At first glance it would appear to be a merger of the sacred and profane.
Rupert Murdoch - the man whose Fox Network brought to television the risque "Married With Children," the nihilistic series "The Simpsons" and the violent children's program "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers" - agreed Wednesday to pay $1.9 billion to acquire the cable channel controlled by Pat Robertson, the religious-right purveyor of "The 700 Club" Christian talk show, family oriented movies and reruns of such wholesome programming as "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."But in fact, Murdoch and Robertson are similar in key ways - politically conservative yet pragmatic executives concerned with creating the largest audiences possible for their television fare.
That is why, whatever Murdoch's plans for spicing up Robertson's Family Channel, analysts say he must take care not to totally alienate the viewership that has turned the operation into the United States' ninth-largest cable network, reaching 67 million homes.
Murdoch has always been "completely unconcerned with the very social agenda that Robertson seems to cherish, such as sexual abstinence, heterosexuality and the patriarchal family structure - in short everything that `The Simpsons' makes fun of," said Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media studies at Johns Hopkins University.
And yet, Miller continued, the two media executives' differences "may be more apparent than real."
Murdoch, whose Fox Kids World-wide Inc. unit of News Corp. is acquiring the Robertson-controlled holding company, International Family Entertainment Inc., is intent on expanding into cable programming and vying with such family fare as the Disney Channel and Viacom's Nickelodeon network.
Meanwhile, Robertson, a businessman who spun out International Family several years ago from the Christian Broadcasting Network to create a publiclytraded company, had come to realize that in an era of media mergers, he had little choice but to sell out.
"We felt it was time for the Family Channel to join the consolidation that was going on in the industry," said Robertson, who started the Christian Broadcasting Network in 1960 and turned it into a culturally and politically powerful force that enabled him eventually to found the Christian Coalition and to mount a serious run for the White House during the Republican primary campaign of 1988. One of his political supporters in that race was Murdoch.
Fox executives said that Robertson would continue to serve as host of "The 700 Club," which runs on the Family Channel each weeknight, combining spiritual uplift of a conservative Christian flavor with on-air healing sessions.