaper than litigation. The network also wanted to avoid negative publicity
during TBN's 25th anniversary year, the younger Crouch said.
The elder Crouch has not commented on the case, and his son declined to
discuss it for this article. But network spokesman Ronn Torossian said the
elder Crouch was the victim in a fight "against a twice-convicted felon,
a drug abuser and an extortionist, and we expect the court system will soon
find our chairman vindicated."
Torossian said TBN "continues to experience rapid growth and any issues
which the media concocts are simply not relevant to our business strategy
in Philadelphia or elsewhere. We expect that all unfounded allegations will
go away very quickly."
The allegations are now the subject of legal maneuvering because Ford
is accused of violating the 1998 settlement's confidentiality agreement by
again threatening to go public.
In the meantime, TBN is expanding a Christian television empire that is
said to be the largest in the world, with more than 12,000 affiliates worldwide
and accessibility for 93 percent of American households.
The network just finished its biannual "praise-a-thon" drive to raise
funds for an annual budget of more than $500 million. The weeklong telethon
usually has a live nightly broadcast, but this year it went to a taped, best-of
format. According to the younger Crouch, the decision had to do not with
the legal troubles but with his mother and network cofounder Jan Crouch's
continuing recovery from gallbladder surgery and a desire to make use of
the archives.
Torossian says the controversy has not adversely affected the network,
which he said was healthier than ever. Added Crouch Jr., "based on our pledges,
we are going right through the roof."
In Philadelphia, the younger Crouch said, station officials are looking
to move from the Manayunk headquarters and to upgrade equipment and other
infrastructure. In three to six months, he said, they hope to begin producing
local programming.
TBN officials have begun contacting local ministers for help in producing programming including Praise, a talk show, and Joy in Our Town, which has an "issue-and-answers type format," Crouch Jr. said.
TBN, which began in Southern California, did not become the dominant supplier
of Christian television until scandals in the late 1980s led to the downfall
of televangelists such as Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. That left a vacuum that
TBN filled, said Quentin J. Schultze, author of Televangelism and American Culture: The Business of Popular Religion.
Schultze described TBN's programming as a "conservative Christian smorgasbord."
The schedule includes everything from "apologetics to preaching to what some
would call a religious variety show with live audiences," said Schultze,
a religion professor at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich.
In 1991, the network tried to purchase WTGI-TV (Channel 61) in Wilmington
via a TBN subsidiary, National Minority TV Inc., but the network withdrew
its application after it was accused of using the subsidiary to get around
FCC regulations that limited the number of full-power stations that could
at that time be owned by a U.S. company.
Crouch Jr. said that the difficulty in purchasing the Wilmington station
involved "coming to terms on the value of the station. So we backed off."
Ole Anthony, a longtime critic of TBN, calls the network a "moral snakepit,"
with the Crouches living lavish lifestyles and presenting a distorted view
of Christianity by promoting the notion that believers can expect material
prosperity.
"Most of what they are preaching about," said Anthony, president of Trinity
Foundation Inc., a Dallas-based religious watchdog group, "is that Christianity
rewards greed."
The younger Crouch said the station offers more than the controversial "prosperity gospel." And he defended the teaching.
"If you give, it is not unheard of that God will bless you for it," he
said. "It's part of the Bible. If you want to try to deny it and say all
Christians should live in poverty and hand-to-mouth, I don't agree."
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