© 2000 Benton Foundation
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
Sparking Dialogue That Can Lead to Action
by Carole Ashkinaze
Television sparks dialogue and dialogue can lead to action, as evidenced by P.O.V./The American Documentary’s most ambitious high-impact venture to date.
The Television Race Initiative (TRI) has taken High Impact Television to a whole new level–with thematically linked programming, investments in local resources and outreach over time. Earlier collaborations, which had employed such grassroots strategies as pre-broadcast screenings and electronic networks to foster dialogue for single broadcasts, had helped to point the way.
With first-year funding and other support from the Ford, John D. and
Catherine T. MacArthur, Surdna and James Irvine Foundations, TRI set out
not just to generate activity around broadcasts, but to keep the momentum
going after they aired. "We knew that if we had more than one program on a
single theme," said American Documentary Executive Director Ellen
Schneider, "we could offer a much more useful tool to our partners. And by
selecting stories that range from reflections on slavery to
Japanese-American internment, we could help enrich the national dialogue
on race." It was a gamble that would catapult public television from a
presenter of "important" documentaries, for which it had already captured
every top television award, into a force capable of transforming
communities’ images of themselves.
A NEW MEDIA MODEL
Launched on September 15, 1998, with Macky
Alston’s award-winning Family Name, about a history of slave-ownership
within his own family, TRI’s story-driven programming included: Orlando
Bagwell’s acclaimed series, Africans in America (October 1998);
Facing the Truth with Bill Moyers (March 1999); Beyond Black
and White: Affirmative Action in America (March 1999), P.O.V.’s
Rabbit in the Moon (July 1999) and American Playhouse/ITVS’s
An American Love Story
(September 1999).
First-year activities focused on six pilot cities (Baltimore, Boston, Norfolk, Raleigh/Durham, Twin Cities and San Francisco), selected because they had innovative public television stations, complex or changing racial demographics and infrastructures of nonprofit groups concerned about race.
Each engaged in strategic planning around local issues, sometimes assisted by national nonprofits. For example, in Raleigh/Durham, UNC-TV used the broadcasts to foster guided dialogue around a rapidly changing local demographic. The Twin Cities’ KTCA and Maryland Public Television focused on interfaith activities, inviting places of worship to use storytelling as a vehicle for community building. In Norfolk, WHRO defined the task of engaging communities of color as "everyone’s job"–spurring staff to volunteer their time on this project. In San Francisco, community dialogues and TV spots leading up to KQED’s broadcast of Rabbit in the Moon ,–a "memoir" of Japanese-American internment–helped to build momentum not only for the topic, but for the potential of diverse and innovative story-telling in public life.
TRI, created to foster long-term, collaborative, local strategies on race, differs from conventional outreach, in three important ways:
1. It is a long-term process, as opposed to a program-specific project,
2. It requires deep and genuine collaboration with community partners, and
3. It is most effective when there is a stationwide "buy-in."
Stations ask their "brain trust" community partners to do more than extend their outreach efforts. They ask them to join a strategic alliance to design and coordinate off-air activities related to TRI programming that will broaden, intensify and sustain dialogue and action related to issues in their communities.
TRI supports stations’ progress in several ways: First, by inviting them to "co-create" new ways to "frame" programming in their communities, thereby encouraging innovation. Second, by helping them to create workplans that served as the basis for successful fundraising proposals, for the hiring of part-time dedicated TRI coordinators. Third, with ongoing access to resources, technical assistance and moral support, through regular contact with TRI’s evaluator and staff.
STIRRING THINGS UP IN THE BAY AREA
The Bay Area Television Race Initiative (BATRI) in San Francisco demonstrates how a station can build new relationships with groups that were previously overlooked, including civil-rights, minority and faith-based networks, and begin to transform its own image.
From the moment Emiko Omori’s moving documentary, Rabbit in the Moon , about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, showed up in P.O.V.’s 1999 lineup, staffers at KQED saw it as an opportunity for local engagement–and not just because the station’s viewing area contained a large concentration of Japanese Americans. Other factors included the film’s focus on little-known pockets of resistance in the face of civil-rights violations–a topic with implications across racial and ethnic lines–and the fact that Omori is a well-known, San Francisco-based independent filmmaker.
As KQED station manager DeAnn Hamilton explained it, "We put a brain trust together." With the help of staff, the station identified a Native American, Latina, Jew, Afro-Cuban, Caucasian and South African with personal connections to the topic and invited them to screen the film months before it was scheduled to air. "They didn’t know what to expect and neither did we," she recalls. But in the ensuing discussion, the Japanese-American "memoir" resonated deeply with members of other racial and ethnic groups, who drew parallels to their own experience. Wendy Hanamura, a KQED producer, attended and was so moved that she proposed that they take to the airwaves in a series of "interstitials" (1-to-3-minute spots) to call attention to the upcoming documentary–and to spark conversations about race in the larger community. The station also wove their comments into a 30-minute locally produced documentary, for airing immediately following Rabbit in the Moon . "Taken as a whole," the station said in its press material, "these reflections combine to tell America’s story."
It was an unprecedented community partnership, in which the insights of community leaders directly enriched programming, and in which programming directly enriched community conversation. Critics and viewers lavished praise on the production. And the response from the community was swift and impressive.
Bay Area organizations that were already working in the area of race relations seized on it as a high-profile media tool to help convene their communities; many also used TRI’s Rabbit in the Moon facilitator’s guide, which encourages viewers to "contemplate our own histories and how the stories we hear–and don’t hear–shape our beliefs about ourselves, our heritage, our communities and our country."
In the East Bay, the Multi-Cultural Center of the College of Alameda, the Organization of Alameda Asians and the Buena Vista Methodist Church held a screening at which the dialogue was so robust that the group began to plan collective action on behalf of the local homeless population. Berkeley Dispute Resolution screened Rabbit in the Moon for its conflict mediators, to encourage them to examine personal issues of racism.
Luckily, Hamilton said, TRI "happened at a time" when the station possessed the staff and resources to do more of its own production and was prepared to make a stationwide commitment. It also created an extensive Web site to stimulate community dialogue, issued promotional materials and "tune-in" announcements, and distributed its facilitator’s guide to Bay Area community, media and educational contacts. And KQED’s FM radio station worked with BATRI to plan radio panel/call-in shows to air close to broadcasts of TRI shows.
Production was a byproduct, not a priority, of TRI’s efforts to change the way public television stations participate in their community. And yet, it helped the station "to connect with (groups) that we hadn’t been able to connect with on that kind of level," Hamilton said, and to sustain those partnerships over time.
Indeed, Rabbit in the Moon was just the beginning of a sustained effort, building on the themes and partnerships already developed, around subsequent broadcasts.
Partners from Grace Cathedral, Intergroup Clearinghouse and Jones United Methodist Church continued working with BATRI through Family Name, Beyond Black and White: Affirmative Action in America, and Facing the Truth with Bill Moyers. Partners from local high schools, San Francisco State University, the University of California at Berkeley and several civil rights organizations, looking ahead to a forthcoming FRONTLINE documentary about the "meritocracy" created by college admissions tests, entered into discussions with BATRI about how to engage the public around issues of equity and privilege in education. Local productions developed with the help of such partners have included Making the Grade about affirmative action in which film crews followed a young, inner-city Filipina and a Caucasian from Marin County in their efforts to get into Berkeley, and a continuing focus on race in KQED’s Bay Window , and other locally produced news and information shows.
The Bay Area Television Race Initiative has emerged as a national model for sustaining civic engagement around race relations. It "fundamentally change[s] the relationship that public television stations have with their surrounding communities," according to Communications Sciences Group’s Dr. Frances Cooper, who was hired to evaluate the TRI model.
HAMPTON ROADS, IN LIVING COLOR
The tissue of life we weave with colors all our own,
And in the field of destiny we reap as we have sown.
– John Greenleaf Whittier
Taking its cue from the poet, Hampton Roads, Virginia’s WHRO named its Television Race Initiative "Colors All Our Own"–and set out to explore the legacy of race and American identity in its historically significant and culturally vibrant viewing area, which includes Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Portsmouth, Newport News, Hampton, Chesapeake, Suffolk, Williamsburg, Gloucester and several smaller towns on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.
Issues of race have enduring and often painful resonance in Virginia but are not easily broached in the old capital of the Confederacy. To facilitate civic participation and promote a dialogue with diverse audiences, the station and its two affiliated radio stations adopted three goals:
1. To provide a focal point for effective community dialogue,
2. To educate the citizenry and
3. To engage the community (by raising the visibility of race-related activities that are already going on and inspiring people to get more involved).
"We are a broadcaster; we are not a social service agency. We are not going to define the problem, and we’re not going to solve the problem," WHRO Station Manager Mary Pruess said. "But by partnering with the agencies in the community that do have that as part of their mission and expertise, we can make a difference."
WHRO pegged its first outreach to prospective partners to the October 1998 release of the PBS series, Africans in America . Virginia, with its vast plantations and history of slave ownership, "was so much a part of that story," Pruess said. The response from museums, libraries, civil-rights organizations, arts organizations, communities of faith, businesses, media organizations, school systems and government was overwhelming, netting 100 partners for the initiative. "Clearly, the moment was right for the community to engage in this topic," she said.
WHRO, with no "outreach" department per se, made the promotion of community engagement around issues of color "everyone’s job," setting up internal programming, education and coordination teams on which anyone in the organization could participate. Early team contributions included: an original "Colors All Our Own" song, written by a local composer at a staffer’s request; a show entitled Jefferson and Slavery , pegged to an event at a local, historically black college; and a monthly partners’ newsletter, with a mailing list that has grown from 300 to 1,500 in less than a year. And the community has pitched in enthusiastically, with art exhibits, screenings, panel discussions, newspaper stories and school events linked to broadcasts.
There were so many local activities related to hate crimes in August 1999, when gunfire broke out at a Jewish Community Center in far-off Los Angeles, that national media reports contained extensive coverage of the positive things happening in and around Norfolk. "This was not because we created something to get media attention, but because we were already there doing something," pointed out Pruess; those activities had been inspired by the airing of Forgotten Fires , a documentary about church-burnings.
Those activities, and the ensuing publicity, also helped to build interest in the broadcast of American Love Story just three weeks later, generating thoughtful and in-depth articles about interracial families in local newspapers.
"It’s just a beginning," says Pruess, who sees a need for more business involvement, specific evaluation tools and facilitator trainings. "But we have community ownership of this thing. The community understands it. They’ve bought into this project. The awareness (of racial issues) is definitely there among decision-makers in this community."
CONCLUSION
P.O.V.’s earlier High Impact Television campaigns had worked with groups with fairly specific common objectives. Partners in the Getting to The Heart of the Matter campaign, for example, had used programming to build awareness of, and increase services and compassion for, women living with AIDS. However, partners in the Television Race Initiative warned that combating racism is more complex. They advised beginning with the creation of safe settings in which to host dialogues, with the potential to lead to constructive action. Powerful storytelling, like Family Name and Rabbit in the Moon , can serve as a catalyst for such conversations.
These strategies for framing and enhancing broadcasts definitely have had an impact. Stations have built new relationships with groups that were previously overlooked, including civil-rights, minority and faith-based networks. In turn, these organizations have come to value public television as a partner.
After an initial year of station implementation, groups from Piedmont,
California to Baltimore had organized screenings to bring together
community leaders and citizens who had never met before, and who remain
active. Editorial writers lavished praise on the efforts, calling for more
dialogue tools like TRI, on the heels of President Clinton’s Initiative on
Race. TRI was also invited to present its model at national gatherings of
The Council on Foundations (April 1999); The Brookings Institution (May
1999); the Public Broadcasting System (June 1999); the Public Television
Outreach Alliance (June 1999);
UNITY ‘99: Journalists of Color (July
1999) and the National League of Cities (July 1999).
Television is our most influential and ubiquitous communications technology. With a sustained effort to use the medium in strategic and creative ways, the Television Race Initiative offers a replicable model for promoting constructive dialogue and problem-solving around a pressing social issue.
Carole Ashkinaze is a Washington-based journalist who writes frequently about minorities, women and social policy.