People who suspect that local broadcast news is two-dimensional when it comes to talking about race and racism may be on to something. Local TV and radio are just responding to their audience, and the audience, in this case, is named Michelle.
Michelle is a fictional power-suited suburban blonde mom, who, with her two kids, is featured on a poster used by TV station WSPA (“7 On Your Side”) in Spartanburg, South Carolina to remind employees that their audience is made up of white, suburban moms in their thirties who are politically conservative, have full-time jobs, and are between 25 and 54 years old.
This could be problematic, given that 49 percent of Spartanburg’s population is black, and Neilson research shows blacks watch 37 percent more TV – two hours a day more – than whites. But here in St. Louis, black median household income is half that of whites and Asians, and advertisers go after the white audience for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: that’s where the money is.
Local TV across the U.S. has hemorrhaged viewers since 2000, losing between one-third and one half of their total audience. The problem is compounded in a “mature” (read: stagnant) market like St. Louis, where ad revenue and population remain flat. Go-go growth markets like Denver or Charlotte can always count on an influx of new bodies and new businesses to generate new income. In zero-sum, low-growth St. Louis, broadcast news advertising revenue has to be stolen from the other guy.
This makes St. Louis broadcast news managers, their station general managers and their conglomerate owners very, very nervous about offending the audience – by that, they mean the lucrative white audience – and driving away ad revenue. An angry listener or viewer in St. Louis who stops listening or watching can’t be replaced with a new arrival.
All of this circles back to Michelle in South Carolina. No broadcast newsroom I’ve encountered in St. Louis has needed a consultant-created poster display, because news managers here internalized the concept years ago: The audience you should care about is white, suburban and conservative.
That unspoken rule was first spoken to me in no uncertain terms in late 1996 at KMOX, where I had been following the campaign to expand MetroLink into St. Charles County. Aware that the anti-MetroLink campaign had a nasty, racist tinge, I developed the ENI (the Eek, Negroes! Index) to rank the fear level in callers to my show who were sure that hordes of rampaging black folk would board trains, cross the Missouri River, steal the available supply of flat-screen TVs and then ride back home, carrying loot like Visigoths leaving the ruins of Rome.
The (now departed) KMOX program director chewed me out, ending with an admonition: “Stop doing those stories. And stop paying so much attention to the city public schools. Our audience doesn’t care. Our audience is mostly in St. Charles County.”
That audience told me what it thought in July 2013, when I was doing a daily feature for KPLR 11’s 4 p.m. news. I wrote a sort of video letter to my grandson, Collin, who is black and is now 11. This was the day after a Florida jury found George Zimmerman not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin, and I told Collin to be careful, especially if he was ever stopped or confronted by a white police officer or “neighborhood watch” person.
The reaction from white St. Louis on the KPLR Facebook page was roughly the same as if I’d supported Osama bin Laden for president. Viewers wrote everything from “George Zimmerman isn’t white, he’s half-Hispanic” to “Way to go, more race-mongering.”
After Ferguson, of course, every broadcast outlet did focus on race, even though the cognitive dissonance between urgency and old habits of pandering to a conservative white audience sometimes produced interesting results.
One local TV station, for example, ended up doing lots of pro-police stories. Several staffers claim that focus was to counteract white anger and threats from Darren Wilson supporters. The station had broadcast one report live from the street where Wilson lived. Angry viewers said that put Wilson in danger. The complaints were laced with more than a few threats. The same thing happened to CNN correspondent Ed Lavandera, who had to be pulled off the Ferguson story because he, too, had done a stand-up near Wilson’s home, and he, too, was bombarded with threats.
Perhaps the most jarring broadcast was on KMOX radio Tuesday November 25, the day after the St. Louis County grand jury declined to indict Wilson and parts of Ferguson and Dellwood burned. Rush Limbaugh’s 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. right-wing commentary show was pre-empted as KMOX trotted out its only black anchor and host, the supremely talented and nuanced Carol Daniel, to anchor a three-hour special on Ferguson. For one day at least, KMOX seemed to realize that letting the amazingly profitable Limbaugh and his white suburban dittoheads on the air would be the equivalent of bringing a flamethrower into a crowded theatre.
TV stations in St. Louis, like TV stations everywhere, will respond that they cover all of the region fairly and that they have numerous people of color on the air. It’s true that there are more non-whites on St. Louis local TV than ever before, but they are not the ones who make programming decisions or hand out story assignments.
In the age of U-Stream, Twitter, and Instagram, local TV and radio are probably less relevant than ever, but they still remain the only news sources licensed by the federal government to use the airways that belong to the public – or, at least, belong to the white suburban public.
Charles Jaco is a journalist, novelist and author who has worked for NBC News, CNN, Fox 2, KMOX and KTRS.
