Picture in your mind the face of your city’s mayor. Can’t do it? How about all five county supervisors?
OK, try this. Think of the conductor of our Pacific Symphony. Can you see him in your head? Now try the superintendent of the Orange County Department of Education. How about the president of Disneyland?
Whatever your responses to the above exercise, for the vast majority of OC’s 3.2 million people, the above task would be an impossible one.
Why?
Because almost 70% of us get our news and information from Los Angeles-based radio or television. That makes L.A.’s mayor and City Council far more visible to us than the OC supervisors. This reality makes OC very different from other communities.
Now, the only broadcast entity working to actually pay attention to OC issues, events, institutions and people finds its future being challenged due to an unexpected Appellate Court decision that invalidated the sale of KOCE Television from its founding college district to the KOCE-TV Foundation.
At issue, whether a competing bid from an out of state religious broadcaster, with a “preach and pray” format, actually should have been awarded the station last year.
The winning bidder in the process was the 30-member KOCE-TV Foundation, a private, nonprofit corporation including luminaries such as Dwight Decker, Marian Bergeson, Judi Partridge, Joel Slutzky, Chris Anderson, Mary Lyons, Betty Mower, Bob Brown and Jo Ellen Allen.
The foundation has been the governing board of the station since last fall when the Federal Communications Commission awarded it KOCE’s broadcast license.
Even though 65% of KOCE-TV’s rapidly growing 2.5 million person weekly audience views the station from Los Angeles, Ventura, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, KOCE’s commitment has been overtly, consistently and,some might say,almost obnoxiously, OC.
KOCE’s new mission statement reads: Unite and promote Orange County and reveal it to Southern California. Its over-arching strategies are to be live, be local, create content and create community.
Under the eight-month leadership of the KOCE-TV Foundation, the station has raised more operating revenue than ever before, enhanced funds for primetime PBS programs, strengthened its commitment to standards-based, on-air and online support to half a million K-14 students and their teachers, launched a spectacular 24/7 digital high-definition channel, began increasing the newsgathering capacity of local shows such as “Real Orange,” “Inside OC with Rick Reiff” and announced a plan to establish a 24/7 OC cable news channel.
These efforts are just the beginning pieces of an aggressive business plan for KOCE’s future created in partnership with the foundation board and other OC community leaders. KOCE-TV Foundation’s new Education Committee, under the direction of Bergeson, now is tackling the tough problem of workforce development, hoping to use KOCE digital broadcast bandwidth to connect people with technical skills required to work in today’s OC companies.
KOCE-TV is a not-for-profit business. As such, it is not pressured by owners or shareholders to pretend it is an L.A. station. It is not under the gun to broadcast ratings-grabbing syndicated shows that will appeal to the entire marketplace, all the time.
The premise for KOCE’s future is an assumption that OC’s lack of cohesiveness as a community is not the result of the scattering of our tall buildings among many different cities. The true problem is the absence of the kind of broadcast media that are, perhaps unwittingly, a powerful unifying force in most significant population centers in America.
Local television gives viewers a sense of what it means to be part of the place they live, a sense of the ethos of their community, the uniqueness of its spirit and the quality and diversity of its people and goals of its community and business leaders. It reveals collective community values such as education, entrepreneurism and culture. It exposes viewers to amazing people who are local community treasures and to businesses and institutions that are making local and national impact.
The current challenge to the KOCE-TV Foundation’s ownership of the station is not just a threat to KOCE. It is a threat to the concept of an OC community. But there are things you can do to help:
Tell everyone. Send e-mails to local community leaders and newspaper editorial pages, expressing your outrage at the thought of our only OC oriented broadcast medium being taken from us. Contact info for editorial pagers is available at www.koce.org.
Contact the Trustees of the Coast Community College District at www.cccd.edu/board/trustees.aspx and encourage them to appeal the current decision, and, if that fails, to pursue one of the available options that will allow KOCE to move forward under the auspices of the KOCE-TV Foundation.
Contact your company’s marketing department and ask them to consider a corporate sponsorship on KOCE to reach your potential customers. A fiscally strong KOCE is better able to take on this legal challenge.
Contact me at Mrogers@koce.org. I am happy to hear your positive ideas for insuring KOCE’s long-term future to OC.
Yes, there has been an offer by the competing religious broadcaster to give 20% the broadcast bandwidth to KOCE for community programming. That offer is a non-starter because the 20% of bandwidth would have no claim on cable or satellite carriage, leaving KOCE with almost no viewers. It also would prevent KOCE from providing a competitive high-definition TV service in the market.
Some see irony in the fact that OC, of all places, in order to know itself, must rely on a not-for-profit, public entity such as KOCE. But it is KOCE’s non-profit nature that enables it to spend so much time focusing on the OC subset of the L.A. TV market.
If this county were any other similarly sized city in America, it would have five local television stations and a dozen news vans doing live shots from all our happenings, connecting us with one another. But, instead, we are in the shadow of L.A. and Hollywood. And the reality is that network television’s present infatuation with “The O.C.” eventually will wane.
When that happens, what will be left,KOCE or nothing?
Rogers is president and general manager of KOCE-TV.
