Page 89 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

78 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

identification of the station as a whole—admits to some logical
planning.
The key to this planning is a special form of one of the oldest
methods of organizing a variety of forces against a variety of obstacles
in order to focus on one objective: the campaign.
Flowing from a creative transformation of an alleged weakness into a
strength, the public or community service campaign manages to
mobilize all the strategies local stations have mustered to meet their
obligations to owners, advertisers, viewers, government and, of course,
the local community in one policy gesture. It seems almost too good to
be true.

PERSUASIVE NEWS: THE CAMPAIGN
For the last fifty years, a significant part of the study of communications
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has been the study of campaigns. Communication campaigns have
been employed in three principal areas: (1) politics, (2) public health,
safety and welfare and (3) product promotion and corporate image
enhancement.
An overwhelming amount of specific case study has been
commissioned by the customers for product promotion and corporate
image enhancement and is in fact the bulk of what is known as market
research. Media advisers and political pollsters are performing an
increasing amount of research on elections and referenda.
Although government and varied public-service agencies, from the
New York Public Library to the United States Army, have
commissioned research into effects as well as other research called
‘formative’ (=analysis of the needs and vulnerabilities of the target
before designing the campaign), for the most part research into
American public or community service campaigns has not been nearly
as abundant. It is nowhere near as thorough, for instance, as the
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research commissioned by India into the effectiveness of its population
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control campaigns. The reason for this may be that in many instances
the campaign involves a so-called ‘preventive innovation’ such as not
taking drugs or not starting to smoke. How does one count the number
of dogs who do not bark in the night?
Total campaigns are indeed an outgrowth of the long-established
practice of using broadcast facilities to get the public to do things in
general. For instance, it has been the mandated and voluntary practice
of stations to provide free airtime for a given number of public-service
announcements, most of them produced by the interested parties (like