TV WOMAN OF ACTION ON CONDOM AD

The vice president and general manager of television station WXYZ speaks so softly that often you wish you could hand her a mike. She dresses quietly too, deliberately wearing dark suits and pale silk shirts, not wanting to be “too visible” as a woman manager. Around her there is turmoil, yet Jeanne Findlater--in 1979, the first woman in a major market to be named a television chief executive, and this year the nation’s first television executive, under the specter of AIDS, to air condom commercials--projects an aura of calm.

She is a woman in her mid-50s, who declines to give her exact age because it “categorizes.” She has two grown children--a son, 33, in television sales in Denver; a daughter, 31, a physician in the Detroit area. She uses her second husband’s name.

“I sought out the condom ad,” Findlater says matter-of-factly.

“Someone recently asked me, ‘Was it my being female (that prompted the decision to air the ads)’? I think it’s more my previous jobs that were influential. As a reporter, as an editor at the (Detroit) Free Press, as program director, and as general manager. And, as a public schoolteacher of inner-city children, teen-agers. . . . I’ve always worked,” she says. “I’m not an overnight sensation. It’s taken me years to establish myself.”

It is late afternoon, Feb. 10. In Washington, the surgeon general of the United States had just finished testifying before a House subcommittee--with network representatives in the audience--calling upon the networks to air condom ads as a “positive public health benefit.” C. Everett Koop’s testimony, in effect vindicating Findlater’s decision to air the LifeStyles-brand commercial Jan. 26, would be a lead item on her ABC-affiliated station, as well as on other stations nationwide.

Meanwhile, in her own backyard, Findlater was trying to head off a possible boycott of WXYZ by the Macomb County Republican Committee.

She had just been tipped by Kay McNabb, committee vice chairman in the conservative blue-collar county north of Detroit, that a resolution attacking the station would be offered that night. Privately, there was talk of boycott.

Two nights after WXYZ aired the condom ad, WDIV, the NBC affiliate headed by President and General Manager Amy McCombs, broadcast the same ad. Findlater does not believe gender had anything to do with it. Ironically, McCombs, about 15 years younger than Findlater, became the nation’s first woman general manager in 1978 at WJXT in Jacksonville, Fla.

After a quick talk with a physician friend at (Henry) Ford Hospital to marshal statistical ammunition, Findlater phoned McNabb back. WXYZ’s ads had run for a week during “Nightline” and during “The Oprah Winfrey Show” after 10 a.m. “Of course the ads are directed at adults and not at children,” the general manager began. “The ads are no longer on the air, but that does not mean to say that if we get them again we won’t air them,” and she paused, “because we will.”

Then, after noting that the ad on WXYZ showed a young woman stating that “I’ll do a lot for love, but I’m not ready to die for it,” Findlater cited “the grim statistics right here in Michigan.” It isn’t just AIDS, she said, though the disease is the “center of attention. In Michigan in 1986, there were 130 new cases of AIDS reported; since 1981, the whole total has been 272. So, with half that number reported last year, you get some idea of the time bomb we’re living under.

“There are other kinds of sexually transmitted diseases,” Findlater continued. “In gonorrhea, syphilis, in 1986 alone (in Michigan), there were 38,000 new cases of venereal diseases. Now, let’s address the subject of teen-age pregnancy and what it’s doing in the community.”

She quoted from a Newsweek cover story that put illegitimate teen births in 1960 at 15%, in 1984, at 56%. She said the station was about to produce a prime-time documentary on the subject, and noted that a physician at the University of Michigan’s School of Medicine had told her, “You have to walk through the wards with me and see children having their second babies.”

“If people are not prepared for pregnancy,” Findlater argued, “you end up with some children born seriously deprived of nutrition . . . On the other side of the coin is information.”

Detroit ranks fourth in the nation in teen pregnancy, and for Findlater that is as compelling a reason to air the ads as the threat of disease and death. Airing condom ads will not drive teen-agers “to change their beliefs and practices because somebody told them there’s such a thing as condoms,” she told McNabb, but “reminding them that there is something they can use which is inexpensive and readily available.” The ads also “afford parents a wonderful opportunity to impose their own values.”

With McNabb indicating there would be a push to table the issue, and Findlater offering to “come over” and present WXYZ’s point of view, if necessary, the conversation ended. Unruffled, Findlater went on to other business.

She phoned an ABC/Capital Cities lawyer who had attended the subcommittee hearing to get “some first-hand information; it’s my old reporter’s instinct.” Despite “loads of programming” including public-service announcements about sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy with the message “just say no!, “ she suggested that “as a positive thing, commercials sell. We can do a lot of consciousness-raising.”

She gave interviews to the Detroit News and to her own station about Surgeon General Koop’s “welcome” testimony. “I understand the networks’ position (in refusing to air condom ads) that they program for the whole country, and only a local television station can say what is good for their own community, but in truth that’s denying their responsibility. . . . That’s a cop-out.”

Between conversations and keeping an eye on three TV screens before her--two 19-inch sets tuned to the CBS and NBC affiliates, and a 25-inch set for WXYZ--Findlater took time out to admire the view from her window in suburban Southfield. “At night when the weather gets warmer, this time of evening, the sun is getting lower in the sky. I’m not kidding you. You see a spectacle out there. Rabbits playing around in a circle, gamboling on the lawn, partridge and pheasant, and I’ve seen a fox, an opossum out there, raccoons. We have behind the station woods that the Michigan Department of Conservancy told me have not been touched by God or man for a couple of hundred years. . . . “

Later, in Macomb County, a tamer resolution objecting to the station’s action was tabled.

Three years ago, while WXYZ was owned by the ABC network, before being sold by Capital Cities to Scripps Howard Broadcasting, Findlater wrote a long presentation to the head of the network’s broadcast standards division, on behalf of contraceptive advertising for products “legally for sale.” Along with the teen pregnancy issue, “herpes was a growing problem in the community. . . . “ She received a swift turndown.

In December, 1985, Findlater delivered an on-air editorial saying Michigan schools should give contraceptives to students who wanted them because “teen-age pregnancy is at an all-time high (and) parents can’t, or at least aren’t doing their job of educating children to be responsible.” There was hardly a peep of response.

When the sale of WXYZ to Scripps Howard was completed at the beginning of 1986, she phoned company President Don Perris to discuss airing the commercials. “It was my first philosophical conversation with him.” She got a green light. Last April, WXYZ aired a commercial for the Today contraceptive sponge. She got a half-dozen calls and letters.

In September, even before the advertising agencies had completed their spots, she told her national sales manager “to let it be known that this station would be very interested in running (condom) ads.”

Altogether, WXYZ received about 700 letters and phone calls, about evenly divided. Last Wednesday, Detroit radio station WJR conducted a phone poll on condom ads. Of the first 125 calls tallied, 60% favored airing.

There was no particular incident that solidified her attitude on the matter, “just the nonending bombardment over abortion. We editorialized in favor of choice and of state-funded abortions. It’s not a choice I would make for myself, but I feel it is an option women have a right to make for themselves. Much more important was how you make the best choices.

“When I was a teacher in an inner-city school,” Findlater continued, “and taught boys and girls 10-14 years of age, many of my children (students) were sexually active. Two of these girls became pregnant. They were children with IQs of about 80. It was incredible. The teen-agers that I worked with, they had ideas that a contraceptive could be a Coca-Cola douche, that if you had sex standing up or were wearing high heels you couldn’t get pregnant, that if you were young you couldn’t get pregnant. . . . “

A child of the Depression, growing up in Detroit, Findlater did not go to Wayne State University until after her children were born, and she had helped put her first husband through college. She went to college at night, graduating from the School of Education in 1963 with honors. She left teaching two years later when her husband “wanted to marry someone else. I had never known anybody personally who was divorced and it was just a real shocking thing, apart from all the heartbreak.”

She found teaching too emotionally draining at that point, and with “the pain of the whole thing, the shock and the embarrassment, I just wanted to disappear.” When her younger brother, Patrick Sullivan, an Episcopal priest who is now dean of faculty at Vassar, decided to take his family to India to study, Findlater joined them with her children, and stayed for two years. She came home determined to find a new career.

She worked as a consumer researcher for the Free Press’ Action Line column. When the paper went on strike, she got a job in public television, and decided that she was meant for life behind the camera. She switched to WKBD, a successful independent TV station, producing the popular Lou Gordon show. She was producer when George Romney allowed that he was “brainwashed” by generals in Vietnam, thereby ending his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. Without a flicker of hesitation, she says she didn’t understand what all the fuss was about, and is only sorry that “nice Mr. Romney” suffered.

She returned to the Free Press as associate editor of its Sunday magazine in 1969, married Richard Findlater, a magazine sales executive, “one of the most elegant, sophisticated people I know,” and joined WXYZ in 1971.

Her rise through the ranks was relatively swift--and smooth: assistant program director, 1973; program director, 1975; and general manager in April, 1979. Although she had experienced “that first radical click” (change of attitude) a decade earlier--after a male executive at WKBD approached her asking: “You’re not bucking to be program director or something like that? Don’t think about it because women aren’t going to be those things”--she credits her success at WXYZ to the man she replaced, Jim Osborn.

Asked whether she sees a “glass ceiling” for women in top television management, Findlater said she’s not comfortable with that, but added: “I was not only the first female general manager in a (network) owned station, but I have been the only one in that role.”

At WXYZ, where 14 hours of every 24 hours are devoted to news, informational and talk-show programs, Findlater spearheaded creation and production of “Hot Fudge,” an award-winning syndicated series, “the first program for children that was devoted to understanding their emotions. Anger and envy, shame of one’s name, jealousy of a sibling, embarrassment about looking different.” Last year she created “Learn to Read,” 30 half-hours of instructional programming directed toward illiterate adults. The program will air in more than 80 stations next month.

On Feb. 11 Findlater hosted a meeting of three top Michigan school officials, a station producer and her advertising director. They discussed the creation of an hour prime-time documentary on teen pregnancy to air this spring, another half-hour program on the subject directed toward teens to air in the fall and public service announcements between. The officials pledged cooperation.

One official notes that there has to be something to counteract all that “sex-sex-sex” on the soaps. Behind him, Findlater’s three screens are silently tuned to the afternoon soaps.

“We are not narrow-casting in any sense; we are broad casting,” Findlater notes later. “And we are putting on programs attractive to the big body of viewers. And who is to say ‘General Hospital’ or ‘One Life to Live’ shouldn’t be there? An awful lot of Americans enjoy it.

“Television is an awesomely powerful teacher, for better or for worse,” she adds. “If on the one hand we are in our programming showing people who are sexually active and often with consequences that are never addressed, we never show the dark side of some of that behavior . . . in other ways, we do a very good job. Our job is to identify problems in the community. Unwanted pregnancies. Sexually transmitted diseases. Public affairs and news programs, even good entertainment programming, may not be enough. . . .”

She returns to the issue at hand. Perhaps contraceptive advertising is an answer. “If some people are offended by hearing a message they think is inappropriate, there are an awful lot of people who are going to benefit. The day we start programming to benefit the least, the fewest, then that’s the day we should be off the air.”