© 2000 Benton Foundation
Introduction Of Special Interest: Model Campaigns Chapter 1: Chapter 2: Television Race Initiative Chapter 4: Positive: Life with HIV Perspectives Strategic and
Contents
POV's High Impact TV
from Partners
Practical Advice
by Pat Aufderheide, The American University
This book is about imagining–imagining cinema beyond the cineplex, television beyond ratings, funding beyond deadlines.
And it is about remembering–remembering why we care about the creation and distribution of creative, contentious, provocative, evocative programs; why we care about the peculiarly intense relationship between communities and their TV providers; why we believe in the distinctively American institution of nonprofit entrepreneurship.
It is about seeing products of the powerful audio-visual medium as tools in the effort to bring out the best in ourselves and our neighbors.
NOT JUST A MOVIE
Social-issue documentaries are often designed not just to inform, but as spurs to social action, to help change happen. But most of us barely have room in our heads for that notion, because of the hold that entertainment movies have on our expectations for the form. It isn’t hard to figure out how that happened–how pleasant diversion got to be the measure of all audio-visual expression in this screen-happy society. Our hugely successful commercial entertainment business– consider that entertainment products are edging out aerospace as America’s number one export–has, as part of its mission, to let us know how central, compelling and really, really fun it is.
That’s called marketing. The marketers worship fun. They can’t help it. It’s their job. They’re terrified of not-fun. They know fun as the new sacred monster of our culture. And they know, and tell us, that everything else is not-fun.
Under the daily onslaught of their salesmanship, some of us come to believe that anything that doesn’t end up on a wide screen on Saturday night, anything that doesn’t have a frisson of celebrity or the sensational, anything that doesn’t tickle the viewer into forgetting to zap, can’t really be significant. Others of us cultivate a blanket cynicism, prizing the "alternative" and believing that anything inserted into the language and flow of mainstream commercial entertainment must be engulfed by it. And some of us go into retirement from the media onslaught, convinced that the serious work of life is accomplished out of the glare of the spotlight, thank you, and that the wise simply avert their eyes from the many idiot boxes of our lives.
Meanwhile, the fabric of our culture is being woven with the stuff of communications media, as our newspapers, newsletters, magazines, radios, televisions, movie theaters, and phone and computer networks construct our understanding of the world and our place in it. To put it another way, media are the battleground on which combatants fight to define common sense. When the great American communications theorist James Carey said, "Reality is, above all, a scarce resource," he was explaining why the work of making media is always and inevitably about power. It is part of the
never-ending contest to control meaning.
Social-issue documentaries distinguish themselves not only by being about "real life," but also by helping to shape that reality. Hunger for this kind of authenticity has increased throughout our society, even as marketers have capitalized on it with sensationalized, tabloid-TV versions of the documentary genre. Social-issue documentaries emerge
from behind the shiny surface of our daily media experience and treat us not just as passive viewers, but also as social
actors who can affect our world.
The programs discussed here were made and used by people who really understand the link between media and power. They knew that media both challenge received reality and can create whole new territories of it. They also knew, however, that films and videos enter into crowded lives and fully furnished imaginations. They saw these works not as solutions, but as powerful, adaptable tools in a larger intervention. They saw them as opportunities to foster mobilization,
networking, collaboration.
A NETWORK OF SCREENS
And none too soon, either, because we are all riding the white water of communicational change. Once upon a time, one spoke of the power of films. Then one had to speak of film and video, of TV and VCRs. Moments later, the computer networkers began swaggering about, confidently predicting convergence, and the death of the old order entirely.
In fact, both the old and the new order are doing pretty well. Under the onslaught of multichannel television, interactive and digital everything, old-fashioned broadcast television still continues to be king of electronic media. At
the same time, new technologies make strategy the key to planning.
The old media model–make a program, place it on
television, put together an outreach campaign that lets relevant
communities know about it–has been flipped. Now, the documentary is often
the centerpiece of sophisticated, multi-layered and multi-constituency
campaigns. Projects such as Positive: Life with HIV, A Healthy Baby Girl, Cadillac
Desert, Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter, the programs of
the Television Race Initiative and Take this Heart
were all
conceived as elaborate action and policy-oriented enterprises, with a constellation of goals and tools. Print materials appropriate for community organizing and schools, 800 numbers, Web sites, enduring relationships with community
partners and different versions of the same piece of media all may be elements in such campaigns.
Objectives reached were as varied as the projects and partnerships: Thousands of high schoolers reached with public health information; increased numbers of volunteers to help foster parents do a good job; caregiver support groups given a common touchstone for their own sharing of experience; connections made between environmental and
other community organizations. The common thread was social action as both process and result.
Some of the new territory being carved out with new technologies is cyberspace, through the World Wide Web. From a mid-1990s experiment, the Web has burgeoned to become a user-friendly, diverse virtual landscape. You might use it to view a program preview, to order or download the version of the documentary that most suits your needs, or perhaps to print out its curriculum guides or forward them to a colleague. You might also visit a site to begin or continue a conversation, to learn or tell stories.
This environment, as it develops with broadband, will continue to meld mass media with networks, as people not only receive information but respond, create, and build networks around informational nodes. We are coming to the point where audio-visual material is inserted into simple communications such as a phone call or an e-mail.
The collaborations recounted here are thus not only vital civil-society projects on their own, but also important experiments in civic uses of new and evolving communications media. The evaluations conducted on these projects are the pioneering assessments of strategies for an integrated communications media environment.
BEYOND THE MARKETPLACE
One of the important lessons of this book is the unique power of the nonprofit, "independent" sector as a sphere of public life. The American Red Cross, AFSCME, HandsNet2, and the National AIDS Fund are only some of the organizations
whose interests and concerns were promoted by their building of media into their agendas. Each organization had its own
needs to meet, and each shared goals with the others. From public television stations to PBS to the Child Welfare League
of America to The Ford Foundation, organizations operating beyond the harshly levelling terms of the marketplace are
creating the precious resource of social possibility.
The collaborations documented here demonstrate a shared space of values.
They also respond to driving necessity, as new communications media both permit greater interconnections, and also challenge the terms of business as usual. Our public television services no longer can presume an audience grateful for an alternative to commercial TV. Public television leaders now distinguish the service on the basis of its role as a community resource and partner. Funders now routinely build communications components–the video, the Web site, the study guides, the 800 number–into their projects from the beginning, and look for them to help build the project as it develops. Social action and community organizations find themselves operating both locally and globally, as they plug into media resources that can extend and achieve their goals, and build their networks of contacts. These organizations need each other as much as they need powerful media tools.
THE END OF THE BEGINNING
As we chart our way into the Brave New Web of communications media, the stories told here help us find our bearings. The filmmakers, the funders, the programmers and the community leaders who worked together shared the tool of documentary programming to meet their own needs, and also found themselves sharing a common civic space. We can join them there, bringing new ideas, new tools, new twists of technology, new stories.
Pat Aufderheide is a professor in the School of Communication at The American University and the author of The Daily Planet: A Critic on the Capitalist Culture Beat (2000, University of Minnesota Press).