Page 92 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

SELLING CONSENT 81

Earlier on we had market research study which placed KDKA
behind the competition, with a perception of a cold operation.
KD’s Army changed all that.

The most focused campaign to date and the one most directly tied to
news is ‘AIDS Lifeline’. AIDS is a topic that inhabits a vital place in
the public sphere of both small communities and global politics. How
has the ‘mass media treatment’ affected the way people think and act
about AIDS?

GOING PUBLIC WITH AIDS
On 26 August 1987 the National Academy of Television Arts and
Sciences granted KPIX-TV its 1986 Community Services Award, from
a field of two hundred entrants and fifteen finalists. For the same year,
1986, KPIX also won the Peabody Award. Both occasions of
professional kudos were in recognition of KPIX’s extraordinary local
campaign effort, ‘AIDS Lifeline’, which started with one spectacularly
successful documentary in 1983. By 1986 it had blossomed into a
massive campaign of ten Eyewitness News special segments, sixty-two
PSAs using forty-five celebrities and a number of sixty- and thirty-minute
specials. Eight months after the period judged KPIX was still at it,
having aired Heterosexuals and AIDS’, a live studio call-in discussion,
two weeks before the announcement of the award.
‘AIDS Lifeline’ is a true community campaign focused narrowly on a
special subject but reaching and holding the attention of the widest
possible audience. It is a terrifying, unpleasant subject that in many of
its particulars impinges on controversial political questions which raise
tempers to a boil. Not the ideal selling environment. Yet KPIX began
this campaign because it wished to be the San Francisco station and
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San Francisco has in relative terms the largest gay population in the
country and without doubt, irrespective of size, the most organized and
politically active gay population in the world, in terms of its impact on
community awareness, civil services, electioneering and municipal
hiring practices. KPIX anticipated the AIDS ‘story’ as worthy of major
coverage by at least a year in the broadcast news media.
Sceptical critics can point out that although AIDS is hardly upbeat, it
wields a powerful fascination for a mass audience, mixing the perennial
dramatic themes of sex, death, forbidden fruit and apocalyptic plague. It
is thus a topic easily open to exploitation, like that of serial murder or
pornography, on the one hand, and like that of miracle cancer cures and