Page 99 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

88 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

nightmare which severely taxes health resources at every level, a factor
that attracts significant interest from hospitals, insurance companies and
caring agencies in any campaign effort that might alleviate a strain on
their resources.
It pays to be aware that AIDS is among the top three topics for all
national public-service announcements on television, in or out of Group
W’s ‘AIDS Lifeline’, a further testimony to its mainstream relevance, if
not to its marketability. But precisely because of this relevance, as
Edward Brecher and John Langone have pointed out conclusively, the
mainstream media have seriously misreported the AIDS problem, as
they did with radon and as they often do with science and health stories. 30

MOBILIZING MARKETS
At this point, the research community and evaluators of campaigns in
general are still stuck with the effectiveness model that dominated all
communications research until recently. Concrete measurable effects,
31
on the model of billiard-ball causality—how many boxes of cereal? how
many people recognize a name?—was seen as the ‘real’ measure of
what media do. In the same vein, the number of volunteers or checks or
generous partners resulting from a campaign are seen as the ‘real’
significance of a campaign. From a management point of view, this can
hardly change because the bottom line is the last ball on the billiard
table (to mix metaphors). From a research point of view, however, the
contemporary television public-service/community campaign raises
questions of politics and culture and thus fundamental questions of
values.
Local campaigns adapt causes to the mass culture milieu of
mainstream television programming. Syndicated public-service/
community campaigns, since they are reaching for a much wider
market, adapt causes more radically and thus must deal very carefully
with problems of adaptation. If areas like AIDS that require some
scientific understanding can cause trouble, it is even more true in the
realms of politics and religion.
Television campaigns are above all messages of their medium, and
they have more in common, in form, with commercials and sports
coverage than with church meetings or lecture halls, to say nothing of
inspiring texts read in solitude. Different as they are, televangelists like
Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson have far more in common with
entertainers like Johnny Carson and Phil Donahue than they do with
Martin Luther King or Mother Theresa.