Page 94 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

SELLING CONSENT 83

Authoritative testimony to the campaign’s local effectiveness is
offered by Ron De Luca, the Development Director of the San
Francisco AIDS Foundation, who readily declares that KPIX is easily
the single most important outreach tool that local AIDS helping
agencies have. He points out that in San Francisco the annual care per
AIDS patient costs $75,000 less than the national average. Although
this cannot be attributed to one cause, he believes the greater
community of San Francisco, which has responded magnificently to the
special needs of the gay community, is the major factor—volunteers
have replaced paid professionals. De Luca credits KPIX’s outreach
programs and awareness campaign as indispensable in raising
volunteers of various kinds to help AIDS patients. 28
On 28 July 1988 the AIDS Foundation, Herth Realty Company, radio
station KGO and KPIX sponsored ‘AIDS WALK San Francisco’, which
raised in the neighborhood of one million dollars for the following local
agencies: AIDS Emergency Fund, AIDS Health Project, Asian AIDS
Task Force, Black Coalition on AIDS, Instituto Familiar de la Raza-
Latino AIDS Project, Mobilization Against AIDS, San Francisco AIDS
Foundation, STOP AIDS Resource Center, Visiting Nurses and Hospice
of San Francisco. The catalogue of sponsors and beneficiaries is a
testimony to the broadness of KPIX’s community base and the
integrated local nature of the campaign.
As with all such events, KPIX featured the walk prominently on its
news programs before the event and with follow-up, and of course
covered it live with the same style of celebrity and people-on-the-street
interviews, with cutaways to prepared ‘upclose-and-personal’ related
features. The night before the walk, the station broadcast Talking with
Teens, a half-hour guideline for parents on the subject of talking about
AIDS, hosted by Jane Curtin, an actress starring in a popular CBS
melodrama (KPIX is a CBS affiliate). (This particular program as
aforementioned was also distributed as a rental videotape.) 29
The style, attitude and level of discourse in this slick video is typical
of this entire campaign, and of TV campaign ‘texts’ in general.
In this half-hour program which is intended as a serious guideline for
parents who wish to protect their children from AIDS, the word
homosexual is not mentioned once. The word ‘gay’ is mentioned once,
in a joking manner, by an actor portraying a straight male teenager:
‘Gee, Dad, I’m not gay or anything.’ To which the father replies, ‘Fine,
son, but the AIDS virus doesn’t know that.’
The film begins with Curtin in an empty classroom, thinking about
her days as a teenager, when her generation didn’t have to worry about