Abstract
This paper serves as a primer for students of media literacy to encourage critical thinking about ways to serve the public interest in the digital era (SPIDE). It examines the societal actors as they reposition themselves in the digital environment. It takes the nearly 80-year-old mandate, to serve the public interest, established in the Communications Act of 1934 and applies it to the digital media construct. It draws upon the 1947 General Report on Mass Communications by the Commission on Freedom of the Press to ascertain the responsible actors. Specific strategies for serving the public interest in the digital era are explored, based in part on testimony from the Future of Media workshop on March 4, 2010 at the FCC in Washington, D.C. Initiatives examined include free culture vs. permission culture, a new paradigm for public media, and media literacy education. To serve the public, one must know the public but robust assimilation to emerging media technologies and the subsequent changing social norms makes a long-term solution to meeting public interest obligations difficult to evaluate. As such, critical discussion and deliberation by students of media literacy must be ongoing and frequent. As audiences migrate away from the “one-to-many” dissemination model and toward a “many-to-many” participatory model, new digital technologies create new venues to reach the public. The public seeks easier and better access to information, employs new technologies with enthusiasm, and requires reasonable accommodations that fit non-traditional lifestyles. It is clear that change is necessary but it must also be adaptive to each new technological innovation, market concern or public demand.
Background
The term “public interest” is stated 93 times in the Communications Act of 1934 and is considered a guiding principle upon which all mediated communication in the U.S. is based. In determining license applications for spectrum (public airwaves) use for example, the Act states, “The Commission shall determine, in the case of each application filed…whether the public interest, convenience, and necessity will be served by the granting of such application” (Communications Act, 1934, p. 147). The Public Interest, Convenience or Necessity (PICON) agreement is that licensees would be granted permission to use the spectrum in exchange for serving the public interest. It was a simple and useful agreement that media was happy to fulfill in exchange for their rare position on the valuable and limited spectrum. In the digital era however, the utilization of the spectrum is only one piece of the public interest puzzle since cable, satellite and other emerging technologies don’t necessarily inhabit the spectrum. If a quid pro quo no longer exists in the digital era because spectrum licensing has been removed from the equation, what are the incentives for media outlets to continue to serve the public interest? One very basic answer lies in the words often attributed to Thomas Jefferson that, “An informed citizenry is the bulwark of a democracy”. Though the Jefferson Library questions the authenticity of Jefferson ever saying it, the premise that an informed, educated populace will make the best decisions for itself most assuredly holds true. Therefore, those with the responsibility to inform the citizenry hold the keys to a better informed electorate and this is an enormous responsibility that no serious media company should take lightly.
Responsible Actors
To understand who is responsible for steering public interest policy we have to go back to 1942 when Time Magazine founder Henry Luce asked his former college roommate Robert Hutchins, President of the University of Chicago, to form a commission that would answer the question, is freedom of the press in danger? After five years of interviews, conferences and deliberation, the Commission returned their landmark report. The Hutchins Report used the word “press” to refer to all media, which at the time included only newspapers, radio, motion pictures, magazines and books. Television was still in an experimental stage in 1942 and was just becoming a viable commercial entity post World War II when the report was completed. The Internet and other new media technologies were still decades away. But if we use the Commission’s idea that the “press” refers to all media and then extrapolate from that, we can fittingly apply their findings to media technologies that have entered the public sphere since the publication of the report, regardless of whether or not they inhabit the spectrum.
The Hutchins Report identified numerous recommendations for action and grouped them according to three responsible actors namely, the government, the press and the public. The report addressed education issues as a component of the public. Because of the report’s significant influence on the field of communications since 1947, education is considered here as a separate actor. Education’s role as the fundamental influencer of and success-agent for students will help to create a better and more responsive communications industry. Therefore, government, media and education are the institutions through which we will view some current SPIDE initiatives.
Defining Public Interest
The term “public interest” is sometimes regarded as what the public desires rather than what the public needs to be knowledgeable of, and engaged in, the most important issues of our times. Therefore, what the public desires does not automatically satisfy the demands of PICON. Former FCC Chairman Mark Fowler, regarding how people’s preferences express themselves in the marketplace of ideas, stated that, “The public’s interest, then, defines the public interest” (Fowler & Brenner, 1982 p. 4). This view, however, only considers what is most marketable and does little to foster meaningful public interest policy beyond market concerns. “Fowler’s philosophy was that the dollar bill would take care of America’s diverse information needs” (nader.org). Consequently, the marketplace won’t necessarily foster public interest information if a less newsworthy but more marketable story comes along.
The Communications Act currently imposes public interest obligations (PIO’s) on broadcasters that the FCC has determined is for the public good. Existing PIO’s include serving local needs and interests (Section 307(b)), contributing to an informed electorate (Section 315, 312(a)(7) and offering children’s programming (Section 303b(a)). Although these are model examples of PIO’s, some media practitioners still claim that if the public overwhelming desires to watch Family Guy, The Vampire Diaries, Glee or Lost, then airing them serves the public interest. The concern here is that if this is how we are to view the idea of public interest, then we must also assume the public interest changes every time the A.C. Neilsen Company or Arbitron releases their latest ratings and share numbers. Interests that change as often as program ratings would be hard to pin down and nearly impossible to address. Therefore, we must look at SPIDE policy not solely or necessarily for what the public is interested in but rather, what is in the best interest of the public i.e. the good of the whole. This semantic clarification is necessary if we hope to further meaningful discussion about the public interest challenges of the digital era.
The idea of serving the public interest has always been a vague and nebulous dictate since the term conjures up different meanings by different people. A. Thierer (FCC Future of Media Workshop, March 4, 2010, Round table discussion) stated, “What motivates much public interest regulation is a simple desire by some here in Washington to tell the American people what’s best for them.” But certainly there are areas of importance we can agree upon that at least begins to meet the public interest standard in a digital era. E. Klinenburg (FCC Future of Media Workshop, March 4, 2010, Round table discussion) stated that there are “three areas in which the meaning of public interest should be crystal clear. These are: 1) Emergency communications. 2) Local news and information. 3) Diversity.” This is a start. But surely there are public interest initiatives such as those presented in this paper, among others, that regulators could agree upon provided we take the time for careful discussion and deliberation.
The Changing Media Environment
Television and radio are still the dominant technologies but the digital revolution has begun to equal the playing field with online newspapers, satellite radio, social media and the blogosphere, all taking firm hold of the American psyche. As the dominance shifts, so does the responsibility to serve the public interest. Responsible actors, as identified by The Hutchins Report, understand that the advent of new technologies and rapidly changing media habits will require new policies. Too much has changed already, both in infrastructure and adoption by the public, to ignore the inevitable paradigm shift looming on the horizon. How it will play out in the public sphere depends on involvement by all responsible actors, not least of which are our students of media.
There are no doubt obstacles by competing interests and the market environment that responsible parties must face when trying to change an institution as deeply rooted as the American communications industry. Jockeying for position is a knee-jerk reaction to initial requests for change in any system but involved parties must come to understand that the status quo can no longer be an option if the public remains limited in their engagement in matters of public importance.
The work of changing SPIDE requirements of all media entities cannot be ignored. A quick look at fcc.gov shows evidence of a serious effort by the FCC, under the leadership of Julius Genachowski, to hear from all responsible actors. The FCC workshop series entitled The Future of Media, for example, provides a venue for media leaders to discuss the most pressing policy issues with the hope that participants will discover mutual self-interests that will lead to better public interest policy.
Issues of concern in the digital era are numerous and this paper does not intend to address them all. Mega-issues like a national broadband policy, media concentration, net neutrality and the digital divide have garnered much public attention of late, however, higher penetration rates of new technologies and the rapid and continuous growth of underrepresented groups “seems to be a transitional problem” (Benkler, p. 237). Instead, we will consider public interest proposals that have not been as widely discussed but which offer some of the best solutions for serving the public interest in the future. Viewing solutions from a responsible actor’s position of influence lets us see how one issue by one actor is really an issue for all, as SPIDE solutions necessarily require a symbiotic relationship.
Free Culture vs. Permission Culture
The difference between a permission culture and a free culture is made clear if we look at the transformative technological innovations and associated new laws requiring permission to create and succeed. The public has overwhelmingly embraced new, participatory media but government regulations, prompted by intellectual property rights advocates and lobbyists, have imposed a bureaucracy that stifles the ability to transform existing works and to create new works.
In 1977, individual copyright protection increased from a fourteen-year term (with a process for renewability) to a duration that lasts for the life of the author plus seventy years. A corporation may now hold exclusive rights to material for 120 years or in the case of a publication, ninety-five years or whichever is shorter (Middleton & Lee, p. 239). If Walt Disney had to wait for Buster Keaton’s 1928 film Steamboat Bill, Jr., to pass into the public domain, he would never have created Steamboat Willie, his first animation from the same year that introduced Mickey Mouse and led to a new art form and a media dynasty. Drawing from the popular Keaton film, Disney was able to create a new art form in part because he did not require permission to transform the popular film. Had he been subjected to current copyright laws, we might never have seen some of the most creative animated films in history (as he often borrowed from classic books like the Grimm Fairy Tales) nor would we have seen the start of one of the world’s largest media conglomerates. Copyright law would have stopped his creation before it ever started. What other creative works or media entities might we not have had if current laws applied then? More important, what current creative works and media entities are being stifled simply because creation and transformation often requires permission?
Another and perhaps more relevant example of the permission culture can be found in the case of Internet file sharing. In the past, friends would gather and share their vinyl albums with each other, making a cassette tape perhaps and returning the original vinyl. There was nothing illegal about a circle of friends, regardless of the circle’s size, gathering to share the music we purchased legally from our local record stores. There was no effort by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) or other copyright attorneys to stop us from gathering and sharing our varied musical tastes with one another in what is now called peer-to-peer or P2P file sharing. In fact, the process of sharing prompted the purchase of other music created by an artist as the sharing itself exposed us to their creations. Today, because of new technologies that provide greater sharing capacity, the scope of our circle of friends has broadened. Thus, the free culture of sharing has turned into a permission culture, requiring a gatekeeper, a fee (monetary or otherwise), and creating a new level of bureaucracy that in many ways perpetuates and serves itself rather than the public interest. If there is still any question about the rights of creators being infringed because of this technological change, let’s apply the laws of the permission culture to another realm outside of pop culture.
What would it be like if all scientists required permission including paying a fee, to access Albert Einstein’s work on relativity each time they sought to further knowledge in this area or question the relevance of the original work? They would no longer be able to either confirm or find issue with some of his findings without having to begin at the beginning. The benefit of scientific ideas and findings that came before would be lost and scientists would have to recreate the wheel each time they worked in this area of research. Similarly, if pharmaceutical R&D was freely available to others working in the field, how much faster might we have new life-saving medicines? Fortunately for scientists, there is The Public Library of Science, a non-profit corporation whose public interest goal is to make scientific research available to anyone without requiring permission. “This is one of many such efforts to restore a freedom taken for granted before, but now threatened by changing technology and markets.” (Lessig, p. 282). This is not to say that copyright and intellectual property rights have no place in a free culture society. On the contrary, creators should be rewarded for their creations and before someone else can adapt or transform creative work, it must first pass into the public domain. So the issue is not about rewarding or not rewarding creators for their creations. Rather, a major aspect of the debate between free culture and permission culture is how long a creation can be protected before it passes into the public domain.
The same laws that make P2P file sharing illegal would also make the sharing of scientific research illegal without first going through a gatekeeper, paying a fee perhaps and dealing with a new level of bureaucracy. How well would the public interest be served if the scientific community had to start at the beginning or require permission each time someone wanted to advance or take issue with existing scientific research? It is not in the public interest and there is no less harm to a once free culture if permission is required to access information that could benefit society as a whole. The question then becomes, in what other ways could the public interest be served if we were to regain the free culture as it was prior to the technological innovations that made file sharing illegal?
Another example of a free culture evolving into a permission culture lies in the historical roots of Cable television. In 1948 in rural Oregon and rural Pennsylvania, Community Antenna Television (CATV)—the forerunner to Cable TV—had begun in an effort to boost television signals from existing stations in areas where the public could not otherwise receive it. This was an extraordinary application of the public interest mandate as it applied a new purpose to an existing technology. An antenna placed on a hill or mountaintop by the local communities allowed locals to receive television signals by connecting to the community antenna by direct wire. CATV operations were never charged for redistributing content. On the contrary, adding viewers benefited television stations as CATV helped to increase audience size and thus, revenues from advertising. “Cable companies thus built their empire in part upon a “piracy” of the value created by broadcasters’ content.” (Lessig, p. 61)
Until 1994, there was a separation between networks and the content they provided to insure, in part, that the public had a diversity of ideas and opinions available to them. If an independent producer could not find a home for her content on one network, she could simply approach another network or syndicated distributor. The concentration of media and its content origination and distribution has greatly affected diversity and localism. 75% of all shows produced before 1994 were created by independent producers. Today, the number of weekly prime time television hours produced by network studios has increased over 200% and the number of prime time television hours per week produced by independent studios decreased by 63%. (Lessig, p. 165). This concentration requires a marketplace that can sustain the expense of its creations and must therefore be as widely disseminated as possible. This approach competes philosophically with the public interest of increased localism and diversity. Recently we’ve seen conflicts emerging among various media interests that are based primarily on distribution systems and not on the cost of programming. For example, a rift between ABC Television and Cablevision in 2010 or between Cablevision and the Yankees’ YES Network several years prior related to the cost of distribution without regard for the public. It is the public interest, without question, that suffers every time if we conflate content creation and ownership with the market forces of distribution.
Public Media in the Digital Era
Public Media 2.0 is an initiative that encompasses both commercial and non-commercial media to meet the demands of PICON in the digital era. I purposefully disregard the economics of public media in terms of SPIDE but that is not to say economics are not in play. “Markets, however much reviled, make vital contributions to a democratic public sphere that are unlikely to be made any other way” (Starr, p. 401). So it is especially important for both commercial and non-commercial interests to act equally responsibly as new public media regulation is considered. Contributions to a new public media must come from all media if we are to insure the wellbeing of the public via public interest policy. Though it is true that market forces may be in play when determining how to accomplish public interest requirements, or fail to do so, the potential benefit to the public is so great, I believe it clearly negates the relatively small cost each media outlet will incur to insure something as important as this happens.
The fact that media is pervasive and is able to capture our attention in such broad and dramatic ways demands media uses their power to inform wisely. Information that is pertinent to a diverse public must be continuous and omnipresent. Regulation, not deregulation is likely the only way to insure that information for the public’s interest, convenience or necessity is achieved. E. Klinenberg (FCC Future of Media Workshop, March 4, 2010, Round table discussion) emphasized this by pointing out “Our recent experiment in media deregulation did about as much to promote the public good as our experiment with banking deregulation.” So it would be naïve to expect that all media will strictly adhere to new public interest standards without being required to do so by new regulation.
The Public Media 2.0 initiative is a re-engineering of the ways in which public interest programming is disseminated to the public. It is a participatory approach that utilizes new and existing venues and technologies, the “one-to-many” and the “many-to-many” dissemination models, and capitalizes on the linking to and natural clustering of special interest groups. In a sense, it is a holistic approach. After all, commercial media have just as much at stake in improving the awareness of the public as non-commercial media since everyone succeeds when the general public has broad access to diverse, contextual and salient information. B. Cochran (FCC Future of Media Workshop, March 4, 2010, Round table discussion) explained the growing importance of this approach. “Locally targeted programming…is the primary means through which radio and television stations distinguish themselves in an increasingly competitive marketplace.” While sharing the goals of current public broadcasting and public interest policies, Public Media 2.0 also uses new platforms like the web, mobile hand-held devices and even GPS units to distribute public information. J. Fritz (FCC Future of Media Workshop 4, 2010, Round table discussion) stated, “Our audience is a moving target and is not shackled to one distribution platform. The public is constantly moving and isn’t tied to the neat boxes of only those platforms that the government oversees”.
The goals of Public Media 2.0 are clear:
Public Media 2.0 will be built around mission, most fundamentally the ability to support the formation of publics—that is, to link us to deep wells of reliable information and powerful stories, to bring contested perspectives into constructive dialogue, to offer access and space for minority voices, and to build both online and offline communities…but to be public media, they should have at their core the mission to mobilize publics with whatever media are on offer. They should enable participants to shape an informed judgment on which they can act. (Clark and Aufderheide, 2009, p. 29).
One might think that information overload would be the natural result when everyone can speak, and does so; where too much information creates a Babel effect. But empirical evidence and data analysis demonstrates otherwise. Benkler contends that from the perspective of democracy, there are few speakers to which most people listen, just as in the mass-media environment (Benkler, p. 235). So requiring all media, using all venues to serve the public interest, convenience or necessity is more important than ever to insure a well-informed and engaged public.
Imagine what a community of media makers employing Public Media 2.0 can do to mobilize a community around a common goal. It would mean an unsilencing of the public as more and more venues for participation and methods of distribution are created and utilized. Distribution outlets may include cable access channels, low-power FM radio (LPFM) stations, Internet radio, the blogosphere and social media platforms, to name a few. In a people-centric public media, “the individual user has moved from being an anonymous part of a mass to being the center of the media picture.” (Clark and Aufderheide, 2009 p. 5)
As a practical example, let’s look at one community college and how it could serve as a critical hub of public discourse using the Public Media 2.0 Model. Television Studio A at County College of Morris is a prime example of the enormous potential to reach out to the community using the Public Media 2.0 approach. The 2,000+ sq. ft. broadcast facility serves as the local educational Cablevision channel, Morris Educational Television (METV), so to take on a Public Media 2.0 role in this respect would be a matter of content, community connections and scheduling. By affording more time for original local programming, community leaders could become institutional partners with the college and present news and information of concern or interest to the local community while simultaneously helping to improve the skills of the students who produce the programs. In addition, a viable and robust METV could also afford students a variety of internship possibilities. I have seen the improvement in students’ abilities when they must work for a client in addition to a grade. The experience of participating in a professional production at an early stage in a student’s educational career not only helps build stronger skills but also enhances his or her excitement for learning. Moreover, improved student skills leads to better public media through better productions and could encourage even further involvement by institutional partners. So in providing continuous, scheduled and partnered public media, the public succeeds on multiple levels. What this means is that the public’s involvement would make it possible to expand the types of information that enters the public domain, and Internet and governmental policies about infrastructure and copyright for example, that favors the free flow of information, would increase the circulation of news. (Hamilton, p. 6).
Now imagine if the same broadcast were simulcast using a video stream on the college’s website. How many more people might be exposed to important community issues and information if we used this additional platform? Add a real-time web-enabled forum for feedback and we are well on our way to achieving the multi-platform, participatory public media proposed in Public Media 2.0. Beyond that, “many-to-many” dissemination vehicles such as Twitter, Pownce, FriendFeed, Jaiku, and Brightkite are becoming the new social norm and could exponentially increase the flow of community information. But this can only happen if the information is made available in the first place.
Going one step further, let’s add the college’s newspaper to the mix. Like the students who would help produce the METV local programming, journalism students could also improve their skills by engaging more in enterprise reporting, that is, discovering and uncovering stories rather than merely parroting what is drawn from memos and press releases and press briefings and other public statements. A Public Media 2.0 model provides the outlet for such enterprise reporting. A. Schwartzman (FCC Future of Media Workshop, March 4, 2010, Round table discussion) underscored how enterprise reporting is rapidly declining in the digital era with new media platforms more devoted to “repeatage rather than reportage”. We have seen reduced budgets and personnel cuts in traditional media over the past few years minimize the effectiveness of their operations. No longer do we have a flood of foreign correspondents or even national or regional embedded reporters who provide us with first-hand accounts of important news and information. According to T. Rosenstiel (FCC Future of Media Workshop, March 4, 2010, Round table discussion), from 1998 through 2001, there was a dramatic decrease in the level of enterprise reporting. Stories with a reporter fell by 30%. Syndicated stories rose by 62% replacing locally produced stories. Live, local and late-breaking stories dropped by 31%. This is not the way to serve the public interest.
One excellent example of the need for more enterprise reporting is found in a story about the H1N1 virus, or Swine flu, vaccine trials at the University of Maryland in 2009. When a press conference about the vaccine trials was held to explain what the trials of two potential vaccines would mean, coverage was clearly driven by the press release alone. In fact, out of 19 news stories analyzed, only three of the 19 reports added any significant new information about the details of the trials (How News Happens, Project for Excellence in Journalism, p. 23). Public Media 2.0, with its participatory approach, could create a renewed excitement for enterprise reporting. And so it should be clear that the more the public participates in the Public Media 2.0 model, the more it will create diversity of content and enhanced localism.
Media Literacy Education
In a digital era, media literacy education is no less important than the teaching of basic math and English. If we think about why students learn to read and write, the answer, in the end, is not only to teach them to spell correctly or form a logical sentence. It is about how to construct and convey meaning. Media literacy teaches how to construct meaning using the tools and the language of the twenty-first century. (Lessig, p. 38). One textbook definition of media literacy states that, “media literacy is a set of perspectives that we actively use to expose ourselves to the media to interpret the meaning of the messages we encounter” (Potter, p. 19). Another definition explains that media literacy “is the ability to understand, analyze, and deconstruct media images…to make [kids] literate about the way media works, the way it’s constructed, the way it’s delivered, and the way people access it” (Lessig, p. 36). Certainly, deconstructing messages and delivery systems is fundamental to being media literate because in the digital era, students utilize many forms of media to help them understand and communicate ideas about all subjects. But seldom does media literacy education include discussion about change and potential improvements to the existing system. Rarely are students asked to express themselves about ways to improve current media institutions and mechanisms or in general, about how media might work in ways the public would prefer. Students can’t know that they can be proactive and change media systems if they are only taught how to understand and utilize media in its current form. “The only way to change the status quo is for government to make [media] education a top priority for all citizens, especially those in minority and underserved communities” (N. Wright, FCC Future of Media Workshop, March 4, 2010, Round table discussion). And though understanding how media works is basic and essential to media literacy, it is equally essential to start a dialogue with students about the possibilities for change and improvements in SPIDE policy that could advance the creation of new ideas.
Among the recommendations of the Hutchins Report was the “Encouragement of the establishment of centers of advanced study, research and criticism in the field of communications at universities” (Hutchins, 1947, p. 102). In large part because of this recommendation, degrees in communications are now offered in most colleges and universities. Media literacy education is one way institutions of higher learning can continue to be on the leading edge of critical enlightenment to a young audience. Educational institutions have also become repositories of a wide-range of analysis and perspectives on new and evolving issues about the media industry and on the technical, psychological and cultural/sociological effects of media.
Empowering people to consider and make changes based on the needs and desires of the public is nothing new. When Walt Disney met with park personnel after the close of the first day of operations at Disneyland in 1955, he asked if there were any problems. One employee complained that the park patrons were walking on the grass to cut through to other rides and events. Mr. Disney’s response was straightforward: “They’re trying to tell you where they want the paths”. This usability approach is how we need to look at implementing better media policy. Expose students to new, even obscure possibilities rather than focusing on “how to deal” with media as the modus operandi of media literacy education. Open a discussion about usability and learn from each other how best to address SPIDE policy in the future. Additionally, examining ways the public runs into or stumbles upon news and information today such as through the use of mobile hand-held devices like cell phones and iPods, a car’s GPS unit, and email portals like Yahoo and Gmail where one “bumps into the news” on their way to retrieving email, we can better assess how to disseminate public interest information. Imagine the possibilities that could be forwarded by a class of students who are given the freedom to change and improve what they wished regarding the American media collective. This is how change originates; offering and responding to ideas and proffering recommendations that could improve the flow of public information.
Colleges and Universities, and Community Colleges by their name and nature, have positioned themselves as the hegemonic center of the community. They have an enormous influence on a student’s life, providing the tools and learning they need to become engaged members of a community. Requiring media literacy education is a digital-era necessity.
Conclusion
Digital era technology is changing the way we receive news and information, making public interest obligations a formidable challenge. Using their specific areas of influence, responsible actors including students of media must engage in discussion about new ways for government, media and education to improve SPIDE policy. Though historical precedence can serve as a foundation to PICON considerations, it is new thinking about the role of the responsible actors that will lead to stronger, appropriate and more meaningful SPIDE regulation in the future. Exposing students to public interest initiatives that are not part of the mainstream discussion encourages new thinking and discussion about other, yet undiscovered possibilities.
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Raymond Kalas 