When Push Gives a Shove

By James Kelly.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson is a man with a mission, sometimes several missions at once. He surely must be the only person to have confronted Walter Mondale (in - the 1984 Democratic presidential sweepstakes), Kentucky Fried Chicken (whose parent company signed an agreement with Jackson in 1982 to make it easier for blacks to obtain and finance franchises) and Syrian President Hafez Assad (who, at Jackson's urging, released a U.S. flyer shot down over Lebanon in 1983). Today Jackson and Chicago-based Operation PUSH, an organization that he founded, are in the midst of a new crusade, and this time the target is the TV networks.

For the past six months, Jackson and fellow PUSH leaders have staged a viewer boycott of CBS-owned WBBM-TV in Chicago. Jackson last week said that he is trying to expand the campaign not only to four other CBS-owned stations but to the network as well. PUSH representatives met with the general managers of WCBS-TV in New York City and KCBS-TV in Los Angeles last week and their counterpart at WCAU-TV in Philadelphia two weeks ago; talks are being sought with KMOX-TV in St. Louis. Next week Jackson will air his complaints at CBS's annual stockholders' meeting in Philadelphia. After that, the preacher- politician plans to launch similar protests against NBC and ABC. Says Jackson: "The other two networks are just as much in violation as CBS."

What the three networks must do, insists Jackson, is hire more blacks for management and on-air positions and use the services of more minority-owned businesses. Jackson is seeking from the networks the same kind of "covenants" he has signed with several major corporations, including Kentucky Fried Chicken, Coca-Cola, 7-Up and Burger King. Whatever the merits of Jackson's arguments, the PUSH crusade has begun to look a bit like an outtake from the satirical film Network.

The boycott was sparked last October by the demotion of Harry Porterfield, a black newsman who co-anchored WBBM's 6 p.m. weekday program. The station moved Porterfield to weekend anchor chores to make room for the returning Bill Kurtis, a former WBBM anchor who had left his post in 1982 to join the CBS Morning News. When the disaffected Porterfield was wooed by rival WLS-TV, WBBM offered to boost his salary to $300,000. After WLS again raised the ante, reportedly to a five-year contract worth more than $2 million, Porterfield opted to join WLS as a reporter and substitute anchor.

Porterfield's case hardly suffices as a rallying cry to storm the barriers of discrimination. As Chicago Tribune Columnist Mike Royko put it, "I might understand PUSH's concern for Porterfield if he had been flung out of the station door and forced to cadge quarters on a street corner . . . (but) he hasn't exactly become a member of America's underclass."

Nonetheless, PUSH started picketing WBBM's offices twice a week and urged black viewers to tune out. In December the organization presented a proposed agreement to the station. The document called upon WBBM to hire two male black or Hispanic anchors and establish a 40% employment quota for minorities. It said the station should conduct 35% of its banking with black-owned institutions and assign 25% of its legal business to minority lawyers. WBBM also was asked to donate $10 million to the United Negro College Fund and $1 million to "black organizations designated by PUSH."

Three weeks ago, CBS named Johnathan Rodgers as WBBM's general manager. A seasoned TV executive who left his job as head of the CBS Morning News to take the Chicago job, Rodgers, 40, is a well-liked, decisive manager who happens to be black. Jackson and the Rev. Hycel Taylor, the president of PUSH, hailed the choice as a partial capitulation to their demands, thus making it appear that Rodgers won the job because of his color.

Rodgers understandably resented the implication. He held secret meetings with Jackson and PUSH leaders, who promised to stop claiming credit for his appointment. Rodgers also insisted that he would not sign a PUSH pact that called for hiring quotas or other specific actions. He is said to have told Jackson and the others that if PUSH is interested in cutting a better deal for blacks, it should stop pressuring him publicly. Left alone, Rodgers argued, he would appoint more blacks, but he does not want to appear to be caving in to their demands. Apparently persuaded, Jackson told TIME last week that he was willing to give Rodgers a "grace period to develop his program" while turning up the heat elsewhere.

Has the boycott hurt the station's news shows? It is impossible to say. WBBM's news broadcasts, once ranked No. 1, have slipped to second place behind ABC-owned WLS. But the decline began several years ago, when Kurtis left for the CBS Morning News. WLS's potent schedule (the hugely popular Wheel of Fortune appears opposite the second half-hour of WBBM's 6 p.m. news show) and its vastly improved news programs have further siphoned off WBBM's audience. The CBS station has also been bedeviled by internal squabbling so severe that a shoving match once broke out in the newsroom. If Jackson and PUSH spread their campaign to other stations and take the pressure off WBBM, Rodgers may discover that dealing with the reverend was easy compared with attracting rating points from Nielsen.

With reporting by Jack E. White/Chicago