PUSH CALLS ITS CBS BOYCOTT ‘FAIRNESS’ ISSUE

A small, crudely lettered sign on the glass door reads, “Boycott CBS Channel 2.” Inside the tattered lobby of the former South Side synagogue, a bumper sticker affixed to a trash can repeats the message. The receptionist answers her telephone: “Boycott CBS, Operation PUSH.”

For seven months, PUSH, the 14-year-old Chicago-based civil-rights group founded by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, has waged a unilateral and largely ineffectual war on the local CBS-owned TV station, WBBM.

Other news organizations here have accused PUSH of attempting to extort $11 million from CBS and to force the network into a virtual straitjacket of hiring quotas and business deals as the civil-rights organization has tried to extend its protest to other CBS-owned stations in Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and St. Louis.

PUSH took its case to Philadelphia last Wednesday, where Jackson made an appearance at the CBS Inc. annual shareholders meeting. He called on the company to negotiate an agreement setting goals and timetables for more minority hiring and programming.

“If (President) Reagan’s Cabinet was composed of all white males, it would be attacked by CBS,” Jackson said. “PUSH is raising a simple question. Can the news media withstand the same standard of judgment that it applies to others?”

PUSH’s rallying call is “fairness in the media,” but the big issue is white domination of a democracy’s principal medium of mass culture.

“The media control the minds of people--white and black--in this country and the world,” said the Rev. Hycel B. Taylor, national president of PUSH. “It can alter attitudes, distort reality and assassinate through the power of the pen. . . .”

“Fairness,” for Taylor and other supporters of the boycott, means that blacks and other minorities should be better represented on the air, behind the camera and throughout the web of banks, production companies, advertising agencies, equipment suppliers and other firms that support the unarguably white-controlled mass-media industry.

“The immediate concern arises here, in Chicago,” Taylor said. “That’s not to say that we don’t have similar concerns with the other networks, or the print media.”

CBS, PUSH officials acknowledge, is, in many ways, merely a convenient and highly visible target for their complaints.

Recalling that last year the network bore the brunt of assaults from a right-wing protest headed by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), network officials privately congratulate themselves for “doing something right” to be attacked by both conservatives and liberals.

Two situations set CBS in Chicago apart: the graceless demotion last fall of 21-year-veteran black anchorman Harry Porterfield and the presence of fire-breathing WBBM commentator Walter Jacobson, who has long riled the city’s black community. Added to that has been a geyser of racial animosity that erupts anew as often as the city’s mayor, a black man, battles with the board of aldermen, the entrenched social and economic powers that be, or the local newspapers and TV stations.

Jacobson, who says his job is to “bash the mayor’s office,” has taken considerable heat from black community leaders for what they believe is racial motivation for his criticism of Mayor Harold Washington.

In an oft-quoted 1983 speech, Washington chastised local TV stations for employing few minority members and launched a personal attack on Jacobson.

Jacobson denies any racial prejudice.

“Harold Washington, because he’s black, has crystallized the issue of institutional racism. . . ,” Jacobson said in an interview. “He believes he’s getting a worse break because he’s black. If (former Mayor) Jane Byrne were mayor, I don’t think this would be happening.”

From CBS’ point of view, the PUSH complaints are unfounded. The network acknowledges that, in the past, minorities were not well represented among top management.

But that has changed, says CBS/Broadcast Group President Gene Jankowski.

“I think everybody in corporate America is well aware that minorities have to be given equal opportunity,” Jankowski said. “CBS has a very good track record as a corporation.”

One of the changes was the appointment in March of Johnathan Rodgers, a 40-year-old black man, to head the station.

Rodgers is one of the few blacks on CBS’ corporate fast track of younger executives positioned to rise to the company’s top management.

He moved to WBBM after five months as executive producer of “The CBS Morning News.” Previous positions with the company included station manager and news director of CBS-owned Channel 2 in Los Angeles.

Rodgers and CBS deny that he was picked to become CBS’ first black TV station general manager because of the PUSH boycott. But PUSH’s Taylor considers the Rodgers appointment a “small victory” for the protest.

Other than the Rodgers appointment, however, CBS has made few moves that suggest it is feeling any pressure. The network defends its hiring practices and says it is much better about employing blacks and other minorities than most other major corporations.

CBS backs up its position with statistics. As are all TV companies, CBS is required by the terms of its federal broadcast licenses to carry out extensive equal employment opportunity programs.

Minorities make up more than 20% of WBBM’s staff, a figure roughly comparable to the percentage of nonwhites in the Chicago viewing area. CBS claims that its record places it and WBBM well within the Federal Communications Commission’s “zone of reasonableness” for minority employment.

For PUSH, however, that is not enough. PUSH has argued for a 40% minority-employment level, a figure more in line with the population in the city of Chicago. In addition, a widely publicized set of PUSH demands that were handed to CBS in December called for a $10-million donation to the United Negro College Fund and another $1 million to “black organizations designated by PUSH.”

The so-called “covenant,” which PUSH officials now describe as only a negotiating document, also called for WBBM to do business with minority banks, accounting and law firms and service companies.

(Ironically, the biggest portion of CBS’ local banking business has been handled through minority-owned Independence Bank of Chicago for years, the station claims.)

There is very little hard evidence that the boycott has been successful in persuading blacks to switch off WBBM.

Local ratings studies show that news programs on all three network-owned stations are losing audience to syndicated programs on independent TV stations. WBBM’s ratings have fallen further and faster than others stations’, but even PUSH attributes the decline only in part to the boycott.

(WBBM’s evening news ratings have been hit especially hard by the running of the very successful “Wheel of Fortune” game show on the ABC-owned station, WLS.)

Where the PUSH campaign has succeeded, however, has been in bringing the broader issues to the forefront, said media critic John Calloway, a public-TV correspondent and director of the University of Chicago’s prestigious Benton Fellowship program for broadcast journalists.

“What has been successful is to remind everybody in our business that we still have a considerable way to go in terms of what Jesse Jackson calls ‘justice’ in the media,” Calloway said. “We still have a serious problem in terms of on-air presence of minorities. It’s rattled the cages again.”

At times, PUSH’s boycott has been angry and bitter. Most of the raucous local news media have angrily denounced PUSH’s effort and circled their wagons to defend an embattled comrade in journalism.

The Rupert Murdoch-owned Chicago Sun-Times, especially, has railed against the boycott with editorials and front-page stories.

Some PUSH supporters acknowledge that the boycott may be little more than a poorly executed effort to deal with the right problem in the wrong way, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

“The whole extortion argument is bourgeois,” said Chicago Tribune editorial writer and columnist Clarence Page. “I view (the boycott) as a protest against the media--CBS is just the target now. It’s part of the quest for economic leverage.”

Page, a black man and formerly community affairs director at WBBM, is one of the few public supporters of the boycott, and he has chided his fellow journalists for too quickly dismissing PUSH’s charges against WBBM.

“Corporate America is guilty of a kind of executive apartheid,” Page said. “That’s the next frontier of the civil-rights movement.”