Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 7, 1993 TAG: 9303050281
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DIANE WERTS NEWSDAY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
MTV OFFERS SUBSTANCE WITH ITS STYLISH NEWS
It's a hard-hitting spot - this commercial-break message featuring an old white woman with a young black man's voice coming out of her mouth. She's talking about "the colored people taking over the white people of this nation" - "A lot of people are afraid of what will happen to them in a nonwhite America."Are you afraid?
"Are you lying?"
Pretty hard to just groove on the next Snickers commercial after this assault on complacency.
So who's shaking up the scene?
MTV.
Yep, the folks so often lacerated for their preoccupation with split-second images, sexual stereotypes and fun, fun, fun. They're into confrontation these days, too, with a campaign that challenges viewers to stop passively accepting exterior images and start actively examining what lies within their own souls.
"Free Your Mind" is the successor to MTV's red-hot "Choose or Lose" election-year campaign, which made the channel a centerpiece of the '92 presidential campaign.
Between music videos from Whitney Houston and Arrested Development, Bill Clinton was doing live forums with young voters, and even George Bush finally started answering questions from MTV reporters. Clinton lauded the channel on inauguration night, thanking it for getting out the youth vote he says helped him get elected.
(Clinton sat down with MTV's Tabitha Soren on Monday night to talk about his youth service program.)
But then "please vote" is a pretty agreeable campaign; what's the alternative stance? The tolerance issue is tougher. And so is that new campaign's first big presentation, the hourlong MTV News documentary "Straight From the Hood," premiering Wednesday night.
Unlike the usual TV attempt to assess The Big Problem, "Hood" looks at "what lies beneath those images" we see on the nightly news. Producer-director Rob Fox lets the inhabitants of South Central Los Angeles do the talking: a Latino girl who wants to get out of a gang but can't; two black men who used to be in gangs, but now work to stop the violence; a young Korean immigrant whose ambitions were shattered by the destruction of his family's store during last year's rioting.
The sense of desperation is palpable. One man says he's always had warm family support, but "after I walked out of the house, I walked into a war zone." It wasn't until he got three years for a shooting that he had to face different folks - in jail - and learned "the so-called enemy were people, too."
A teacher who got out of the 'hood through a sports scholarship laments that with cutbacks in sports programs now "there are no places for you to go to do anything positive."
Forget a positive place; try going any place. The Latino gang member, Yvette, says offhandedly that she doesn't go to school because she can't - she'd have to cross gang lines, and she'd likely get shot.
"That's the thing I found so surprising," says Linda Corradina, the hour's executive producer and MTV's senior vice president of news and specials, "that these people weren't what you expected."
"Even the girl, Yvette, who grew up in a gang. She doesn't say anything shocking to me. I can hardly believe she's that tough or that she would have a gun or that she's a member of a gang. And then she says sort of matter of factly why she can't go to school anymore - and she says it so matter of factly that that's the shock in it.
"That makes it clear these people are very normal, they're very human, yet they live in this environment that forces them to make certain decisions."
The idea is to broaden our perceptions of the people who live in the feared "South Central," to show they are people of all colors who find their circumstances circumscribing their choices in life.
The same thing goes into the other "Free Your Mind" reports that air as regular elements of MTV News (which runs hourly at :50 on the hour; the reports are also featured on "The Week in Rock," airing twice Saturdays and twice Sundays).
Every other week or so, there's a fresh report on the way social roles and stereotypes affect us - a visit to gay bars outside Camp Lejeune to see how homosexual servicemen and women are forced to socialize in secret, a stop in Germany to meet a rapper putting out a watchdog newsletter about fascist activity.
The reports are more straightforward than MTV's critics might expect.
"We do news pretty traditionally," says Corradina, 33, a former ABC News associate producer. "We don't feature a lot of on-camera people, and we tell stories, you know, who-what-when-where-why. The only difference is some stylistic differences, to keep them visually interesting, and we use music as beds to keep them moving along."
MTV settled on the tolerance campaign because its lifestyle research showed viewers were concerned "about the issue of race, about people being prejudiced, about the idea of people being different and not liking other people," Corradina says.
"It probably had a lot to do with the riots in South Central," and after that pivotal crisis, MTV executives thought they had an obligation to address those concerns.
"Free Your Mind" should keep MTV News "on the map" after last year's groundbreaking political push, says Corradina.
"Even people that don't watch MTV know that MTV News exists now," and that's heartening to Corradina, who's built the department from the stage where the VJs read "news" reports taped a week earlier.
MTV News has grown to encompass regular series on the movie industry ("The Big Picture") and fashion trends ("House of Style").
Upcoming outings include "Seven Deadly Sins," an update on what sin means in the '90s, and "Roadhog," a magazine hour about motorcycle culture. The MTV definition of news isn't deadly earnest; it's information, whether that means the latest platform shoes or the latest government initiative.
And the networks are paying attention. NBC already has borrowed MTV reporter Soren for "Today" show reports, and the networks "have come to us for ways to co-produce things already," Corradina says.