Politically Active Lifetime Gives Its Viewers a Voice

Brenda McIntosh is a Massachusetts mother, married with three children ages 4 to 8. She is one of the viewers who responded to the Lifetime cable channel’s request for personal stories on child-care issues. At the time, she was still dealing with the unexpected departure of the person who cared for her children while she worked.

“It’s like it’s [just] a women’s issue, not a family issue, not a social issue. It’s the mother’s problem that she wants to work,” said McIntosh.

She spends 85% of her income on child care primarily because, “if I didn’t have a good health-care plan, then what would have happened the two times my husband was laid off?”

In July, McIntosh repeated her story before a U.S. Senate Labor Committee hearing on child care, chaired by Sen. James M. Jeffords (R-Vt.), after the kickoff of yet another of the cable channel’s political initiatives, “Share Your World: Adopt a Politician.”

The child-care initiative was just one of the more recent public outreach programs from Lifetime. The cable channel first began to get seriously politically active in 1996 when HMOs began designating breast-cancer surgery as an outpatient procedure.

Two years earlier, the cable channel, a joint venture between Walt Disney Co. and Hearst Corp., had officially redefined itself as “Television for Women.” As part of that strategy, it began developing public service outreach programs on family and women’s issues. Breast cancer education was one of its primary causes.

Once the HMO issue surfaced, Lifetime, through an educational partnership with the National Alliance of Breast Cancer Organizations, began running one-minute spots with reporter Linda Ellerbee. The host of Nickelodeon’s “Nick News” and a breast-cancer survivor asked viewers to sign the network’s online petition against “drive-through mastectomies.”

“We didn’t think it was going to be quite what it turned out to be,” said Amy Langer, executive director of the alliance.

In two weeks, the petition garnered 17,000 responses, from every state in the nation. Lifetime, said Langer, showed it had the “power to evoke topical advocacy on the part of their viewers.”

Alliance and Lifetime executives, who had been quietly cultivating bipartisan relationships in Washington, presented the online responses in a White House meeting with First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.), author of the 1997 Breast Cancer Patient Protection Act that would have restricted outpatient mastectomies.

Andrea Camp, who was press secretary to former Colorado congresswoman Pat Schroeder and is now senior fellow at the Boston-based Institute for Civil Society and a Lifetime consultant, said that the petition was significant, even though federal legislation to limit outpatient breast surgery is still pending.

“Remember, a lot of what you hear on the Hill is, ‘Gee, nobody ever tells us about that,’ ” she said. “So here they got 17,000 signatures. It was impressive.” In fact, Lifetime’s central aim is to build a bridge between its viewers and Washington--enabling everyday women to talk about the issues that are important to them., The goal is to raise awareness among politicians, rather than push specific legislation along. In contrast, when Camp worked with Schroeder on the Family Medical Leave Act, which became law in 1992, “it took five years to get 50 stories from real people to make the issue come alive for politicians.”

“Over the years we’ve had a lot of community actions and state actions,” said Joan Lombardi. A senior associate at Yale University’s Bush Center on Child Development and Social Policy, she was the first director of the Child Care Bureau formed by the Clinton administration in 1995.

“But I think people are starting to see the power of the media in getting our message across, so it’s terrific to see part of the media take this issue seriously.”

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Meredith Wagner, Lifetime’s senior vice president of public affairs, has been the primary engine for its outreach.

“We started doing documentaries on women’s issues, and we realized that, as we were developing programs in response to what was going on in women’s lives, we could make sure that legislators knew about these issues and how significant they were,” said Wagner. “We would use our relationships with women’s groups to get us access to the Hill, and then we would approach [politicians] jointly.”

Viewer response to the mastectomy petition “gave [Lifetime] an inkling of the power they could have,” Camp said.

In the aftermath of the high response from viewers, Lifetime formally polled its viewers about their life issues. Affordable, good-quality child care came out on top. A “Women’s Summit” meeting the network held in early 1997, and e-mail testimonials from viewers, underscored the concern.

The result was the network’s multiyear “Caring for Kids: Our Lifetime Commitment.”

Of course, public service-based outreach programs are not exclusive to Lifetime. MTV has its “Choose or Lose 2000” and “Rock the Vote” campaigns; Nickelodeon has its kid-oriented drives; and every national and local station has its causes. They’re part of corporate life for media companies, a form of practical altruism for TV stations that are always searching for ways to connect with viewers. If viewers respond favorably, that’s a plus for advertisers. However, Lifetime will stay away from more controversial issues--abortion, for instance.

“People feel differently on both sides [of the abortion issue],” Lifetime chief executive Carole Black said. “For us to make a judgment about that, that’s not our place. It’s to offer a forum and information. You can’t argue that there’s not a child-care crisis.”

Despite that, women’s organizations that have worked with Lifetime give it high marks.

“In the beginning, people saw potential for good in television that didn’t really manifest itself in reality,” said Langer. “We have MTV [and its voter outreach] and Nickelodeon’s ‘Big Help,’ but to have a network get in there and make political connections seems to me pioneer ground.”

For its child-care initiative, Lifetime made a $5-million commitment and formed a coalition of 150 nonprofits, from the Child Care Action Campaign and the Children’s Defense Fund to the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund and the National Council of Women’s Organizations.

“This television network is not only at the table,” said Kathy Rodgers, executive director of the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, “it is bringing together women’s groups and children’s advocacy groups and saying, ‘We have the capacity that you don’t have,’ namely the media capacity to amplify the voices and to reach out to people across the country in a way that engages them.”

As part of the effort, Lifetime showed a documentary in the spring, “Confronting the Crisis: Childcare in America,” created by actor-filmmaker Lee Grant. It became the campaign’s strategic visual aid, screened for politicians and political candidates.

When the documentary was shown, it included a tag asking viewers for their child-care stories; some of the 3,000 initial responses, including McIntosh’s, were shared with legislators.

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This election year, Lifetime’s political outreach is shifting focus. “What we’re trying to do is link these issues to the election, to every woman’s vote,” said Wagner.

Lifetime executives including Black were on hand in Washington for the July launch of the “Adopt a Politician” campaign. They were flanked by bipartisan supporters, including Republican Jeffords, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) and other politicians.

Lifetime is asking viewers to pledge to contact one lawmaker monthly regarding child-care concerns.

Faith Wohl, director of the national Child Care Action Campaign, calls Lifetime’s role vital in amplifying the voices of women in the debate over child-care proposals as well as providing easy access to the political process.

Seeing that “the right questions are asked of candidates about their views on child care--not just do you support [it], but what does it mean in terms of what you’re willing to fight for, vote for or advocate as a politician--that’s what Lifetime is enabling,” Wohl said.

Still, the outreach programs are designed to dovetail with Lifetime’s primary mission--being the channel that women tune to and come back to. It is a position that is becoming more critical for Lifetime to defend as Oxygen, its first serious cable competitor, officially signs on in February.

“To define women as your market . . . it’s sort of like saying, ‘We’re going to go after human beings,’ ” Langer said. “We know about Oxygen. . . . Women get rediscovered as a segment practically every day in every industry, but I think another thing about women viewers is that they tend to be somewhat loyal. Viewers build relationships.”