Page 88 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

SELLING CONSENT 77

Feature news treatment consisted of discussions, specialist-interviews
and often exhortation, about crime, drug abuse, good health practices,
family conflict, education, sexual problems, employment, the
environment and consumer complaints. Since these topics are perennial,
they are recycled regularly, sometimes in the form of a short series, or a
monthly ‘drive’ that orchestrates various formats, from specials to short
announcements to news segments. Although many of these topics raise
heated controversy, such as abortion or nuclear hazards, the
overwhelming tendency is to preserve an atmosphere of upbeat
optimism. If hard news is bad news, then local public affairs features
tend to be good news, or at least comforting information.
Controversy can be addressed in editorials, which are usually one- or
two-minute talking heads, the head often that of the station manager or
the public affairs director, if there is one. Another NAB survey, with a
sample of 422 stations, found that less than one-third bother to
editorialize and that of these less than 3 per cent will actually endorse a
candidate in a contested election. So, although the occasional station,
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like KPIX-TV in San Francisco, may occasionally take an unpopular
position it believes in, most stations play it safe for fear of alienating
viewers or of triggering equal-time rebuttals from sources that will
surely alienate viewers, for whose loyalty all this localism is expended.
Boosting the status quo cannot be left to on-air activities. General
managers, like executives of any business that depends on public
acceptance, spend a great deal of time attending civic affairs, visiting
schools, speaking at ceremonies. The better stations make sure that their
on-air talent, which is the key to news and public affairs ratings, is
visible in the flesh for public affairs and local charities. Stations
themselves sponsor dinners for the elderly, music concerts, park and zoo
days for families, fund-raising ball games with their own employees
participating. Weather reporters are increasingly fitting a central casting
type of the all-purpose warm community person, visiting schools and
hospitals with some sort of science or health presentation. 17
Since all of these strategies, on- and off-air, are often common within
the same market, the competition for ratings among local stations
revolves around two intangibles: the personalities of the talent and the
perception of the station as ‘the’ local station. Hiring charismatic talent
is still much of a mystical operation, with successful producers referring
to ineffable visceral cues as the determining factor. Scarcely open to
rational discussion, the star factor is thus underemphasized in studies of
programming strategy. The other factor—competitive edge in local