Broadcasting: Reception From the Cities

ITEM 6 · THE MARKET IS THE TWO CITIES'; WALKERTON'S BROADCAST RECORD IS RECEPTION, PLUS ONE NATIONAL BRUSH

The branch's tail belongs to broadcast, and for Walkerton its whole course is a boundary course: the signals that served the town were always seated in the cities, and the town's one moment in the national broadcast record came to it from outside. The market is the South Bend–Elkhart market, and its founding stations stand at their own cities' streets, printed here at boundary size as the branch orders: WSBT — the Tribune's station, on air in radio from 1922 and in television from 1952 — and its South Bend companions of the founding television years, WNDU-TV (1955) and Elkhart's WSJV (1954), built the market Walkerton has watched and heard ever since; their courses whole are the sister builds'. The county's Black press, from its first South Bend papers forward, and the alternative and digital layers of the market, are likewise the county seat's record at boundary size — no Black paper, alternative sheet, or broadcast station was ever seated in Walkerton, and no full-service broadcast facility seated in the town stands in the record reached; the town appears in the market's record as audience, not as origin. With one exception, and it is the exception Newspapers & Media already banks: in April 2015 the market's ABC57 and the national press descended on the town's Memories Pizza for the Religious Freedom Restoration Act story, and Walkerton stood for a week at the center of the country's broadcast argument — covered, not covering. The branch's tail therefore prints the shape honestly: a town that read its own paper for 121 years and watched the cities' stations for seventy, originating no signal of its own — and, in the digital layer, no successor seat either (the digital-native test stands in this run's influencers addendum, negative at the same strength).

Principal sources: the South Bend–Elkhart market's station record at boundary size (WSBT radio 1922 / television 1952; WNDU-TV 1955; WSJV, Elkhart, 1954); Newspapers & Media, "Coverage today, and broadcast at pointer" (the market's shape and the April 2015 brush); this run's influencers addendum (the digital layer's test).