Nicholas Johnson, How to Talk Back to Your Television Set (New York: Bantam Books, 1970) Copyright Notice: Copyright 1970 by Bantam Books, Inc.; Copyright 1996 by Nicholas Johnson. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part in any medium known now or in the future. Provided, however, that permission is hereby granted to distribute this book under the following conditions: (1) that it is distributed in its entirety, including this copyright notice, (2) that no charge is exacted, or revenue received, directly or indirectly, by anyone in connection with the transfer, and (3) as a matter of courtesy and information, that the author be informed, simultaneously with the distribution, of any distribution to more than one person or posting for availability on the Internet, Web, or publicly available directory. Any other use requires the prior permission of the author: Nicholas Johnson, 1035393@mcimail.com, postal: Box 1876, Iowa City IA 52244-1876, U.S.A. # # # # p. 89 # 4 New Attitudes, New Understanding, New Will: The Media and the Unheard # p. 90 # [blank] # p. 91 # Deepening racial division is not inevitable.... The alternative . . . will require a commitment to national action -- compassionate, massive and sustained, backed by the resources of the most powerful and the richest nation on this earth. From every American it will require new attitudes, new understanding, and above all, new will.... The Commission's major concern with the news media is not in riot reporting, as such, but in the failure to report adequately on race relations and ghetto problems and to bring more Negroes into journalism.... The communications media, ironically, have failed to communicate.... They have not shown understanding or appreciation of -- and thus have not communicated--a sense of Negro culture, thought, or history. -- Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 1968 # p. 92 # "IF PHYSICAL DEATH IS the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then-nothing can be more redemptive." So said Dr. Martin Luther King in 1964. In 1968 he paid the price of physical death But is white America free at last from its death of the spirit? What irony that a Negro should be concerned about freeing the white man. What tragedy that this perceptive prophet of nonviolence cannot, even after violent death, free us. For, as we have now discovered in shock and sorrow, the keys to the manacles of our slavery have, all the time, been in our own pocket -- not his. I think all of us understand this somber truth. We understand that white America must act before black America can be free. And we understand that if black America is not soon free then no American will be free. For we see the fuse of racial discord burning in our cities. We see catastrophe around the corner -- catastrophe which would irreparably maim the institutions of our government and the liberties of all our citizens. We know that America must act. But we see precious little evidence that America is going to act. And so we wonder, what is to be done? What, or who, can break the chains of ignorance, indifference, and outright inhumanity which hold in check our great democracy? Who can tap the tolerance which is our tradition? Who can rekindle the compassion which has made our nation a home for the tired and hungry and poor of so many past generations? I think we can find the answer to that question. # p. 93 # Just listen to a voice from Watts, recorded by author Robert Conot in the frightening days of August 1965: "All we wants is that we get our story told, and get it told right! What we do last night, maybe it wasn't right. But ain't nobody come down here and listen to us before." Martin Luther King has put the same point in a different poetry: "A riot," he once said, "is the language of the unheard." The voices of the Negro revolution tell us, I think, what the first item on our agenda must be. We must listen to the unheard. If necessary, we must be forced to listen. White America must get their message and in the language of reason rather than riot. That is a job for everyone who occupies a position of leadership in our society. But most of all, it is a job for the mass media. Never has a crisis found this nation so dependent on the courage and responsibility of our free press. Never have we been able to see so clearly the truth of Judge Learned Hand's reminder that the independence of the press is a proposition "on which we have staked our all." In our constitutional scheme, freedom of the press is guaranteed in the very first of the ten amendments which make up our Bill of Rights. In the decisions of our Supreme Court, the guarantees of the First Amendment are given special shelter. They are called "preferred freedoms." In the declarations of our statesmen freedom of the press is continually reaffirmed and revered as in no other land. President Johnson told the 1968 National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Convention In Chicago: # p. 94 # The freedom to know the truth must never be compromised or diluted or destroyed.... Government cannot and must not . . . intervene in that role. This national commitment is not just empty rhetoric. It is not just hollow ritual. It is not just an article of faith. For freedom of the press is not an end in itself. It has a purpose. The press must forever be beyond the power of government so that government will never be beyond the power of the press. Government can at no time dictate to the press because the press must, sometimes, lead the people. Our system will not work if the press lets its precious freedom languish. It will not work unless the press has its freedom--to inform, to expose, and to persuade. The media must mold the opinion of tomorrow's polls--not, like the calculating candidate, simply mirror the passion of yesterday's mob. They must educate. All television is educational television. It may not teach the truth. It may preach violence rather than love. It may give more emphasis to the quantity of acquisition than to the quality of use. It may produce more mental illness than health. But it teaches. Endlessly. Soap operas, commercials, prime-time series shows: each has its lesson. The responsibility of the media has never been more in need of exercise than it is now, when paralysis grips our nation. Only confrontation with the terrible truths of race relations in this country can liberate the moral and material resources needed to do the job which must be done. These truths can set us free, and in my judgment, only the media can provide them. President Johnson told the NAB: # p. 95 # I do not want -- and I don't think you want--to wake up some morning and find America changed because we slept when we should have been awake, because we remained silent when we should have spoken up, because we went along with what was popular and fashionable and "in" rather than what was necessary and what was right. Is this too much to ask or to expect? I do not think so. What it comes down to is whether you and I, as private citizens, are willing to do what thoughtful Americans say must be done: President Johnson, the Kerner Commission, responsible journalists, numerous scholars and political leaders. The similarities between the recommendations are far more striking than the differences: dignity, jobs, decent income, education, housing, equal justice. But, as the Kerner Commission reported, "The major need is to generate new will -- the will to tax ourselves to the extent necessary to meet the vital needs of the nation." Dick Gregory has said that for a black man the only difference between the North and the South is that "Down South they don't care how close I get as long as I don't get too big; and up North they don't care how big I get as long as I don't get too close." I think we are all coming to recognize that the differences between North and South are less meaningful than we have wanted to believe. We can take this realization as the starting line for action. The media can take, as their standard for the future, the magnificent role they have played in the past in spurring progress in the South. Without the media the civil rights struggle in the South # p. 96 # could not have seared the nation's conscience as it did. Birmingham and Selma would not have become symbols of shame and catalysts of reform. The national media opened up the "closed society" in the deep South. National magazines, newspapers, and broadcasts said -- to the nation and to Southern communities themselves--what the local media had no stomach to say. The results were spectacular. Now the racial crisis has moved North and West, and editors and producers may have lost some of their enthusiasm for pointing out the threadbare parts of the nation's social fabric. Each city which found itself engulfed by violence during recent summers has been in its turn quite shocked by the experience. Everyone said, "It can't happen here." Everyone believed that "we" treat "them" well. Everyone took years of surface tranquillity as evidence of underlying content. In my judgment, the extent of surprise in each community measured precisely the failure of its news media. I think we would all have to share the judgment of the President's National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission) that "the communications media, ironically, have failed to communicate." To answer the challenge of the Kerner Commission will not, of course, be easy. For the media are subject to pressures--the pressures of political power, of popular disfavor, of prejudice and preconception. But I think that it is in this respect that the Commission can teach us a lesson. Indeed, it is the greatest single lesson we can glean from its forthright report. For no newspaper or broadcast station could ever be under more pressure than that Commission to support the establishment # p. 97 # and to cling to established and comfortable views. The Commission members began their task with little more understanding of the problem before them than you or I might have had. They were willing, and able, to learn--even bitter truths. From July 29, 1967, to March 1, 1968, they met for a total of forty-four days not including trips to riot cities. They assembled high-quality staff, consultants, and advisers. They filled thousands of pages of transcript with the testimony of hundreds of witnesses--including numerous black militants, civil rights leaders, and ghetto residents as well as officials, authors, and experts. Many of the Commissioners changed previous notions. All learned. All reported honestly what they had learned. These leaders of society and government tried to tell it like it is. If they can do it, so can America's mass media. These men were able to say: "What white Americans have never fully understood -- but what the Negro can never forget -- is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it." The media too can carry that message, they too can offer the kind of honest analysis which makes honest solutions possible. Indeed, I believe this has already begun. Many cities are changing their image of the ghetto. The media are forcing them to change. In Los Angeles, for example, the media have truly been struggling to learn some of the lessons burned into its history in August 1965. At least one major newspaper went through a period of intensive soul-searching after the Watts conflagration, I am told. Since then, Negro reporters have been added to a previously all-white staff of newsmen. # p. 98 # Numerous front-page articles have spotlighted ghetto problems and questioned the adequacy of governmental responses. And Los Angeles broadcasters have provided some of the nation's most courageous examples of high-quality journalism about race relations. But Los Angeles needs special vigilance from the media about the problems of its minorities. For Negroes are not Los Angeles' only minority. Harry Belafonte has said: The fact of the matter is that TV excludes not only Negro life in its totality but also, except in documentaries and educational television, the life of poor whites, Puerto Ricans, Indians, Mexicans and many other realities which might indict America. The challenge to the media is to disprove this charge--not with promises, but with articles and programs. Mexican-Americans in California outnumber Negroes by almost two to one. I wonder how many who rely upon the Los Angeles media know that. I wonder how many "Anglos" know that 26 percent of all Mexican-American children living in Los Angeles are not living with both parents. I wonder how many know that the special census of social conditions taken after the Watts riot disclosed that in the barrios of East Los Angeles real income slipped 8 to 10 percent between 1960 and 1965. There is a big job to be done by anyone concerned with the role of the media in contemporary America. We must ensure that the image which Americans have of every city accurately reflects the real-life trials and triumphs of life in schools, # p. 99 # buses, tenements, public housing projects, and welfare offices. Documentaries and front-page features are not enough--though they are important. As former FCC chairman Rosel H. Hyde has observed: "This is not just another story -- another 'issue of public importance.' It is a major crisis. . ." The message which white America needs to hear must be sent out every day--with thirty-second and minute spots (as KSFO has done in San Francisco), with daily reports, and even in commercials, serials and soap operas, and on the fashion, society, women's and sports pages. These are not new thoughts, of course, but I think they are important -- important enough to bear repeating. I also think that they represent no more than a first step. We tend to talk about what we can do to make whites understand blacks, what we can do to tell their story like it is, what whites can do to deal with what they persist in calling the "Negro problem." You would think that only white people read newspapers, that only white people watch the major market television stations. The 1960 census revealed that the population of Washington, D.C., was 55 percent nonwhite. In Los Angeles the figure was 17 percent; in New York City, 15 percent; in Chicago, 24 percent; in San Francisco, 18 percent; in Detroit, 29 percent. The 1970 census will show dramatic increases. How tragic that, according to a 1968 Louis Harris poll, "among Negroes a feeling of alienation from the mainstream of American society has soared from 34 percent to 54 percent since 1966." Why? Perhaps the answer can be found, in part, in the content, image, and attitudes portrayed by the "white press." # p. 100 # What percentage of the information and entertainment produced by the media in those communities reflects the interests, tastes, and needs of those citizens? I do not know the answer to that question. But I would chance a guess that the answer would be rather embarrassing for the publishers and broadcasters involved, insulting to the Negroes and Mexican-Americans of those communities, and intolerable for any American interested in a durable and secure domestic peace. For when we pull our punches in telling the story of race relations, we risk more than the perpetuation of white complacency. We increase radically the risk that black alienation will harden into permanence. Ben Bagdikian, an insightful analyst of the media, has observed: If large segments of our population lose confidence in their formal systems of information, they will invent their own. When we talk about race relations this constitutes the only measure the ghetto-dweller has of how much he can trust our accuracy. If in the things he knows best, the news is false or inaccurate, he may later be unreachable in more fundamental ways. This problem of trust in the system is so fundamental that I do not think it can be solved simply by truthful reporting. We cannot simply tell the story of black and other nonwhite Americans better than we have. They have to tell it for themselves. The media must look to the Negro community to originate its own programming, reporting, and editorializing about its affairs and the affairs of the nation and the world. We have in this respect # p. 101 # a long, long way to go. In Los Angeles, for example, Negroes account for more than 17 percent of the total population, but hold fewer than one percent of the white-collar positions on local newspapers and less than 3 percent of the white-collar jobs offered by local radio and television enterprises. It is true that an increasing number of large cities have among their radio stations one or more devoted to programming for specifically minority audiences. But of the approximately 7,500 radio and television stations in the United States, and the 350 Negro-oriented radio stations, all but about a dozen are owned by whites. Less than two-tenths of one percent of this nation's stations are owned by Negroes! That raises a lot of questions in my mind. How well are these white owners telling the black man's story? How much are they allowing him to tell it for himself? What can the white stations do? Ben Holman of the Justice Department's Community Relations Service has some suggestions: Have you ever wondered what it's like to be seven years old, and black, in a slum school? Have you ever tried to find out how a young, unskilled Negro husband tries to provide for his family? Have you ever thought about the aspirations of a Negro teenager? Do you know what soul food is? What do you know about the myriad of black clubs and organizations in a ghetto community? What really goes on in ghetto poolrooms? Do attitudes of Negro youngsters about sex differ from those of Whites? What is the meaning of the ritual of those storefront churches? What does a young Negro father tell his son about being black in America? Why are there seemingly so many taverns in Ne- # p. 102 # gro neighborhoods? What are the latest in-group jokes in the ghetto? There is a fascinating world of humor, pathos, aspirations, frustrations, toil, heartbreak, violence and joy right under your nose. During 1968, there was a heartening flurry of interest in more sustained minority programming. WNEW-TV in New York began a thirteen-week run of Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant. Houston's KPRC-TV launched a series of ninety-minute prime time specials, NET offered Black Journal, and CBS Of Black America. CBS followed its excellent Of Black America with an educational series, Black Heritage. ABC ran three documentary specials on race in the summer months of 1969. Television shows of black culture, music, dance, and drama increased. The Harlem Culture Festival was shown on CBS. Local and syndicated shows of black music, and even black "talk" shows, have become more common. There are also more blacks on camera in news programs and commercials. The FCC, at long last, issued equal-employment-opportunity regulations applicable to commercial broadcasters. The emphasis is coming to be entirely different -- a new dimension in broadcasting. The Negro is no longer a rioter, a news item, or even a documentary. He is accorded his respectful role in American culture. Fortunately for the viability of such programming it is more than just morally right, socially constructive, and politically essential. It is also popular -- and profitable. (Remember that extraordinary week in February 1968 when Harry Belafonte and his talented friends took over the Tonight show?) Such programming--like the day-long drama of Tuesday, April 9, 1968, through # p. 103 # which black and white America wept as one -- may do more to free us at last than almost any other single act. But is this enough? Race relations have worsened despite the "quiet" summer of 1969. In a report entitled, One Year Later, the Urban Coalition and Urban America reported that little had changed in the year following the Kerner Commission report. The media must continue to bear the weight of America's effort to redress over one hundred years of prejudice and poverty. On the afternoon that Dr. Martin Luther King was shot, the Reverend Jesse Jackson said the assassination would not change the plans of Memphis civil rights leaders to hold a mass meeting that evening, to prepare for demonstrations the following day. Why? "We'll go on with our mass meeting tonight because we have no radio and no other way to communicate with our people...." I think Reverend Jackson's statement makes it easier to understand why minorities feel compelled to resort to picket signs -- and to Molotov cocktails -- in order to communicate with the people of America. There is an alternative. Whether it can, and will, be used rests wholly with America's media. # p. 104 # [blank] # # #