Page 86 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

SELLING CONSENT 75

However, just as the networks are less necessary to local stations, so
too are local stations less necessary to the local television market. The
technology that has helped local broadcast stations has also enabled out-
of-market ‘superstations’ to beam in on many lucrative markets all over
the country. Low-power television stations and other methods of
expanding the available spectrum have been added to the multiple
channels available through cable, whose share of market has catapulted
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in recent years. San Francisco, for instance, has gone from five to
twenty-two television outlets in the eighties. All of these factors are
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added to the burgeoning home use of VCRs, not only for rented
videocassettes but for time-shifted viewing and commercial zapping of
broadcast fare.
The net result of all this technological innovation is to radically
reduce the market share of each outlet and to even more seriously
undercut the revenue base of advertiser-supported television media,
whose rates are not only based on raw numbers but increasingly on
demographically targeted market segments.
A further pressure on broadcast stations, at a time when revenue is
being squeezed, is a demand from ownership for ever higher return on
investment. This obsession for maximum profits in the immediate term
is a broader disease of the entire corporate American economy, fueled
by crushing debt service created by leveraged buy-outs. Although the
effect on networks, all three of whom are now part of far larger
corporate conglomerates with a great demand for cash flow, has been
widely noted, the effect on individual stations, whether independent,
affiliated with networks, or part of chains, is enormous. 10
Despite increasing deregulation, stations remain the most highly
regulated node in the many-stranded television web. They not only are
the primary responsible agents for programming liability, they also are
under pressure to serve the local community by both the terms of the
license and the public interest tradition from the original
Communications Act—an obligation not shared by other program
producers and distributors.
Enlightened management has over the years seen the obligation of
local service as the advantage of local identification, the characteristic
which a station can use as a classic ‘unique selling point’ against all
those other competitors (except for other local stations, of course). This
is achieved in practice by building on traditional avenues of community
involvement, adapted to broadcasting realities.
It should be noted that ‘identity’ for any medium that exists in time,
rather than space, takes the form of ‘continuity’. Although the local