But it’s the face on the television screen that people go after.
Tom Bonner, 35, who has been with KARK-TV in Little Rock, Ark., for 11 years,
remembers the time a burly farmer from Lonoke, with too much to drink, walked
up to him in a bar, poked a finger in his chest and said: “You’re the one that sent
that tornado and tore my house up...I’m going to take your head off.”
Bonner said he looked for the bouncer, couldn’t spot him, and replied, “That’s
right about the tornado, and I’ll tell you something else, I’ll send another one if you
don’t back off.”
Several years ago, when a major flood left water 10 feet deep in San Diego’s
Mission Valley, Mike Ambrose of KGTV recalls that a woman walked up to his car,
whacked the windshield with an umbrella and said, “This rain is your fault.”
Chuck Whitaker of WSBT-TV in South Bend, Ind., says, “One little old lady called
the police department and wanted the weatherman arrested for bringing all the
snow.”
A woman upset that it had rained for her daughter’s wedding called Tom Jolls
of WKBW-TV in Buffalo, N.Y., to give him a piece of her mind. “She held me re-
sponsible and said if she ever met me she would probably hit me,” he said.
Sonny Eliot of WJBK-TV, a forecaster in the Detroit area for 30 years, recalls
predicting 2 to 4 inches of snow in the city several years ago and more than 8 came
down. To retaliate, his colleagues at the station set up a contraption that rained
about 200 galoshes on him while he was giving the forecast the next day.
“I’ve still got the lumps to prove it,” he says.
FIGURE 5-2
Weatherbeaten
Note the similarities between the account of the weatherman who came
to my office and those of other TV weather reporters.
(DAVID L. LANGFORD, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Our instruction in how the negative association works seems to have
been primarily undertaken by the mothers of our society. Remember
how they were always warning us against playing with the bad kids
down the street? Remember how they said it didn’t matter if we did
nothing bad ourselves because, in the eyes of the neighborhood, we
would be “known by the company we kept.” Our mothers were teaching
us about guilt by association. They were giving us a lesson in the neg-
ative side of the principle of association. And they were right. People
do assume that we have the same personality traits as our friends.^22
As for the positive associations, it is the compliance professionals
who teach the lesson. They are incessantly trying to connect themselves
or their products with the things we like. Did you ever wonder what
all those good-looking models are doing standing around in the auto-
mobile ads? What the advertiser hopes they are doing is lending their
144 / Influence