4A
Friday, April 5, 1996
OPINION
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
VIEWPOINT
President has no economic rationale for wage increase
Feelings of empathy and pity are used to justify many things. Take for example President Clinton's crusade for a 90-cent increase in the minimum wage.
Mike O'Donnell, director of the Small Business Development Center, 734 Vermont St., said that an increase in minimum wage probably would have a negligible result.
"The labor market is pretty tight in Lawrence and Topeka," he said. "Wages, even at fast food restaurants, tend to be above the minimum wage. Even the lower-end jobs, as in factories, are pretty good as far as wages go."
O'Donnell said that the bottom line was that no real benefits would accrue to those in Kansas, and that
THE ISSUE:
Minimum wage
there were several disadvantages. With 95 percent of most business in the country being small businesses, employment is sure to suffer from a minimum wage increase.
Many students are in the segment of the market that would see job opportunities decline, while those receiving these wages would see an artificial increase.
If the minimum wage seeks to distribute income from one segment of society to another, then how do its supporters explain the negative consequence of lost jobs?
If there are no jobs then there are no wages.
By raising the salary of minimum-wage earners, the Clinton administration is not rewarding these workers for high productivity or excellence. It is just trying to further the president's political aim.
TOM MOORE FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD
New soccer league could ensure the popularity, growth of sport
The World Cup was held in various U.S. cities during the summer of 1994, and during this time the game of soccer captured the imagination of sports fans in the United States, setting attendance and TV records. Although soccer has been out of the U.S. sporting eye since the World Cup, a new professional league, Major League Soccer, begins play tomorrow in San Jose, Calif., with a televised game on ESPN. This will give the sport another chance to succeed in this country.
Many mainstream U.S. sports fans think that the league will go bankrupt before the end of the summer.
But the growth of the sport at the grass-roots level, especially among youths, coupled with a strong financial backing from powerful companies such as Nike, Budweiser and Fuji film, should allow for the league to survive growing pains and to grow steadily in popularity.
THE ISSUE:
Major league soccer
Previous efforts at establishing a professional soccer league have been futile because of a combination of financial mismanagement and a general lack of interest by fans.
MLS, which placed franchises in Kansas City and nine other U.S. cities, will focus on building the sport in this country around U.S. players.
All player contracts will be owned by the league, not the teams as in most U.S. sports, because the financial problems of previous leagues centered around bidding wars for the best talent.
The MLS will try to market the sport to the younger generation that has grown up playing the game. More U.S. youths participate in soccer than in any sport other than basketball. If this fan base can be tapped, the league can ensure its own success.
JOHN WILSON FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Jeff MacNelly / CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Picketing not as important as storytelling for Blacks
Jesse Jackson's picketing of this year's Academy Awards broadcast was a office box flop, ridiculed even by those who agreed with its intent.
As comedy and tragedy, it symbolized much of what has gone wrong with a civil rights movement, which has been long set adrift by an ambiguous agenda since its glory days in the 1960s.
Instead of unifying his intended constituents behind a worthy cause, Jackson's protest divided those who were protesting on the street against those who have chosen, one way or another, to try to change the system from the inside.
As a result, the public received a disastrously mixed message: Jackson pjkeeting outside while black performers such as Whoopi Goldberg, Vanessa Williams and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar appeared inside on a program produced and directed by the multi-talented millionaire Quincy Jones.
The tragedy is that Jackson's cause, the need for Hollywood to be less parochial and more multicultural in its outlook, is a worthy one. The film industry has made tremendous progress in recent years, but white skin still has its privileges in Hollywood, as it does in most of the United States.
Despite the industry's mushrooming rise in Black stars, directors and producers in recent years, African Americans still feel like the industry's Rodney Dangerfields — they "don't get no respect," either as participants or as consumers.
Blacks purchase a disproportionately high number of movie tickets (25 percent, although they are only about 12 percent of the population) and video rentals. Yet, even successful Black directors such as Spike Lee, John Singleton and the Hughes brothers complain of having a harder time getting major studio backers than do their bright, aspiring Caucasian counterparts.
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST
Even a multimillionaire such as
Bill Cosby is not immune, according to a recent People magazine cover story on racial discrimination in Hollywood. Cosby said in the magazine that he believed his race was a big reason why no one in authority took his offer to buy NBC seriously.
Instead of picketing the Oscars, Jackson should picket the financial backers and ticket buyers who help the industry set its narrow standards.
It is not the movie academy that is the bad guy here. The academy only recognizes standards of excellence, as determined by its members. As one Black filmmaker said when notified of the protest, "We don't need white people to tell us what is excellent."
Picking the Oscars is about as useful as the benighted picket campaigns Rev. Al Sharpton and others have led against Korean, Arab and Jewish grocers in New York City neighborhoods. Jackson, to his credit, has stayed away from such self-defeating gatherings in the past. But his use of the picket line, an effective civil rights tool, to attack a problem that is fundamentally economic reminds me of psychologist Abraham Maslow's dictum: If the only tool you have is a hammer, all problems begin to look like nails.
The same advice that applies to the picketing of Korean grocers applies to the protests against Hollywood: Instead of picking someone else's business, why not open up your own business?
If Blacks want respect in Hollywood or in any other financial marketplace, they'll have to earn it the old-fashioned way, through dollars.
Easy? No, it won't be. Fair? No, it won't always be fair either. That's show biz. That's life.
But respect can be earned, and a growing number of innovative and tireless Black directors and producers are doing it. Ironically, many of them are taking the same cheap and easy road — guns, cops, big-breasted sex objects — that many African Americans have traditionally denounced when it came from Caucasian filmmakers.
Others have produced family films such as Tim Reid's Once upon a Time...When We Were Colored, backed by Bob Joynhson's BET (Black Entertainment Television) Productions, that unfortunately flopped despite critical praise simply because not enough people, Black, Caucasian or any other color, paid to see it.
Great Black actors such as Sidney Poitier in the 1960s disabused Hollywood of the notion that Black actors and stories were not "bankable," which means attractive to financial backers.
Suddenly there was an explosion of Black films. Many were cheap exploitation films, but they provided an important foot in the door for Black talent.
Now that we have our foot in the door, the most urgent question is which way we are going to walk. The success of Waiting to Exhale, produced on a shoestring but becoming No.1 in the nation in its first week at theaters, offers valuable lessons. It amply illustrates how quickly an ostensible "Black movie" can cross over to a wider, whiter audience when it touches common threads of humanity that lie within us all.
Like other Americans, we African Americans have a great story to tell. It is time for us to put down the picket signs, raise the curtain and tell it.
Clarence Page is a columnist at the Chicago Tribune.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Improved attitude can help environment
I am responding to Doug Weinstein's editorial concerning recyclcling.
I am a custodian at the Kansas Union, and every day I stare at the truth displayed before me in the form of cans, newspapers and an array of trash while I hear students' cries for environmental consciousness.
In the lobby, there are eight newspaper recycling bins, four aluminum can recycling bins and more than 10 trash cans that many students overlook.
but every day in the Union lobby I pick up aluminum cans, a myriad of newspapers and various other pieces of trash.
The same is true in Woodruff auditorium as trash and aluminum cans are scattered throughout the isles while four trash cans and two aluminum can containers are left virtually empty.
I realize some students are adamant in their efforts to recycle.
Granted, KU officials should provide more on-campus recycling centers and should efficiently regulate recycling areas that are presently employed so that they do not overflow, but if the University Of Kansas is to become a truly environmentally conscious University, students must eradicate their lackadaisical attitudes and realize each one of us not only can but does make a difference.
Nick Zaller
Tulsa sophomore
Infomercials play on American TV viewers' naiveté
The television industry continues to astound me.
Late last Saturday night, I was searching the TV channels to find something interesting when I caught the famous singer Dionne Warwick in her own talk show.
I was surprised: Why would Warwick have a talk show airing so late at night when less-famous people like Gordon Elliott and Jenny Jones plague the daytime airwaves?
ASSOCIATE EDITORIAL EDITOR
This episode happened to be about psychics.
Her guests were soap opera stars who wanted psychic readings and members of this hotline called the Psychic Friends Network. The psychics kept the audience on the edge of their seats with their astonishing predictions.
When Warwick paused for a commercial, I noticed something peculiar: the commercial was for the same psychic hotline for which the guests on the show worked.
"Wait a minute," I thought. "This show is nothing but a paid advertisement. Dionne Warwick tricked me."
OK, I'll be honest. I'm not that gullible. I knew it was a paid program the whole time.
But apparently there are people who easily have been influenced by the 10 episodes of the Psychic Friends' talk-show commercials that have aired since 1991. The hotline has reported that it receives about 3 million minutes of phone calls a year at about $4 each.
Advertisers are cashing in on America's naiveté by expanding commercials to a half-hour, or a full hour, and making them look like real TV shows. According to USA Today, infomercials generate about $1 billion in revenues a year, an amount that could reach $5 billion by the year 2000. To capture audiences, advertisers use washed-up and second-rate celebrities, whose guest appearances are disguised testimonials. So when viewers think they are watching a *Three's Company* reunion, they actually are being brainwashed into buying a Thighmaster.
One set of infomercials, Amazing Discovery, has made itself look like a real television series by plugging a different product every week. Host Michael Levey and his variety of sweaters have become so familiar to the late night/early morning audiences that many people seem to think his show is a legitimate series.
"Viewers don't label what they see as infomercials," Levey told the Los Angeles Daily News. "They see them as TV programs."
The cable TV market has introduced two infomercial-only networks. Now you don't have to be an insomniac to enjoy pure-commercial television; you can see it any time of the day.
Although the Consumer Resource Network and Cab le Time Direct aren't available in Lawrence, we will see infomercials make a larger presence on our airwaves.
Someday we could be watching what we think is a sitcom when suddenly the wacky neighbor solves the stars' predicament with a special car wax or hair restorant.
When advertisers know they have a grip on consumers, they won't let go.
As consumers in a world inundated with advertisements, we just have to keep our senses and realize that just because our favorite stars from All My Children use the Psychic Friends Network, it doesn't mean we should, too.
Craig Lang is a Springfield, Mo., junior in journalism.
KANSAN STAFF
ASHLEY MILLER
Editor
VIRGINIA MARGHEIM
Managing editor
ROBERT ALLEN
News editor
TOM EBLEN
General manager, news adviser
Editors
Campus ... Joann Birk
... Phillip Brownlee
Editorial ... Paul Todd
Associate editorial ... Craig Lang
Miami ... Tom Eroksen
Sports ... Tom Erroksen
Associate sports ... Bill Pesquila
Photo ... Matt Flickerman
Graphics ... Kosh Musser
Social sessions ... Gavin Turner
Wire ... Tom Ternary
Illustration ... Michael Laeker
HEATHER NIEHAUS
Business manager
KONAN HAUSER
Retail sales manager
JAY STEINER
Sales and marketing adviser
JUSTIN KNUPP
Technology coordinator
Business Staff
Campus mgr ... Karen Gersch
Regional mgr ... Kelly Connexy
National mgr ... Mark Oztakm
Special Section mgrs ... Horm Blowo
Production mgrs ... Rachal Cahill
Marketing director ... Heather Valler
Marketing director ... Cary Bestolff
Public Relations dir ... Mary Jenkins
Creative director ... Ed Kowalski
Classified mgr ... Stacey Weygarten
Internship/oo-op mgr ... T.J. Clark
THE COMPLETELY POINTLESS ADVENTURES OF BRIGG AND FRO
I never fully realized the beauty of our local lakee until right now.
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