Jerry Wishnow: An Activist Life
Social fires blaze outside all of our doors — racism, police brutality, drugs. The list seems endless. As a young man raised in Roxbury Massachusetts’ subsidized housing in the 1960s Jerry Wishnow had an outsized social conscience.
Street activism was the obvious way to go. But after working with a number of organizations and finally fleeing attackers in 1965 Selma, Alabama he thought there must be a better way.
Why not Jeffersonian Participatory Democracy. Give the people the truth and they will make the right social changes. He went to Northwestern University for his Masters's In Journalism. After a short stint as a freelance writer, he realized that he was still outside looking in.
During that period broadcasting was the tip of the media sword. He decided to go inside where he had access to the bullhorn. He reasoned that if broadcasters can sell soap and cars, they can sell social change.
As a newly minted 22-year-old white WBZ Radio-TV producer he watched as Dr. King’s assassination sent 100 American cities up like popcorn. Roxbury’s Blacks exploded in rage. Oft described “racist” Boston School Committee Chairman, Louise Day Hicks responded inconcongrously by shuttering the key Black, feeder school, a school he had attended years earlier. After weeks of closed schools, Wishnow went to management with an audacious idea.
Why not: invite the Black Panthers, principals and parents as well as Hicks and a quorum of her Committeemen to a 17 x 17' studio; with a black and white facilitator to move things along; a group dynamics pioneer to explain the action and put the entire event on the air life and commercial-free. Oh, and padlock the studio door from the outside. No one could leave until they agreed on a plan to reopen the schools. After 24 hours of confrontation, snoring, farting and ultimately dialogue an accommodation to reopen the school was reached. The event, dubbed T–Group 15, was covered with a full-page, Newsweek article and six national awards followed. Two nationally recognized Hollywood producers Vin Di Bona, America’s Funniest Home Videos creator/producer and Chas. Floyd Johnson, Executive Producer of the CBS television series, NCIS is currently working to turn Wishnow’s screenplay of the event into a feature film.
Three weeks later a historic blizzard paralyzed greater Boston and Wishnow asked, “Why not turn the station into a 24 hour, centralized “Storm Center”? People called in asking for help and WBZ used its signal, phone banks, and staff to connect them to government officials and volunteers to resolve their issues. The station helped thousands and drew a remarkable 33% rating (Kay Mills, Chicago Daily News, FCC’s Johnson Finds Something to Praise, 3/14/72.)
During the next six years, Wishnow’s projects flowed: Rush Hour Rescue, a free drive time road repair service; Commuter Computer, a computerized driver/passenger carpooling service responding to the 70’s energy crisis; Stomp Smoking and Shape Up Boston, months-long projects, one designed to stop audience smoking, the other to encourage weight loss and finally the WBZ Drug Bill bringing democracy to life by inviting the audience and experts to create and ultimately pass a drug bill to limit marijuana prosecution.
“WBZ went from being an entertainer and vendor to a friend and public service station,” said Wishnow.
In 1974 he started the Wishnow Group Inc. The Marblehead MA company developed and produced media-centered campaigns aimed at measurably intervening in substantive social problems utilizing mutually beneficial partnerships between media, nonprofits and businesses. Wishnow’s “secret sauce” was to martial several million dollars in unsold time the broadcaster would have lost to not only promote the intervention but to provide a windfall of exposure to the organizations that made it work. The community non-profits that provided the manpower and the business and government organizations that served as underwriters all shared equally in the invaluable institutional exposure.
An early Wishnow project, The Volunteer Connection, had him not intervening in just one community problem but creating a mechanism to provide manpower to assist in multiple interventions by creating a beginning-to-end voluntarism process. Wishnow brought his AmeriCorps concept — which was designed to recruit, screen, train, place and recognize volunteers — along with a written guarantee of valuable media support from KXAS TV (NBC-Dallas FT. Worth) to Dallas based Junior league, President Lyda Hill. With Wishnow’s media consultation Hill found funding from the Hogg Foundation and provided her professional management to the year-long campaign. An independent study showed that voluntarism increased an astounding 90%. The project renamed the Volunteer Connection received President Reagan’s 1986 Volunteer Action Award at the White House and was widely copied. Wishnow donated his original copy-written name for the project, AmeriCorps, to the Clinton White House and assisted in the media launching of the American version of the Peace Corps.
Wishnow’s projects went on to measurably reduce infant mortality, property crime, change drug laws and add antidiscrimination curricula to US and international schools. His campaigns received over 70 national and regional awards including a Peabody award, three national Emmys and four presidential commendations. Wishnow is the author of “The Activist” a text designed to train local broadcasters in media-based community activism. Many of his project materials are included in the archives of the Paley Center for Media. He has provided pro-bono consultation to numerous national organizations including Yale Law School’s First Amendment Council and Paul Newman’s “Hole in the Wall Gang.”