Needling the Media

“Freedom of the press is great—IF you own a press.” It’s a cliché in media, but it’s been especially true in the television era.  Television made media access a privilege, not a right.

In the early 1970s, I worked for a non-profit community organization:  the Central Seattle Community Council (later the Central Seattle Community Council Federation—try answering the phone with THAT every day.)  Straight out of college at the time of Seattle’s Boeing depression , with a B.A. in English, I was not highly prized on the job market.  Fortunately, a remnant of the War on Poverty offered a job training program, and I became a Public Relations trainee with a minimum wage.

As a Creative Writing graduate, I wrote.  I wrote Press Releases, I wrote newsletters, I wrote Annual Reports, I wrote and edited a monthly newspaper, I wrote correspondence.  I learned to use ditto machines (hand-cranked cylinders printing blue ink on white paper with ungodly smelly (and no doubt hazardous) chemicals) and mimeograph machines (electric printing devices using stencil masters and ungodly smelly (and no doubt hazardous) chemicals).  My work life was spent behind an IBM electric typewriter, formulating position papers and fact sheets on the community issues we were organizing around:  racism, unemployment, housing discrimination and neglect, preventing construction of a ten-lane freeway through the community, and public transportation.  I was the Voice of CSCCF (which we all pronounced “KissKfuh”)—and I was pretty good at it.

With one exception:  television.

The problem was simple:  television is a visual medium.  It requires images, and, in particular, moving images.  Moving images doing dramatic, compelling things.  I was the voice of an organization that wanted community activists to talk, usually at great length, and about issues like mortgage loan redlining. 

We held press conferences.  Yawn.  A few print reporters and, if we were lucky, a TV camera crew would dutifully attend, and our ISSUE OF URGENT IMPORTANCE (IOUI) would get a couple of column inches in a community newspaper and, if we were lucky, a ten-second mention on the local TV news. We held media events, like planting a community garden on abandoned housing property (it quickly went to seed).  Yawn.  From a television standpoint, covering this event was literally as exciting as watching grass grow.

Seattle’s Central Area was, at the time, the heart of Seattle’s ghetto.  Generations of racist real estate and banking practices had concentrated black residents within its boundaries, and the neighborhood had suffered from years of governmental neglect.  Worse, the Boeing depression had hit especially hard here, forcing people with few reserves to board up their houses and leave.  CSCCF advocated governmental action to end banking discrimination and promote reinvestment in these houses (an example of the Law of Unintended Consequences:  much of this came to pass and is, today, called “gentrification”—and it’s still forcing poorer residents to move away.)  But how does one make such esoteric issues television-friendly?

That’s how I found myself at one of those boarded-up houses one drizzly, gray January day, organizing a Press Conference.  We were announcing some new proposal for housing (a long-forgotten plan called Urban Homesteading, I believe), and we wanted to somehow dramatize the need.  The Central Area was full of such crumbling houses, and there was no dispute that they were public health and safety hazards.  Among other things, they attracted rats and garbage and served as convenient shelter for drug addicts and prostitutes.  Their very presence in a neighborhood drove down the value of nearby houses and increased the chances that they, too, would soon be abandoned.  We wanted to show this.  What better way than to invite the media to visit?

The problem was that we chose the wrong house.  Yes, plywood covered its windows and the lawn was unmowed, but inside it was still relatively pristine.  Not a rat in attendance, nor any holes in the walls.  And the television crew was due to arrive at any moment.

We’d made sure that the electricity was off, so at least they’d have to set up generators for their lights.  And what little furniture remained was, if not tattered, at least rather dingy.  But something was still lacking, something that would signal danger. 

One of my colleagues casually produced a hypodermic needle and placed it behind the couch.  Where he got it I never asked.  As the TV crew arrived and toured the living room, the reporter dramatically “discovered” it. Drama!  Danger!

The story ran that night as a feature.  And I completed my training in PR with a successful foray into media manipulation.