The Market
Media Policies and Media Reform
excerpted from the book
The Problem of the Media
U.S. Communication Politics in
the 21st Century
by Robert W. McChesney
Monthly Review Press, 2004, paper
The Market
p179
The cable TV systems industry (e.g. Comcast, Time Warner, and
Cox) has undergone perhaps the most striking consolidation over
the past fifteen to twenty years. It has gone from a "ma
and pa" industry of the 1970s to an enterprise in which six
giant firms control over 80 percent of the market. The power of
such consolidation is immense: since 1996 (when the Telecommunications
Act was passed) cable TV rates have increased at three times the
inflation rate. Comcast claims over 30 percent of the market,
and by all accounts further consolidation is inevitable, as smaller
firms cannot compete with such a Goliath. "Size has always
mattered in this business," a Comcast executive noted in
2003. For one thing, large cable systems have negotiating leverage
with the stations that need to be carried on their systems; independent
cable TV channels cannot survive, because they have no negotiating
power, unless a large media company, more often than not a cable
TV systems operator, owns them." Comcast had so much leverage
over cable TV channels by the fall of 2003 that even the other
media giants were forced to make concessions unthinkable in earlier
times to remain on Comcast systems. "There are three companies"
that will own cable TV channels, "Viacom, AOL Time Warner,
and News Corporation," mogul Haim Saban predicted in 2003.
"The rest are going to get gobbled up."
p182
As the dust begins to clear from the mergers of the past decade,
the contours of the U.S. media system come into focus. There tend
to be three main tiers of media firms. The first tier, composed
of Time Warner, Viacom, News Corporation, Sony, General Electric,
Bertelsmann, and Disney, are vertically integrated powerhouses-indeed
vast conglomerates-with various combinations of film studios,
TV networks, cable TV channels, book publishing, newspapers, radio
stations, music companies, TV channels, and the like. Their annual
revenues tend to run in the $15-$40 billion range, placing them
squarely among the few hundred largest firms in the world. Cable
giant Comcast certainly is large enough to be a first-tier firm,
though it is not especially vertically integrated. Expect that
to change, if Comcast has its way.
p182
... twenty of the twenty-five largest cable TV channels are now
owned by the five first-tier media firms, the same firms that
own the networks and many of the TV stations in the largest markets
.40 These five companies, between their cable and broadcast properties,
still reach around 90 percent of the total television audience
.
p183
The second tier is composed of another twenty firms-such as Cox,
New York Times, Gannett, Clear Channel-that tend to be major players
in a single area or two related areas. These firms have annual
media sales in the $3-$lo billion range and rank among the six
or seven hundred largest firms in the United States. The lion's
share of the U.S. media system is dominated by the firms in the
first two tiers: they provide or control the vast majority of
TV and cable programs, stations, networks, motion pictures, recorded
music, magazines, books, newspapers, radio stations, and so on.
The third tier is made up of the thousands of much smaller media
firms that fill the nooks and crannies of the media system, though
they can sometimes have influence in certain markets. They tend
to be dependent in some ways on first- and second-tier firms and
are often the targets of mergers and acquisitions. Many survive
because their markets-and profits-are too small to interest the
giants.
p190
Having concentrated control in media is precisely a problem because
such ownership power is extremely important and attractive to
owners. Control over public information, over the news, over the
culture offers tremendous benefits for media owners, and it is
a privilege owners have historically enjoyed, sometimes to democracy's
detriment.
p200
A market-driven media system in a society with pronounced inequality
will have structural pressures to reinforce rather than to challenge
such inequality; those on top will tend to drive the media to
benefit those on top.
p200
People are exposed to the media fare that the giants can profit
from, they develop a taste for it, they consume it, and then the
media giants claim they must make more of it to satisfy demand.
What is demanded depends to a very large extent on what is produced
rather than the other way around, what John Kenneth Galbraith
called the "dependence effect" in The Affluent Society.
To paraphrase Say's Law, supply creates demand. In the immortal
words of Walton Hale Hamilton, "Business succeeds rather
better than the state in imposing restraints upon individuals,
because its imperatives are disguised as choices." So Indeed,
the massive amounts that media firms spend on marketing their
products-the five largest first-tier media firms spent $4.5 billion
on TV advertising in 2002, making the media industry one of the
largest advertisers overall -- combined with the nevertheless
high rate of failure suggest that these firms (and the market
in general) are not particularly good at determining what people
want.
For examples of supply creating demand,
consider the following. In the 1970S foreign-language films accounted
for nearly 10 percent of the U.S. theater box office; by 2003
the figure was under 1 percent. Evidence suggests this was not
triggered by a drop-off in audience demand but instead to the
sharp decline in foreign film distribution once the theater industry
switched over to multiplex theaters . To be commercially viable,
movies must open on 1,500 screens and be supported by sizable
advertising, "a cost that requires the active participation
of a wealthy studio parent. " "If you don't hit it within
24 to 72 hours," a Universal executive commented on the importance
of a film's opening, "you're out of the game ." While
there is the occasional exception, this logic basically priced
most foreign film producers out of the U.S. market. Similarly,
classical music accounted for nearly one-quarter of U.S. recorded
music sales in 1960; that figure plummeted to 3.2 percent by 2001.
Whereas once classical music sometimes could be found on several
commercial radio stations in a large city, today listeners are
fortunate to find it on a single public station. A key part of
any explanation: classical music was discontinued or downgraded
in the curricula of a significant percentage of U.S. schools in
the intervening years.
In both cases, media giants would claim,
accurately, that foreign language films and classical music evoke
little demand in the United States today. But the lack of exposure-the
low supply eliminated the basis for demand. The same thing could
be said for several other media, such as documentary film. This
is no surprise because there is no incentive over the long term
for commercial media to cultivate tastes or develop interests
in new material. Having a commitment to generating new cultural
genres and ideas may be good for society, it may be something
people value, but it is bad business. People can't reasonably
express their desire for an alternative in the marketplace if
the choice does not exist and they have not had enough exposure
to it to evaluate it.
p202
People may wish to see more documentaries on television, even
as they watch The Jerry Springer Show, just as citizens may wish
to have large and effective national parks, even if they do not
plan to personally visit any of them, or they may wish to have
excellent public schools even if they do not have school-age children.
Acting only as consumers, citizens cannot address their social
concerns effectively. Markets cannot address all sorts of important
values people may wish to see upheld in their media. As Ed Baker
notes, all of this points to the crucial importance of public
participation in media policy making; how else can the people
voice their needs?
p203
By the late 1990s the U.S. children's market for commercial media
had grown to astronomical proportions. In 1983 about $100 million
in TV advertising was aimed at children. By 1997 that figure had
climbed to $1 billion, and the total amount of advertising and
marketing aimed at children reached $12.7 billion.", The
total U.S. market for children's products was valued at $166 billion
in 2000, and another study estimated that children influence up
to $500 billion per year in purchases. The media markets have
responded with a barrage of media aimed at children, from toddlers
to young teens. Attracting children to commercial media and commercial
messages is a major industry. A 2003 study sponsored by the Kaiser
Family Foundation determined that America's youngest children
were "immersed" in commercial television, and to an
extent that was "astounding" even to longtime researchers
in the field.
The social implications of this carpet-bombing
of children by commercial media have been the subject of considerable
research. The range of debate extends from "this is probably
not a good thing we are doing to children" to "this
is a massive crisis for our society.'
*****
Media Policies and Media Reform
p210
It may appear that the profit-driven nature of the U.S. media
system generates an inexorable logic that requires businesses
to act as they do, for better or for worse. There is an element
of truth to such a position, but taken in isolation it is also
misleading. The larger truth is that the current media market's
nature is set by explicit government policies, regulations, and
subsidies. For the cable TV industry or the commercial broadcasting
industry, this linkage between policies and market structure and
logic are transparent. The government creates these markets and
sets the terms for the firms to operate; only after policies are
set does market logic become inexorable. But this same relationship
defines all media industries: behind every media system is a government
policy or set of policies, and behind every policy is a policy-making
process.
p211
Neil Postman argued that the( replacement of print culture with
a culture dominated by television has led to a general dumbing
down of society because television produces lazy minds (and shallow
institutions) less capable of rigorous and sustained thought compared
to those weaned in a society immersed in reading.
p213
Digital technology radically departs from traditional analog broadcasting
and opens the door to innumerable new policy options for television
broadcasting. For example, on the same amount of spectrum that
provided five analog stations to a community, digital broadcasting
could offer considerably more channels, well over twenty. Alternatively,
society might elect to utilize the spectrum to provide higher-quality
transmissions, using more spectrum per station, what is called
high-definition television. (Or a combination of the two approaches
could be chosen.) The emergence of digital broadcasting technology
in the 1990s offered an ideal opportunity to discuss the future
of television, electronic media, and fundamental communication
policies. Policies could have been crafted and implemented to
establish numerous new digital TV stations in every community
to complement the existing broadcasters. It would not have been
inconceivable, for example, to establish enough over-the-air channels
that many citizens would no longer need to subscribe to a cable
or satellite service to receive the channels they desire. The
possibilities opened up by the technology were enormous.
The corrupt drafting of the 1996 Telecommunications
Act, however, denied citizens their right to choose what television
would become. The last thing the existing commercial broadcasters
wanted was for the public to get the crazy idea that they could
reconstruct the TV system to make it superior. So the NAB lobbied
successfully to get a clause added to the Telecommunications Act
that required the FCC to allocate to each existing broadcaster
double their amount of spectrum so that they could simultaneously
transmit their signals digitally. This massive amount of scarce
spectrum would be given at no charge; other commercial users of
the spectrum, like cellular telephone companies, would still have
to pay the government. That commercial broadcasters were gobbling
up the spectrum and therefore hijacking any possibility for public
debate over digital television barely raised an eyebrow in Washington.
What did raise eyebrows was that broadcasters
were getting an enormous commercial gift-then valued at $70 billion.
It struck many observers as an extreme case of corporate welfare.
Senator John McCain called the digital TV giveaway "one of
the great rip-offs in American history. They used to rob trains
in the Old West, now we rob spectrum. And the NAB antagonized
a powerful (though not quite powerful enough) lobby by taking
this spectrum from the wireless companies hankering to develop
it. For a few years after the law's passage some politicians and
regulators occasionally bellyached about how criminal the spectrum
giveaway was and made some threats, but, in the end, the NAB got
exactly what it wanted. As Business Week concluded, commercial
broadcasting is an industry "accustomed to getting its way
in Washington."
Beyond the sheer corruption of the digital
TV spectrum giveaway, what should be clear is that the rhetoric
about "letting the market ...determine the course" for
digital television was just that-rhetoric.
p215
... by 2001, one Wall Street analyst estimated the [digital] spectrum
that had been given to the commercial broadcasters as having grown
in value to $365 billion.
p215
The FCC will merely set terms so that these industries in combination
can generate as much profit as possible from public property.
This is regulation in the private interest taken to extremes.
Once the digital TV system is in place, years from now, policy
makers and industry CEOs alike will almost certainly characterize
it as a natural development of free market competition. And any
future effort to exact public service from the huge firms granted
all these privileges will be dismissed as a callous attempt by
the government to interfere with the free market.
If anything, the shift from analog to
digital in radio has been even more corrupt than the backroom
wheeling and dealing with digital TV. The process was as privatized
and as secretive as any imaginable. IBiquity, a private firm whose
major shareholders include the fifteen largest radio broadcasters
such as Clear Channel, Viacom, and Cox Communications, put the
plan together and the FCC approved it in 2002. Under it, the transition
from analog to digital radio broadcasting occurs gradually and
without change in the radio dial. Because the dial will remain
the same, listeners will come to think of digital radio as merely
a technical enhancement of the signal, not as a new technology
that could have reformed the industry. An opportunity to easily
add numerous stations in every community has been squandered because
existing radio owners want no new competition for "their"
listeners. In addition, because the digital plan calls for broadcasters
to transmit identical analog and digital signals simultaneously
adjacent to each other, it leaves less room for low-power stations.
Arguably .001 percent of the American people, aside from those
in the radio industry, have any knowledge of the digital radio
plan-there was virtually no press coverage, and even members of
Congress are ignorant of it. Yet the plan may well lock radio
into an unnecessary system for generations.
p219
... the open nature of the Internet heretofore has not been natural
to the technology but, rather, has been premised on the long-standing
"common carrier" telecommunication policy requiring
telephone companies to permit all who wish to use their services,
including Internet access services, the right do so on a favorable,
nondiscriminatory, basis. This has been the main barrier preventing
firms from erecting lucrative commercial toll booths for websites
and users. Cable successfully won a Bush FCC policy in 2002 that
eliminated the rights of Internet Service Providers to have any
access to their broadband networks. Soon after, the FCC also awarded
telephone companies similar control on their all-fiber networks.
"At the behest of powerful interests, the FCC is buying onto
a warped vision that open networks should be replaced by closed
networks and that the FCC should excuse broadband providers from
longstanding non-discrimination requirements," FCC Commissioner
Michael Copps cautioned in December 2003. "If we continue
down this path, the basic end-to-end openness that made the Internet
great will be gone. With cable the leading residential broadband
provider, and given its new architectural control as a result
of lobbying, the Net will take on more of the characteristics
of the U.S. entertainment media marketplace. But it is still up
for grabs. The outcome of this policy battle will go a long way
toward determining how open access to the Internet will remain
in coming years.
p225
Ownership does matter, especially media, where control over ideas,
news, and culture rates as a unique power even among powerful
corporations. Private ownership of media, in nonegalitarian societies,
is not content-neutral or viewpoint-neutral; the best ideas do
not automatically rise to the top. Add advertising's role, as
well as the workings of the oligopolistic marketplace, and private
ownership becomes a vise that directly and indirectly pressures
content.
p226
The eventual [media] model that won out in the United States,
the corporate form, did so not as a result of broad public debate
with an evaluation of alternatives, but, rather, because the powerful
commercial interests were able to have their way with policy makers.
This is a subject much larger than media. As U.S. history shows,
the power of corporations was a central political issue throughout
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; it dominated
the thoughts of the Populists and was a pressing concern to many
people during the Progressive Era. The granting to corporations
of personhood and constitutional protection remains one of the
most controversial legal and economic developments in U.S. history.
p227
... the commercial media market is as effective a media commissar
as an authoritarian government might hope for-and has the advantage
of achieving its ends without resorting to explicit repression.
p230
For decades the big commercial broadcasters pounded on politicians
and regulators to relax or eliminate the rules. In 1996 they triumphed
when they inserted a section into the Clinton administration-backed
Telecommunications Act eliminating the national caps on the number
of radio stations a single company could own.
What has happened with U.S. radio broadcasting
since 1996 has often been characterized as a case of market forces
running wild: in fact, it is a case of corrupt policy making that
allowed a handful of large companies to run wild. Almost overnight
the radio industry's structure was turned upside down. Well over
half the stations were sold until a few massive firms like Clear
Channel (owner of more than 1,200 stations) and Viacom came to
rule the roost. With the maximum number of stations it was allowed
to own in 1995, Clear Channel accounted for 1.3 percent of the
radio industry's revenues; by 2001, the "deregulated"
Clear Channel had garnered more than 20 percent of the pot. In
addition, overall industry revenues shot up more than 55 percent
over the same six years, thanks to large companies' greater leverage
over advertisers .6 The value of stations skyrocketed as well
since they were far more valuable as part of massive empires than
they had been as stand-alone operations. And of course the market
values of these stations had nothing to do with the actual costs
of production, which were quite low.
Radio broadcasting, which due to its low
cost of transmission and reception was ideally suited for local
control, decentralization, and creative risk-taking, quickly became
a nationally directed enterprise run by a few massive firms in
service to Wall Street and Madison Avenue. To top it off, the
FCC has been lax in enforcing the admittedly weak new regulations.
Although the 1996 rules limit a company owning eight radio stations
in a market, the FCC has permitted a company to exceed that number
in thirty-four different markets .
The implications for radio content have
been striking. Local content is hardly a cost-effective method
for a national chain-the whole idea is to lower production costs
while jacking up advertising revenues-so local radio news has
declined, as has much of locally originated programming. Clear
Channel and Viacom have gained notoriety for developing a technique
that permitted a corporate announcer to give the illusion that
they were speaking locally to different stations around the nation
simultaneously. By 2000, advertising comprised around 18 minutes
per hour on commercial stations, according to Variety, a sharp
increase from a decade earlier. And payola, the long outlawed
practice of bribing stations to play certain recordings, has returned
to radio as a source of over $100 million in revenues. Now, however,
the money goes to the owners, not the disc jockeys, and therefore
it is considered quasilegal.
Between payola and the conservatism built
into large commercial organizations, the range of music getting
extensive airplay in the United States has shrunk, and the notion
of localism in music content has been nearly eliminated. And people
are not happy. Journalists, music lovers, those in the music industry,
and the public at large typically express dissatisfaction with
what passes for U.S. commercial radio broadcasting today. Rocker
Tom Petty devoted the lead track on an album to radio's decline
in 2002. "Saying that things were better [before] is kind
of tiring when it comes from old people," Petty remarked,
"but they were ." In September 2003 Senator John McCain,
the chair of the Senate Commerce Committee that oversees broadcast
regulation, weighed in on the Senate floor: "I think there
is one area of agreement .... There is too much concentration
in radio. I know of no credible person who disagrees with that.
"
p236
... [a] fairly recent interpretation of antitrust law shows no
concern over concentrated and undemocratic power; instead it shows
a virtually single-minded concern with "market efficiency."
It is thus of quite dubious value. Antitrust law was spawned during
the eras of the populist and progressive movements, which held
distinctly political concerns about the effects of concentrated
wealth as an impediment to equality and the exercise of self-government.
In 1888, Senator John Sherman advocated the first great antitrust
law, the Sherman Antitrust Act, not to lower prices for shoppers,
but because the trusts' political power threatened to tear the
nation apart and undermine the government's legitimacy. This political
element to antitrust law was reaffirmed in the 1935 Public Utilities
Holding Company Act, in which Congress demonstrated anxiety about
the political power that could be harnessed by utility-based conglomerates,
so it prevented utilities from owning other enterprises."
In the landmark 1945 Associated Press
v. U.S. case, the Supreme Court ruled that antitrust regulations
could be applied to the media with no violation of their First
Amendment rights. Hugo Black's famous opinion-"The assumption
that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse
and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public,
that a free press is a condition of a free society"-opened
the door for a proactive initiative against media concentration.
Leaving little doubt about the court's opinion, Justice Felix
Frankfurter wrote in his concurring statement: "Truth and
understanding are not wares like peanuts or potatoes. And so,
the incidence of restraints upon the promotion of truth ... calls
into play considerations very different from comparable restraints
in a cooperative enterprise having merely a commercial aspect."
Immediately following the Associated Press decision, Morris Ernst,
the legendary ACLU First Amendment lawyer, called for the government
to break up the big media companies because they violated the
spirit and intent of both antitrust law and the First Amendment."
There is no reason to believe that the Constitution prohibits
media-specific antitrust or competition laws that would require
greater restrictions on mergers. And there is good reason to follow
justice Black in thinking such a response would serve First Amendment
values. In his opinion in the case Turner Broadcasting System
v. FCC, Justice Anthony Kennedy concluded, "Assuring the
public has access to a multiplicity of information sources is
a governmental purpose of the highest order." Indeed, the
only barrier to aggressive antitrust policies in the realm of
media comes from Congress and the White House, from lack of political
will, and from corruption of the policy-making process.
p239
We need our government to generate a coherent policy for media
ownership that encompasses the entirety of the media industries.
It must result from detailed study and debate, and it must lay
down a set of values and specific guidelines that will anticipate
and shape future developments. It should be seen as a huge undertaking,
similar in magnitude to the government's response to the energy
crisis or the threat of terrorism. It should also eliminate the
current piecemeal logic of current antitrust thinking, in which
each merger is dealt with separately which serves only to weaken
any possibility of meaningful antitrust enforcement. Once a single
large company is allowed to get bigger, then all its competitors
have to be granted the same privilege or a power imbalance will
result.
p241
A radical new development in publicly subsidized media came with
the invention of public service broadcasting in the early twentieth
century. Unlike previous subsidies, this plan called for the use
of public money explicitly to generate media content directly,
not simply encourage commercial entities to do so. It stemmed
from two other media evolutions. First, radio broadcasting presented
an unprecedented problem for every nation: how to best utilize
the scarce spectrum that could be devoted to this revolutionary
communication technology. Second, the emerging commercial media
system, even at its very best, had inherent flaws-externalities-that
could be damaging to a self-governing or humane society. In combination,
these factors prompted the belief that it was not just a right
but also a duty of citizens in a democratic society to subsidize
and promote a viable nonprofit and noncommercial broadcasting
media sector. The result, public service broadcasting, has become
a major institution in much of the world, though much less so
in the United States. Still, this public service tradition has
much to offer democratic media policy making in general.
Public service broadcasting refers to
a nonprofit, noncommercial broadcasting service directed at the
entire population and providing a full range of programming. At
its best, it is accountable to the citizenry, has some distance
from the dominant forces holding political power, and does not
rely upon the market to determine its programming.
p242
Cable TV systems are required to turn over channels (and subsidies)
for "public access" broadcasting if communities demand
them when local monopoly cable contracts are negotiated. These
public access channels are legally content- and viewpoint-neutral-they
have no editorial position, and, ideally, they teem with a vibrant
range of political opinion. Public access channels tend to be
most attractive to those who feel boxed out of the commercial
system. Similarly, community radio broadcasting-nonprofit and
noncommercial stations dependent largely upon listener donations-exists
in scores of U.S. cities. The model was pioneered by the innovative
Pacifica system, which has "listener-sponsored" stations
in five cities. C-SPAN has provided an invaluable nonprofit and
noncommercial service on cable television, though it is not the
result of public policy so much as a PR gesture by the cable industry
to fend off regulation in the public interest. In other words,
the public pays a high price for C-SPAN-to the extent it succeeds
as a PR maneuver to permit cable companies to jack up their rates-and
the public has no control over its operations.
By far the largest government expenditure
to create nonprofit and noncommercial broadcasting has been for
the Voice of America and various clandestine services like Radio
Free Europe. But these programs are designed for overseas audiences-for
diplomatic or propagandistic purposes, depending upon one's perspective-and
are not meant to be consumed by the people who pay for them. Most
Americans barely know they exist.
But it is public service broadcasting
that has the broadest and richest tradition. In most democratic
nations of the world, a significant section of the spectrum is
devoted to nonprofit (and usually noncommercial) radio and television.
The most notable example in the English-speaking world is the
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Maintaining public service
broadcasting has been a difficult task in the United States for
any number of reasons, but in particular because the dominant
commercial interests have little interest in coexisting with a
strong nonprofit sector that would peel away "their"
audience. Today U.S. public service broadcasting is in crisis.
Never lavishly funded or supported, the system struggles to survive
in a fairly small niche of the media market. Its most vociferous
critics charge that public broadcasting is a dubious institution
in principle and now has become a bureaucratically ossified relic
of a bygone era made irrelevant by the plethora of new cable channels
and Internet websites. These critics argue that the market, combined
with new technologies, can do a superior job of serving the public
interest and with no public broadcasting subsidy to boot. Because
public broadcasting retains an element of political support, especially
from the influential upper middle class, its existence is accepted
by most of its critics, but only if it remains marginal and poorly
subsidized.
To provide some sense of public broadcasting's
dilemma, consider this: 111 2003 public broadcasting received
a federal subsidy of around $365 million, about what Disney's
ESPN receives in subscriber fees from cable TV systems every two
months. If the United States subsidized a public broadcasting
service at rates comparable to Britain's per capita rate for public
broadcasting, for example, it would have an annual subsidy in
the $15 billion range. This would make it one of the three or
four largest media operations in our country and provide an enormous
spur to audiovisual production-conceivably large enough to change
the industry's direction. In Europe, a huge and impressive variety
of programming that would never pass commercial muster has been
produced as a result of these subsidies.
Why has public service broadcasting been
a marginal phenomenon in the United States in comparison to elsewhere?
The main reason is that proponents in other nations were able
to get their systems established before commercial broadcasters
had achieved dominance over the airwaves. The defeat of the broadcast
reform movement in 1934 quashed the hope for this caliber of public
broadcasting in the United States. At the time, commercial broadcasters
argued that few would listen to their stations if people had access
to advertising-free stations with quality entertainment-which
they conceded that people wanted-so it was unfair to allow public
broadcasting to exist and thereby undermine commercial broadcasting.
The U.S. government did establish extremely well-funded noncommercial
broadcasting services in the 1940S and beyond-but they were directed
at those outside the United States. Indeed, the deal made with
the commercial broadcasting industry was that those services-Voice
of America, Armed Forces radio and television, Radio Free Europe
would not be accessible in the United States. The explanation
was that explicit government propaganda should be restricted to
foreigners, but a clear concern for the commercial broadcasters
was that the American public not be exposed to well-funded noncommercial
fare.
In the 1960s, the commercial broadcasting
lobby finally relented, and a national public radio and television
service started, but it was not a BBC type of operation, providing
a full range of noncommercial programming to the entire population.
The plan for what became the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)
and National Public Radio (NPR) did not call for such a system-the
commercial dominance of the airwaves was a given-but rather for
a broadcasting service that concentrated exclusively upon providing
the public service programming that commercial stations were constantly
lambasted for avoiding. The commercial broadcasters laid first
claim to popular programming, and public broadcasters were left
with programming that had less immediate audience appeal.
At its best, as envisioned in the Carnegie
Commission reports that helped birth the system, U.S. public broadcasting
was seen as producing cutting edge political and creative programming
that commercial broadcasting found unprofitable, and serving poor
and marginalized audiences of little interest to commercial networks.
As Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania said during the congressional
debates on the matter in 1967, "I want to see things on public
television that I hate things that make me think! "102 In
the minds of the original Carnegie Commission, this was to be
a well-funded service based on an excise tax on the sale of television
sets that would eventually reach 5 percent; this money would be
placed in a trust fund over which politicians would have no direct
control. When the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 was passed,
this key element of the Carnegie plan was dropped. Had it been
fully implemented, public broadcasting would enjoy an annual subsidy
in the $3 billion range in 2003 dollars .
The Carnegie vision was doomed from the
start because the independent funding mechanism had been sabotaged.
When PBS broadcast muckraking programs such as 1970's Banks and
the Poor, it sent some politicians into a tizzy. President Nixon
vetoed the public broadcasting budget authorization in 1972 to
express his displeasure . The Democratic platform that year, arguably
the most left-wing one since the New Deal, stated, "We should
support long-range financing for public broadcasting, insulated
from political pressures. We deplore the Nixon Administration's
crude efforts to starve and muzzle public broadcasting, which
has become a vital supplement to commercial television. "
PBS eventually did get its funding, but with it public broadcasters
got a clear message: be careful in the coverage of political and
social issues and expect resistance if you proceed outside the
political boundaries that exist in commercial broadcast journalism.
This pattern recurs. Conservatives use
what little money Congress provides as leverage continually to
badger public broadcasters to stay within the same ideological
range found on commercial networks. Conservatives are obsessed
with public broadcasting because in it the traditional sources
of control in commercial media-owners and advertisers-are absent,
so a greater possibility exists that the public system will produce
critical work. Milton Friedman has called for subjecting public
broadcasting to "market discipline. Soon after the Republican
takeover of Congress in the 1994 elections, Speaker Newt Gingrich
announced his plan to "zero out" public broadcasting
due to its alleged liberal bias. He abandoned the plan when Republicans
were flooded with public opposition, much of it from well-to-do
people who vote and make campaign contributions.
Accordingly, NPR and PBS at a national
level tend to provide a bland variant of mainstream and conventional
journalism, comparable to what's on the commercial networks, especially
on highly sensitive matters such as the economy and the U.S. role
in the world. Public broadcasting is so obsessed with conservative
criticism, even more than commercial news media journalists are,
that it bends over backwards to appease the Right and appear "balanced."
When the conservative pundit Bill O'Reilly stormed off Terry Gross's
NPR radio interview program in 2003 because he was upset with
the tenor of her questions-by all accounts much milder than how
O'Reilly routinely badgers his guests-the response by the NPR
ombudsman sent a chilling message to all public broadcasters.
"Listeners were not well served by this interview,"
he said. "Unfortunately, the interview only served to confirm
the belief, held by some, in NPR's liberal bias. he message is
loud and clear: hands off the Right.
p246
Entertainment and cultural fare has had a slightly different experience.
U.S. public broadcasters were consigned to do programming for
which there was little audience, so members of Congress concluded
that an underutilized service (with little popular support) did
not need a lavish budget. Public broadcasters rarely dared to
schedule prime-time entertainment programs with mass appeal. Such
shows would have helped develop the broad audiences and public
support that European public broadcasters enjoyed, but U.S. public
broadcasters understood that such an approach was political suicide;
the muscular commercial broadcasting lobby would have complained
to Congress that the government was subsidizing unfair competition,
and thus interfering with the free market. Public broadcasters
quickly realized they could count on the federal government for
only a fraction of their budgets if they were to produce anything
at all. They turned almost entirely away from their original commitment
to experimental programming and to marginalized and poor audiences,
and instead began cultivating an upper middle class sliver with
business and high-culture programming. This tactic provided a
solid base for periodic "pledge drives" as well as a
political constituency that commanded respect in Washington. It
also made public broadcasting increasingly attractive to advertisers-or
"underwriters," as they were euphemistically termed.
The prospect of government subsidy continues
to decline because as public broadcasting grows more and more
commercial within the limits allowed to it, its justification
for a subsidy decreases. Similarly, management of public stations
increasingly adopts the mores and obsession with ratings and target
demographics of commercial broadcasting, because the stations
must rely on delivering a wealthy audience to stay afloat.- In
this context public broadcasters have come to brag about their
affluent audience, rather than bemoan their lack of a working-class
following . Public broadcasting becomes increasingly dependent
upon corporate money, and that requires it to compete with commercial
media for those finds, with all that that suggests. By 2003 PBS
formally authorized the airing of 30-second advertising spots.
As all of this happens, the government sees less and less justification
for public subsidy. Between the government and the market, U.S.
public broadcasting experiences the worst of both worlds.
p250
We need to conceive of public media as including a variety of
institutions-for example, community and low-power radio and television
stations, public access channels, and Independent Media Centers,
along with a strengthened public broadcasting sector. When NPR
sided with the commercial broadcasters in 2000 and worked against
the creation of one thousand new noncommercial low-power FM radio
stations, it was one of the darkest moments for democracy in recent
U.S. media history. Let us hope it is never repeated.
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