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Innovative Station Founder Speaks by Don Schwartz
Frederick Thomas in MHz's Washington DC control room, circa 1995. photo: courtesy F. Thomas
MHZ NETWORKS IS A UNIQUE AMERICAN
media company with an exclusive focus: the world beyond the United States’ borders.
I discovered MHz via their publicist and was instantly intrigued. Why don’t I already know about this large, multi-faceted network with its important humanitarian mission?
Born in a non-PBS public television station, and based in Falls Church, Virginia, with the call letters WNVC and WNVT, it was rebranded as MHz Networks and now reaches 38 million American households.
Growing steadily, MHz Worldview is available in over half the top 20 US markets, notably WFME in New York City, KLCS in Los Angeles and KCSM in San Francisco.
I wanted to know more about MHz and how it developed. I wanted to bring it to the attention of people like me—those of us who were unaware of this vital media outlet. To that end I contacted and interviewed its founder and CEO Frederick Thomas.
Born in Washington, DC, and raised in the area, Thomas attended the American University there for his BA degree in American Studies and MA in Film and Video.
Thomas has won three regional Emmy awards as Executive Producer, a regional Billboard Music Award for Best Regional Show, and in 2013, a “Communication Education Award” from the World Affairs Council.
I spoke with him by phone at his office.
Frederick Thomas on a shoot in India's Golden Temple, circa 2005. photo: courtesy F. Thomas
CineSource:What brought you from your B.A. in American Studies to a program in Film?
Frederick Thomas: I assumed I was going to go for a PhD in American Studies. I had zeroed in on an era—the bohemian era. I was in my twenties, I was fascinated with that whole period of time—1880s through up to about 1920.
It was an era that included progressive thinkers like Emma Goldman, John Reed, and people looking to break through the status quo like Isadora Duncan. It was a renaissance of thought and action with a lot if it initiated by questions that arose out of the industrial age and the end of the Victorian age.
Also, right around the same time I was deciding on grad schools the home video experience—Betamax and VHS—exploded. I found myself consuming films, and most of them were foreign films. I found it to be kind of an extension of my American Studies interests.
What I couldn’t find in the video store I could watch on the early 80s version of Bravo. What a cool channel that was. ‘The Tin Drum’, ‘Das Boot’, ‘1900’ were films that told world history from a different perspective. Essentially, a non-Hollywood ‘what really happened’ perspective, of the people living the stories.
In American Studies you spend a lot of time studying immigration. In fact, you could argue that American Studies is all about immigration, and the various immigration movements into the country, and then the effect of those immigrants on America as a whole.
It’s current today, isn’t it? I mean it has never gone away. I think all of that is the background and the impetus, and the interest, and the reason why I wanted to do what I ended up doing.
I wanted to help show Americans the world in a way that could help them understand America even better. In the end, I felt I could be more effective doing it though film than by studying it for years and writing a book. I just wanted to use the new mass medium of television.
So, that brought you to your Masters in film?
My BA degree and film consumption definitely made me decide to go to film school to ‘make things’ instead of just studying things. But, I also had a lifetime of exposure to the world through my dad.
He worked for the United States Information Agency. He was a deputy director, he worked with Edward R. Murrow who was one of his bosses, if not his direct boss. My dad was in charge of a magazine called ‘America Illustrated’, a monthly publication of American propaganda, basically.
It was a part of an exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States. Every month there would be hundreds of thousands of these respective magazines. Theirs was called ‘Soviet Life’. The magazines were exchanged between the two countries.
Television when Thomas was growing up in the '50s. photo: courtesy F. Thomas
My dad would bring home a copy of ‘America Illustrated’ and a copy of ‘Soviet Life’ every month. He’d sit me down, put ‘em in front of me, go through each one, and tell me which stories were true, and which ones were lies. (laughs)
I guess that kinda stuck. This was in 1968 or ’69. I was in 6th or 7th grade.
Somewhere in there I had an exposure that the world was different than the way it was being presented here, to us—especially through American news. [It] seemed to always present the world as a dangerous place, where all there are are earthquakes, volcanoes, and wars.
How did this experience drive your decisions to study film, to enter the media world?
The beauty of America is that it’s brand new. It’s kind of isolated from the rest of the world, but that same beauty can be the reason why we get ourselves in a lot of trouble. Even though we are made up of the world’s people, we don’t know much about the world.
Our students score pretty badly on geography standards. Of course, everybody knows this strange irony that this land of immigrants doesn’t know much about the world.
How can that be? Quite literally, I felt that maybe there was something I could do about it. In a very real sense, that story began in ’93 when I came to this public station here that now is a national TV network.
What did you do after you received your Masters degree?
I ran a public access cable facility right after my graduate degree—a cable station here in Fairfax County, Virginia. I worked there for about five years. Then I took a job as a program director with a public television broadcast station in Washington, DC where there are four different public television licensees.
The one I started with is licensed to a company headquartered a hundred miles south from here, in Richmond, Virginia. As the fourth public station it had limited PBS program rights—like you could only air ten percent of the PBS schedule, and it had to run those programs six weeks after the first run. So, if ‘Frontline’ ran September 1st, you had to wait six weeks to run it on one of these stations.
So what I did was to take the little bit of international programming it had—mostly locally-produced programs—and turn the whole station into an international channel. The station already had a lot of ethnic programs—South Asian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Iranian.
This was ’93. There was no Internet. There was nothing. So, these shows were really, really important. It was a great use of public TV, honestly, because it helped these communities to stay in touch. Those shows were great.
What did you do there?
The first thing I did was create a program schedule you could count on. Meaning if we scheduled the program, then we aired the program—revolutionary at the time for that particular station.
But the first big thing I did was spend the ungodly sum of ten thousand dollars—ungodly to the people who worked there—and got ten of the best foreign films that I could put my hands on, the classics. Everything from ‘The Seven Samurai’ to Polanski’s ‘Knife in the Water’, ‘Bicycle Thief’—I tried to get a range of countries, and they were all four or five star films.
In the fall of ’93 we took one night, Wednesday nights, eight to ten o’clock, and made that ‘international film night.’ The rest of the schedule, honestly, was a bloody mess. There was no consistency, nothing in it that anybody had any reason to watch.
Thomas at a meeting in Vietnam, circa 2010. photo: courtesy F. Thomas
So, we started on a Wednesday night, put these in. We even had to babysit to makes sure that the people putting the tapes in put them in in the right order. You couldn’t even count on that.
We did that from September ‘til December, and then the first week of December we went on the air with what we called ‘The Greatest Week of Foreign Films.’ We put films on six nights in a row, and the final night was ‘The Seven Samurai’.
Then we did what all public stations do, we pledged—see if there was an audience out there. The first night it was a little scary. We had a couple of mishaps. It seemed the phones were not plugged in. That’s a real problem when you’re asking people to phone in.
All of a sudden: POW! The phones started ringing. I know it sounds a little corny, but they’ve been ringing even since. We ended up tripling what we had paid for the bloody films. Two weeks later I was named station manager.
Then, in January of ’94, I changed the name from the call letters of WNVC, and went with the moniker WNVC World View TV. I threw out all the crappy 2nd shelf public TV programming that nobody watched [laughs], and moved us into international newscasts during the day.
This was ’94. There was no satellite TV for us, there wasn’t anything. So, we just started doing deals, and using the satellite downlink capabilities that we had. We started acquiring news from all the foreign channels that were on satellite that we could get our hands on.
The initial idea, at that point, was to focus on the one million people in the D.C. area who were non-natives. I used the 1990 census data, and looked for programming for the top ten population groups.
The schedule would be something like—during the day it was news, we might go from the Greek news from ten to ten-thirty, in Greek, and then switch to the Italian news, in Italian, and then switch to the Japanese news, in Japanese. It became popular very quickly.
Then, at night, at least between seven and eleven, we’d provide English accessible—either in English, or with subtitles—entertainment programming. We just kept going with the films. We ended up airing narrative feature films from over 50 countries.
Then we acquired some sports. We carried soccer for awhile. Gaelic football. Australian rules football. We tried to make primetime be kind of a way of looking at the world for everybody. And, then during the day it was language-specific.
We had books of letters from people about our new programming. A lawyer friend of mine used to get his hair cut at a Greek barber somewhere downtown. The guy would put a Closed sign on his door between ten and ten-thirty so he could watch the Greek news. (laughs)
We did pledge festivals in different languages. We started with Dewali, our first big one—the Indian festival of lights. I was often the guy havin’ to be on air, but more often it was the local producers—south Asian or Indian—who would ask viewers to send contributions to the station. By the time we had finished doing all of that, I would say we did seven or eight different languages: Vietnamese, Chinese, Urdu, Japanese, even French.
Somewhere in the late 90s a couple things happened. Satellite TV arrived, and so the Greek barber who loved his half-hour of Greek news every day, suddenly he could buy a box, a little, tiny dish, and he could have a Greek channel 24 hours a day. We saw a lot of groups head that way.
We shifted gears again. Now we were going to focus on the English language as the base language, but it’s going to be all about the world—and only about the world. That was around 2001. SONY Pictures had bought up a lot of the classic films which took away our bread and butter.
Around that same time we shifted toward dramas, some of these cop shows. One of the first ones was ‘Maigret’—a classic French detective. We had to have something, and we started in on those, and they just began to replace the feature films. We held on to Australian football, Gaelic football. We lost the soccer eventually. We’d carried all the soccer that you can imagine.
Right around 2000, the Richmond corporation asked me to run the second station up here. So, we took that one over, and we decided to make it more youth/international-oriented. We started to do a lot of music, and made it more the generation X, generation Y, the kids who had grown up internationally.
This was opposed to what we had been programming the first channel for which was more a generation that had been Peace Corps-oriented. We tried to make the second channel more hip. That worked pretty well, for awhile.
In mid-2000, we started getting letters from people who had moved out of the area who were asking, ‘Where the hell do we find MHz in Tucson? You should be in Tucson.’ Had a couple of stations in other markets say, ‘Hey, if you can put the signal on a satellite, I’ll put it on the air here, in Chicago.’
I thought, ‘Yeah, well, if I had the money, I’d put it on satellite tomorrow.’ But, we didn’t have a way of doing it. It was very expensive—for us.
Around 2006, an opportunity popped up from folks we had been working with who had some extra satellite capacity, domestically, here in the U.S. I can remember the phone call, remember where I was.
They said, ‘I’ve got a channel for you in the U.S. You can have it until we resell it; but you have 30 days to get us a signal and you might be able to use it for six months or a year. Do you think you can do it?’ And, we did!
We pulled everything we had national rights for. We rebranded it, renamed it. Called it MHz Worldview. Put the thing up.
We had these two stations in a top ten market that were independent—still public, but not part of PBS. But, we still had technical and an intranet hookups with public stations. We could send messages to each other—kind of a message board/email arrangement.
Once we had put MHz Worldview on the satellite one afternoon, we let all the public television stations in the U.S. know that we had a 24/7 international feed. The message was simple: If you you’re interested, let us know. Two hours later we had ten stations say, ‘Yeah, we’re interested.’ It was pretty cool. It was one of those moments where you just go, ‘Damn, I would’ve been happy with one or two (laughs). We had ten.’
From there we just started signing agreements. We used the free satellite space that we had. There was a moment in time where we signed up with Chicago, and all of a sudden we were distributed in a market bigger than our own.
That was a big, big moment. Because then you have to have... well, simple things—somewhere for an affiliate to phone in 24 hours a day. You need to be able to update them with program changes. All of a sudden we’re really a national network. I wouldn’t say it happened over night, but it happened really quickly.
From there to here we’ve just kept building on it. We have 35 affiliates around the country, 38 million households have access to MHz Worldview.
Meanwhile, back in Washington, D.C. where we still had two separate TV antennas, the game plan was this: We knew digital TV was coming, we knew what it meant—where you used to put one channel on a signal, digital would allow you to put four or more. You literally could put multiple channels in the same bandwidth where you use to could only put one.
The FCC had set a deadline for when that would happen: February, 2009. So that was the primary reason we created MHz Worldview—because we knew stations all over the country would have extra channel capacity, but no actual channels to put in that space.
For public TV, all they were going to do was repackage what PBS already did. So, they would take all the kids programming and make it the Kids Channel. That’s not a bad strategy for them, but there was nothing new, nothing different.
So, we really wanted to get in the air before the digital transition took place. But, we also wanted to do that back here in Washington—for another reason. We had entire foreign networks that wanted access to Washington, D.C. And because we had two broadcast antennas here, we had double the amount of spectrum. We literally had double the spectrum that any other broadcaster had in the market. So we started adding whole international networks as our digital channels. We ended up with six channels on each of the two broadcast spectrums that we had—12 international channels in Washington, D.C.
I guess we’re best known for being the first and only major network for bringing the entire Al Jazeera English-language service to the United States in 2009, and we put them on here in Washington, D.C. We have carried Russia Today for longer than that. France 24. NHK, a Japanese feed. Korean Channel Arirang TV. We have had SABC, South African Broadcast Corporation.
Currently we have CCTV from China. We’ve had Ethiopian Channel. Nigerian Channel. Some will stay on for a year, some have been on for seven or eight years. We filled up Washington, D.C. with international news, and continue to move new channels into the market.
It’s quite ironic that this smallest broadcaster in the Washington, D.C. market in 2009, when the digital transition came, put more programming—international or domestic—in the air than all of them. It was pretty funny—truly David and Goliath. We broadcast material that people would not have seen otherwise.
Our national channel, MHz Worldview, was getting distributed in similar means around the country. We’re now in the entire state of Utah. We’re in places you wouldn’t think, in places where it would make a lot of sense, and we’re not in places you would think we should be, but we haven’t broken through yet—like New York. In total, around 38 million households nation-wide.
That’s current until just this year. Through the course of time, particularly the last ten years, we’ve kept pushing the international window. The parent corporation, Commonwealth Public Broadcasting, which is in Richmond, Virginia, was a traditional PBS television operation. MHz had become the exact opposite of the PBS approach.
We had entertained for quite awhile, over a decade, the notion of being truly independent. Not having to fit inside of the Richmond corporate way of doing things. There’s no right or wrong to it. It’s just different. And if you’re focused on the world, and the United States, and connecting all that together like MHz was, suffice it to say your culture is quite different than the culture of a station, which is really only focused on one town in Virginia.
And over time, I think the Richmond board of directors began to see that there probably was some value in letting us go. Make their life easier, let them focus on Richmond completely and which they do very well, and let us focus and pursue what we want to do. After quite a bit of negotiation, January 22nd of this year, we legally separated from them. So, we are now completely an independent organization.
I’ll state the obvious, congratulations! You have access to 38 million households via broadcasting and cable. What about the Internet?
That’s where we’ve been expanding dramatically in the last three or four years, and particularly since we became an independent entity this year. We are on Roku. If you had one of the first Roku boxes, our logo was on the outside of the box. That’s how early-on we were with Roku.
A certain amount of our content is on Amazon Prime; a little bit of content on iTunes and Google Chrome. We have apps that you can download the live stream both on Android and iOS. We are building apps for all the smart TVs. The real question is, ‘Where are we going?’ We’re going everywhere everybody else is going—all screens, all the time.
We don’t have the resources of ABC, NBC; we’re very niche oriented, which gives us a great advantage. We’re small, we’re nimble, we can move pretty quickly.
The most recent and biggest news about what we’re doing is the creation of a commercial channel. MHz Choice is a linear channel with all the premier international entertainment programming we acquire. MHz Worldview will remain a news and information channel distributed through public television. That’s about all I want to say about it right now. Suffice it to say we’re moving pretty fast on that.
As the founder and CEO what specifically do you do to support the continued growth and development of MHz?
It changes almost every month. It’s been that way for twenty years. There is no element that I haven’t done. The consistent thing across all that time is strategizing: Where next? How to get there—before others do? And how to do it in a way that you don’t sort of give away the ‘secret sauce.’ It’s all about strategy. Some of that is reading the trades, talking to other people; but I think most of it is constantly reinventing and thinking about how we have to reinvent ourselves.
If you were in my office you would notice there are Emmy awards on the floor from fourteen years ago. I have never even hung them on the wall. Now it’s become kind of a symbol for me—the point being I don’t want to tell the stories about what we’ve done because to me we haven’t done anything yet.
So, it’s constantly thinking, ‘What’s next?’ There’s a million and one ways to move a video file these days. Everyday there’s a new device. It’s really trying to think all that through.
You began by talking about being told by your father about what was true and what was not true in those two magazines, ‘America Illustrated’ and ‘Russia Today’. You were introduced to propaganda at an early age. Now you have an extremely important media organization with a dozen different international news channels. You don’t control their programming, they do. How do you deal with the virtual certainty that many, if not most, of those channels include propaganda?
Our job is to bring it, present it. The times when it’s tough, those are the times when you have to remember why you’re doing what you’re doing. With Al Jazeera we took a little bit of heat. It went unnoticed which was really surprising to me. We had a couple of people who didn’t know the difference between Al Qaeda and Al Jazeera. We had a couple of those, but they came and went.
The ‘Russia Today’ programming has been most recent where people have voiced their opinions. They get pretty fired up about it. We do live in an information age. I do appreciate that this is broadcast on the air, got our name on it. But I also know there’s a thing called a remote control. I’m always amazed how people can get fired up about it. But I would rather have this content available than not have it available. Not having it available is a much scarier concept. That’s how I deal with it.
We have had a couple of stories where things went a little weird, emotions were running high. After 9/11, during the invasion of Afghanistan, there was a moratorium in the American media of showing dead American bodies, American soldiers—a real hot-button issue. It was a way of controlling and sanitizing a war for Americans. But we were carrying networks from all over the world. At the time we had a live Mexican newscast right out of Mexico City. They were not blocking those images.
I had an ‘air-switcher’—a guy responsible for switching the programs. And he’s former military. He took it upon himself to block the images. I came to work the next morning confronted with a large number of irate viewers. It was crazy. And then there was the network from Mexico City. They demanded an apology. I had to write an apology that they read on-air the next night.
Now the air-switcher was a different story. I suspended him for two weeks. Told him to go home and think about what he’d done. He still works for us. I would say in all the years that’s about as close as we’ve come to somebody not really gettin’ it.
From a personal point of view I don’t come at it that way. I think we have a job to do, we do it. It doesn’t matter what you put on. I tell you one thing—for as many people that are angry about ‘Russia Today’, I can say easily we have many more that love that channel.
Your answer makes perfect sense. It involves the intelligence of Americans—whether or not we can filter out propaganda from reality. Propaganda in and of itself is news.
This is personal for me on a different level. I have four kids. Been married twice. My two older kids, their mother is from Burma, she grew up in Australia, and so they have relatives in Burma, Australia, and England. I have a third child with my wife. His roots run to Ireland, France, and he has a love of all things Italian. Our fourth child we adopted from Russia, before she was a year old. We’ve always encouraged her to understand her Russian roots and some day explore them in a personal way. Some nights when she watches the American evening news with us, I’ll flip it over to ‘Russia Today’ on one of my MHz channels. Pretty amazing when you think about that parallel to my own childhood.
Look, it’s all about people. There are like-minded people all over the world. It’s more important to remember that than it is to remember some kind of label that goes with them—that all Russians are like this, or all Americans are like that. I think the smartest people in the world are the ones who know something about many, many cultures, but also know even more about people. Those two things have to go together in order to consider yourself smart in my book.
Don Schwartz is an actor, writer and blogger on all things documentary, and can be seen here or reached .