Alexandra Klaren - On Becoming Neighbors: The Communication Ethics of Fred Rogers

IN HIS 1997 COMMENCEMENT SPEECH to the Memphis Theological Seminary, titled Invisible to the Eye, Fred Rogers, at the age of sixty-nine, reflects back on defining moments in his life. He recounts the experience of being bullied when he was an overweight and timid young boy. Afraid to go to school each day, he was, in his own words, a perfect target for ridicule. One day, after being released from school early, he decided to walk home. Soon after leaving the school grounds, he noticed that he was being followed by a group of boys who quickly gained on him while taunting him verbally. Freddy, hey, fat Freddy, they shouted, were going to get you, Freddy. Rogers recalls breaking into a sprint, hoping that he would run fast enough to make it to the house of a widowed neighbor. He remembers praying that she would be home so that he would be taken in and sheltered from the ensuing threat. She was indeed home, and Rogers found refuge.

As one might imagine, the painful feelings of shame that resulted from the social abuse and ostracism of bullying affected Rogers deeply. He recounts how, when he told the adult caretakers in his life about the bullying, the resounding message he received in response was to just let on that you dont care; then nobody will bother you. But, Rogers recalls, he did care. He resented the treatment and cried to himself whenever he was alone. I cried through my fingers as I made up songs on the piano. He sought out stories about people who were poor in spirit and derived identification and meaning from those narratives. I started to look behind the things that people said and did; and, little by little, concluded that Saint-Exupry was absolutely right: What is essential is invisible to the eye. So after a lot of sadness, I began a lifelong search for what is essential; what it is about my neighbor that doesnt meet the eye.

In this book I explore Rogerss search for the essential, that which is invisible to the eye, through a detailed and dynamic look into his groundbreaking, long-running public television program, Mister Rogers Neighborhoodhis lifes work. Integrating his advanced studies in both child development and Christian theology into the foundational rhetorics of his program, Rogers offered viewers a space of refuge, safety, and affirmation where dialogical connection, learning, and experience could take place at the parasocial level of television.and by encountering Gods compassionate presence during his own periods of suffering, encapsulates well the overarching directive and ethos of Neighborhood and speaks to the ways Rogers conceived of the program as his television ministry.

My overarching goal is to examine and analyze the vision, production, and reception of Neighborhood from the perspectives of communication, media and culture, rhetoric, and communication ethics. One cannot gain a thorough understanding of the breadth and dynamism of Rogerss communication project and the cultural phenomenon of Neighborhood through a consideration of the program alone; likewise, an inquiry solely into viewer mail lacks the critical other half of the communication puzzle that prompted its writingthe rhetorical offerings of the program. My study thus echoes the stages that Rogerss television creation went through from conception to production, reflection to refinement, utterance to reception and answerability. What follows covers an arc from imagining the program to implementing it and then moves on to an examination of how it was received through an analysis of viewer mail from the 1970s and 1980s. By analyzing Rogerss comments on the program, as well as episodes, scripts, other