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All these entrepreneur-preachers have been hit hard, at least temporarily, by the PTL scandal. Swaggart says that in April and May he ran a $3 million deficit; the June gap was a little over $1 million. In June, Robertson's CBN reported $12 million in lost revenues for the three-month period ending in May and projects a $21 million shortfall through next March. The Roberts organization has admitted that monthly donations to the ministry dipped from $4.5 million to about $3 million in April and May. Falwell has reported a $4 million deficit in the wake of the scandals, and Schuller admits to a "significant" dip during March and April.
The drop in funds has coincided with a decline in the ministries' TV audience. Exact figures on cable viewership are hard to come by, but the falloff of broadcast viewers has been dramatic (see chart). Between February and May, the number of TV households tuning in to Swaggart's weekly show dropped from 2,161,000 to 1,759,000. Robert Schuller's Hour of Power lost 191,000 households, dipping to 1,507,000. Oral Roberts dropped 155,000 households, to 994,000. Jerry Falwell's Old Time Gospel Hour and Robertson's daily 700 Club just about held even. The only gainer of the group, ironically, was The ptl Show, which climbed from 250,000 to 302,000 households. That increase may have been due to curiosity seekers or to Falwell supporters who tuned in after the Fundamentalist minister took over the program.
The ratings changes are highly significant in the televangelism industry, because viewers form what ministries term their "donor base." The faithful TV audience is a mainstay of ministry income, providing a steady flow of gifts -- commonly $10 or $20 a contributor. The names and addresses of donors are carefully preserved in computer banks and used in direct-mail donation pitches, another major source of ministry income. At the Jimmy Swaggart Ministries headquarters, for example, workers used to extract some $2.5 million in monthly donations from occasional donors. That amount has now been cut in half.
All these ups and downs stem directly from accounts of the mismanagement, which reached epic heights, or perhaps depths, at PTL. From a jury-rigged studio, which began broadcasting in 1974 from an old furniture store in Charlotte, Jim and Tammy Bakker had nurtured a Christian entertainment colossus. But the mountains of documents at PTL show that the ministry ran, almost literally, on a wing and a prayer. At one time the ministry spent employee retirement funds to pay operating expenses. PTL had no reliable internal audits, no checks and balances for financial accountability and often no receipts or other devices for keeping track of incoming and outgoing cash. In the final months of the Bakker era, PTL was taking in $4.2 million a month and spending $7.2 million.
Behind the accumulated chaos was a helter-skelter organization run by an insecure, often dictatorial man who, in the words of a former PTL executive, "didn't know how to balance his own checkbook." Executive turnover was constant. PTL repeatedly switched legal advisers and accounting firms. Under Bakker, PTL at one point had 47 bank accounts and 17 vice presidents, with financial control split into four separate departments. Thus no one except Bakker and his closest aides had an overall view of the ministry and its money.