Where are the broadcast editorials?

ONCE UPON A TIME, Chicago stations editorialized about such lofty and mundane subjects as the Vietnam War and buying fresh meat on Sundays.

Today, most editorial voices are "heard" only in print.

Broadcast vets remember when things were different -- and they could make a difference.

"I thought it was ridiculous and terribly inconvenient" that Chicago consumers could not buy fresh meat in grocery stores after 6 p.m. or on Sundays, said Dillon Smith, the former editorial director of WMAQ-TV. But the butchers' union had successfully pressured legislators to make those sales illegal.

In the 1970s Smith's station both editorialized and mobilized a campaign called "Beef About It." The 20,000 responses it received provided leverage that resulted in overturning the law.

Other stations were also editorially active. Every summer, for instance, several boats would crash into the breakwater at Oak Street Beach.

"We presented editorials demanding that someone take responsibility for doing something. To the best of my knowledge, there have not been any more accidents there, or certainly not the number that were happening before," said Bill Campbell, community services director of WLS-TV.

The demise of editorials came when mergers and acquisitions of stations across the U.S. resulted in large debts for the new owners, said Marjorie Arons-Barron, former president of the National Broadcast Editorial Association.

General Electric bought RCA and NBC, Laurence Tisch became the controlling stockholder of CBS, and Capital Cities bought ABC. They all wanted cutbacks.

"It was easiest to cut back in a news department," Arons-Barron said.

At the same time, thanks to federal deregulation, "editorials were no longer seen as a necessary index of local stations' commitment to the community," Arons-Barron added.

Smith agrees. "The bottom line was to cut jobs that don't bring in any profits, so eliminating the people who did editorials plus eliminating the production, secretarial, and administrative costs could be a significant little addition to the profit of a television station," he said.

The newer breed of owners is less likely to expect editorials than the traditional type of owners, according to Don Gale, vice president of news and public affairs at KSL-AM and FM, in Salt Lake City. Gale said he has done an editorial every day for almost 17 years, and the people of Salt Lake City expect them.

"Our role is not to shape public opinion. Our role is to encourage public discourse," he said. But "it takes a lot of time and effort and you have to have a thick skin."

Smith may not have feared to shape public opinion, but presumably he too had a thick skin. Smith said WMAQ-TV took a very strong position against the Vietnam War. It was quite unusual at that time for a local television station to seriously deal with a national issue, said Smith, a five-time Emmy winner.

Salt Lake City, Boston, Portland, and Milwaukee still have broadcast editorials, but the only major Chicago station continuing the editorial tradition is WBBM-AM, which airs editorials four times a day, three times a week.

WBBM-AM editorials can make a difference. A couple of years ago editorial director Cate Cahan took a walk with a man in a wheel chair. She found newspaper vending boxes in front of the curb cuts, which forced handicapped people into the streets. Cahan's award-winning editorial aired and within one month city workers were removing obstacles.

Now, WBBM-AM is taking on the Department of Children and Family Services, which said there aren't enough black foster and adoptive parents. WBBM challenged DCFS to recruit blacks in churches.

Why does WBBM-AM continue to editorialize when others have stopped?

"I don't pay attention to what the other guys are doing," said Steve Carver, vice president and general manager of WBBM-AM. "We do them because we think we should."

Elizabeth Aspengren, a graduate of Northwestern University, is a freelance writer in Chicago. This article is reprinted by permission of Chicago Journalist, the magazine of the Chicago Headline Club, chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, October 1994.