free text l0 to three-to-one, three-to-one today, i hanako montgomery in tokyo and this jensen: it s a time of enormous turmoil. shut up in here. the 60s are over dad. durham: here s michael at the foul line, a shot on ehlo. -good! -yeah! ha-ha! turner: we intend to cover all the news all the time. we won t be signing off until the world ends. isn t that special? any tool for human expression will bring out the best and the worst in us, and television has been that. they don t pay me enough to deal with animals like this. people are no longer embarrassed to admit they watch television. we have seen the news and it is us. clark: slowly but surely, the 1970s are disappearing. the 1980s will be upon us. what a decade it is coming up. happy new year! [ cheers and applause ] auletta: as you begin the 80s in the television world, the landscape was, on any given evening, 9 out of 10 people were watching only one of three networks. more than 30 million people are addicted to it.
jamemes: that s s what s hahappening. we are being sat in the back of the bus television style. and if pittman gets away with this, then there are others cable shows that are going to try it. pittman: mtv doesn t exclude black acts. what mtv does exclude is music that s not rock and roll. mtv came out with no consideration on how to o infuse black musisic into theheir mi. i am j just floorered by the fat that there are so few black artists featured on it. why is that? we have to try and do what we think not only new york and los angeles will appreciate but some town in the midwest that would be scared to death by prince or a string of other black faces. interesting. okay. thank you very much. when are we going to see anybody of color on mtv, bebecause you said music television. when are you going to start covering all genres of musicic? whoo! music has no color. and it shouldn t have color. and i don t believe in that. what i do, i don t want it labeled black or white.
announcer:r: for a whwhile it seeeemed theres nonothing new on the horizon. announcing the latest achievement in home entertainment. the power of sight video. the power of sound stereo. mtv, music television. [ rock music plays ] we are so excited about this new concept in tv. we ll be doing for tv what fm did for radio. [ music plays ] quinn: at the time the world was saying, we don t think anybody is going to watch videos over and over, but wewe knew wewe had sosomething spspecial. oohoh, my littltle pretty o my pretty one when you gonna give me some time, sharona? brown: mtv made you feel like those artists were in the room. you had a personal concert all day. crackck that whipip kasem: whehen you haveve the rorotation of,f, say, 100 didifferent vivideos being rotated over a and over on mtv, they do a a great job b of expoposing new a acts. here in my car where the image breaks down
i like michaelel jackson because e he can sing good, he s s bad and h he knows how to d dance. he s s so sexy andnd so gorgeo. he s exciting! michchael jacksoson is the mn of the 80s. graham: mtv starts to get pressure from cbs records, which was michael jackson s label. rock andnd roll in i itself rereally was the thing that broke a lot of rules. and when you re very successful, you try to make your own rules occasionally. graham: as the story goes, cbs essentially said, we will pull every other artist we have onon mtv if y you don t p play this. they h had to be e essentially blackmkmailed into doioing it. i it doesn t t matter whoho sg or right just beat it he was the artist that mtv really needed. they didn n t know they neededed him, but boboy, when wewe started t e ththe michael l jackson viv, it was just unbelievable. and no one s going to. questlove: then there s the domino effect. suddenly you see prince videos from warner brothers do the same thing. so o toni
didn t necessarily get that quickly. do yoyou really w want toto hurt me? ? do you really want to make me cry? boy george: do you really want to hurt me? is a good song. it s a song that old people like and young people like. so i think the proof is in the pudding. buy it and eat it. majewski: mtv actually met with duran duran s managers and said, we re looking for kind of like james bond videos, on lococation, and d their mananagers are t ths that wenent to the b band mems and saidid, look, we realllly need to o up the ae with thesese clips. wewe need to g give this c chl somemething theyey ve neverr seen b before. m moving on t the floor no, babe you re a bird of paradise man: there are some that have accused your videos of being soft porn. well, excuuuuse me! [ laughter ] we like to call them tastefully smutty. her name is rio and she dances on the sand