Life In The Fox Lane

A slight, bearded man with an unassuming voice climbs a broadcast pole in rural Arkansas to place his television station's antenna on the tower - without permission. He's done this at dozens of sites across the state and won't take the antennas down - eventually forcing communities to accept his station.

Is this legal?

"I do it," says KASN 38 Director of Marketing Chris Garrett with a mischievous grin. And he's successful. The Little Rock-based station now has cable carriage on over 225 cable systems across the state.

Garrett is living up to his station's tag line of "Doing Television Like No One Else," and that's what KASN 38, the only independent station left in the state, has had to do since it lost its Fox Broadcasting affiliation in April 1990.

Meanwhile, KLRT Fox 16 is utilizing its Fox affiliation for all it's worth - right down to including the broadcasting company's name in the station's title.

"You just become more valuable when you're a network affiliate," says KLRT Vice President and General Manager Steve Scollard. He feels strongly on this point because Scollard fought hard - and some say dirty - to get the affiliation.

When KASN was the Arkansas Fox affiliate in 1988, the station negotiated a merger with KLRT that would have transferred the Fox affiliation, plus other programming to KLRT. Meanwhile, KASN would have become a Home Shopping Network.

But once the Fox affiliation switched and KASN laid off over half of its employees, KLRT suddenly pulled out of the deal - notifying KASN by fax.

"Quite frankly, we were set up," says Paula Pruett, president of MMC Television Corp., the company that owns KASN.

According to the terms of the merger agreement, Fox reverted back to KASN when the deal...