Springfield Leader and Press from Springfield, Missouri • 125

Election coverage looms On the air By Mark Marymont Presumably, everyone out there knows there is an election coming up this Tuesday. After months of listening-tp-and watching the candidates; 'we who actually.bqthetfo vote, will get he. opportunity to respond to all the candidates. Not to mention their commercials. As usual, most of the local television and radio stations will carry local and national returns.

The stations with big news departments will send reporters scurrying throughout the area to gather up facts and figures and augment that material with iacts and figures from various networks and wire services. Some stations will also have reporters doing exit polling asking members of the public whom they voted for in an effort to predict the winner of the election before anyone else does. In Springfield television station KYTV and two radio stations, KTTS AM and FM and KGBX-AM, will be polling various precincts around the city. ''We'll release the material about 7:29 Tuesday night," said Joyce Reed, Channel 3 hews director. "We'll be doing the polling in conjunction with SMS (Southwest Missouri State don't like to release that kind of material before the polls close, but I do think it's valid after the election is over." Reed added that her news department, in conjunction with Drury College, had done three different public opinion polls on the election, "We polled Greene County, the Seventh District and our viewing area in northwest Arkansas.

Interestingly, we found that there isn't one local Republican on the ballot in Carroll County, Arkansas." News directors Dan Wadlington and Dan Shelley, of KGBX and KTTS respectively, said they'll release their exit poll results about "7:01" election evening. "We'll poll "at selected precints, the bellwether precincts," said Shelley, who wouldn't say how many precincts his ranch hands would be rounding up figures in. Shelley said that beginning Friday, Nov. 2, he was going to be releasing material from a telephone poll of voters coordinated by Dr. Gordon Friedman, a political 'science professor at SMS.

Wadlington said his news department will be conducting exit polls in 14 precincts around the county. He added that the material will be aired right after the polls close Tuesday. As for last-minute specials, only television station KOLR will present any kind of election preview. It will air at 10:30 p.m. Sunday, and will feature Channel 10 reporters Mike Peters, Sally Kernan and Carol Taylor.

Features on the issues and candidates have aired the past few weeks on TV stations KSPR and KMTC. KOZK, the public TV station, aired an excellent series of debates, coordinated by the League of Women Voters, among the various candidates for state offices. At radio station WTO-AM and -FM, news director Brent Dunn said he would be running a series of brief specials this weekend and Monday that would deal with the various candidates and issues on the ballot. KSMU-FM will air a program on the' candidates for Greene County Sheriff Monday morning at 6:39. The folks at KLFJ-AM have featured, various candidates on their "Let's Talk" program, which airs at 1:30 p.m.

daily; and KWFC-FM will be running a series of brief election previews Sunday called "Assignment 5." Virtually every station in town will offer some election coverage Tuesday evening including KORX-FM, which is based in Greenfield and rebroadcast in Springfield via a translator. Mark Allen said his station will be the official Dade County reporter for the KYTV news reports. "We'll get some other information from them in return," he added. Last January, we announced that station officials at KOLR and KYTV had decided not to run political commercials during their local newscasts. They expressed concern about confusing viewers with political stories and commercials.

Apparently, it was decided that the viewers were more trustworthy then they thought, at least at KYTV. "We discovered we were about the only station in the state that was not running commercials in the news, so we decided to put them in there," Joyce Reed said. Dean Wasson, promotions director at KOLR, said his station was still not running political commercials in the news. No news is bad news for Demaree They say that good things come to those who wait, but Pat Demaree might disagree with that. Demaree is the Fayetteviile, Ark.

radio station owner who applied to the Federal Communications Commission to buy the 100,000 watt FM frequency currently licensed to KWFC, which is owned and operated by Baptist Bible College in Springfield. That was almost two years ago and Demaree is still waiting. "All the word I've gotten is that they are still working on the application," Demaree said from his Fayetteviile office last week. "I've talked to my attorney this weekend and he gave me some encouragement. We're hoping for a favorable decision soon.

It's been so long that I'm afraid to speculate. I don't even talk to my people here about it." One reason for the delay is the rather unusual frequency trade that KWFC is trying to accomplish in the deal. In return for selling the current 97.3 frequency to Demaree for almost a million dollars, KWFC station officials have also applied for a non-commerical FM frequency at 89.1. William Askew, KWFC manager, said last week he had heard rumors that the applications were about to be approved. "But, I've also heard they are about to be turned down," Askew added.

"We don't know what to think, we're just sitting and waiting." application was also held up by objections filed with the FCC by the company that owns KWTO. Those objections have been cleared Up, according to Demaree. Demaree still refuses to talk pulicly about the stations likely format. He has acknowl. edged that with three full-time country stations in Springfield (KWTO-AM, KTTS-AM and KTTS-FM) it's not likely he'll stock up on Willie Nelson records.

"I just can't say what we'll play there," he said. "But we intend to be competitive; no matter what we program. Mark Marymont, a former radio disc jockey and producer, is a columnist and feature writer for Springfield Newspapers. Pag 3 Tha Nowi-Uadar Sundoy, Novombor 4, 1984.