"If disagreements cut too deeply into the value structure of the individual, if television threatens the sense of cultural security, the individual may take steps to engage the medium at the level of personal action. Most often this occurs in the form of letters to the network or to local stations, and again, the pattern is not new to television. It has occurred with every other mass medium in modern industrial society" (p. 569).
When I was working at WVUA23, a local television station in Tuscaloosa, AL, part of my job was to field calls from viewers with connectivity issues. Occasionally, we would get callers complaining instead about the content we air or something as inane as a show moving timeslots. Infamously, one letter we received was a tyrade by a self-proclaimed "long time viewer" who couldn't stomach our switch to broadcasting more Spanish-language shows. It is apparent from these experiences that the "cultural security" television both protects and threatens is critical to the viewers' engagement with the media. The racist viewer's security was threatened by a programming shift symptomatic of the growing Hispanic population in Alabama; the other's security was threatened simply because he could no longer watch Bones reruns at 9 o'clock.
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