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The Citizen, 1985-10-23, Page 4Local TV programming dictated by the network, economics Wonderwhy a hittelevision show turns up at 6:30 on Saturday night on the local channel? Angry that a heavily promoted CBC drama special shows up on Sunday afternoon (or not at all) instead of Thursday night? Blame it on network affiliation and the needs of advertisers. Al Skelton, manager of CKNX television, says trying to be all things to all people as the only resident television station for a large area of western Ontario: means that someoneis always unhappy with programming on his station. Being an affiliate of the Canadian Broadcasting Cor- poration complicates the situa- tion that much more. As an affiliate of the publicly- owned network CKNX loses large hunks of the prime time. Generally the 8 p.m. to 11 slot are "reserved time" or time when the affiliate must shbw programs originating with the network. It provides the local station with top flight Canadian content such as Fifth Estate, Seeing Things and The National and The Journal but it also saddles the station with a lot of programming advertisers are clammering to stay away from. One exception to the prime time rule is Thursday night when the affiliates can call the shots on programming and fill prime time with big named American shows such as Cagney and Lacy. Thursday night i§ also the time, however, when CBC schedules many of its most highly publi- cized drama specials or mini- series. When these don't show up on the local channel, the phones start ringing on the CKNX switchboard. With such specials the local affiliate has three choices: it can show the specials anyway and forego a lot of advertising revenue because these specials are seldom supported by adver- tising agencies buying time for their clients; they can ignore the shows altogether and put up with the complaints from that minori- ty of the audience that feels they've paid for the CBC and deserve to get those expensive productions just like people in' the city; or they can tape the specials and show them later. CKNX has done a little of each, often repeating a series like Home Fires on Sunday after- noons. Why then are you stuck watching reruns of Three's. Company on Tuesday nights at 7:30 when a hot new American sitcom like Golden Girls is playing on CBC? Credit (or discredit) that to cautious adver- tisers, Skelton says. CBC's programming in the 7 to 8 p.m. slot is what Skelton calls a "patchwork". A big hit like Golden Girls, Facts of Life or Too Close for Comfort may take up part of that slot but something ,with little broad appeal like IGrowski & Co. may leave viewers switching channels for the rest of the period. Advertis- ers are cautious and like some- thing steady like reruns of popular situation comedies every night of the week. about what the minute-by- minute viewership is for after- noon programming or Saturday night programming so the sit corns often show up in those slots. By the way, have you noticed CKNX and CFPL programming has become more and more alike? Advertising is the answer to that one too. The big time advertisers are approached to advertise on both stations (they might overlook the smaller CKNX rural market if they weren't handled this way) and they want to get the same programs for their money. The continuing fragmentation of the already small audience in the CKNX television coverage area causes both long-term and short term problems for Skelton. Pencilled into this year's programming, for instance, was the Polka Dot Door children's show. At.the last moment TV Ontario, which produces the show, decided it didn't want anyone but its own stations showing the program. Yet signi- ficant areas, such as many homes in this area, are too far from the TVO transmitters in London or Harriston to get a clear signal. Unhappy parents started calling the station when the show didn't appear on CKNX. At the same time the growing number of towns getting cable television puts the squeeze on the station as the only resident television in its attempts to gain enough audience to attract na- tional advertisers. "A rating point here is entirely different than a rating point in Toronto," Skelton says. Because there are fewer potential viewers 'in the first place' we need more rating points here than in a bigger centre." Still, he says, the station has survived for nearly 30 years so the smaller market hasn't crip- pled the station. The survival plan for the future is to concen- trate the station's limited re- sources in the news area. Good local news coverage, Skelton says, is the one thing the Detroit stations can't provide. The station is counting on tnat news coverage to keep people flicking their tuner to CKNX deipite the smorgasbord of channels now available from cable to satelite. PAGE 4. THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 1985. The Citizen Serving Brussels, Blyth, Auburn, Belgrave, Ethel, Londesborough, Walton and surrounding townships. P.O. Box 152, P.O. Box 429, Brussels, Ont. Blyth, Ont. NOG 1HO NOM 1HO Subscription price: $15.00 Advertising and news deadline: Monday 4 p.m. Editor and Publisher Keith Roulston Advertising Manager Beverley A. Brown Production and Office Manager Jill Roulston Doing it our way We rural and village people are a stubborn lot. Tell us we're not supposed to be able to do something and we'll find a way to do it. Back when new government safety regulations condemned many arenas to Flose, it was the smaller villages that usually had their arenas built and paid for long before the big towns could get their act together. While people in large centres just pay more on their taxes for things like recreation programs, people in our villages volunteer their services in many ways to keep the costs of arenas and community centres down. And so it was when people in the north-central part of Huron, the part that 'forms the communities of Blyth and Brussels, decided they needed a community newspaper. After more than a century of having a paper in Brussels and more than 90 years in Blyth, the two newspapers disappeared in a decision that made good economic sense to the new owners. Their computers and calculators said towns this small couldn't support a newspaper. And to be fair, after nearly century the people of the towns had come to take their newspapers for granted. Businessmen weren't supporting the papers through advertising and people had become blase about whether or not they let the papers know about new events. But after three years of doing without a community newspaper, people in each community realized how important it was to the life of the community. Little issues became big because, with no official source of information, rumours abounded. Businessmen found they weren't able to get their message about their business out to all their potential customers, people just plain felt that their communities were somehow smaller, less important because they weren't getting much coverage in the papers of nearby larger communities. The figures, for the accountants in the offices of a big company, don't make any more sense today than they did three years ago. In fact there are even fewer businesses on the local main streets today than there were then. But many people in the Brussels and Blyth areas had faith in their communities, faith enough to raise the money collectively in amounts from $100 to $3000 to give their communities back a newspaper. They were led by an optomist about small village life, Sheila Richards of Brussels who has also been a major moving force in the Blyth Festival, a person who has already proved in that institution that the impossible doesn't have to even take a little longer. The communities, through their own efforts, now have their paper back. It's up to them now to prove the accountants are wrong when they say it's impossible to have a profitable newspaper in these communities. We can do it our way. Getting dumped on While we in Huron county are breathing a sigh of relief that we weren't the winners of the lottery to get the Ontario Waste Management Corp.'s toxic waste dump, it's hard not to feel sorry for the people of West Lincoln Township who were not so lucky. We know how they feel. Although Dr. Donald Chant says that the clay layer in the soil of the West Lincoln site was the thickest of any of the seven potential locations for the plant thus making it the safest, one can't help wonder if the rural location also made it the safest from a pure politics point of view. Three families will be directly affected by the location of the 300-acre plant. If a more urban centre had been chosen, hundreds, even thousands of families would have been putting pressure on politicians to change their minds. It's hard to argue against the fact that from a pure safety standpoint a rural area is safer than a densly-populated area. The fewer the people in the neighbourhood, the less chance there is for people to get hurt. The Bhopal gas leak in India, for instance, would have been a minor incident if not for the slums crowded against the walls of the factory. Yet it shows again the unfairness of our modern, supposedly democratic society. Democracy means the majority rules and the minority can often get hurt. With the "not-in-my-back- yard" hostility about a toxic waste dump, the places with smaller populations were most likely to get saddled with the plant. The locations where the waste is produced, the places that benefit from the jobs in the plants producing the waste, are least likely to get the waste plant because of a high population that will raise a stink about getting the plant. And so the little places, the places that get the least beneift from the production of wastes, get dumped on. There's trouble out there One of the pleasures of living in a small community is that you get to know people from all walks of live. Yet though we see people every day, we may not know what goes-on in their private lives. These are trouble times for many people involved in agriculture. The interest rate crisis of the early '80's has been compounded by a disastrous drop in the price of farmland that has left many farmers, who had borrowed against the high real estate prices of a few years ago, teetering on the brink of financial ruin. These crises have been further multiplied in seriousness by world-wide surpluses in nearly every product produced by our farmers from beef and pork to corn and wheat. Farmers already worried about their futures must now face the fact that the return on what they've been producing this year is going to be so low, it will not provide a way out. These issues, of cout se, have been discussed far and wide on a large scale. We can shake our heads and say how sad, or we can philosophically say too bad but that's the way things have to work in a free economy but this all overlooks one thing: there are people out there, people we know, who are going through agony right this minute. If we live in the country, it might be our neighbour whose family is desperately feeling surrounded by unbeatable forces. Village residents may be meeting these people every day on the street, in church, at the arena. These aren't the visible poor like the people who inhabit slums in the cities. They aren't crowded into areas where mere residency signals them as part of the poor. Because of the high cash-flow style of farming today, they may look prosperous right up until the day they post the farm for sale or the bank forecloses. That does not lessen the anguish of those in trouble. It doesn't diminish the feeling of being all alone, of being abandoned by the rest of society. It doesn't make them feel any less guilty at perhaps seeing a farm that has been in the family generations, slipping from their grasp. It doesn't ease the sense of inadequacy that comes with what we relate as "failure" in our modern society. One of the great traditions of rural communities has been our desire to look after our own. Once when neighbours would lose a barn to fire, neighbours would help rebuild. Today's disaster is too big for that kind of direct action out surely we can show the same kind of understanding and willingness to help. We can prove again the strength of rural life: we care. Send us your letters