Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 4, 1994 TAG: 9409070012
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By ARLENE LEVINSON ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Citizens are yakking to the government and the news media, implored to share their opinions by toll-free telephone, computer and fax. Across the land, people hear the powerful begging: Talk to me - and talk and talk and talk.
One day in June, CNN watchers catching the latest on the O.J. Simpson drama heard the newsreader break her usual solemn demeanor and graciously say, ``We're taking your calls.''
Not content with its own Postal Service, the Clinton White House has rolled out an electronic red carpet, piling e-mail on top of what many now call ``snail mail.''
Tony Bouza, Minneapolis' former police chief, is running for governor as an ``interactive candidate.'' Dial 1-800-HEY-TONY and hear his views, then tell him yours.
And turning to page 3 of New York' Daily News, readers recently saw a plea to decide by telephone poll: ``Should Chelsea Be Allowed To Go To Woodstock?''
Celebrities are crawling all over the on-line grapevine. Any day, the likes of Mick Jagger and Mel Gibson, Erica Jong and Joan Jett and Jamie Lee Curtis are participating in conversations with people they never heard of.
Trying to describe this trend, James Love used the analogy of a microphone at a town meeting. Said Love, who uses e-mail for grass-roots organizing as head of economic studies for a Ralph Nader organization called the Center for Study of Responsive Law, ``Technology is adding more microphones, lots more microphones, where people can talk about things.''
Not so long ago, elected officials and the news media seemed high and mighty, hard to reach without connections and money.
Apart from a letter to the editor, a note to the White House or City Hall, or, for the really riled, a public protest, few were the ways to talk back beyond the barstool, kitchen table or office watercooler.
With the new technology, people are crashing old boundaries between the hoi polloi and the powers that be.
Or are they?
Does it make a difference? Is this a 20th century Tower of Babel raised to a keyboard-clattering, telephone-jangling roar of nonsense?
Skeptics say, at best, it releases tension.
``A lot of it is symbolic democracy,'' said Ray Suarez, host of National Public Radio's daily call-in program ``Talk of the Nation.''
``This form of radio satisfies something deep in people who are, at all levels of society, feeling more cut off from government,'' Suarez said. Americans these days, he said, feel ``that government is a remote, self-perpetuating institution that goes on without them, without asking them. This form of radio lets off some of the steam.''
At worst, this more voluble America distracts people from real action, others say.
``One has to wonder,'' said Robert Unmacht at The M Street Journal, a weekly newsletter for the radio trade, ``if people had been able to call the King (George III) and say, `This damn tax, it's a really nasty unfair thing' if they would have called off the revolution. Once you've blown off steam, you don't quite have ... to go further.''
Holding forth on current events is a national pastime as venerable as the cracker barrel and front porch. It was modernized by Phil Donahue, credited with enlarging the dialogue the day he leaped into the audience of his barely new ``The Phil Donahue Show'' and let a woman ask his guest a question.
The studio audience itself arrived by serendipity; it was an afterthought, compensation for people who had come to see another TV show that had been canceled.
That was in 1967, the same year the toll-free 800 number was first available nationwide.
But it was the remarkable presidential campaign of 1992 that enlarged the conversation by pulling even the presidency down to street level.
While his opponents flew from primary to primary, independent billionaire Ross Perot popped up on ``Donahue,'' ``Larry King Live'' and C-SPAN. Soon, Bill Clinton was taking your calls on ``Today.''
``People are tired of being manipulated,'' Clinton said then of his freedom from the press. George Bush tried to buck the trend, and lost. Town meetings were redefined; television became the village.
Now, the computer-equipped can reach Clinton at presidentwhitehouse.gov.
Kathy Gordon, a 37-year-old manager of word-processing and graphics at a San Francisco construction management firm, sends four or five e-mail letters every month to the White House, Hillary Rodham Clinton or members of Congress.
`You send two sentences, that say `I think this and this,' or `I support that' and kaboom, it's a count.''
She dispatches her letters at work, a task that takes two or three minutes, tops. ``I feel better,'' she said. ``I feel like a better-informed voter. I feel more a part of what's going on, vs. someone who's standing back and watching.''
It's not only in Washington that folks are hip to e-mail. So is the mayor of Cincinnati.
``Both politicians and the public are desperately searching for ways to overcome ... a tremendous gap in communication,'' said Mayor Roxanne Qualls. ``Any politician worth his or her salt knows you do have mechanisms where you listen to people. Otherwise, you become extremely removed and out of touch.''
Democracy American-style has always counted on news organizations to carry messages back and forth but, until lately, it's largely been a one-way street.
Now, even these entities are getting into the act. U.S. News & World Report magazine, for example, is one of a growing number of news organizations, among them television networks and newspapers from the Army Times to The New York Times, soliciting critiques of their reporting from readers.
William Allman, a senior writer who covers science for U.S. News, said entering an e-mail dialogue with readers has ousted him from the journalistic cloister.
``This connects you to the people who actually read your stuff,'' Allman said. ``You find out American people are very skeptical. They question what you say. That has been very productive, as painful as it is.''
Long before e-mail, radio was turning up the volume of public opinion. But even that forum has expanded dramatically.
In five years, the number of news and mostly talk radio stations has more than tripled, and call-in shows are as standard as the weather report.
No longer primarily the haunt of crazed insomniacs, talk radio and, increasingly, television, are heating up with an electrical storm of call-in programs attracting all sorts.
All-talk radio began in 1960 at KABC in Los Angeles. By 1989, almost three decades later, just 319 radio stations followed the news and mostly talk format, according to Unmacht at The M Street Journal.
This year, their numbers exceed 1,000, and virtually every one of the nearly 12,000 radio stations in this country has some talk programming.
Even TV has gotten into the act.
You can e-mail ABC and, on the air, the newsmagazine ``Dateline NBC'' urges viewers to comment on current events by fax, phone mail or via the Internet.
Besides the familiar Larry King and local variations of him are America's Talking, a cable channel owned by NBC, and such shows as ``Direct Line'' on National Empowerment Television, a conservative public affairs channel.
Multimedia, which produces the ``Donahue'' and ``Rush Limbaugh'' shows, this fall will inaugurate The Talk Channel, another all-talk cable TV channel.
And on Aug. 22, CNN began ``TalkBack Live'' a daily current events show in which the 150 audience members also are the guests. Cameras and microphones are posted at shopping malls to take remote commentary, and viewers also participate by fax and e-mail read on the air.
The highlight and lure of the show is a mystery guest with the power to act on the subject in question who steps forward for the show's final 15 minutes.
All this speaking up is a sign of democracy in transition, observers say.
``We've been taught that we're really bad people in the citizenship department, that we're shallow, stupid, that we're couch potatoes,'' said James Love, the electronic grass-roots organizer.
``It's made people really think about what the real opportunities are. As a result of this, there's an interest in redefining how you make a democracy actually work.''
by CNB