Popping the Question

TV programmers have long been concerned--and confounded-- with theproblem of viewer participation. Just how can they get their audiences to feel some sense of involvement with that big cold impersonal thing staring across the living room? The latest answer is to ask a question.

The Big Question, Voice of the Peopie or Televote, as it is variously known, is a simple and inexpensive scheme. The station introduces a question on the early-evening newscast and invites the viewers to register their opinions--on a mix-or-match basis--by dialing one of two telephone numbers (one for yes votes, the other for no). Ten or more receivers at the station automatically answer with a recorded "thank you" and tabulate the results, which are then announced on the late-evening news report.

The surveys are hardly an accurate gauge of public sentiment, since anybody can stuff a yes or no phone number simply by calling repeatedly. Nor does the public always seem to know what it wants. In Houston, for example, 54% of KHOU's callers felt that the U.S. should end its involvement in Viet Nam; but a few nights later, 73% voted in favor of escalating the war. Said Program Director Dean Borba: "We're not quite sure what that means." James Pederson, secretary of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, feels that it means that "the polls aren't worth anything." He should know: he voted 80 times in a poll that pitted Johnson against Reagan--and the President still lost.

"Tax Cheats." Still, the game has proved so popular that 32 stations in the U.S. are now polling their audiences on everything from Ho Chi Minh to miniskirts, world trade to the World Series. When Station KSTR of Minneapolis-St. Paul asked whether the clergy should take part in civil rights marches, the crush of calls jammed the station's lines and short-circuited the switchboard of the nearby Midway Hospital. Of the 4,326 callers who did get through, 62% held that clergymen should stay in the pulpit and off the pavement.

While most of the queries deal with issues of national significance, some are inconsequential ("Do you favor a leash law for dogs?"), frivolous ("Do you like long hair on boys?") or merely vague ("Have we failed our founding fathers?"). In Boston, 64% of WHDH's callers said that they believed that flying saucers originated in outer space; in Tampa, Fla., 67% confessed to WFLA that they cheat on their income tax. When asked if they would vote for Lyndon Johnson in 1968, response was a resounding no from 63% of the callers in Houston, 77% in Pittsburgh and 82% in Minneapolis. Among the Republican candidates, Reagan ranked the highest and Romney the lowest in New Orleans and Minneapolis. Other polls indicate that viewers are strongly in favor of sex education in public schools, liberalization of abortion laws, and reopening the investigation of the Kennedy assassination.

Nosy Network. Last week a kind of nosy network was instituted, in which 14 stations agreed to ask the same question and compile their answers. Of the 42,000 viewers who replied to the first question, ("Should the U.S. stop bomb ing North Viet Nam immediately?"), 62% voted no, 38% yes.

Perhaps the most pertinent question was posed by radio station KQRS in Minneapolis, which, to meet the competition of two local TV polls, started its own. After running the quiz for a few weeks, the station asked its listeners if they thought such telephone surveys were valid. When 82% voted no, KQRS ditched the poll.

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