The Political Economy of the Media Volume IT
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The Political Economy of the Media Volume IT
The International Library of Studies in Media and Culture Series Editors: Laurie Taylor Emeritus Professor of Sociology University of York
The Political Economy of the Media
Andrew Tudor
Volume 11
Reader in Sociology University of York 1. Feminist Cultural Studies (Volumes I and Terry I.ovell
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2. The Political Economy of the Media (Volumes I and Peter Golding and Graham Murdock
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Edited by
Peter Golding Professor of Sociology Loughborough University, UK and
Graham Murdock Reader in the Sociology of Culture, Loughborough University, UK Wherever possible, the articles in these volumes have been reproduced as originally published using facsimile reproduction, inclusive of footnotes and pagination to facilitate ease of reference. THE INTERNATIONAL LffiRARY OF STUDIES IN MEDIA AND CULTURE For a list of all Edward Elgar published titles visit our site on the World Wide Web at http://www.e-elgar.co.uk
634244 An Elgar Reference Collection Cheltenham, UK • Brookfield, US
©Peter Golding and Graham Murdock 1997. For copyright of. individual articles please refer to the Acknowledgements.
Contents
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Acknowledgements Introduction by the editors: 'Communication and the Common Good'
Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited 8 Lansdown Place Cheltenham · · Glos GL50 2HU
PART I
UK
Edward ~lgar Publishing Company Did Post Road. Brookfie!d Vermont 05036
us
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The political economy of the media I edited by Peter Golding and Graham Murdock. (International library of studies in media and culture ; 2) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Mass media. I. Golding, Peter. II. Murdock, Graham. ill. Series. P91.25.P65 1997 302.23-dc20
ISBN 1 85278 777 5 (2 volume set)
Printed in Great Britain by Galliard (Printers) Ltd, Great Yarmouth
96-35918 CIP
ix xiii
PRIVATE INTERESTS TO COMMON GOODS 1. Edward Alsworth Ross (1910), 'The Suppression of Important News', The Atlantic Monthly, CV, 303-11. 2. Upton Sinclair (1919), The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism, Pasadena, CA: Upton Sinclair, extracts from 221-9, 244-6, 250-52, 258-60, 282-91, 408-14. 3. R. Hutchins (1947), A Free and Responsible Press: A General Report on Mass Communication, edited by Robert D. Leigh, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 20-29, 59-65, 67-8, 83-6, 92-~. 4. James Curran (1977), 'Capitalism and Control of the Press, 1800-1975', in James Curran, Michael Gurevitch and Janet Wollacott (eds), Mass Communication and Society, Chapter 8, Edward Arnold/Open University Press, 195-230. 5. Graham Murdock and Peter Golding (1989), 'Information Poverty and Political Inequality: Citizenship in the Age of Privatized Communications', Journal of Communication, 39 (3), Summer, 180-95. 6. Jiirgen Habermas (1979) [ 1964], 'The Public Sphere', in Armand Mattelart and Seth Siegelaub (eds), Communication and Class Struggle. I. Capitalism, Imperialism, IGIIMMRC, 198-201, bibliography. 7. James Curran (1991), 'Rethinking the Media as a Public Sphere', in Peter Dahlgren and Colin Sparks (eds), Communication and Citizenship: Journalism and the Public Sphere in the New Media Age, Chapter 1, London and New York: Routledge, 27-57. 8. Jiirgen Habermas (1992), 'Further Reflections on the Public Sphere' (translated by Thomas Burger), in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere, Chapter 17, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 421-61. 9. Michael Schudson (1992), 'Was There Ever a Public Sphere? If So, When? Reflections on the American Case', in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere, Chapter 6, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 143-63.
3
12
41
64
100
116
120
151
192
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PARTll
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PUBLIC BROADCASTING AND THE PUBLIC INTEREST 10. J.C.W. Reith (1924), 'The Function of Broadcasting', 'The Responsibility', 'A Public Service', 'The Great Multitude', 'The Best of Everything', 'The Bread upon the Waters' and 'In Touch with the Infinite', selected chapters from his Broadcast over Britain, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 15-19, 31-9, 57-64, 77-82, 147-54, 181-8, 217-24. 215 11. Herbert Hoover (1952), 'Development and Control of Radio Broadcasting', The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Cabinet and the Presidency 1920-1933, Chapter 20, New York: · Macmillan, 139-48, appendix. 267 12. Report of the Committee on Broadcasting 1960 (The Pilkington Report), Presented to Parliament by the Postmaster General in June 1962, Cmnd. 1753, London: HMSO, excerpts from 16-18, 19-20, 37-8, 41, 46, 60, 62, 63, 70-71, 67-8. 277 13. FRC Interpretation of the Public Interest: 'Statement Made by the Commission on August 23, 1928, Relative to Public Interest, Convenience, or Necessity', 2 FRC Ann. Rep. 166 (1928), in Frank J. Kahn (ed.) (1978), Documents ofAmerican Broadcasting, Chapter 10, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 3rd Edition, 49-55, related readings. 287 14. The Great Lakes Statement: 'In the Matter of the Application of Great Lakes Broadcasting Co.', FRC Docket No. 4900, 3 FRC Ann. Rep. 32 (1929), in Frank J. Kahn (ed.) (1978), Documents of American Broadcasting, Chapter 11, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 3rd Edition, 56-62, related readings. 294 15. 'The "Vast Wasteland"': Address by Newton N. Minow to the National Association of Broadcasters, Washington D. C. May 9, 1961, in Frank J. Kahn (ed.) (1978), Documents of American Broadcasting, Chapter 28, Englewood Cliffs: NJ: Prentice-Hall, 3rd Edition, 281-91, related readings. 301 16. Peter Jay (1984), 'Electronic Publishing', The Crisis for Western Political Economy and other Essays, London: Andre Deutsch, 219-36. 313 17. Report of the Committee on Financing the BBC (The Peacock Report 1986), 12.2 'Broadcasting Aims and Broadcasting Finance', 12.3 'Implications for the Present System', 12.4 'Strategy and Implementation', Cmnd. 9824, London: HMSO, 125-36. 331 18. Douglas Kellner (1990), 'Public Access Television' and 'Satellite Television and Some Utopian Proposals', Television and the Crisis of Def!Wcracy, Chapter 5, Sections 3 and 4, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 207-24, notes and bi~liography. 343
The Political Economy of the Media //
PART
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POLICING THE PUBLIC INTEREST 19. Robert Britt Horwitz (1989), 'Telecommunications and Their Deregulation: An Introduction' and 'Theories of Regulation', The Irony of Regulatory Reform: The Deregulation of American Telecommunications, Chapters 1 and 2, New York and Ox:(ord: Oxford University Press, 3-45, 285-95. 20. William H. Melody (1990), 'Communication Policy in the Global Information Economy: Whither the Public Interest?', in Marjorie Ferguson (ed.), Public Communication- The New Imperatives: Future Directions for Media Research, Chapter 2, London: Sage, 16-39, references. 21. Vincent Mosco (1990), 'The Mythology of Telecommunications Deregulation', Journal of Communication, 40 (1), Winter, 36-49. 22. James Curran and Jean Seaton (1991), 'Alternative Approaches to Media Reform', Power Without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain, Chapter 19, London: Routledge, 4th Edition, 335-72. 23. Howard Davis and Carl Levy (1992), 'The Regulation and Deregulation of Television: A British/West European Comparison', Economy and Society, 21 (4), November, 453-82.
PART IV INSTITUTIONALIZING DIVERSITY 24. George Lansbury (1925), 'The Miracle of Fleet Street' and 'Finance', selected chapters from The Miracle of Fleet Street: The Story of The Daily Herald, London: Labour Publishing Company, 1-22, 157-67. 25. Brian Groombridge (1972), 'Alternatives and Precursors' and 'Mobilizing British Resources for Democracy', Television and the People: A Programme for Democratic Participation, Chapters 10 and 12, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 161-86, notes and 219-41, notes. 26. The International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems (1980), 'Democratization of Communication', Many Voices, One World, Part ill: Chapter 3, London, New York and Paris: Kogan Page, Unipub and Unesco, 166-74. 27. John Keane (1991), 'Public Service Media?', The Media and Democracy, Cambridge: Polity Press, 116-62. 28. Peter Golding (1990), 'Political Communication and Citizenship: The Media and Democracy in an Inegalitarian Social Order', in Marjorie Ferguson (ed.), Public Communication- The New Imperatives: Future Directions for Media Research, Chapter 5, London: Sage, 84-100, references.
Name Index
vii
365
419
444
458
496
529
562
612 621
668 687
Acknowledgements The editors and publishers wish to thank the authors and the following publishers who have kindly given permission for the use of copyright material. Blackwell Publishers Ltd for excerpt: John Keane (1991), 'Public Service Media?', The Media and Democracy, 116-62. HMSO for excerpts: Report ofthe Committee on Broadcasting 1960 (The Pilkington Report), Cmnd. 1753, excerpts from 16-18, 19-20, 37-8,41, 46, 60, 62, 63, 70-71, 67-8; Report of the Committee on Financing the BBC (The Peacock Report 1986), Sections 12.2, 12.3, 12.4, Cmnd. 9824, 125-36. Herbert Hoover Presidential Library for excerpt: Herbert Hoover (1952), 'Development and Control of Radio Broadcasting', The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Cabinet and the Presidency 1920-1933, Chapter 20, 139-48, appendix. Hodder Headline PLC for excerpt: James Curran (1977), 'Capitalism and Control of the Press, 1800-1975', in James Curran, Michael Gurevitch and Janet Wollacott (eds), Mass Communication and Society, Chapter 8, 195-230. Peter Jay for his own excerpt: (1984), 'Electronic Publishing', The Crisis for Western Political Economy and other Essays, 219-36. Frank J. Kahn for excerpts: (1978), FRC Interpretation of the Public Interest: 'Statement Made by the Commission on August 23, 1928, Relative to Public Interest, Convenience, or Necessity', 2 FRC Ann. Rep. 166 (1928), in FrankJ. Kahn (ed.), Documents ofAmerican Broadcasting, Chapter 10, 3rd Edition, 49-55, related readings; (1978), The Great Lakes Statement: 'In the Matter of the Application of Great Lakes Broadcasting Co:', FRC Docket No. 4900, 3 FRC Ann. Rep. 32 (1929), in Frank J. Kahn (ed.), Documents of American Broadcasting, Chapter 11, 3rd Edition, 56-62, related readings; (1978), 'The "Vast Wasteland"': Address by Newton N. Minow to the National Association of Broadcasters, Washington, D.C. May 9, 1961, in FrankJ. Kahn (ed.), Documents ofAmerican BroadcaSting, Chapter 28, 3rd Edition, 281-91, related readings. Kogan Page Ltd for excerpt: The International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems (1980), 'Democratization of Communication', Many Voices, One World, Part III: Chapter 3, 166-74.
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MIT Press for excerpts: Michael Schudson (1992), 'Was There Ever a Public Sphere? If So, When? Reflections on the American Case', in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habennas and the Public Sphere, Chapter 6, 143-63; Jiirgen Habermas (1992), 'Further Reflections on the Public Sphere' (translated by Thomas Burger), in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habennas and the Public Sphere, Chapter 17, 421-61. Oxford University Press for articles: Graham Murdock and Peter Golding (1989), 'Information Poverty and Political Inequality: Citizenship in the Age of Privatized Communications', Journal of Communication, 39 (3), Summer, 180-95; Vincent Mosco (1990), 'The Mythology of Telecommunications Deregulation', Journal of Communication, 40 {1), Winter, 36-49. Oxford University Press, Inc. for excerpts: Robert Britt Horwitz (1989), 'Telecommunications and Their Deregulation: An Introduction' and 'Theories of Regulation', The Irony of Regulatory Reform: The Deregulation of American Telecommunications, Chapters 1 and 2, . 3-45' 285-95. Penguin Books Ltd for excerpts: Brian Groombridge (1972), 'Alternatives and Precursors' and 'Mobilizing British Resources for Democracy', Television and the People: A Programme for Democratic Participation, Chapters 10 and 12, 161-86, notes and 219-41, notes. Routledge for excerpts and article: James Curran (1991), 'Rethinking the Media as a Public Sphere', in Peter Dahlgren and Colin Sparks (eds), Communication and Citizenship: Journalism and the Public Sphere in the New Media Age, Chapter I, 27-57; James Curran and Jean Seaton (1991), 'Alternative Approaches to Media Reform', Power Without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain, Chapter 19, 4th Edition, 335-72; Howard Davis and Carl Levy (1992), 'The Regulation and Deregulation of Television: A British/West European Comparison', Economy and Sodety, 21 (4), November, 453-82. Sage Publications Ltd for excerpts: William H. Melody (1990), 'Communication Policy in the Global Information Economy: Whither the Public Interest?', in Marjorie Ferguson (ed.), Public Communication - The New Imperatives: Future Directions for Media Research, Chapter 2, 166-39, references; Peter Golding (1990), 'Political Communication and Citizenship: The Media and Democracy in an lnegalitarian Social Order', in Marjorie Ferguson (ed.), Public Communication - The New Imperatives: Future Directions for Media Research, Chapter 5, 84-100, references. Telos Press Ltd for excerpt: Jiirgen Habermas (1979) [ 1964] , 'The Public Sphere', in Armand Mattelart and Seth Siegelaub (eds), Communication and Class Struggle. 1. Capitalism, Imperialism, 198-201, bibliography. University of Chicago Press for excerpt: The Commission on Freedom of the Press (1947), A Free and Responsible Press: A General Repon on Mass Communication, edited by Robert D. Leigh, 20-29, 59-65, 67-8, 83-6, 92-3.
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Westview Press, Inc. for excerpt: Douglas Kellner (1990), 'Public Access Television' and 'Satellite Television and Some Utopian Proposals', Chapter 5, Sections 3 and 4, Television and the Crisis of Democracy, 207-24, notes and bibliography.
Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity. In addition the publishers wish to thank the Library of the London School of Economics and Political Science for its assistance in obtaining these articles.
Introduction: Communication and the Contmon Good Peter Golding and Graham Murdock
As Western societies moved from the age of feudalism and absolutism to that of modernity, relations between public and private life were fundamentally redefined. A number of commentators interpreted this shift as centring around a basic division between the state and civil society. One of the most striking institutional features of modernity was the rise of the nation-state as a central node of power. New machineries of administration, law and surveillance, penetrating ever more pervasively into people's everyday lives, were added to longstanding systems of taxation. The consolidation and extension of this system prompted increased demands for basic freedoms in relation to private life and to the multiple social and political arenas - clubs, churches, trade unions, associations and social movements that comprised civil society and provided foci of identity and solidarity beyond the reach of the state. There were struggles to establish rights to freedom of conscience and religious worship, freedom of association and freedom of speech and expression, and extended battles to win rights to participate forms of political life that expressed public opinio~ and the public will. At the heart of these demands was the notion that people were no longer 'subjects' but 'citizens'. The subjects of a monarch or ruler were protected by, but also subjected to, a central power that could be exercised in an arbitrary way. Citizens were defined as free and equal members of a moral and political community - the 'public'. They claimed the right to participate in electing representatives who would formulate the laws by which they would consent to be governed and the right to be treated equally under those laws. These notions found their most influential early expression in the American Declaration of Independence and in the slogan, 'To Arms, Citizens', which echoed through revolutionary France. These clarion calls played a decisive role in defining the 'political' concerns of political economy. They centred around the balance between state activity and power (and its proper limits) and the organization of civil society; between rights and responsibilities; · private interests and the public good. The problem was that civil society included not only the intimate world of private life and the dense networks of social and voluntary associations, but also the commercial corporations at the heart of industrial capitalism. Consequently, the problem was not simply how to balance the interests of the state and capital, but how best to organize the complex interplay between these two central nodes of power and the private and social life of civil society. Adam Smith's seminal text The Wealth of Nations, first published in the year of the American Declaration, is (as we noted in Volume I) often promoted by present-day advocates of 'free' markets as a straightforward celebration of the way in which the 'hidden hand' of
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The Political Economy of the Media //
market dynamics works unerringly to produce a perfect fit between the pursuit of economic interests and the promotion of the common good. In fact, Smith was careful to point out that in some spheres, such as education and culture, state-supported activity might do rather better than markets in advancing the public interest. He had little to say about the communications system, but with the rapid growth of the popular press and other public media in the second half of the 19th century, market failures and imperfections emerged as major issues for debate. The concept of citizenship presupposed a diverse and open communications system. If people were to participate fully in debates about prevailing systems and competing proposals for intervention and change, they had to have access to the widest possible range of viewpoints, relevant information and frameworks of interpretation, coupled with opportunities to participate in arguments as speakers as well as listeners. In a democratic society the success and popular legitimacy of a system of political representation - institutionalized in local and national assemblies - depended on the vitality and openness of the system of discursive representation organized through public cultural institutions. The general imaginative and argumentative space provided by these organizations is what the contemporary German theorist, Jiirgen Habermas, has called, in a very influential formulation, the 'public sphere'. It offers citizens access to the social dialogues that confront questions of common concern (Dahlgren, 1995: 9) where a balance needs to be struck between personal or sectional interests on the one hand and common interests on the other. Part I of this volume includes Habermas' own summary of his core argument (Chapter 6) together with several representative critiques and rethinkings of his position ·(Chapters 9 and 7) and a 1992 piece by Habermas himself (Chapter 8) in which he reflects on his original position and answers his critics. In the book that initiated the debate, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (originally published in 1962), Habermas argues that, together with the salons, coffee houses, clubs and other meeting places, the pamphlets, journals and newspapers that emerged in the early phase of liberal capitalism were instrumental in constructing a new 'bourgeois public sphere'. By providing an extended arena for information exchange and rational argument, they enabled the rising classes of entrepreneurs and professionals to develop a shared world view and a set of common interests. With the arrival of representative democracy and the modem mass media however he argues, that the concept of 'public' was extended well beyond its original bourgeois boundaries and that rational argument gave way to sensation. His deeply pessimistic view of the emergence of mass popular media and their inability to sustain a rational public sphere was shared by many commentators who witnessed these developments at first hand. In the early part of the 19th century, it was possible to view the development of a more open market in information and opinion, centred around the press, as an essential precondition for the extension of citizenship. The ending, or weakening, of the more obvious forms of state control over means of communication - licensing, special taxes on newsprint, detailed official censorship - was greeted almost universally as a liberation. The idea of a 'free' press became more or less synonymous with a 'free' market. As the century wore oii, however, it became evident that capital exercised its own forms of manipulation and censorship and promoted its specific interests over the general interest. Concern focused on two groups of capitalists with a central stake in the emerging
popular press- newspaper owners and advertisers. As the readings in Part N in Volume I illustrate, these concerns are still very much on the contemporary agenda of discussion and policy. The origins of these debates lie in the second half of the 19th century. As the news production process became less labour intensive and more dependent on expensive machinery, the costs of entering the major markets soared and newspaper ownership became more and more the privilege of wealthy entrepreneurs who controlled chains of titles. Men like Northcliffe in Britain and Pulitzer and Hearst in the US emerged as a new breed of press barons who ran their print empires like feudal overlords and expected their editors to follow whatever political line they chose. The other figures of power were the major corporations who saw the popular press as a key arena for advertising and promoting both their products and their corporate image. The ways in which the organization and operation of the British press were shaped by advertisers' interests over the period from 1800 to 1975 is taken up by James Curran in Chapter 4. Earlier critics were mther less circumspect in their attacks on advertisers and newspaper owners. Chapters 1 and 2 by Edward Ross and Upton Sinclair, both American writers from the early part of the 20th century, are reprinted here as examples. Ross was a Professor of Sociology, Sinclair a journalist and novelist who once stood, unsuccessfully, for election as Governor of California. They represent a powerful current of radical populism that has had a major influence on criticat political economy in the United States. Strong echoes can be found in the work of Dallas Smythe and Herbert Schiller (reprinted in Volume I) as well as in contemporary polemical commentary. If it was obvious to radical observers that a press operating in a capitalist marketplace could not, and would not, offer the diversity of information, argument and perspective required for full citizenship, it was by no means clear what should be done about it. This was particularly problematic in the United States where Constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech applied to corporations as well as to individuals. As one disgruntled commentator put it in 1900: 'The American people must dearly love the freedom of the press, or we should have heard before now much talk of government control or operation of the newspaper' (Wilcox, 1900: 90). Observers were no nearer to squaring this circle half a century later. When the Commission on Freedom of the press under R. Hutchins published its conclusions (Chapter 3), it was obliged to fall back on moral suasion, calling on the 'giant units' that dominated the marketplace to act responsibly in 'providing the current intelligence needed by a free society'. By the time the Report was published, however, the focus of concern over the organization of public communications had already shifted - from the press to broadcasting. The latter had first emerged as a major popular medium in the 1920s with the rise of radio services. The dilemma facing American legislators is dramatically caught in the memoirs of Herbert Hoover (Chapter 11). As Secretary of Commerce, he played a central role in debates about the way this powerful new medium should be organized in the United States, calling four national radio conferences between 1922 and 1925 to hammer out a modus vivendi. He insisted that the 'ether is a public medium, and its use must be for public benefit', but could envisage no option but to allow stations to be operated by private companies and financed by the sale of advertising time and commercial sponsorship opportunities. At the same time, he recognized the need for a regulatory system that would ensure that radio
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TJze Political Economy of the Media Il
services operated, in the words of the 1927 Radio Act, according to 'public interest, convenience, or necessity'. To this end, a five-member regulatory body, the Federal Radio Commission (FRC), was set up to allocate and renew broadcasting licences and to oversee the general delivery of services. As the early FRC statements reprinted here indicate (Chapters 13 and 14), the Commission had considerable difficulty in defining what constituted 'the public interest'. They were clear that because 'broadcasting stations are licensed to serve the public and not for the purpose of furthering the private or selfish interests of individuals or groups', advertising had to be 'rigidly confined' to prevent the airwaves from being unduly commandeered by commercial speech at the expense of other voices. But they were less certain about how best to fill the non-advertising space, settling for the notion of 'well-rounded' programming 'in which entertainment, religion, education and instruction, important public events, discussions of public questions, weather, market reports and news, and matters of interest to all members of the family find a place'. However, by 1961, when Newton Minow gave his first public speech as Chair of the Federal Communications Commission (~e enlarged successor to the FRC), he condemned American television, which by then had overtaken radio as the major popular medium, as a 'vast wasteland' (Chapter 15). One response to commercial television's perceived failure to deliver appropriate cultural resources for a complex democracy was to explore the opportunities for access programming offered by the proliferating local cable networks (Chapter 8). A second respo_nse was the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. This established a Corporation for Public Broadcasting to channel Congressional funds to support a network of educational and non-profit-making stations across the country. This provided the basis for a new Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Finances remained problematic, however, with the monies granted by Congress being constantly threatened by cuts. To top up their budgets, stations appealed for voluntary donations from viewers, a system that had strong echoes of the proposals for endowed newspapers put forward, unsuccessfully, by an earlier generation of activists (see again Chapters 1 and 2). In marked contrast to this relatively late initiative, broadcasting in Britain was organized, almost from the outset, as a public service rather than a commercial enterprise. This idea was given its most influential formulation by John Reith, the first Managing Director of the British Broadcasting Company, founded by a consortium of radio manufacturers to offer services to listeners as an incentive to invest in their new receiving sets. The Government had granted the Company a monopoly right to broadcast and it fell to Reith to define how it would use this privilege responsibly. His book Broadcast over Britain, written in haste and published in 1924, was the result (see Chapter 10). In strictly economic terms, broadcasting (however it was organized) was a public good rather than a commodity since, unlike a cinema seat or a newspaper, it could be enjoyed by everyone simultaneously: it was nonexclusive. But for Reith it was also a public good in the more philosophical sense that it operated to promote and consolidate shared experiences and common values. To this end, unlike commercial broadcasting, it set out to address people as citizens, as members of moral and political communiti.es, not as consumers of products and programmes. The difficulty was deciding whose definition of the 'needs' of citizenship should prevail? This became even more problematic when the BBC was recreated as a public institution - the British Broadcasting Corporation - in the late 1920s. A diverse and open broadcasting
system required an operating space, relatively free from the pressures of the marketplace on the one hand and of the state on the other. The BBC's guaranteed income from the compulsory licence fee levied on set ownership removed it from the need to take advertising, but its position as the sole national broadcaster continually exposed it to pressure to identify the 'public' interest with the 'national' interest as defined by the state and/or the government of the day. In this context, the professional autonomy of broadcasters had to be continually defended and fought for. But even when won, there were problems with the way autonomy was exercised. Critics of public service television claimed that it was overly paternalistic, staffed by mandarins intent on giving people what they felt they needed rather than what they wanted. This paternal position was trenchantly defended in The Pilldngton Report of 1960 which reviewed the initial performance of the new commercial television stations launched in Britain in the mid-1950s (Chapter 12). Commercial television in Britain was strongly regulated. Companies were obliged to produce a range of programmes that would not necessarily be popular or profitable, but which fitted the established definition of 'public service'. This was the social price levied on the 'licences to print money' granted by their regional monopolies over the sale of advertising time. However, throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, more and more groups began to complain that this system failed to properly represent their interests or aspirations. They saw themselves pushed to the margins of programming by the BBC's orientation to outmoded definitions of national culture and by the commercial companies' search for maximum audiences. They demanded a system of representation more sensitive to shifts in the structure of civil society. One solution (described in Chapter 25) was to press for more opportunities for viewers to appear in and to make programmes. A second option was that of 'electronic publishing'. One of the most influential versions of this idea came from Peter Jay who had worked at the Treasury (Chapter 16). He argued that new distribution technologies spelled the end of conventional broadcasting and enabled all forms of communications to adopt the model of print publishing, in which companies decided what to offer and then sold their services to customers. This would allow for an explosion of 'narrowcasting' in which specialist services were targeted at particular interest groups. State interference would be reduced to a minimum since there would be no need for regulation outside of the general limits imposed by laws in areas such as copyright, racism and pornography. This manifesto for the 'commodification' of broadcasting fitted snugly with the wider shift in policy-oriented thinking in the late 1970s, prompted by the resurgence of neo-liberal economics. This new orthodoxy found one of its most cogent British expressions in The Peacock Report on broadcast finances, published in 1986 (Chapter 17), which provided an authoritative and influential statement of the case for converting all broadcast services, including those offered by the BBC, into subscription channels. This would abolish at a stroke two of the central tenets of the public service ideal - that everyone should have equal access to all services regardless of their level of income, and that channels should provide mixed programming so that people would encounter new and unexpected material alongside familiar fare. Yet, interestingly, Peacock insisted on a safety net, arguing that the market was unlikely to support the full range of programmes required for citizenship and that, consequently, some form of public subsidy for production was essential. In a rapidly changing communications environment, recent arguments about the appropriate
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balance between the public sector and the market and about the need to rethink the role of regulation have extended well beyond broadcasting. The increasing convergence of media sectors, brought about by the shift towards digital coding (which allows all forms of communications to be stored and accessed using the same basic binary language of O's and 1's), has given a new impetus to neo-liberal arguments for reducing public regulation and allowing maximum scope for market dynamics and relations. The major testing ground for these arguments was the drive to deregulate the telecommunications system in the US. This process and some of the reasons behind it are addressed in the extracts by Robert Britt Horwitz and Vincent Mosco (Chapters 19 and 21). The pieces by Davis and Levy and by William Melody (Chapters 23 and 20) offer comparative, international, perspectives on the wider drive to deregulate communications, whilst the extract from Curran and Seaton (Chapter 22) places this movement alongside competing policy frameworks. The recent rise and rise of market-oriented policies makes the task of formulating alternative initiatives - designed to promote diversity, ensure accessibility and meet the-cultural and information needs of complex democracy - all the more pressing for critical political economy. The conceptual and practical problems raised by this ambition are addressed in Part IV. Chapters 24 and 25 by George Lansbury and Brian Groombridge recount the careers of selected attempts to intervene in the British newspaper market and television system, whilst the pieces by John Keane and Peter Golding and the extract from the McBride Report (Chapters 27, 28 and 26) deal more generally with the justifications and prerequisites of policies aiming to democratize the operations of public media and to orientate these media more forcefully to the overall extension of democracy. The rise of the new media the Internet, video, multi-media systems, virtual reality offers new opportunities for democratic communications, but they do so in the context of deeply-embedded social, economic, political and cultural formations. Analysing the relations between these formations, and in particular the· ways in which the economic organization of the communications industries structures their social and political uses and their cultural potentialities, is the distinctive task and promise of the political economy of communications. Understanding how these links might be realigned to deepen democratization is the particular challenge of a political economy that claims to be critical.
References Dahlgren, Peter (1995), Television and the Public Sphere: Citizenship, Democracy and the Media, London: Sage. Wilcox, D.F. (1900), 'The American Newspaper: A Study in Social Psychology', Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, July, pp. 56-92.
Part I Private Interests to Common Goods
[1] THE SU;E>PR.ESSION OF IMPORTANT NEWS BY EDWARD ALSWORTH H.OSS
I
MosT of the criticism launched at our daily newspapers hits the wrong party. Granted they sensationalize vice and crime, "play up" trivialities, exploit the pr.ivate affairs of prominent people, embroider facts, and offend good taste with screech, blare, and color. Dut all this may be only the means of meeting the demand, of" giving the public what it wants." The newspaper cannot be.expected to remain dignified and serious now that it caters to the common millions, instead of, as formerly, to the professional and business classes. To interest errand-boy and factory-girl and raw immigrant, it had to become spicy, amusing, emotional, and chromatic. For these, blame, then, the American people. · There is just one deadly, damning count against the daily newspaper as it is coming to be, namely, It does not git•e the news.
For all its pretensions, many a daily newspaper is not "giving the public what it wants." In spite of these widely trumpeted prodigies of costly journalistic "enterprise," these ferreting reporters and hurrying correspondents, these leased cables and special trains, news, good "live" news, "red-hot stuff," is deliberately being suppressed or distorted. This occurs oftener now than formerly, and bids fair to occur yet oftener in the future. And this in spite of the fact that the aspiration of the press has been upward. Venality has waned. Detter and
better men have been drawn into journalism, and they have wrought under more self-restraint. The time when it could be said, as it was said of the Reverend Dr. Dodd, that one had "descended so low as to become editor of a newspaper," seems as remote as the Ice Age. The editor who uses his paper to air his prejudices, satisfy his grudges, and serve his private ambitions, is going out. Sobered by a growing realization of their social function, newspap(!r men have come under a sense of responsibility. Not long ago it seemed as if a professional spirit and a professional ethics were about to inspire the news.: paper world; and to this end courses and schools of journalism were established, with high hopes. The arrest of this promising movement explains why nine out of ten newspaper men of fifteen years' experience are cynics. As usual, no one is to blame. The apostasy of the daily press is caused by three economic developments in the field of newspaper publishing. II
In the first place, the great city daily has become a blanket sheet with elaborate presswork, printed in mammoth editions that must be turned out in the least time. The necessary plant is so costly, and the Associated Press franchise is so expensive, that the daily newspaper in the big city has become a capitalistic enterprise. To-day a million dollars will not begin to outfit a metropolitan newspaper. The editor 303
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THE SUPPRESSION OF IMPORTANT NEWS
is no longer the owner, for he has not, and cannot command, the capital needed to start it or buy it. The editor of the type of Greclcy, Dana, Mcdill, Story, Halstead, and Raymond, who owns his paper and makes it his astral body, the projection of his character and ideals, is rare. Perhaps l\Ir. Watterson and JUr. Nelson are the best living representatives of the type. More and more the owner of the big daily is a business man who finds it hard to see why he should run his property on different lines from the hotel proprietor, the vaudeville manager, or the owner of an amusement park. The editors are hired men, and they may put into the paper no more of their conscience and ideals than comports with getting the biggest return from the investment. Of course, the old-time editor who owned his paper tried to make money,- no sin that!- but just as to-day the author, the lecturer, or the scholar tries to make money, namely, within the limitations imposed by his principles and his professional standards. But, now that the provider of the ·newspaper capital hires the editor instead of the editor hiring the newspaper capital, the paper is likelier to be run as a money-maker pure and simple- a factory where ink and brains are so applied to white paper as to turn out the largest possible marketable product. The capitalist-owner means no harm, but he is not bothered by the standards that hamper the editor-owner. He follows a few simple maxims that work out well enough in selling shoes or cigars or sheet-music. "Give people what they want, not what you want." "Back nothing that will be unpopular." "Run the concern for all it is worth." This drifting of ultimate control in to the hands of men with b.usiness motives is what is known as "the commercialization of the press."
The significance of it is apparent when you consider the second economic development, namely, the growth of newspaper advertising. The dissemination of news and the puryeyance of publicity are two essentially distinc;t functions which, for the sake of conYenience, are carried on by the same agency. Theoneappeals to subscribers, the other to advertisers. The one calls for good faith, the other does not. The one is the corner-stone of liberty and democracy, the other a convenience of commerce. Now, the pun'cyance of publicity is becoming the main concern of the newspaper, and threatens to throw quite into the shade the communication of news or opinions. Every year the sale of advertising yields a larger proportion of the total receipts, and the subscribers furnish a smaller proportion. Thirty years aao, advertising yielded less than half of the earnings of the daily newspapers. To-day, it yields at least two-thirds. In the larger dailies· the receipts from advertisers are several times the receipts from the readers, in some cases constituting riincty per cent of the total revenues. As the newspaper expands to eight, twelve, and sixteen pages, while the price sinks to three cents, two cents, one cent, the time comes when the advertisers support the newspaper. The readers are there to read, not to provide funds. "He who pays the piper calls the tune." When news-columns and editorial page are a mere inCident in the profitable sale of mercantile publicity, it is strictly "businesslike" to let the big advertisers censor both. Of course, you must not let the cat out of the bag, or you will lose readers, and thereupon advertisina. As the publicity expert, Deweese, fra~kly puts it; "The reader must be flimflammed with the idea that the publisher is really publishing the newspaper or magazine for him." The wise owner will
5
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"maintain the beautiful and impress- mill, it may come into the hands of ive bluff of running a journal to influ- those who will hold it in bondage to ence public opinion, to purify politics, other and bigger investments. The to elevate public morals, etc." In the magnate-owner may find it to his adlast analysis, then, the smothering of vantage not to run it as a newspaper facts in deference to the advertiser pure and simple, but to make it- on an instrument for coloring finds a limit in the intelligence and the sly alertness of the reading public. Hand- certain kinds of news, diffusing certain led as "a commercial proposition," the misinformation, or fostering certain imnewspaper dares not suppress such pressions or prejudices in its clientele. news beyond a certain point,' and it In a word, he may shape its policy by can always proudly point to the un- non-journalistic considerations. By suppressed news as proof of its inde- making his paper he! phis other schemes, or further his political or social ambipend~nce and public spirit. The immunity enjoyed by the big tions, he will hurt it as a money-maker, advertiser becomes more serious as no doubt, but he may contrive to fool more kinds of business resort to adver- enough of the people enough of the tising. Formerly, readers who under- time. Aside from such thraldom, newsstood why accidents and labor trou- papers are subject to the tendency of bles never occur in department stores, diverse businesses to become tied to. why dramatic criticisms are so lenient, gether by the cross-investments of their and the reviews ·of books from the owners. But naturally, when the shares publishers who advertise are so good- of a newspaper lie in the safe-deposit natured, could still expect from their box cheek by jowl with gas, telephone, journal an ungloved freedom in deal- and pipe-line stock, a tenderness for ing with gas, electric, railroad, and these collateral interests is likely to afbanking companies. But now the gas fect the news-columns. people advertise,'.' Cook with gas," the electric people urge you to put your Ill sewing-machine on their current, and That in consequence of its commerthe railroads spill oceans of ink to attractsettlersor tourists. The banks and cialization, and its frequent subjection trust companies are buyers of space, to outside interests, the daily newsinvestment advertising has sprung up paper is constantly suppressing importlike Jonah's gourd, and telephone and ant news, will appear from the intraction companies are being drawn stances that follow. They are hardly ip.to the vortex of competitive public- a third of the material that has come ity. Presently, in the news-columns of to the writer's attention. A prominent Philadelphia clothier the sheet that steers by the cash-register, every concern that has fa vors to visiting New York was caught pervertseek, duties to dodge, or regulations to ing boys, and cut his throat. His firm evade, will be able to press the soft being a heavy advertiser, not a single paper in his home city mentioned the pedal. A third development is the subor- tragedy. One New York paper took dination of newspapers to other enter- advantage of the situation by sending prises. After a newspaper becomes a over an extra edition containing the piece of paying property, detachable story. The firm in question has a from the editor's personality, which large bra·nch in a Western city. There may be bought and sold like a hotel or too the local press was silent, and the VOL. 105-NO. 3
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....;: __ t~ .la ~ ~SO bO ~~ -~~ ~!a E·~~ C)..d C)..d ~ .§ '~>f-c : sense of a bourgeois public sphere,4 for instance the representation of the nation or of particular mandates, has nothing to do with the medieval representative public sphere - a public sphere directly linked to the concrete existence of a ruler. As long as the prince and the estates of the realm still "are" the land, instead of merely functioning as deputies for it, they are able to "re-present"; they represent their power "before" the people, instead of for the people. The feudal authorities (church, princes and nobility),.to which the representative public sphere was first linked, disintegrated during a long process of polarization. By the end of the eighteenth century they had broken apart into private elements on the one hand, and into public on ihe other. The position of the church changed with the reformation: the link to divine authority which the church represented, that is, religion, became a private matter. So-called religious freedom came to insure what was historically the first area of private autonomy. The church itself continued its existence as one public and legal body among others. The corresponding polarization within princely authority was visibly manifested in the separation of the public budget from the private household expenses of a ruler. The institutions of public authority, along with the bureaucracy and the military, and in part also with the legal institutions; asserted their independence from the privatized sphere of the princely court. Finally, the feudal estates were transformed as· well: the nobility became the organs of public authority, parliament and the legal institutions; while those occupied in trades and professions, insofar as they had already established urban corporations and territorial organizations, developed into a sphere of bourgeois society which would stand apart from the state as a genuine area of private autonomy. The representative public sphere yielded to that new sphere of "public a'uthority" which came into being with national and territorial states. Continuous state activity (permanent administration, standing army) now corresponded to the permanence of the relationships which with the stock exchange and the press had developed within the exchange of commodities and information. Public authority consolidated into a concrete opposition for those who were merely subject to it and who at first found only a negative definition of themselves within it. These were the "private individuals" who were excluded from public authority because they held no office. "Public" no longer referred to the "representative" court of a prince endowed with authority, but rather fo an institution regulated according to competence, to an apparatus endowed with a monopoly on the legal exertion of authority. Private individuals subsumed in the state at whom public authority was directed now made up the public body. 4. The expression "'represent" is used in a very specific sense in the following section, namely to "present oneself." The important thing to understand is that the medieval public sphere, if it even deserves this designation, is tied to the personal. The feudal lord and estates create the public sphere by means of their very presence.
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HABERMAS
Society, now a private realm occupying a position in opposition to the state, stood on the one hand as if in clear contrast to the state. On the other hand, that society had become a conce~n of p~bl!c interest to the degree that the reproducuon of hfe m the wake of the developing market economy had grown beyond the bounds of private domestic authority. The bourgeois public sphere could be understood as the sphere of private individuals assembled into a public body, which almost immediately laid claim to the officially regulated "intellectual newspapers" for use against the public authority itself. In those newspapers, and in moralistic and critical journals, they debated that public authority on the general rules of social intercourse in their fundamentally privatized yet publically relevant sphere of labor and commodity exchange.
3. THE LIBERAL MODEL OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE The medium of this debate- public discussion - was unique and without historical precedent. Hitherto the estates had negotiated agreements with their princes, settling their claims to power from case to case. This development took a different course in England, where the parliament limited royal power, than it did on the contintent, where the monarchies mediatized the estates. The third estate then broke with this form of power arrangement since it could no longer establish itself as a ruling group. A division of power by means of the delineation of the rights of the nobility was no longer possible within an exchange economy-private authority over capitalist property is, after all, unpolitical. Bourgeois individuals are private individuals. As such, they do not "rule." Their claims to power vis-a-vis public authority were thus directed not against the concentration of power, which was to be "shared." Instead, their ideas infiltrated the very principle on which the existing power is based. To the principle of the existing power, the bourgeois public opposed the principle of supervision-that very principle which demands that proceedings he made puhlic ( l'ubliziliil). The principle of supervision is thus a means of transforming the nature of power, not merely one basis of legitimation exchanged for another. In the first modern C()nstitutions the catalogues of fundamental rights were a perfect image of the liberal model of the public sphere: they guaranteed the society as a sphere of private autonomy and the restriction of public aUihority to a few functions. Between these two spheres, the constitutions further insured the existence of a realm of private individuals assembled into a public body who as citizens transmit the needs of bourgeois society to the state, in order, ideally, to transform political into "rational" authority within the medium of this public sphere. The general interest, which was the measure of such a rationality, was then guaranteed, according to the presuppositions of a society of free commodity exchange, when the activities of private individuals in the marketplace were free from social compulsion and from political pressure in the public sphere.
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The Political Economy of the Media 11 C. Capitalist Mode: 1.Hegemony: The Public
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HABERJ\.tAS
Although the liberal model of the public sphere is still instructive today with res peel to the normative claim that information be accessible to the public,5 it cannot be applied to the actual conditions of an industrially advanced mass democracy organized in the form of the social welfare state. In part the liberal model bad always included ideological components, but it is also in part true that the social pre-conditions, to which the ideological elements could at one time
at least be linkeil, had been fundamentally transformed. The very forms in which the public sphere manifested itself, to which supporters of the liberal model could appeal for evidence, began to chang~ with the Chartist movement in England and the February revolution in France. Because of the dif· fusion of press and propaganda, the public bodv ex· panded beyond the bounds of the bourgeoisie. The public body lost not only its social exclusivity; it lost in addition the coherence created by bourgeois social institutions and a relatively high standard of education. Conflicts hitherto restricted to the private sphere now intrude into the public sphere. Group needs which can expect no satisfaction from a self· regulating market now tend towards a regulation by the state. The public sphere, which must now mediate these demands, becomes a field for the competition of interests, competitions which assume the form of violent conflict. Laws which obviously have come about under the "pressure of the street" can scarcely still be understood as arising from the consensus of private individuals engaged in public discussion. They correspond in a more or less unconcealed manner to the compromise of conflicting private interest. Social organizations which deal with the state act in the political public sphere, whether through the agency of political parties or directly in connection with the public administration. With the interweaving of the public and private realm, not only do the political authorities assume certain func. lions in the sphere of commodity exchange and social Jabor, but conversely social powers now assume political functions. This leads to a kind of "refeudaJ. ization" of the public sphere. Large organizations strive for political compromises with the state and with each other, excluding the public sphere whenever possible. But at the same time the large or· ganizations must assure themselves of at least plebiscitary support from the mass of the population through an apparent display of openness (demon· strative PubliziJat).6 The political public sphere of the social welfare state is characterized by a peculiar weakening of iU critical functions. At one time the process of making proceedings public (Publizitiit) was intended to subject persons or affairs to public reason, and to make political decisions subject to appeal before the court of public opinion. But often enough today the process of making public simply serves the arcane poJi. cies of special interests; in the form of "publicity" it wins. public prestige for people or affairs, thus making them worthy of acclamation in a climate of non-public opinion. The very words "public rela· lions work" (OeffentlichkeitsarbeiJ) betray the fact that a public sphere must first be arduously constructed case by case, a public sphere which earlier grew out of the social structure. Even the central relationship of the public, the parties and the parlia· ment is affected by this change in function.
S. Here it should be understood· that Habermas considers the principle behind tbe bourgeois public sphere as indispensable, but not its historical form. 6. One must distinguish between Habermas' concept of "making proceedings public" (Publivtiit) and the "public
sphere" (Oe!fl!llllichluit). The term Publir.iliil de.mibes the degree of public effect generated by a public act. Thus a situation can arise in which the form of public opinioa making is maintained, while the substance of the public sphere has long ago been undermined.
At the same time, daily political newspapers assumed an important role. In the second half of the eighteenth century literary journalism created serious competition for the earlier news sheets which were mere compilations of notices. Kart Biicher characterized this great development as follows: "Newspapers changed from mere institutions for the publication of news into bearers and leaders of public opinion-weapons of party politics. This transformed the newspaper business. A new element emerged between the gathering and the publication of news: the editorial staff. But for the newspaper publisher it meant that he changed from a vendor of recent news to a dealer in public opinion." The publishers insured the newspapers a commercial basis, yet without commercializing them as such. The press remained an institution of the public itself, effective in the manner of a mediator and intensifier of public discussion, no longer a mere organ for the spreading of news but not yet the medium of a consumer culture. This type of journalism can be observed above all during periods of revolution when newspapers of the smallest political groups and organizations spring up, for instance in Paris in 1789. Even in the Paris of 1848 every half-way eminent politician organized his club, every other his journal: 450 clubs and over 200 journals were established there between February and May alone. Until the permanent legalization of a politically functional public sphere, the appearance of a political newspaper meant joining the struggle for freedom and public opinion, and thus for the public sphere as a principle. Only with the establishment of the bourgeois constitutional state was the intellectual press relieved of the pressure of its convictions. Since then it has been able to abandon its polemical position and take advantage of the earning possibilites of a commercial undertaking. In England, France,. and the United States the transformation from a journalism of conviction to one of commerce began in the 1830s at approximately the same time. In the transition from the literary journalism of private individuals to the public services of the mass media the public sphere was transformed by the influx of private interests, which received special prominence in the mass media.
4. THE PUBUC SPHERE IN THE SOCIAL WELFARE STATE MASS DEMOCRACY
The Political Economy of the Media I! C. Capitalist Mode: 1.Hegemony: The Press Yet thiS trend towards the weakening of the public sphere as a principle is opposed by the extension of fundamental rights in the social welfare state. The demand that information be accessible to the public is extended from organs of the state to all organizations dealing with the state. To the degree that this is realized, a public body of organized private individuals would take the place of the nowdefunct public body of private individuals who relate individually to each other. Only these organized individuals could participate effectively in the process of public communication; only they could use the channels of the public sphere which exist within parties and associations and the process of making proceedings public (Publizitiit) which was established to facilitate the dealings of organizations with the state. Political compromises would have to be legitimized through this process of public communication. The idea of the public sphere, preserved in the social welfare state mass democracy, an idea which calls for a rationalization of power through the medium of public discussion among private individuals, threatens to disintegrate with the structural transformation of the public sphere itself. It could only be realized today, on an altered basis, as a rational reorganization of social and political power under the mutual control of rival organizations committed to-tbe public sphere in their internal structure as well as in their relations with the state and each other.
Appendix: Selected Bibliography C. THE FORMATION Or THE CAl'ITALIST MODE ·oF COMMUNICATION I. The Rise of Bourgeois Hegemony BARONE, Guilia; Armando PETRUCCI. Prima: Non leggere ( Biblioteche e pubblica letrura in ltalia dui 186/ ai nostri giorni)Milan: Mazzotta, 1976. COLLET, Collet Dobson. History of tire Taxes 011 Knowledge: Their Origin and Repeal. London: Watts, 1933. *DEBES, Dietmar, ed. Gepriese11es A11denken von Erfindung der Buclrdruckerie: Leipziger Stimmen zur Erfindung Gutenbergs. Leipzig: Reclam, 1968. ESCARPIT, Robert. The Book Revolution. Paris: London: UNESCO, Harrap, 1966. FEBVRE, Lucien; Henri-Jean MARTIN. The Comi11g of tire Book: Tire Impact of Priming 1450·1800. London: New Left Books, 1976. *"Gutenberg", an issue of L'arc (Aix-en-Provence, France), 50, nd (1973?). HABERMAS, Jurgen. Strukturwandel der 0/femlic/rkeit: Umersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der burgerliclren Gesellschaft. Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1971. (CN:I49)
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KUNZLE. David. The History of 1he Comic S1rip: Volume/. The Early Comic Strip (Narrative Strips and l'iclllres Stories in tire Early European Broadsheets 1450-1826), Berkeley, Ca: University or Calirornia, 1973. (CN:437) • Le livre fra/lcais: Hier, aujourd'lrui, demain. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1972. MARTIN, Henri-Jean. Livre, pouvoirs el societe ii Paris au XVlie siecle. Paris: Droz, 1969. WILUAMS, Raymond. 77ze Long Revolution. N. Y .: Harper & Row, 1966. (CN:603)
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ermas
ficd by the London Jacobins. He shows how under the influence of radical intellectuals and under the conditions of modern communication, the traditional culture of the common people brought forth a new political culture with organizational forms and practices of its own. "The emergence of the plebeian public sphere thus marks a specific phase in the historical development of the life relations of the petite bourgeoisie and the strata below it. It is, on the one hand, a variant of the bourgeois public sphere, for it takes it as a model. On the other hand it is more than a mere variant, since it develops the bourgeois public sphere's emancipatory potential in a new social context. The plebeian public sphere is, in a manner of speaking, a bourgeois public sphere whose social preconditions have been rendered null." 17 The exclusion of the culturally and politically mobilized lower strata entails a pluralization of the public sphere in the very process of its emergence. Next to, and interlocked with, the hegemonic public sphere, a plebeian one assumes shape. Within the traditional forms of representative publicness, the exclusion of the pe.ople operated in a different manner. Here the people functioned as the backdrop before which the ruling estates, nobility, church dignitaries, kings, etc. displayed themselves a,nd their status. By its very exclusion from the domination so represented, the people are part of the constitutive conditions of this representative publicness. I continue to believe that this type of publicness (only sketchily described in section 2 of Structural Transformation) constitutes the historical background to modern forms of public communication. Had he kept this contrast in mind, Richard Sennett might have been able to avoid orienting his diagnosis of the collapse of the bourgeois public sphere toward a wrong model. For Sennett makes certain features of representative publicness an integral part of the classical bourgeois public sphere; he does not grasp the specifically bourgeois dialectic of inwardness and publicness that in the eighteenth century, through the ascendancy of the audience-oriented privateness of the bourgeois intimate sphere, begins to capture the literary world as well. Since he does not sufficiently distinguish between the two types of publicness, he believes that he can document the cor-
The Political Economy of the Media 11
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427 Further Reflections on the Public Sphere
rectness of his diagnosis of the end of "public culture" by reference to the decline in the forms of an impersonal, ceremonialized role-playing esthetic of self-presentation. However, staging the presentation of oneself behind a mask that removes private emotions and everything subjective from sight should properly be considered part of the highly stylized framework of a representative publicness whose conventions had already crumbled in the eighteenth century, when bourgeois private people formed themselves into a public and therewith became . the carriers of a new type of public sphere. 18 I must confess, however, that only after reading Mikhail Bakhtin's great book Rabelais and His World have my eyes become really opened to the inner dynamics of a plebeian culture. This culture of the common people apparently was by no means only a backdrop, that is, a passive echo of the dominant culture; it was also the periodically recurring violent revolt of a counterproject to the hierarchical world of domination, with its official celebrations and everyday disciplines. 19 Only a stereoscopic view of this sort reveals how a mechanism of exclusion that locks out and represses at the same time calls forth countereffects that cannot be neutralized. If we apply the same perspective to the bourgeois public sphere, the exclusion of women from this world dominated by men now looks different than it appeared to me at the time. (3)
No doubt existed about the patriarchal character of the conjugal family that constituted both the core of bourgeois society's private sphere and the source of the novel psychological experiences of a subjectivity concerned with itself. By now, however, the growing feminist literature has sensitized our awareness to the patriarchal character of the public sphere itself, a public sphere that soon transcended the confines of the reading public (of which women were a constituting part) and assumed political functions. 20 The question is whether women were excluded from the bourgeois public sphere in the same fashion as workers, peasants, and the "people," i.e., men lacking "independence."
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Jiirgen Habermas
Further Reflections on the Public Sphere
Both women and the other groups were denied equal active participation in the formation of political opinion and will. Under the conditions of a class society, bourgeois democracy thus from its very inception contradicted essential premises of its self-understanding. This dialectic could still be grasped within the categories of the Marxist critique of domination and ideology. Within this perspective I investigated how the relationship between public and private spheres changed in the course of the expansion of the democratic right of participation and the social-welfare state's compensation for class-specific disadvantages. Nevertheless, this structural transformation of the political public sphere proceeded without affecting the patriarchal character of society as a whole. Equality of civil rights, finally attained in the twentieth century, has no doubt created for hitherto underprivileged women the opportunity to improve their social status. Yet women who, through equal political rights, also managed to come to enjoy increased socialwelfare benefits did not therewith accomplish the modification of the underprivileged status tied to gender. The progress toward emancipation, for which feminism has struggled for two centuries, has by now been set into motion on a broad front. Like the social emancipation of wage workers, it is a phenomenon of the universalization of civil rights. However, unlike the institutionalization of class conflict, the transformation of the relationship between the sexes affects not only the economic system but has an impact on the private core area of the conjugal family. This shows that the exclusion of women has been constitutive for the political public sphere not merely in that the latter has been dominated by men as a matter of contingency but also in that its structure and relation to the private sphere has been determined in a gender-specific fashion. Unlike the exclusion of underprivileged men, the exclusion of women had structuring significance. This is the thesis advocated by Carol Pateman in an influential essay first published in 1983. She deconstructs the contract-theoretical justifications of the democratic constitutional state to demonstrate that rationalist legal criticism of the paternalistic exercise of dominatiQn. merely functions to modernize patriarchy in the form of a rule of brothers: "Patriarchalism has
two dimensions: the paternal (father versus son) and the masculine (husband versus wife). Political theorists can represent the outcome of the theoretical battle as a victory for contract theory because they are silent about the sexual or conjugal aspect of patriarchy, which appears as nonpolitical or natural."21 Pateman remains skeptical concerning women's integration on equal terms into a political public sphere whose structures continue to be wedded to the patriarchal features of a private sphere removed from the agenda of public discussion: "Now that the feminist struggle has reached the point where women are almost formal civic equals, the opposition is highlighted between equality made after a male image and the real social position of women as women" (p. 122). Of course, this convincing consideration does not dismiss rights to unrestricted inclusion and equality, which are an integral part of the liberal public sphere's self-interpretation, but rather appeals to them. Foucault considers the formative rules of a hegemonic discourse as mechanisms of exclusion constituting their respective "other." In these cases there is no communication between those within and those without. Those who participate in the discourse do not share a common language with the protesting others. This is how one may conceive of the relationship between the representative publicness of traditional domination and the devalued counterculture of the common people: people were forced to move and express themselves in a universe that was different and other. In this system, therefore, culture and counterculture were so interlinked that one went down with the other. Bourgeois publicness, in contrast, is articulated in discourses that provided areas of common ground not only for the labor movement but also for the excluded other, that is, the feminist movement. Contact with these movements in turn transformed these discourses and the structures of the public sphere itself from within. From the very beginning, the universalistic discourses of the bourgeois public sphere were based on self-referential premises; they did not remain unaffected by a criticism from within because they differ from Foucaultian discourses by virtue of their potential for self-transformation.
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Jiirgen
Habermas
(4) The two shortcomings remonstrated by Eley have implications for an ideal-typical model of the bourgeois public sphere. The modern public sphere comprises several arenas in which, through printed materials dealing with matters of culture, information, and entertainment, a conflict of opinions is fought out more or less discursively. This conflict does not merely involve a competition among various parties of loosely associated private people; from the beginning a dominant bourgeois public collides with a plebeian one. From this it follows, especially if one seriously tries to make room for the feminist dynamic of the excluded other, that the model of the contradictory institutionalization of the public sphere in the bourgeois constitutional state (developed in section 11 of Structural Tmnsfonnation) is conceived too rigidly. The tensions that come to the fore in the liberal public sphere must be depicted more clearly as potentials for a self-transformation. As a result, the contrast between an early political public sphere (lasting up to the middle of the nineteenth century) and the public sphere of the mass-democratic social-welfare states, which has been subverted by power, no longer has the ring of a contrast between an idealistically glorified past and a present distorted by the mirror of cultural criticism. This implicit normative gradient bothered many reviewers. As I shall discuss, it was a consequence not only of the ideology-critical approach as such but also of the blocking out of aspects that I mentioned, to be sure, but whose significance I underestimated. Still, a mistake in the assessment of the significance of certain aspects does not falsify the larger outline of the process of transformation that I presented. 2 The Structural Transfonnation of the Public Sphere: Three Revisions
The structural transformation of the public sphere is embedded in the transformation of state and economy. At the time, I conceived of the-latter within a theoretical framework that had been outlined in Hegel's. philosophy of right, had been
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elaborated by the young Marx, and had received its specific shape in the German constitutional-law tradition since Lorenz von Stein. The constitutional construction of the relationship between a public authority that guarantees liberties and a socioeconomic realm organized on the basis of private law has two sources: on the one hand, the liberal theory of constitutional rights developed during the period of German history known as Vormiirz (pre-March), insisting (with obvious political intention) on a strict separation of public and private law; on the other hand, the consequences of the failure of the "dual German revolution of 1848/9" (Wehler), that is, the-development of a state based on the rule of law but without democracy. E. W. Bockenforde highlights this specifically German retardation in the gradual enactment of political equality for all citizens as follows: Once "state" and "society" have begun to confront each other, the problem of society's share in the state's decision-making power and its exercise arises . . . . The state put individuals and society into a condition of civil liberty, -and it maintained them in this condition through the creation and enforcement of the new general legal order. Yet individuals and society did not attain political freedom, that is, no share in the political decision-making power concentrated in the state, and no institutionalized possibility to exert an active influence upon it. The state as an organization of domination rested as it were within itself, that is to say, sociologically speaking, it was supported by the monarchy, the civil service and the army, and partially also by the nobility, and thus was "separated" both organizationally and institutionally from the society represented by the bourgeoisie. 22
This historical background also supplies the context for the specific interest in a public sphere. The latter is capable of assuming a political function only to the extent to which it enables the participants in the economy, via their status as citizens, to mutually accommodate or generalize their interests and to assert them so effectively that state power is transformed into a fluid medium of society's self-organization. This is what the young Marx had in mind when he spoke of the reabsorption of the state into a society that has become political in itself. The idea of such a self-organization, channeled through the public communication of freely associated members of society,
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demands (in a first sense) that the "separation" of state and society, as sketched by BockenfOrde, be overcome. Connected with the conception of this separation on the level of constitutiona,l law is another, more general one: the emergence, through differentiation, of an economy controlled through market mechanisms from the premodern orders of political domination. Since the early-modern period, this differentiation had accompanied the gradual ascendency of the capitalist mode of production and the emergence of modern state bureaucracies. In the retrospective view of liberalism, these developments are interpreted as having their point of convergence in the autonomy of a "bourgeois society" in Hegel's and Marx's sense, that is, in the economic self-regulation of an economic society organized through activities under private law upheld by a constitutional state. This model of a progressive separation of state and society, no longer specially geared toward the specific development in the German states ?f the nineteenth century but informed more by the prototypIcal development in Great Britain, supplied the foil for my analysis of the reversal of this trend that began in the latter part of the nineteenth century. For this interlinking of state and economy removes the ground from under the model of society assumed by bourgeois private law and the liberal view of the constiLulion. 23 The de facto negation of the tendency toward a separation of state and society I conceptualized, by reference to its juridical reflections, as a neocorporatist "societalization of the state," on the one hand, and as a "state-ification of society," on the other, both occurring as a result of the interventionist policies of a now actively interfering state. All this has by now been investigated with much greater precision. I merely want to bring back to mind the theoretical perspective that emerges when the normative meaning of the self-regulation of a society characterized by a radical democratic elimination of the separation between state and economic sphere is compared with the functional interlinkage of the two systems as it actually became reality. My guiding point of view was that of the potential for societal self-regulation inhering in the political public~·sphere, and I was interested in the repercussions of those complex developments toward the social-
welfare state and organized capitalism in the Western type societies. In particular, I was concerned with the repercussions on the private sphere and the social bases of private autonomy (subsection I below), the structure of the public sphere as well as the composition and behavior of the public. (subsection 2), and finally, the legitimation process of mass democracy itself (subsection 3). With regard to these three aspects, my presentation in chapters 5 to 7 of Structural Transformation exhibits a number of weaknesses. (I)
In the modern natural-law conceptions, but also in the social theories of the Scottish moral philosophers, civil society (bilrgerliche Gesellschaft) was always contrasted with public authority or government as a sphere that is private in its entirety. 24 According to the self-conception of early modern bourgeois society, stratified by occupational groupings, the sphere of commodity exchange and sociallabor as well as the household and the family relieved from productive functions without distinctions were deemed to belong to the private sphere of "civil society." Both were structured in a like sense; the position and decision-making latitude of private owners involved in production constituted the basis for a private autonomy whose psychological flip side, so to speak, lay in the conjugal family's intimate sphere. For the economically dependent classes, a tight structural connection of this sort never existed. But only with the onset of the social emancipation of the lower strata and with the politicization of class conflicts on a massive scale in the nineteenth century did awareness also arise in the lifeworld of the bourgeois social strata that the two realms, the family's intimate sphere and the occupational system, were structured at cross-purposes. What a later literature conceptualized as the tendency toward an "organizational society," as the progressing autonomy of the level of the organization vis-a-vis the network of basic interactions, I described in section 17 as the "polarization of the social sphere and the intimate sphere."
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The real~ of pr~vate life, defined by family, neighborly contacts, soctal occasiOns, and all sorts of informal relations, does ~lot. merely become a distinct entity through differentiation; it Is sunultaneously transformed differently for each social stra. turn in the course of long-term tendencies such as urbanization burea~cratization, the concentration of enterprises, and finall; the s~tft to mass consumption accompanied by ever more leisur~ ttme. Yet I am interested here not in the empirical aspects (whtch need to be supplemented) of this structural transformati.on of the circumstances of life experience but in the theoretical point of view from which I described at the time the changing status of the private sphere. After the universali?:ation of equal civil rights, the private ~utonomy of the masses could no longer have its social basis m the control over private property, in contrast to those private people who in the associations of the bourgeois public sphere had come together to form the public of citizens. To be sure the actualization of the potential for societal self-regulatio~ presumpti~ely contained in an expanding public sphere would have requtred that the culturally and politically mobilized masses make effective use of their rights to communication and participation. But even under ideally favorable conditions of communication, one could have expected from economically dependent masses a contribution to the spontaneous formation o~ opinion and will only to the extent to which they had attamed the equivalent of the social independence of private property owners. Obviously, the propertiless masses could no lo~ger gain control of the social-preconditions of their private exts.tence through part~cipation in a system of commodity and capttal markets orgamzed under private law. Their private autonomy had to be secured through reliance on the status guarantees of a social-welfare state. This derivative private autonomy, however, could function as an equivalent of the original private autonomy based on control over private property only to the degree to which the citizens, as clients of the social-welfare state, came to ef1ioy status guarantees that they themselves bestowed on themselves in their capacities as citizens of a democratic state. This in turn appeared to become possible
in proportion to the expansion of democratic control to the economic process in its entirety. This consideration had its place in the context of a drawnout controversy among scholars of constitutional law in the 1950s. Ernst Forsthoff and Wolfgang Abendroth were protag-. onists in this dispute over an issue of legal systematics, i.e., the compatibility of the social-welfare principle with the handeddown architectonics of the constitutional state. 25 )'he Carl Schmitt school argued that the preservation of the structure of the constitutional state required the unconditional priority of the protection of the classical legal freedoms over the demands of social welfare provisions. 26 Abendroth, in contrast, interpreted the social-welfare principle simultaneously as the preeminent hermeneutic governing the interpretation of the constitution and as a policy-shaping maxim for the political legislator. The idea of the social-welfare state was to provide the leverage for a radical democratic reformism that preserved at least the possibility for a transition toward democratic socialism. Abendroth maintained that the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany aimed at "extending the idea of a substantively democratic constitutional state (which means especially the principle of equality and its combination with the notion of participation in the idea of self-determination) to the entire economic and social order" (Structural Transformation, pp. 226-227, my emphasis). Within this perspective, of course, the political public sphere is reduced to function as a sort of adjunct for a legislator whose judgment is theoretically and constitutionally predetermined and who knows a priori in what fashion the democratic state has to pursue "the substantive shaping of the social order" that is incumbent on it, namely through "the state's interference with that ownership ... that makes possible private control over large means of production and therewith control over economic and social positions of power that cannot be democratically legitimated." 27 · As much as the insistence on the dogmas of the liberal constitutional state has failed to do justice to the changed social conditions, one cannot but be struck by the weaknesses of a Hegelian-Marxist style of thought, all wrapped up in notions of totality, as is evidently the case with Abendroth's fascinating
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program. Even though in the meantime I have distanced myself more from such an approach, this circumstance does nothing to diminish my intellectual and personal debt to. Wolfgang Abendroth, which I acknowledged in my dedication. I must state my conviction, however, that a functionally differentiated society cannot be adequately grasped by holistic concepts of society. The bankruptcy of state socialism now witnessed has once again confirmed that a modern, market-regulated economic system cannot be switched as one pleases, from a monetary mechanism to one involving administrative power and democratic decision making, without threatening its performance capacity. Additionally, our experiences with a socialwelfare state being pushed to its limits have sensitized us to the phenomena of bureaucratization and intrusive legalism (Verrechtlichung).28 These pathological effects are consequences of the state's interventions in spheres of activity structured in a manner that renders the legal-administrative mode of regulating them inappropriate.
of communication became more regulated, and the opportunities for access to public communication became subjected to ever greater selective pressure. Therewith emerged a new sort of influence, i.e., media power, which, used for purposes of manipulation, once and for all took care of the innocence of the principle of publicity. The public sphere, simultaneously prestructured and dominated by the mass media, developed · into an arena infiltrated by power in which, by means of topic selection and topical contributions, a battle is fought not only over influence but over the control of communication flows that affect behavior while their strategic intentions are kept hidden as much as possible. A realistic description and analysis of the power-infiltrated public sphere certainly prohibits the uncontrolled infusion of valuing points of view. Yet by the same token, it is too high a price to pay if, in exchange for such a prohibition, empirically important differences are paved over. Therefore, I introduced a distinction between, on the one hand, the critical functions of self-regulated, horizontally interlinked, inclusive, and more or less discourse-resembling communicative processes supported by weak institutions and, on the other hand, those functions that aim to influence the decisions of consumers, voters, and clients and are promoted by organizations intervening in a public sphere under the sway of mass media to mobilize purchasing power, loyalty, or conformist behavior. These extractive intrusions into a public sphere no longer perceived as anything else than an environment of one's own system of reference encounter a public communication whose spontaneous source of regeneration is to be found in the lifeworld.80 This was the meaning of the thesis that "publicity operating under the conditions of a social-welfare state must conceive of itself as a self-generating process. Gradually it has to establish itself in competition with that other tendency which, within an immensely expanded public sphere, turns the principle of publicity against itself and thereby reduces its critical efficacy" (Stritctural Transformation, p. 233). While on the whole I would stick to my descriptions of the changed infrastructure of a public sphere infiltrated by power, its analysis needs to be revised, especially my assessment of the
(2) The central topic of the second half of the book is the structural transformation, embedded in the integration of state and society, of the public sphere itself. The infrastructure of the public sphere has changed along with the forms of organization, marketing, and consumption of a professionalized book production that operates on a larger scale and is oriented to new strata of readers, and of a newspaper and periodical press whose contents have also not remained the same. It changed with the rise of the electronic mass media, the new relevance of advertising, the increasing fusion of entertainment and information, the greater centralization in all areas, the collapse of the liberal associationallife, the collapse of surveyable public spheres on the community level, etc. It seems that these tendencies were assessed correctly, even if in the meantime more detailed investigations have been presented.29 In conjunction with an ever more commercialized and increasingly dense netwo~k of communication, with the growing capital requirements and organizational scale of publishing enterprises, the channels
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changes in the public's behavior. In retrospect, l discern a number of reasons for the insufficiency of my interpretation: the sociology of voter behavior was only in its beginnings, in Germany at least. What I came to grips with at the time were my own first-hand experiences with the first election campaigns run along the lines of marketing strategies on the basis of opinion polls. I presume that the population of the German Democratic Republic has been similarly shocked by the campaigns of the West German parties currently invading its territory. Also, at the time television had barely made its start in the Federal Republic. I became acquainted with such sociology only years later in the United States; thus I was not able to check the literature with experiences of my own. Furthermore, the strong influence of Adorno's theory of mass culture is not difficult to discern. Additionally, the depressing results of the just-finished empirical investigation for Student und Politik may have contributed to an underestimation of the positive influence of formal schooling, especially of its expanding secondary level, on cultural mobilization and the promotion of critical attitudes. 31 It should be remembered, however, that the process later called the "educational revolution" by Parsons, had not yet started up in the Federal Republic. Finally there is the glaring absence of anything belonging to the dimension that by now has come to attract great attention under the label of "political culture." As late as 1963 Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba had still attempted to capture the "civic culture" by means of a few attitudinal variables. 32 Even the more broadly conceived research on value change, initiated by Ronald Inglehart's Silent Revolution (Princeton 1977), did not yet extend to the entire spectrum of political mentalities that are firmly engrained in a culture and in which a mass public's repertory of responses is historically rooted. 33 In fine, my diagnosis of a unilinear development from a politically active public to one withdrawn into a bad privacy, from a "culture-debating to a culture-consuming public," is too simplistic. At the time, I was too pessimistic about the resisting power and above all the critical potential of a pluralistic, internally much differentiated mass public whose cultural usages have begun to shake off tl;le constraints of class. In co~unction
with the ambivalent relaxation of the distinction between high arid low culture, and the no less ambiguous "new intimacy between culture and politics," which is more complex than a mere assimilation of information to entertainment, the standards of evaluation themselves have also changed. I cannot even begin to comment on the diversified literature in the sociology of political behavior, since I have paid only sporadic attention to it. 34 Just as relevant to the topic of the structural transformation of the public sphere is the research on the media, 35 especially the investigations in the sociology of communication concerned with the social effects of television. 36 At the time, I had to rely on the results of the research tradition established by Lazarsfeld, which in the 1970s was heavily criticized for its individualist-behaviorist approach constrained by the limitations of small-group psychology.37 At the opposite pole, the ideology-critical approach has been continued in a more empirical vein. 38 It has directed the attention of communication researchers to. the institutional context of the media, on the one hand, 39 and, on the other, to the cultural context of their reception. 40 Stuart Hall's distinction between three different interpretive strategies on the part of spectators (who either submit to the structure of what is being offered, take an appositional stance, or synthesize it with their own interpretations) illustrates well how the perspective has changed from the older explanatory models still assuming linear causal processes. (3)
In the last chapter of the book I had attempted to bring the two strands together: the empirical diagnosis of the breakdown of the liberal public sphere and the normative aspect of a radical democratic vision that takes into account and turns to its own purpose the functional intertwining of state and society that objectively goes on above the heads, as it were, of the participants. These two aspects are reflected in two diverging conceptualizations of "public opinion." As a fictitious construct of constitutional law, public opinion continues, in the normative theory of democracy, to be endowed with the unitariness
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Jiirgen Habermas of a conterfactual entity. In the empirical investigations of media research and the sociology of communication this entity has long since been disassembled. However, both aspects must be kept in mind if one wants to grasp the mode in which the creation of legitimacy has actually collie to operate in mass democracies constituted as social-welfare states, yet does not want to gloss over the distinction between genuine processes of public communication and those that have been subverted by power. This intention provides the rationale for the provisional model, sketched at the end of the book, of a mass-mediadominated arena in which opposing tendencies clash. The degree of its infusion with power was s"upposed to be measured by the extent to which the informal, nonpublic opinions (i.e., those attitudes and assessments that are taken for granted within a culture and that make up the lifeworld constituting the context and ground of public communication) are not fed into the circuits of formal, quasi public opinion making by the mass media (which state and economy, considering them system environments, try to influence) or by the degree to which both realms are brought into conflict by means of a critical publicity. At the time, I could not imagine any other vehicle· of critical publicity than internally democratized interest associations and parties. Intraparty and intra-associational public spheres appeared to me as the potential centers of a public communication still capable of being regenerated. This conclusion was derived from the trend toward an organization society in which it is no longer associated individuals but rather members of organized collectivities who, in a polycentric public sphere, compete for the assent of passive masses in order to achieve a balance of power and interests against each other and especially against the massive complex of state bureaucracies. As recently as the 1980s, Norberto Bobbio, for example, has proposed a theory of democracy based on the same premises.41 However, this model again ran up against that pluralism of irreconcilable interests that already moved the liberal theoreticians to object to,the "tyranny of the majority." Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill were perhaps not so mistaken in their
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belief that the early liberal notion of a discursively accomplished formation of opinion and will was nothing but a veiled version of majority power. From the point of view of normative considerations, they were at most prepared to admit public opinion as a constraint on power, but in no way as a medium for the potential rationalization of power altogether. If "a structurally ineradicable antagonism of interests would set narrow boundaries for a public sphere reorganized . . . to fulfill its critical function" (Structural Transformation, p. 234), it would certainly be sufficient simply to charge liberal theory with an ambivalent conception of the public sphere, as I did in section 15 of Structural Transformation. 3
A Modified Theoretical Framework
In spite of the objections raised, I continue to stay with the intention that guided the study as a whole. The mass democracies constituted as social-welfare states, as far as their normative self-interpretation is concerned, can claim to continue the principles of the liberal constitutional state only as long as they seriously try to live up to the mandate of a public sphere that fulfills political functions.· Accordingly,. it is necessary to demonstrate how it may be possible, in our type of society, for "the public . . . to set in motion a critical process of public communication through the very organizations that mcdiatizc it" (Structural Transformation, p. 232). This question drew me back, at the close of the book, to the problem on which I had touched but failed to address properly. The contribution of Stmctural Transformation to a contemporary theory of democracy had to come under a cloud if "the unresolved plurality of competing interests ... makes it doubtful whether there can ever emerge a general interest of the kind to which a public opinion could refer as a criterion" (Structural Transformation, p. 234). On the basis of the theoretical means available to me at the time, I could not resolve this problem. Further advances were necessary to produce a theoretical framework within which I can now reformulate the questions and provide at least the outline of an answer. I want to recall, by way of a few brief remarks, the major way stations of this development.
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(1)
municative rationality in favor of an empirical approach in which the tension of the abstract opposition between norm and reality is dissolved. Furthermore, unlike the classical assumptions of historical materialism, it brings to the fore the relative structural autonomy and internal history of cultural systems of interpretation. 45
Only to a superficial glance would it have appeared possible to write Structural Transformation along the lines of a developmental history of society in the style of Marx and Max Weber. The dialectic of the bourgeois public sphere, which determines the book's structure, wears the ideology-critical approach on its sleeve. The ideals of bourgeois humanism that have left their characteristic mark on the self-interpretation of the intimate sphere and the pubic and that are articulated in the key concepts of subjectivity and self-actualization, rational formation of opinion and will, and personal and political self-determination have infused the institutions of the constitutional state to such an extent that, functioning as a utopian potential, they point beyond a constitutional reality that negates them. The dynamic of historical development too was to be fueled by this tension between idea and reality.. Unfortunately, this thought makes it tempting to idealize the bourgeois public sphere in a manner going way beyond any methodologically legitimate idealization of the sort involved in ideal-typical conceptualization. But it is also propped up, at least implicitly, by background assumptions belonging to a philosophy of history that have been refuted by the civilized barbarisms of the twentieth century. When these bourgeois ideals are cashed in, when the consciousness turns cynical, the commitment to those norms and value orientations that the critique of ideology must presuppose for its appeal to find a hearing becomes defunct. 42 I suggested, therefore, that the normative foundations of the critical theory of society be laid at a deeper level. 43 The theory of communicative action intends to bring into the open the rational potential intrinsic in everyday communicative practices. Therewith it also prepares the way for a social science that proceeds reconstructively, identifies the entire spectrum of cultural and societal rationalization processes, and also traces them back beyond the threshold of modern societies. Such a tack no longer restricts the search for normative potentials to a formation of the public sphere that was specific to a single epoch. 44 It r~moves the necessity for stylizing particular prototypical manifestations of an institutionally embodied corn-
(2) The perspective from which I inquired into the structural transformation of the public sphere was linked to a theory of democracy indebted to Abendroth's concept of a socialist democracy evolving out of the democratic, constitutional welfare state. In general, it remained captive of a notion that became questionable in the meantime, i.e., that society and its selforganization are to be con~idered a totality. The society that administers itself, that by means of a legal enactment of plans writes the program controlling all spheres of its life, including its economic reproduction, was to be integrated through the political will of the sovereign people. But the presumption that society as a whole can be conceived as an association writ large, directing itself via the media of law and political power, has become entirely implausible in view of the high level of complexity of functionally differentiated societies. The holistic notion of a societal totality in which the associated individuals participate like the members of an encompassing organization is particularly ill suited to provide access to the realities of an economic system regulated through markets and of an administrative system regulated through power. While in Technik und Wissenschaft als "Ideologie" ( 1968) I had still tried to differentiate between the action systems of state and economy on the level of a theory of action, proposing the predominance of purposive and rational (or success-oriented) action versus that of communicative action as a distinguishing criterion, this all-toohandy parallelization of action systems and action types produced some nonsensical results. 46 This caused me, in Legitimation Crisis (1973), to link the concept oflifeworld, introduced in On the Logic of the Social Sciences ( 1967), to that of the boundary maintaining system. From this emerged, in The Theory of
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Communicative Action (1981), the two-tiered concept of society
as lifeworld and as system.47 The implications for my concept of democracy were considerable. From that time on I have considered state apparatus and economy to be systemically integrated action fields that can no longer be transforn~ed democratically from within, that is, be switched over to a political mode of integration, without damage to their proper systemic logic and therewith their ability to function. The abysmal collapse of state socialism has only confirmed this. Instead, radical democratization now aims for a shifting of forces w~thin a "separation of powers" that itself is to be maintained in principle. The new equilibrium to be attained is not one between state powers but between different resources for societal integration. The goal is no longer to supersede an economic system having a capitalist life of its own and a system of domination having a bureaucratic life of its own but to erect a democratic dam against the colonializing encroachment of system imperatives on areas of the lifeworld. Therewith we have bid a farewell to the notion of alienation and appropriation of objectified essentialist powers, whose place is in a philosophy of praxis. A radical-democratic change in the process of legitimation aims at a new balance between the forces of societal integration so that the social-integrative . power of solidarity-the "communicative force of production"48--can prevail over the powers of the other two control resources, i.e., money and administrative power, and therewith successfully assert the practically oriented demands of the lifeworld. (3)
The social integrative power of communicative action is first of all located in those particularized forms of life and lifeworlds that are intertwined with concrete traditions and interest constellations in the "ethical" sphere ("Sittlichkeit"), to use Hegel's terms. But the solidarity-generating energies of these fabrics of life do not directly carry over into democratic procedures for· the settling of,competing interests and power claims on the political level. This is especially so in posttraditional societies
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in which a homogeneity of background convictions cannot be assumed and in which a presumptively shared class interest has given way to a confused pluralism of competing and equally legitimate forms of life. To be sure, the intersubjectivist formulation of a concept of solidarity that links the establishment of understandings (Verstiindigung) to validity claims that can be criticized, and therewith to the ability on the part of individuated subjects fully in a position to make up their own minds (zurechnungsfiihig) to announce their disagreement (Neinsagenkonnen), already does away with the usual connotations of unity and wholeness. However, even in this abstract formulation the word "solidarity" must not suggest the false model of a formation of will a la Rousseau that was intended to establish the conditions under which the empirical wills of separate burghers could be transformed, without any intermediary, into the wills, open to reason and oriented toward the common good, of moral citizens of a state. Rousseau based this expectation of virtuousness (illusory from the beginning) on a separation of the roles of "bourgeois" and "citoyen," which made economic independence and equality of opportunity a precondition of the status of autonomous citizen. The social-welfare state negates this role separation: "In the modern Western democracies this relationship has been severed. The democratic formation of the will has become instrumental to the promotion of social equality in the sense of maximizing the even distribution of the national product among the individuals."49 Preuss justifiably underscores that nowadays the public role of the citizen and the private role of the client of the social-welfare state's bureaucracies are interlinked in the political process. "The mass democracy established as a social-welfare state [has] produced the paradoxical category of the 'societalized private person,' whom we commonly call 'client' and who becomes one with the role of citizen to the extent to which he becomes societally universal" (ibid., p. 48). Democratic universalism flips over into "generalized particularism." In section 12 of Structural Transformation I criticized Rousseau's "democracy of non public opinion" because he conceives of the general will as a "consensus of hearts rather than of
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arguments." The morality with which Rousseau demands the citizens to be imbued and that he places in the individuals' motives and virtues must instead be anchored in the process of public communication itself. The essential aspect here is pinpointed by B. Manin: IL is necessary to alter radic~lly the perspective commor~ _to bot~l liberal· theories and democratic thought: the source of legltunacy 1s not the predetermined wi_ll of i~div!duals, but rathe~ _the proce~s. of its formation, that is, deliberation Itself. ... A legitimate decision does not represent the will of all, but i~ one that r~sul.ts _from the deliberation of all. •t is the process by wh1ch everyone swill Is forme~ that confers its legitimacy on the outcome, rather than the sum of already formed wills. The deliberative principle is both individualist and democratic.... We must affirm, at the risk of contradicting a long tradition, that legitimate law is the result of general deliberation, and not the expression of general will. 50
Therewith the burden of proof shifts from the morality of citizens to the conduciveness of specific processes of the democratic fonuation or opinion and will, presumed to have the potential for generating rational outcomes, of actually leading to such results.
(4) This is why "political public sphere" is appropriate as the quintessential concept denoting all those conditions of communication under which there can come into being a discursive formation of opinion and will on the part of a public composed of the citizens of a state. This is why it is suitable as the fundamental concept of a theory of democracy whose intent is normative. In this sense Jean Cohen defines the concept of deliberative democracy as follows: "The notion of a deliberative democracy is rooted in the intuitive ideal of a democrative association in which the justification of the terms and conditions of association proceeds through public argument and reasoning among equal citizens. Citizens in such an order share a commitment to the resolution of problems of collective choice through public reasoning, and regard their basic institutions as legitimate insofar as they establish a framework for free
Further Reflections on the Public Sphere
public deliberation." 51 This discou~~e-center~? c~ncept of~~ mocracy places its faith in the political mobthzauon _and utilization of the communicative force of production. Yet, consequently, it has to be shown that social issues liable to generate conflicts are open to rational regulation, that is, re~ ulation in the common interest of all parties involved. Additionally, it must be explained why e_ngaging. in publ~c arguments and negotiations is the ~ppropnate ~edmm f~r this rational formation of will. Otherwise, the premise of the hberal model would be justified, that the only way in which irreconcilably conflicting interests can be "brought to terms" is through a strategically conducted struggle. In the last two decades John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Bruce Ackermann, Paul Lorenzen, and K.-0. Apel have contributed arguments intended to clarify how practical-poli_tical qu~stions, insofar as they are· of a moral nature, can be decided rationally. These authors have made explicit the. "monl point of view" that permits an impartial assessment of what, in a particular case, is in the general interest. Regardless of how they have formulated and justified their universalizing principl~s an? moral axioms, this much seems to have become clear m this wide-ranging discussion: there are solid reasons available that can provide a foundation for a universalization of interests and for an appropriate application of norms embodying such general interests.s2 Beyond that, with K.-0. Apel, 53 I developed a discourse-centered approach to ethics that views the exchange of arguments and counter-arguments as t?e most suitab~e procedure for resolving moral-practical questiOns. 54 Therewith the second of the two above-mentioned questions receives an answer. The discourse-centered approach to ethics does not limit itself to the claim that it can derive a general principle of morality from the normative content of the indispen~abl~ p~ag matic preconditions of all rational deb~te. Rather, th~s pnn:1~le itself refers to the discursive redemption of normative vahdny claims, for it anchors the validity of norms in the possihility of a rationally founded agreement on the part of all tho~e. who might be affected, insofar as they take on the ro~e of partzczf~nts in a rational debate. In this view, then, the settlmg of politiCal
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questions, as far as their moral core is concerned, depends on the institutionalization of practices of rational public debate. Of course, although issues of political principle almost always also have a moral dimension, by no ~eans all questions institutionally defined as part of the bailiwick of political decision makers are of a moral nature. Political controversies frequently concern empirical questions, the interpretation of states of affairs, explanations, prognoses, etc. Also, certain problems of great significance, so-called existential issues, often concern not questions of justice but, as questions concerning the good life, have to do .with ethical-political self-image, be it of a whole society, be it of some subcultures. After all, the majority of conflicts have their sources in the collision of group interests and concern distributive problems that can be resolved only by means of compromises. Yet this differentiation within the field of issues that require political decisions negates neither the prime importance of moral considerations nor the practicability of rational debate as the very form of political communication. Empirical and evaluative questions are frequently inseparable and evidently cannot be dealt with without reliance on arguments. 55 The ethical-political process of coming to an understanding about how, as members of a particular collectivity, we want to live must at least not be at odds with moral norms. Negotiations must rely on the exchange of arguments, and whether they lead to compromises that are fair depends essentially on procedural conditions subject to moral judgment. The discourse-centered theoretical approach has the advantage of being able to specify the preconditions for communication that have to be fulfilled in the various forms of rational debate and in negotiations if the results of such discourses are to be presumed to be rational. Therewith this approach opens up the possibility of linking normative considerations to empirical sociological ones.
conditions of ma:ss democracies constituted as social-welfare states, a discursive formation of opinion and will can be institutionalized in such a fashion that it becomes possible to bridge the gap between enlightened self-interest and orientation to the common good, between the roles of client and citizen. Indeed, an element intrinsic to the preconditions of communication of all practices of rational debate is the presumption of impartiality and the expectation that the participants question and trans~end whatever their initial preferences may have been. Meeting these two .preconditions must even become a matter of routine. Modern natural law's way of coming to terms with this problem was the introduction of legitimate legal coercion. And the subsequent problem entailed by this solution, how the political power required for the coercive imposition of law could itself be morally controlled, was met by Kant's idea of a state subject to the rule of law. Within a discoursecentered theoretical approach, this idea is carried further to give rise to the notions that additionally the law is applied to itself: it must also guarantee the discursive mode by means of which generation and application of legislative programs are to proceed within the parameters of rational debate. This implies the institutionalization of legal procedures that guarantee an approximate fulfillment of the demanding prec~nditions of communication required for fair negotiations and free debates. These idealizing preconditions demand the complete inclusion of all parties that might be affected, their equality, free and easy interaction, no restrictions of topics and topical contributions, the possibility of revising the outcomes, etc. In this context the legal procedures serve to uphold within an empirically existing community of communication the spatial, temporal, and substantive constraints on choices that are operative within a presumed ideal one. 56 For instance, the rule to abide by majority decisions can he interpreted as an arrangement squaring a formation of opinion that seeks truth and is as discursive as circumstances permit with the temporal constraints to which the formation of will is subject. Within a discourse-centered theoretical approach, decision by majority must remain internally related to a practice of rational debate, which entails further institutional arrange-
(5) Since the discourse-centered concept of democracy first of all has to be clarified and made plausible within the framework of a normative theory, the question remains of how, under the
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IIICJJLs (such as the requirement to state one's reasons, rules allotting the burden of proof, repeated readings of legislative proposals, etc.). A majority decision must be arrived at in such a fashion, and only in such a fashion, that its content can be claimed to be the rationally motivated but fallible result of a discussion concerning the judicious resolution of a problem, a discussion that has come temporarily to a close because coming to a decision could no longer be postponed. Other institutions too may be interpreted from this same perspective of a legal institutionalization of the general conditions of communication for a discursive formation of will, as, for example, the regulations concerning the composition and mode of opi~ration of parliamentary bodies, the responsibilities and immunities of elected representatives, the political pluralism of a multiparty system, the necessity for broad-based parties to package their programs so that they appeal. to various interest constellations, etc. The deciphering of the normative meaning of existing institutions within a discourse-centered theoretical approach additionally supplies a perspective on the introduction and testing of novel institutional arrangements that might counteract the trend toward the transmutation of citizens into clients. These must reinforce the gradation between the two roles by interrupting the short circuit that abandons the field to the play of immediate personal preferences and the generalized particularism of interests organized in special-interest associations. The novel idea of connecting the vote to a "multiple preference ordering" is a case in point. 57 Such suggestions must be based on an analysis of the inhibiting factors at work in the existing arrangements that condition citizens to an unpolitical follower mentality and prevent them from reflecting and being concerned with anything but their own short-term personal interests. In other words, the unlocking of the democratic meaning of the constitutional state's institutions within a discourse-centered theoretical approach must be supplemented with the critical investigation of the mechanisms that in democracies constituted as social-welfare states function to alienate citizens from the political process. ss
451 Further Reflections on the Public Sphere
(6) To be sure, the normative content of a concept of democracy that refers to processes of norm and value formation taking the form of discursive public communications is not restricted to appropriate institutional arrangements at the level of the democratic constitutional state. Rather, it pushes beyond formally instituted processes of communication and decision making. Corporatively organized opinion formation resulting in responsible decision making can serve the goal of a cooperative search for truth only to the extent to which it remains permeable to the free-floating values, topics, topical contributions, and arguments of the surrounding political communication. Such opinion formation must be facilitated by the constitution, but it. cannot be formally organized in its entirety. Instead, the expectation deriving from a discourse-centered theoretical approach, that rational results will obtain, is based on the interplay between a constitutionally instituted formation of the political will and the spontaneous flow of communication unsubverted by power, within a public sphere that is not geared toward decision making but toward discovery and problem resolution and that in this sense is nonorganized. If there still is to be a realistic application of the idea of the sovereignty of the people to highly complex societies, it must be uncoupled from the concrete understanding of its embodiment in physically present, participating, and jointly deciding members of a collectivity. There may actually be circumstances under which a direct widening of the formal opportunities for participation and involvement in decision making only intensifies "generalized particularism," that is, the privileged assertion of local and group-specific special interests that, from Burke to Weber, Schumpeter, and today's neoconservatives, has provided the arguments of a democratic elitism. This can be prevented by procedurally viewing the sovereignty.· of the people as comprising the essential conditions that enable processes of public communication to take the form of discourse. The one remaining "embodiment" of the altogether dispersed sovereignty of the people is in those rather demanding forms of subjectless
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communication that regulate the flow of the formation of political opinion and will so as to endow their fallible results with the presumption of practical rationality. 59 This sovereignty turned into a flow of communication comes to the fore in the power of public discourses that uncover topics of relevance to all of society, interpret values, contribute to the resolution. of problems, generate .good reasons, and debunk bad ones. Of co.urse, these opinions must be given shape in the form of decisions by democratically constituted decision-making bodies. The responsibility for practically consequential decisions must be based in an institution. Discourses do not govern. They generate a communicative power that cannot take the place of administration but can only influence it. This inHuence is limited to the procurement and withdrawal of legitimation. Communicative power cannot supply a substitute for the systematic inner logic of public bureaucracies. Rather, it achieves an impact on this logic "in a siegelike manner." If the sovereignty of the people is in this fashion dissolved into procedures and attempts, the symbolic place of power-a vacuum since 1789, that is, since the revolutionary abolishment of paternalistic forms of domination-also remains empty and is not filled with new identity-conveying symbolizations, like people or nations, as Rodel, following Claude Le fort, would have it. 60
transformation of the public sphere and those long-term trends that the theory of communicative action conceives as a rationalization of the lifeworld. A public sphere that functions politically requires more than the institutional guarantees of the constitutional state; it also needs the supportive spirit of cultural traditions and patterns of socialization, of the political culture, of a populace accustomed to freedom. The central question in Structural Transformation is nowadays discussed under the rubric of the "rediscovery of civil society." The global reference to a "supportive" spirit of differentially organized lifeworlds and their potential for critical reflection is not sufficient. It must be made more concrete, and not only with regard to patterns of socialization and to cultural traditions. A liberal political culture rooted in motives and value orientations certainly provides a favorable soil for spontaneous public communications. But the forms of interchange and organization, the institutionalizations of support of a political public sphere unsubverted by power, are even more important. Here is the point of departure for Claus Offe's most recent analyses. Offe uses the concept of "relations of association," intending "to confront the global categories of lifeworld and form of life that are to provide the discourse ethic with an anchorage in the social realm, ·with rather more sociological categories."61 The vague concept "relations of association" is not by accident reminiscent of the "associational life" that at one time constituted the social stratum of the bourgeois public sphere. It also recalls the now current meaning of the term "civil society," which no longer includes a sphere of an economy regulated via labor, capital, and commodity markets and thus differs from the modern translation, common sine~ Hegel and Marx, of "societas civilis" as "bourgeois society" ("bilrgerliche Gesellschaft"). Unfortunately, a search for clear definitions in the relevant publications is in vain. However, this much is apparent: the institutional core of "civil society" is constituted by voluntary unions outside the realm of the state and the economy and ranging· (to give some examples in no particular order) from churches, cultural associations, and academies to independent media, sport and leisure clubs, debating societies, groups of concerned citizens, and grass-roots petitioning drives
4
Civil Society or Political Public Sphere
Having thus changed my premises and upgraded their precision, I can finally return to the task of describing a political public sphere characterized by at least two crosscutting processes: the communicative generation of legitimate power on the one hand and the manipulative deployment of media power to procure mass loyalty, consumer demand, and "compliance" with systemic imperatives on the other. The question that had been left pending concerning the basis and sources of an informal formation of opinion in autonomous public spheres now can no longer be answered with reference to the status guarantees of the social-welfare state and with the holistic demand for the political self-organization of society. Rather, this is the place where the circle closes between the structural
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all the way .to occupational associations, political parties, labor unions, and ''alternative institutions." John Keane attributes to these associations the following task or function: "to maintain and to redefine the boundaries between civil society and state through two interdependent and simultaneous processes: the expansion of social equality and liberty, and the restructuring and democratization of the state."62 In other words, he refers to opinion-forming associations. Unlike the political parties, which to a large extent have become fused with the state, they are not part of the administrative system but manage to have a political impact via the public media because they either participate directly in public communications or, as in the case of projects advocating alternatives to conventional wisdom, because the programmatic character of their activities sets examples through which they implicitly contribute to public discussion. Similarly, Offe endows the relations of associations with the function of establishing contexts conducive to a political communication that, through sufficiently convincing arguments, readies citizens to engage in "responsible behavior": "To behave responsibly means for the actor to adopt toward his own actions, in the futurum exactum, the e:valuative perspectives of the expert, the generalized other, and his own self all at once, thus subjecting the criteria governing the behavior to functional, social, and temporal validation."63 The concept of civil society owes its rise in favor to the criticism leveled, especially by dissidents from state-socialist societies, against the totalitarian annihilation of the political public sphere. 64 Here Hannah Arendt's concept of totalitarianism, with its focus on communication, plays an important role. It provides the foil that makes it understandable why the opinion-shaping associations, around which autonomous public spheres can be built up, occupy such a prominent place in the ch·il society. It is precisely this communicative praxis on the part of citizens that, in totalitarian regimes, is subjected to the control of the secret police. The revolutionary changes in eastern and central Europe have confirmed these analyses. Not coincidentally, they were triggered by reform policies initiated under the banner of gla!inost. As if a large-scale experiment in
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social science had been set up, the apparatus of domination was overthrown by the increasing pressure of peacefully proceeding citizen movements; the Gennan Democratic Republic is the primary case in point. In a first step, out of these citizen movements grew the infrastructure of a new order, whose outline had already become visible in the ruins of state socialism. The pacesetters of this revolution were voluntary associations in the churches, the human rights groups, the appositional circles pursuing ecological and feminist goals, against whose latent influence the totalitarian public sphere could from the beginning be stabilized only through reliance on force. The situation is different in Western-type societies. Here voluntary associations are established within the institutional framework of the democratic constitutional state. And here a different question arises, one that cartnot be answered without considerable empirical research. This is the question of whether, and to what extent, a public sphere dominated by mass media provides a realistic chance for the members of civil society, in their competition with the political and economic invaders' media power, to bring about changes in the spectrum of values, topics, and reasons channeled by external influences, to open .it up in an innovative way, and to screen it critically. It seems to me that the concept of a public sphere operative in the political realm, as I developed it in Structural Transformation, still provides the appropriate analytical perspective for the treatment of this problem. This is why Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen, in their attempt to make the concept of civil society fruitful for an up-to-date theory of democracy, adopt the architecture of "system and lifeworld" as it was proposed in The Theory of Communicative Action. 65 I conclude with the reference to an inventive study dealing with the impact of electronic media on the restructuring of basic interactions. Its title, No Sense of Place, stands for the claim of the dissolution of those structures within which individuals living in society have hitherto perceived their social positions and have placed themselves. Now even those social boundaries that defined the lifeworld's coordinates of space and historical time have begun to move:
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Many of the features of our "information age" make us resemble the most ·primitive of social and political forms: the hunting and gathering society. As nomadic peoples, hunters and gatherers have no loyal relationship to territory. They, too, have little "sense of place"; specific activities are not totally fixed to specific physical settings. The lack of boundaries both in hunting and gathering and in electronic societies leads to many striking parallels. Of all known societal types before our own, hunting and gathering societies have tended to be the most egalitarian in terms of the roles of males and females, children and adults, and leaders and followers. The difficulty of maintaining many separate places or distinct social spheres tends to involve everyone in everyone else's business.66
siderable evidence attesting to the ambivalent nature of. the democratic potential of a public sphere whose infrastructure is mar.ked by the growing selective constraints imposed by electronic mass communication. Thus if today I made another attempt to analyze the structural transformation of the public sphere, I am not sure what its outcome would be for a theory of democracy-maybe one that could give cause for a less pessimistic assessment and for an outlook going beyond the formulation of merely defiant · postulates.
An unforeseen confirmation of this somewhat overblown thesis is again provided by the revolutionary events of 1989. The transformation occurring in the German Democratic Republic, in Czechoslovakia, and in Romania formed a chain of events properly considered not merely as a historical process that happened to be shown on television but one whose very mode of occurrence was televisional. The mass media's worldwide diffusion had not only a decisive infectious effect. In contrast to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the physical presence of the masses demonstrating in the squares and streets was able to generate revolutionary power only to the degree to which television made its presence ubiquitous. With regard to the normal conditions of Western societies, Joshua Meyrowitz's thesis that the mass media induced the dismantling of socially defined boundaries is too linear. There are obvious objections. The dedifferentiation and destructuring affecting our lifeworld as a result of the electronically produced omnipresence of events and of the synchronization of heterochronologies certainly have a considerable impact on social self-perception. This removal of barriers, however, goes hand in hand with a multiplication of roles becoming specified in the process, with a pluralization of forms of life, and with an individualization of life plans. Deracination is accompanied. by the construction of personal communal allegiances and roots, the leveling of differences by impotence in the face of an impenetrable systemic complexity. These are complementary and interlocking developments. Thus the mass media have contradictory effects in other dimensions as well. There is con-
Notes I. The question of a new printing has arisen for rather extrinsic reasons. The sale of the Luchterhand-Verlag, to which I am· much obliged for the promotion of my early books, necessitated a change of publishers. At the same time, this edition by the Reclam-Verlag in Leipzig represents the first publication of any of my books in the Germ.an Democratic Republic.
2.
J. Habermas, Die nachholende Revolution (Frankfurt, 1990).
3. The Structural Transfonnation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989). 4. This provided the occasion for a conference at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in September 1989. In addition to sociologists, political scientists, and philosophers, there were participants from the disciplines of history, literature, communication, and anthropology. I found the meeting extraordinarily instructive, and I am grateful to the participants for suggestions. 5. W. Jliger, Offentlichkeit und Parlamentarismus: Eine Kritik a11 Jiirgen Habermas (Stuttgart, 1973). For a listing of reviews, see R. Gtirtzen, J. Habennas: Eine Bibliographie seiner Schriften und der Sekundiirliteratur, 1952-1981 (Frankfurt, 1981). 6. G. Eley, "Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century" (manuscript, 1989). 7. H. U. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. I (Munich, 1987), pp. 303-331. 8. R. v. Diilmen, Die Gesellschaft der Aufkliirer (Frankfurt, 1986). 9. K. Eder, Geschichte als Lemprozefl (Frankfurt, 1985), pp. 123 ff. 10. For France, see the contrilnuions by Etienne Franc;ois, Jack Censer, and Pierre Reuu in R. Koselleck and R. Reichanlt, Die jra11zosiche Rlil'olulitm alr /Jrur.h tlt•s g"sl"ilrchaftlicheu Blilt'llfltseins (Munich, 1988), pp. 117 IT. 11. H. U. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 2, pp. 520-546.
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459 Further Reflections on the Public
12. P. U. Hohendahl, Building a National Literature: The Case of Germany, 1530-1870 (lthaca: Comcll University Press, 1989), especially chapters 2 and 3.
27. W. Abendroth, "Zum Begriff des demokratischen und sozialen Rechtsstaates," in Forsthoff Rechtsstaatlichheit und Sozialstaatlichheit, pp. 123 ff.
13. l'atricia Hollis, ed., Pt·essure from Without (London, 1974).
28. F. Kubler, ed., Verrechtlichung von Wirtschaft, Arbeit und sozialer Solidaritiit (BadenBaden, 1984); J. Habermas, "Law and Morality," in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 8 (Salt Lake City and Cambridge, 1988), pp. 217-280.
14. J. 11. Plumb, "The 1'ublic, Literature, and the Arts in tht! Eighteeilth Century," in M. R. Marrus, ed., The Emergence of Leisure (New York, 1974). 15. R. Williams, 71rc Ltmg lkrto/uticm (London, 1961); R. Williams, Commrmicatioi!S (London, I 962). Ili. F.. Thompson, 11re Jl;lnking of the English Working Class (London, 1963). 17. G. Lottes, Politische Aujk{jjrung und plebejisch~ Publikum (Munich, 1979), p. 110. Sec also 0. Negt and A. Kl~ge, Erfahrung tmd Offentlichkeit. Zur Organisationsanalyse /Jiit-gn-lir.her muljJroletarisr.her Offentliclrkeit (Frankfurt, 1972). 18. R. Scnncll, "/1re Fall of J>ublfc Man (New York, 1977). 19. N. Z. Davis, Humanismus, Narrenherrschaft und Riten der Gewalt (Frankfurt, 1987), especially chapter 4. On traditions of countercultural festivals going way back before the Renaissance, see J. Heers, Vom Mwnmensclumz zum Machttheater (Frankfurt, 1986). 20. C. Hall, "Private Persons versus Public Someones: Class, Gender, and Politics in England, 1780-1850," in C. Steedman, C. Urwin, V. Walkerdine, eds.; Language, Gender, and Childhood (London, 1985), pp. 10 ff.; J. B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revollllion (lthaca, 1988). 21. C. Pateman, "The Fraternal Social Contract," in J. Keane, ed., Civil Society and the State (London, 1988), p. 105. The same point is made by A. W. Gouldner, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology (New York, 1976), p. 103: "The integration of the patriarch-
ical family system with a system of private property was the fundamental grounding of the private; a sphere that did not routinely have to give an accounting of itself, by providing either information about its conduct or judification for it. Private property and patriarchy were thus indirectly the grounding for the public."
29. R. Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London, 1974); R. Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London, 1983); D. l'rokop, ed., Medimforschung, vol. 1, Konzerne, Macher, Kontrollettre (Frankfun, 1985). 30. See W. R. Langenbucher, ed., Zur Theorie der politischen Kommunikotion (Munich, 1974). 31. J. Habermas, L. v. Friedeburg, C. Oler, and F. Weltz, Student und Politik (Neuwied, 1961). 32. The Civic Cullure: Political Altitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, 1963). Also see G. Almond, S. Veba, eds., The Civic Culture Revisited (Boston, 1980). 33. See, however, R. N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart (Berkeley, 1985). 34." See, for example, S. H. Barnes, Max Kaase, eds., Political Action: Mass Participation in Fitte Westem Democracies (Beverly Hills, 1979).
35. See the anniversary issue "Ferment in the Field," Journal of Gommwrimticm 33 (1983). For this reference my thanks go to Rolf Megersohn, who himself has been active for decades in the fields of the sociology of mass media and of mass culture. 31i. A summary of results is provided by J. T. Klapper, The Effects of MtL5S Comrmmicaticm (Glencoe, 1960). 37. T. Gitlin, "Media Sociology: The Dominant Paradigm," Theory and Society 6 (1978): 205-253. For a response, see the rebuttal by E. Katz, "Communication Research since Lazarsfeld," Public Opinion Quarterly, Winter 1987, 25-45.
22. E. W. Bockenforde, "Die Bedeutung der Unterscheidung von Staat und Gesellschaft im demokratischen Sozialstaat der Gegenwart," trans. in E. W. BockenfOrde, State, Society and Liberty: Studies in Political Tlreory and Constitutional Law (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991 ).
38. C. Lodziak, The Power of Television (London, 1986).
23. D. Grim m, Recht un Staat der burgerlichen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1987).
Instructive from the point of view of society as a whole is C. Calhoun, "Populist Politics, Communications Media, and Large Scale Societal Integration," Social Theory 6 (1988): 219-241.
24. J. Habermas, "Die klassische Lehre von der Politik in ihrem Verhaltnis zur Sozialphilosophie," also "Naturrecht und Revolution," both trans. inj. Habermas, Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973). In addition, see J. Keane, "Despotism and Democracy: The Origins and Development of the Distinction between Civil Society and the State, 1750-1850," in Keane, Civil Society and the State, pp. 35 IT.
39. T. Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching (Berkeley, 1983); H. Gans, Deciding What's News (New York, 1979). A survey is provided by G. Tuckmann, "Mass Media Institutions," in N. Smelser, ed., Handbook of Sociology (New York, 1988), pp. 601-625.
40. S. Hall, "Encoding and Decoding in the TV-Discourse," in S. Hall, ed., Culture, Media, Language (London, 1980), pp. 128-138; D. Morley, Family Television (London, 1988).
25. E. Forsthoff, ed., Rechtsstaatliclrkeit und Sozialstaatlichkeit (Darmstadt, 1968).
41. N. Bobbio, The Future of Democracy (Oxford, 1987).
26. E. Forsthoff, "Begriff und Wesen des sozialen Rechtsstaates"; E. R. Huber, "Rechtsstaat und Sozialstaat in der modernen lndustriegesellschaft"; both contained in Forsthoff, Rechtsslaatlichkeit und Sozialstaatlichkeit, pp. 165 ff. and 589 ff.
42. For a critique of Marx's concept of ideology, see J. Keane, Democracy and Civil Society: On the Predicaments of European Socialism (London, 1988), pp. 213 ff. 43. S. Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia (New York, 1987).
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44. J. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989).
62. Keane, Democracy and Civil Society (1988), p. 14. 63. C. Offe, in Honneth et al. Zwischenbetrachtungen, p. 758.
45. J. Habermas, "Historischer Materialismus und die Entwicklung normativer Strukturen," in J. Habermas, Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus {Frankfurt, 1976), pp. 9-48.
64. See the contributions by J. Rupnik, M. Vajda, and Z. A. Pelczynski in Keane, ed., Ciuil Society a11d the State (1988), part 3.
46. A. Honneth, Kritik der Macht {Frankfurt, 1985), pp. 265 ff.
65. A. Arato and J. Cohcn, "Civil Society and Social Theory," Thesis Elevm, no. 21 (1988), pp. 40-67; Arato and Cohen, "Politics and the Reconstruction of the Concept of Civil Society," in Honneth et al., Zwischenbetrachtungen, pp. 482-503.
47. Sec my Reply to objections in A. Honneth and H. Joas, eds., Kommunikativts Handeln {Frankfurt, 1986), 377 ff.
66. J. Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place {Oxford, 1985). 48. See my interview with H. P. Kriiger in J. Habermas, Die .nacholemle Revolution, pp. 82 IT. 49. U. Preusss, "Was· heiOt radikale Demokratie heute?" in Forum fiir Philosophic, ed., Die ldeen von 1789 {Frankfurt, 1989), pp. 47-67. 50. B. Manin, "On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation," Political Theory 15 {1987): 351 ff. Manin's explicit reference is not to Structural Transformation but to "Legitimationsprobleme" (see note 36, p. 367). 51. J. Cohen, "Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy," in A Hamlin, P. Pettit, eds., The Good Polity (Oxford, 1989), pp. 12-24. Cohen too refers not to Structural Transformation but to three of my later publications (in English) (see note 13, p. 33). 52. K. Giinther, Der Sinn filr Angemessenheit {Frankfurt, 1987). 53. See K.-0. Ape!, Diskurs und Verantwortung (Frankfurt, 1988). 54. J. Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975); J. Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). 55. J. Habermas, "Towards a Communication Concept of Rational Collective WillFormation," Ratio juris 2 {1989): 144-154. 56. See my "Law and Morality," pp. 246 ff. 57. The paraphrase is based on R. E. Goodin, "Laundering Preferences," inJ. Elster and A. Hylland, eds., Foundations of Sociol Science Theory (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 75101. C. Offe develops this consideration in his ingenious essay "Bindung, Fessel, Bremse: Die Uniibersichtlichkeit von Selbstbeschriikungsformeln," in A. Honneth, T. McCarthy, C. Offe, A. Wellmer, Zwischenbetrachtungen (Frankfurt, 1989), pp. 739-775.
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58. C. Offe and U. K. Preuss, "Can Democratic Institutions Make ·Efficient Use of Moral Resources?" manuscript. 59. J. Habermas, "Volkssouveriinitl!t als Verfahren: Ein normativer Begriff der Offentlichkeit?" in Die Jdeen von 1789 (1989), pp. 7-36. 60. U. Rode!, G. Frankenberg, and H. Dubiel, Die demokratische Frage {Frankfurt, 1989), chapter 4. 61. Offe, in Honneth et·al., Zwischenbetrachtungen, p. 755.
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The Political Economy of the Media Il 144 Michael Schudson
[9] Was There Ever a Public Sphere? If So, When? Reflections on the American Case Michael Schudson
Critiques of American politics and culture are sometimes posed as if contemporary life represents a decline from some great and golden age. Christopher Lasch, for instance, bemoans "the transformation of politics from a central component of popular culture.into a spectator sport." What once existed but has been lost, in Lasch's view, is "the opportunity to exercise the virtues associated with deliberation and participation in public debate." What we are seeing is "the atrophy of these virtues in the common people-judgment, prudence, eloquence, courage, self-reliance, resourcefulness, common sense." 1 Different images of the good old days appear without consensus about just when the good old days happened. George Anastaplo, among many others, has blamed much of the recent decline on television, and he successively offered two datings of the golden age. First, impressed that people would stand in the hot sun for several hours listening to "tight, tough arguments," he suggests the Lincoln-Douglas debates as a contrast to the TV era. He argues that the trouble with TV is not only that it fails to inform but also that it deceives people into believing they are informed. In contrast, "a generation ago"-not, I note, an era when people listened to hours of tight, tough argument in any forum-"you would know that if you had not read certain things, you were not able to talk about issues properly, and you might defer to those who had taken the trouble to inform themselves." 2
If liberals see atrophy, so too do conservatives. Allan Bloom is the most celebrated to discuss a straight-line decline of civility in an age characterized by lack of character, lack of seriousness, lack of discipline, lack of nerve by those in positions of authority, the advance of a superficial and relativistic democratic ethos ultimately inimical to a good society. Both liberals and conservatives often see television as the cause, or at any rate the chief symptom, of the decline of a public sphere. It is an almost reflexlike, parenthetical explanatory catchall, as in the claim of New York Times media and politics reporter Michael Orcskes that "the first generation raised with tele~ision is a generation that participates less in the democracy than any . before it.":1 In fact, Oreskes is referring to the second generation raised with television, not the first, and he is wrong that it participates less in the democracy than any before it. Voting rates were just as miserable in 1920 as in 1984, and were worse in the 1790s. But let me offer as the main foil for this discussion an observation in the very important and influential research of American political scientist Waiter Dean Burnham. In a 1974 essay he offers the example of the Lincoln-Douglas debates as evidence of the character of the mid nineteenth century American voter. He infers, from the fact that rational campaigners seekit~g election would engage in what seem to us unusually sophisticated and erudite debates on national issues before rural publics and the fact that party newspapers with similar rational inclinations to advance the interests of their candidates would reprint these debates in their entirety,. that mid~nineteenth century voters were literate, attentive, and interested in issues of transcendent importance. 4 Are these safe inferences to make? I do not think so. Burnham himself all but declares them faulty in his next paragraphs. For he goes on to hold that nineteenth-century American politics was characterized by what he terms "political confessionalism." That is, mid-nineteenth-century Americans were devoutly attached to political parties. They tended to live in "island communities" surrounded by other people like themselves. Ethnic and religious communities provided the basis for political allegiances and very often were closely connected to
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the ideological content of political parties. 5 Political campaigns were, in a sense, more religious revivals and popular entertainments than the settings for rational-critical discussion. It is true that the voters who attended or read of the Lincoln-Douglas debates in their party newspapers were literate. It is true that they attended, but it is not at all apparent what·in those debates they attended to. It is true that they participated, but it is not dear that they were "interested in issues of transcendent importance" (or that even if they were in 1858, a moment of particularly heightened political conflict, this has any bearing on their political interests in 1848 or 1868). A point of comparison may help clarify this. Lawrence Levine has shown that Shakespearean drama was enormously popular in nineteenth-century America. But do we know from this how audiences related to it? No. What Levine's research suggests is that audiences enjoyed Shakespeare because they could read him as a creator of just the sorts of melodramas to which they were most partial. They saw Macbeth or Lear as rugged individualists up against the dangers of time ·and nature, warring against fate with all the larger-than-life energy Americans liked to see on the stage. Audiences saw Shakespeare's plays as a set of moral lessons: Thomas Jefferson saw Lear as a study of the importance of filial duty; Abraham Lincoln saw Macbeth as a study of tyranny and murder; John Quincy Adams saw Othello as a tale cautioning against interracial marriage. In popular American ideology and in the Shakespeare that Americans enjoyed, the individual bore responsibility for his own fate; if he failed, it was only through lack of inner discipline and control. All of these lessons came draped in the kind of expansive oratory that Americans liked in both their theater and their politics. 1; What does this say of Lincoln-Douglas? It reminds us, as does a great deal of contemporm·y literary theory, that what the audience receives from the texts it approaches is not obviously encoded in the texts themselves. Did the Lincoln-Douglas audiences attend the debates because they sought to rationally and critically follow the arguments? Did they attend because they were thinking through the questions of slavery and states' rights? Were they out for a good time? Were they
connoisseurs of oratory who admired the effectiveness of Lincoln and Douglas at skewering each other but lacked much concern for whether their arguments were right or wrong? Did they simply enjoy the spectacle of solitary combat? Had they already made up their political minds and come out only to show support for their man? The longing of contemporary critics of our political culture to stand in the sun for three hours to listen to political speeches is selective. If there is nostalgia for the Lincoln-Douglas debates (not that they left any words, phrases, or ideas anyone can recall), there is no hankering for dramatic readings of Edward Everett's hours-long address at Gettysburg. Instead, it is Abraham Lincoln's sound-bite-length address that has left a lasting impression. (As it happens, not long ago people did listen to literally hours of political address, interspersed with music, at antiwar rallies in the 1960s, If it is any measure, I can say from personal experience that there is a big difference between attending a rally and actually listening to the speeches.) This is not to deny that the Lincoln-Douglas debates were an impressive exercise of democracy. But it is well to remember that they were strikingly unusual even in their own day. The id~a that a public sphere of rational-critical discourse flourished in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, at least in the American instance, is an inadequate, if· not incoherent, notion. Its empirical basis, in the American case, seems to me remarkably thin. When we examine descriptions of what public life was actually like, there is not much to suggest the rationalcritical discussion J iirgen Habermas posits as central to the public sphere. Perhaps more distressing, for some periods there is not much to indicate even very general interest, let alone participation, in public affairs. What I want to focus on in the rest of this paper are two defining features of the political public sphere. First, what is the level of participation in the public sphere: who is legally eligible for political activity and what portion of those eligible actually participate? Second, to what extent is political participation carried out through rational and critical discourse? This is a vital part of the concept of the public sphere as Habermas has presented it. No plebiscitary democracy, for instance,
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would qualify for Habermas as having a functioning public sphere; not only does participation need to be widespread, but it must be rational. One of the great contributions of the concept of a public sphere is that it insists that an ideal democratic polity be defined by features beyond those that formally enable political participation. It is not only the fact of political involvement but its quality that the concept of the public sphere evokes. There are, certainly, other conditions or preconditions of a public sphere, but these two are undoubtedly central, and I will limit my discussion in this paper to these alone. 7 This discussion is inspired by Habermas more than it is directly responsive to his work. That is, I am not engaged in criticizing the historical evidence he adduces for the emergence (and later disintegration) of a public sphere. His historical account concerns European affairs, ~nd I do not presume the American case either confirms or contradicts·European developments. I am concerned with Habermas's model of the public sphere not so much as "a paradigm for analyzing historical change," as Pet~~ Hohendahl put it, but more as "a normative category for political critique.'~8 That is, I think historians should examine a.s a central question of political history the rise or fall, expanSion or contraction (the appropriate metaphor is not clear) of a public sphere or, more generally, what the conditions have been in different periods that encourage or discourage public participation in politics and public involvement in rationalcritical discussion of politics.
franchise as a reasonable, though certainly incomplete, index of inclusion in the political world but also what percentages of those groups actually exercise their political rights. Contemporary commentators regularly observe that present voting participation rates are significantly lower than they were in the mid nineteenth century. This is so. There was a sharp decline in voter turnout from the 1880s to a low in the 1920s; during the New Deal and after, voting rates increased, but there has been a striking decline again from 1960 to the present. This should be viewed, however, in the longer perspective of American history. Jane Mansbridge found in her study of a New England town meeting in the 1970s that only some 35 percent of eligible voters turned out to this archetype of democratic decision making. How did this compare, she asked, to the New England town meetings of. the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? In Dedham, Massachusetts, where records are quite complete for the mid seventeenth century, attendance varied. From 1636 to 1644, 74 percent of eligible voters typically attended meeting. While this turnout is much higher than in town meetings today, its significance is mitigated by the fact that every inhabitant lived within one mile of the meeting place, there were fiJ?.es for lateness to town meeting or absence from town meeting, a town crier visited the house of every latecomer or absentee half an hour into the meeting, and only some sixty men were eligible in the first place. In Sudbury, a town that did not impose fines, attendance averaged 46 percent in the 1650s. In many towns for which we have good evidence, attendance in the eighteenth century was lower still. Mansbridge estimates that 20 to 60 percent of·potential voters attended meeting in eighteenth-century Massachusetts. The figures for the nineteenth century are similar except for periods of particularly intense conflict, when turnout rose to as high as 75 percent. In the town she studied, ninteenth-century attendance was 30 to ·35 percent while in the current period it is around 25 percent or as high as 66 percent in times of special conflict. 9 John Adams told a friend while visiting Worcester in 1755, "This whole town is immersed in politics.'' Yet as historian Robert Zemsky concludes, "The average provincial seldom en-
1 Citizen Participation in Politics The more people participate as citizens in politics, the closer one comes to the ideal of a public sphere. By this criterion, in American history the period since 1865 is an improvement upon all prior periods, with the enfranchisement of Negroes; the period since 1920 is better than any prior period, with the enfranchisement of women; and the period since 1965 is better still with the civil rights laws that made the Fifteenth Amendment a substantial reality. But the question is not only what segments of the population are legally eligible to participate in politics (I am taking the
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gaged in political activity. He had little desire to hold office; his attendance at town meetings and participation in provincial elections was sporadic; and when he did join in political campaigns, he rarely lent more than his moral support to the cause." 10 In revolutionary America, 10 to 15 percent of white adult males voted at the beginning of the Revolution, 20 to 40 percent during the 1780s. 11 In Massachusetts the first Congressional elections of 1788 and 1790 brought out 13 percent and 16 percent of eligible voters. The high point of turnout in state elections in the decade came in 1787 after the "near civil war" of Shays Rebellion-a 28 percent turnout. 12 In eighteenth-century New England, the most democratic culture in colonial North America, p~ople participated in politics occasionally at best. "Apathy prevailed among citizens until they perceived a threat to their immediate interests," according to historian Ronald Formisano's analysis of eighteenth-century Massachusetts. 13 The nineteenth century, before party mobilization began in the 1840s, was no better. "In the 1820s the vast majority of citizens had lost interest in politics. They had never voted much in presidential elections anyway, and now they involved themselves only sporadically in state and local affairs."14 There is not much to be said in favor of any time in America's past before the 1840s in terms of political participation and political interest. William Gienapp characterizes American political life before the 1820s as follows: "Previously deference to social elites and mass indifference characterized the nation's politics; despite suffrage laws sufficiently liberal to allow mass participation, few men were interested in politics, and fewer still actively participated in political affairs. Politics simply did not seem important to most Americans." 15 With the rise of mass-based political parties in the Jacksonian era, political participation took a new turn. Voting rates shot up dramatically. For example, the percentage of the potential electorate that voted in Connecticut was 8 percent in 1820 and 15 percent in 1824.. By 1832 this rose to 46 percent and by 1844 to 80 percent. 16 Turnout figures of around 80 percent were common outside the South until the turn of the century, when they began to d.ecline, reaching a lower point in the 1920s than at any time since before Andrew Jackson. If we take voter
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turnout as the measure (and it seems to me a good one), there is no question that in terms of political participation, there was a golden age of American political culture, the period from 1840 to 1900. This period, then, merits close consideration. What was the character of political culture in this period? What was the nature of political discourse? What features of the era supported mass political involvement? And was this involvement or a type or quality we might reasonably long for, or at least learn from, today? 2 Rational-Critical Political Discourse It is difficult enough to know voter turnout rates for the nineteenth century. To try to learn how eighteenth- or nineteenthcentury voters conceived of politics, came to political views, and arrived at political choices and actions is substantially harder. There is so much here we would need to know and that we never will know in any complete way. Did people talk about politics in their homes? Was the talk of politics at taverns or coffeehouses "rational-critical," or was it gossipy, incidental background to sociability rather than its center? What connection did people feel to politics? Was voting a proud act of citizenship or a deferential act of social obligation to community notables? When people read about politics, what did they look for? What frameworks of meaning did they possess for absorbing new information? Did they have coherent ideologies or patchwork sets of beliefs with little connection among the pieces? None of this is easy to discover. Still, there are some important clues available. For purposes of exposition, I will distinguish between the internal resources of citizens for participation in political discourse and the external resources available for their use-specifically, parties, the press, and electoral procedures. Internal Resources of Citizens American colonists of the eighteenth century were not well read. If they owned a book at all, it was the Bible. If they owned a second book, it was likely to be a collection of sermons
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or possibly John Bunyan's Christian allegory, Pilgrim's Progress, or some other religious work. Where we have comprehensive inventories of communities, even in New England 50 to 70 percent of households owned no books at all. The most active bookseller in Virginia in the mid eighteenth century sold books to 250 customers a year in a colony with a white population of 130,000.17 In New England, where literacy rates were somewhat higher than elsewhere in the colonies, popular reading was severely restricted and was almost exclusively religious. Works of science or literature reached only a small audience made up almost entirely of the very small group of people who were college graduates. 18 The one class of deeply literate people, the clergy, almost exclusively read religious literature and played relatively minor roles ·(judging, for instance, from their insignificance at the Constitutional Convention) in the great political debates of their time. 19 That Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson read widely in contemporary philosophy is not a trait they shared with many contemporaries. That Franklin read books at all was itself a social calling card; he reports in his autobiography that when he first journeyed to Philadelphia, he met a physician at an inn who "finding I had read a little" became sociable and friendly. Readers were relatively rare birds, not participants in a broad, ongoing, and institutionalized rationalcritical discourse. The best-seller success of Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense in 1776 was due, in Paine's own estimation, not only to its being issued at a time of intense political conflict but also to its being addressed to the common republican reader. Political pamphlet literature in the colonies was ordinarily addressed to the small, educated elite and was written in a florid style full of classical references that had meaning only to a few. Paine purged his writing of the classics, used as reference primarily the Biblical tradition, and sought "language as plain as the alphabet." 20 In the nineteenth century the intellectual resources of the population expanded. Literacy shifted from being intensive to being extensive, schooling became much more accessible, and the secularization ofculture, along with the democratization of religion, spread a wider range of ideas to more and more
people. This is not to say that the growth of literacy and the growing market for printed literature, including political li~- . erature, was necessarily a force for liberation at each moment. Hvernment for the primary benefit of advertisers. Such benefit as is derived by advertisers must be incidental and entirely secondary to the interest of the public. The same question arises in another connection. Where the station is used for the broadcasting of a considerable amount of what is called "direct advertising," including the quoting of merchandise prices, the advertising is usually offensive to the listening public. Advertising should be only incidental to some real service rendered to the public, and not the main object of a program. The commission realizes that in some .communities, particularly in the State of Iowa, there seems to exist a strong sentiment in favor of such advertising on the part of the listening public. At least the broadcasters in that community have succeeded in maki~g an impressive demonstration before the commission on each occasion when the matter has come up for discussion. The commission is not fully convinced that it has heard both sides of the matter, but is willing to concede that in some localities the quoting of direct merchandise prices may serve as a sort of local market, and in that community a service may thus be
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rendered. That such is not the case generally, however, the commission knows from thousands and thousands of letters which it has had from all over the country complaining of.such practices. Another question which must be taken seriously is the location of the transmitter of the station. This is properly a question of interference. Generally speaking, it is not in the public interest, convenience, or necessity for a station of substantial power (500 wa~ts or more) to be located in the midst or a thickly inhabited community. The question of the proper location of a station with respect to its power is a complicated one and can not here be discussed in detail. Obviously it is desirable that a station serving a particular community or region should cover that community or region with a signal strong enough to constitute adequate service. It is also desirable that the ~ignal be not so strong as to blanket reception from other stations operating on other frequencies. There is a certain amount of blanketing in the vicinity of every transmitter, even one of 5, 10, or 50 watts. The frequencies used by stations in the same geographical region can be widely enough sepanited, however, so that the blanketing will not be serious from a transmitter of less than 500 watts, even when located in a thickly inhabited community. With stations of that amount of power, or greater, the problem becomes a serious one. In order to serve the whole of a large metropolitan area a 500-watt !:tation has barely sufficient power even when it is located in the center· of the area. If its transmitter is located away from the thickly inhabited portions and out in the country it will not give satisfactory service. Such an area can only be adequately served, without blanketing, by stations of greater power locatedin sparsely settled portions of the near-by country. Theoretically, therefore, it may be said that it will not serve public interest,. convenience, or necessity to permit the location of a low-powered station in a large city. It can not hope to serve the entire city, and yet it renders the frequency useless for the listeners of the city outside of the small area immediately surrounding the station. On the other hand, such a station might give very good service to a small town or city. The commission is furthermore convinced that in applying the test of public interest, convenience, or necessity, it may consider the character of the licensee or applicant, his financial responsibility, andhis past record, in order to determine whether he is more or less likely to fulftll the trust imposed by the license than others who are seeking the same privilege from the same community, State, or zone. A word of warning must be given to those broadcasting (of which there have been all too many) who consume much of the valuable time allotted to them under their licenses in matters of a distinctly private nature, which are not only uninteresting but also distasteful to the listening public. Such is the case where two rival broadcasters in the same community spend their time in abusing each other over the air.
The Political Economy of the Media 11 FRC Interpretation of the Public Interest
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A station which does not operate on a regular schedule made known to the public through announcements in the press or otherwise is not rendering a service which meets the test of the law. If the radio listener does not know whether or not a particular station is broadcasting, or what its program will be, but must rely on the whim of the broadcaster and on chance in tuning his dial at the proper time, the service is not such as to justify the commission in licensing such a broadcaster as against one who will give a regular service of which the public is properly advised. A fortiori, where a licensee does not use his transmitter at all and broadcasts his programs, if at all, over some other transmitter separately licensed, he is not rendering any service. It is also improper that the zone and State in which his station is located should be charged with a license under such conditions in connection with the quota of that zone and that State under the Davis amendment. A broadcaster who is not sufficiently concerned with the public's interest in good radio reception to provide his transmitter with an adequate control or check on its frequency is not entitled to a license. The commission in allowing a latitude of 500 cycles has been very lenient and will necessarily have to reduce this margin in the future. Instability in frequency means that the radio-listening public is subjected to increased interference by heterodyne (and, in some cases, cross-talk) on adjacent channels as well as on the assigned channels. In conclusion, the commission desires to point out that the test - "public interest, convenience, or necessity" - becomes a matter of a comparative and not an absolute standard when applied to broadcasting stations. Since the number of channels is limited and the number of persons desiring to broadcast is far greater than can be accommodated, the commission must determine from among the applicants before it which of them will, if licensed, best serve the public. In a measure, perhaps, all of them give more or less service. Those who give the least, however, must be sacrificed for those who give the most. The emphasis must be first and foremost on the interest, the convenience, and the necessity of the listening public, and not on the interest, convenience, or necessity of the individual broadcaster or the advertiser.
Related Reading
106. Holt, Darrel, "The Origin of 'Public Interest' in Broadcasting," Educational Broadcasting Review, 1, No. 1 (October 1967), 15-19. 131. Le Due, Don R., and Thomas A. McCain, 'The Federal Radio Commission in Federal Court: Origins of Broadcast Regulatory Doctrines," Journal of Broadcasting, 14, No. 4 (Fall 1970), 393-410.
The Political Economy of the Media II The Great Lakf!$ Statement
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The Great Lakes statement also contains the germ of what was promulgated as the "Fairness Doctrine" 20 years later (see Document 22, pp. 217-231). lt is clear that by 1929 the FRC had come to view advertising as the economic backbone of broadcasting and was prepared to accept it as an inevitability, within bounds. The last sentence of the statement alludes to listeners' councils, which were the forerunners of the citizens groups of today.
[14]
The Great Lakes Statement
Related Reading: 106,118,131,187.
In the Matter of the Application of Great Lakes Broadcasting Co. FRC Docket No. 4900 3 FRC Ann. Rep. 32 (1929) The FRC reconstructed its interpretation of the public interest in this early comparative hearing proceeding. The reformulation was unaffected by a court remand [Great Lakes Broadcasting Company eta/. v.Federal Radio Commission, 37 F.2d 993 (D.C. Cir. 1930); cert. dismissed 281 U.S. 706]. The 1927 Radio Act's "public interest, convenience, or necessity" phrase was derived from public utility law. The Great Lakes statement gives detailed treatment to the contention that although broadcasting was a type of utility, radio stations were not to be thought of as common carriers. This principle was given legislative affirmation in 1934 when Section 3(h) was included in the Communications Act. The statement is noteworthy for its emphasis on the requirement that radio stations carry diverse and balanced programming to serve the "tastes, needs, and desires" of the general public. This has been an underlying premise of subsequent FCC programming pronouncements, including the currently applied 1960 statement (see Document 26, pp. 262-278). Although the force of this principle has been moderated with respect to the vastly expanded AM and FM radio services, its vigor remains unabated for television broadcasting. 56
... Broadcasting stations are licensed to serve the public and not for the purpose of furthering the private or selfish interests of individuals or groups of individuals. The standard of public interest, convenience, or necessity means nothing if it does not mean this. The only exception that can be made to this rule has to do with advertising; the exception, however, is only apparent because advertising furnishes the economic support for the service and thus makes it possible. As will be pointed out below, the amount and character ofadve~tising must be rigidly confined within the limits consistent with the public service expected of the station. The service to be rendered by a station may be viewed from two angles, {I) as an instrument for the communication of intelligence of various kinds to the general public by persons wishing to transmit such intelligence, or (2) as an instrument for the purveying of intangible commodities consisting of entertainment, instruction, education, and information to a listening public. As an instrument for the communication of intelligence, a broadcasting station has frequently been compared to other forms of communication, such as wire telegraphy or telephony, or point-to-point wireless telephony or telegraphy, with the obvious distinction that the messages from a broadcasting station are addressed to and received by the general public, whereas toll messages in point-to-point service are addressed to single persons and attended by safeguards to preserve their confidential nature. If the analogy were pursued with the usual legal incidents, a broadcasting station would have to accept and transmit for all persons on an equal basis without discrimination in charge, and according to rates fixed by a governmental body; this obligation would extend to anything and everything any member of the public might desire to communicate to the listening public, whether it consist of music, propaganda, reading, advertising, or what-not. The public would be deprived of the advantage of the self-imposed censorship exercised by the program directors of broadcasting stations who, for the sake of the popularity and standing of their stations, will select entertainment and educational features according to the needs and desires of their invisible audiences. In the present state of the art there is no way of increasing the number of stations without great injury to the listening public, and yet
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thousands of stations might be necessary to accommodate all the individuals who insist on airing their views through the microphone. If there are many such persons, as there undoubtedly are, the results would be, first, to crowd most or all of the better programs off the air, and second, to create an almost insoluble problem, i.e., how to choose from among an excess of applicants who shall be given time to address the public and who shall exercise the power to make such a choice. To pursue the analogy of telephone and telegraph public utilities is, therefore, to emphasize the right of the sender of messages to the detriment of the listening public. The commission believes that such an analogy is a mistaken one when applied to broadcasting stations; the emphasis should be on the receiving of service and the standard of public interest, convenience or necessity should be construed accordingly. This point of view does not take broadcasting stations out of the category of public utilities or relieve them of corresponding obligations; it simply assimilates them to a different group of public utilities, i.e., those engaged in purveying commodities to the general public, such, for example, as heat, water, light, and power companies, whose duties are to consumers, just as the duties of broadcasting stations are to listeners. The commodity may be intangible but so is electric light; the broadcast program has become a vital part of daily life. Just as heal, water, light, and power companies use franchises obtained from city or State to bring their commodities through pipes, conduits, or wires over public highways to the home, so a broadcasting station uses a franchise from the Federal Government to bring its commodity over a channel through the ether to the home. The Government does not try to tell a public utility such as an electric-light company that it must obtain its materials such as coal or wire, from all corners on equal terms; it is not interested so long as the service rendered in the form of light is good. Similarly, the commission believes that the Government is interested mainly in seeing to it that the program service of broadcasting stations is good, i.e., in accordance with the standard of public interest, convenience, or necessity. · It may be said that the law has already written an exception into the foregoing viewpoint in that, by section 18 of the radio act of 1927, a broadcasting station is required to afford equal opportunities for use of the station to all candidates for a public office if it permits any of the candidates to use the station. It will be noticed, however, that in the same section it is provided that "no obligation is hereby imposed upon any licensee to allow the use of its station by any such candidate." This is not only not inconsistent with, but on the contrary it supports, the commission's viewpoint. Again the emphasis is on the listening public, not on the sender of the message. It would not be fair, indeed it would not be good service to the public to allow a one-sided presentation of the political issues of a campaign. In so far as a program consists of discussion of public questions, public interest requires ample play for the free and fair competition of opposing views, and the commission believes that the principle applies not only to addresses by political candidates but to all
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discussions of issues of importance to the public. The great majority of broadcasting stations are, the commission is glad to ·say, already tacitly recognizing a broader duty than the law imposes upon them .... An indispensable condition to good service by any station is, of course, rrodern efficient:apparatus, equipped with all devices necessary to insure fidelity in the transmission of voice and music and to avoid frequency instability or other causes of interference .... There are a few negative guides to the evaluation of broadcasting stations. First of these in importance are the injunctions of the statute itself, such, for example, as the requirement for nondiscrimination between political candidates and the prohibition against the utterance of "any obscene, indecent, or profane language" (sec. 29). In the same connection may be mentioned rules and regulations of the commission, including the requirements as to the announcing of call letters am as to the accurate description of mechanical reproductions (such as phonograph records) in announcements .... For more positive guides the commission again finds itself persuaded of the applicability of doctrines analogous to those governing the group of public utilities to which reference has already been made. If the viewpoint is found that the service to the listening public is what must be kept in contemplation in construing the legal standard with reference to broadcasting stations, the service must first of all be continuous during hours when the public usually listens, and must be on a schedule upon which the public may rely .... Furthermore, the service rendered by broadcasting stations must be without discrimination as between its listeners. Obviously, in a strictly physical sense, a station can not discriminate so as to furnish its programs to one listener and not to another;. in this respect it is a public utility by virtue of the laws of nature. Even were it technically possible, as it may easily be as the art progresses, so to design both transmitters and receiving sets that the signals emitted by a particular transmitter can be received only by a particular kind of receiving set not available to the general public, the commission would not allow channels in the broadcast band to be used in such fashion. By the same token, it is proceeding very cautiously in permitting television in the broadcast band because, during the hours of such transmission, the great majority of the public audience in the service area of the station, not being equipped to receive television signals, are deprived of the use of the channel. TI1erc is, however, a deeper significance to the principle of nondiscrimination which the commission believes may well furnish the basic formula for the evaluation of broadcasting stations. The entire listening public wilhin I he service area of a station, or of a group of stations in one community, is entitled to service from that station or stations. If, therefore, all the programs lransmilted are intended for, and interesting or valuable to, only a small portion of that public, the rest of the listeners are being discriminated against. This does not mean that every individual is entitled to his exact preference in program items. ll does mean, in the opinion of the commission, that the tastes, needs, and desires
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of all substantial groups among the listening public should be met, in some fair proportion, by a well-rounded program, in which entertainment, consisting of music of both classical and lighter grades, religion, education and instruction, important public events, discussions of public questions, weather, market reports, and news, and matters of interest to all members of the family find a place. With so few channels in the spectrum and so few hours in the day, there are obvious limitations on the emphasis which can appropriately be placed on any portion of the program. There are parts of the day and of the evening when one type of service is more appropriate, than another. There are differences between communities as to the need for one type as against another. The commission does not propose to erect a rigid schedule specifying the hours or minutes that may be devoted to one kind of program or another. What it wishes to emphasize is the general character which it believes must be conformed to by a station in order to best serve the public .... In such a scheme there is no room for the operation of broadcasting stations exclusively by or in the private interests of individuals or groups so far as the nature of the programs is concerned. There is not room in the broadcast band for every school of thought, religious, political, social, and economic, each to have its separate broadcasting station, its mouthpiece in the ether. If franchises are extended to some it gives them an unfair advantage over others, and results in a corresponding cutting down of general public-service stations. It favors the interests and desires of a portion of the listening public at the expense of the rest. Propaganda stations (a term which is here used for the sake of convenience and not in a derogatory sense) are not consistent with the most beneficial sort of discussion of public questions. As a general rule, postulated on the laws of nature as well as on the standard of public interest, convenience, or necessity, particular doctrines, creeds, and beliefs must find their way into the market of ideas by the existing public-service stations, and if they are of sufficient importance to the listening public the microphone will undoubtedly be available. If it is not, a well-founded complaint will receive the careful consideration of the commission in its future action with reference to the station complained of. The contention may be made that propaganda stations are as well able as other stations to accompany their messages with entertainment and other program features of interest to the public. Even if this were true, the fact remains that the station is used for what is essentially a private purpose for a substantial portion of the time and in addition, is constantly subject to the very human temptation not to be fair to opposing schools of thought and their representatives. By and large, furthermore, propaganda stations do not have the financial resources nor do they have the standing and popularity with the public necessary to obtain the best results in programs of general interest. The contention may also be made that to follow out the commission's viewpoint is to make unjustifiable concessions to what is popular at the expense of what is
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important and serious. This bears on a consideration which the commission realizes must always be kept carefully in mind and in so far as it has power under the law it will do so in its reviews of the records of particular stations. A defect, if there is any, however, would not be remedied by a one-sided presentation of a controversial subject, no matter how serious. The commission has great confidence in the sound judgment of the listening public, however, as to what types of programs are in its own best interest. If the question were now raised for the first time, after the commission has given careful study to it, the commission would not license any propaganda station, at least, to an exclusive position on a cleared channel. Unfortunately, under the law in force prior to the radio act of 1927 (see particularly Hoover v. Intercity Rad.io Co., 286 Fed. 1003), the Secretary of Commerce had no power to distinguish between kinds of applicants and it was not possible to foresee the present situation and its problems. Consequently there are and have been for a long time in existence a number of stations operated by religious or similar organizations. Certain enterprising organizations, quick to see the possibilities of radio and anxious to present their creeds to the public, availed themselves of license privileges from the earlier days of broadcasting, and now have good records and a certain degree of popularity among listeners. The commission feels that the situation must be dealt with on a common-sense basis. It does not ~eem just to deprive such stations of all right to operation and the question must be solved on a comparative basis. While the commission is of the opinion that a broadcasting station engaged in general public service has, ordinarily, a claim to preference over a propaganda station, it will apply this principle as to existing stations by giving preferential facilities to the former and assigning less desirable positions to the latter to the extent that engineering principles permit. In. rare cases it is possible to combine a general public-service station and a high-class religious station in a division of time which will approximate a well-rounded program. In other cases religious stations must accept part time on inferior channels or on daylight assignments where they are still able to transmit during the hours when religious services are usually expected by the listening public. It may be urged that the same reasoning applies to advertising. In a sense this is true. The commission must, however, recognize that, without advertising, broadcasting would not exist, and must confine itself to limiting this advertising in amount and in character so as to preserve the largest possible amount of service for the public. The advertising must, of course, be presented as such and not under the guise of other forms on the same principle that the newspaper must not present advertising as news. It will be recognized and accepted for what it is on suCh a basis, whereas propaganda is difficult to recognize. If a rule against advertising were enforced, the public would be deprived of millions of dollars worth of programs which are being given out entirely by concerns simply for the resultant good will which is believed to accrue to the broadcaster or the advertiser by the announcement of his name and business in connection with
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programs. Advertising must be accepted for the present as the sole means of support for broadcasting, and regulation must be relied upon to prevent the abuse and overuse of the privilege. It may be urged that if what has heretofore been said is law, the listening public is left at the mercy of the broadcaster. Even if this were so, the commission doubts that any iJ:nprovement would be effected by placing the public at the mercy of each individual in turn who desired to communicate his hobby, his theory, or his grievance over the microphone, or at the mercy of every advertiser without regard to the standing either of himself or his product. That it is not so, however, is demonstrable from two considerations. In the first place, the listener has a complete power of censorship by turning his dial away from a program which he does not like; this results in a keen appreciation by the broadcaster of the necessity of pleasing a large portion of his listeners· if he is to hold. his audience, and of not .displeasing, annoying, or offending the sensibilities of any substantial portion of the public. His failure or success is immediately reflected on the telephone and in the mail, and he knows that the same reaction to his programs will reach the licensing authority. In the second place, the licensing authority will have occasion, both in connection with renewals of his license and in connection with applications of others for his. privileges, to review his past performances and to determine whether he has met with the standard. A safeguard which some of the leading stations employ, and which appeals to the commission as a wise precaution, is the association with the station of an advisory board made up of men and women whose character, standing, and occupations will insure a well-rounded program best calculated to serve the greatest portion of the population in the region to be served.
Related Reading 106. Holt, Darrel, 'The Origin of 'Public Interest' in Broadcasting," Educational Broadcasting Review, 1, No. 1 (October 1967), 15-19. 118. Kahn, Frank J., 'The Quasi-Utility Basis for Broadcast Regulation," Journal of Broadcasting, 18, No.3 (Summer 1974), 259-276. 131. Le Due, Don R., and Thomas A. McCain, 'The Federal Radio Commission in Federal Court: Origins of Broadcast Regulatory Doctrines," Journal of Broadcasting, 14, No. 4 (Fall 1970), 393-410. 187. Rosenbloom, Joel, "Authority of the Federal Communications Commission" in Freedom and Responsibilty in Broadcasting, ed., John E. Coons. ' Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1961.
[15]
The ''Vast Wasteland'' Address by Newton N. Minow to the National Association of Broadcasters, Washington, D.C. * May 9, 1961 Newton N. Minow served only 28 months as FCC Ch~irman but no commissioner before or since matched his impa~t on' the general p~blic and broadcasting. A Chicago lawyer and associate of Adlai E. Stevenson, Minow was named to the Commission early in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy. He resigned in the middle of 1963 to take a more lucrative legal position in private industry. This speech alarmed broadcasters, made newspaper headlines, and evoked favorable public response and comment in the print media. It signaled the. start of a new regulatory activism and an end to the corruption that riddled the FCC in the closing years of the Eisenhower administration, when two commissioners (including a ch'!irman) were forced to resign because of their scandalous dealings with some of the broadcasters they were supposed to regulate. Some aspects of Minow's regulatory program, outlined in this address, attracted wide support and were realized in the following 2 years. Educational television station construction was given a $32 million boost when Congress passed the "ETV Facilities Act of 1962" (Public Law 87-447, approved May 1, 1962). The prospects for UHF television brightened with enactment of the "All Channel Receiver Law" (Public Law 87-529, approved July 10, 1962) which added Sections 303(s) and 330 to the *Reprinted with permission from Newton N. Minow, Equal Time: The Private Broadcaster and the Public Interest, ed. Lawrence Laurent (New York: Atheneum, 1964 ), pp.48-64. 281
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Communications Act (see pp. 526 and 543). But protection of Pay TV from infanticide and reduction of broadcast advertising excesses were among the regulatory objectives Minow failed to achieve because of his short stay in office and the shifting··regulatory climate following his departure. lt was Minow's outspoken discontent with television programming and his vow to lead the FCC to review broadcast content more closely when acting on license renewals that made broadcasters apprehensive. Anxious not to find out if the Chairman really meant what he said, networks and stations alike attempted to make the "vast wasteland" bloom with more public affairs programs, improved children's offerings, and a de-emphasis on violent action shows. The change proved to be as temporary as Minow's tenure at the FCC. More lasting was the technique of "regulation by raised eyebrow" that Minow used with considerable success in this speech and which his successors have continued to employ in the delicate area of broadcast programming with varied results. Related Reading: 3, 64,127,156,171,187 ,198,238.
Governor Collins, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen: Thank you for this opportunity to meet with you today. This is my fust public address since I took over my new job. When the New Frontiersmen rode into town, I locked myself in my office to do my homework and get my feet wet. But apparently I haven't managed to stay out of hot water. I seem to have detected a certain nervous apprehension about what I might say or do when I emerged from that locked office for this, my maiden station break. First, let me begin by dispelling a rumor. I was not picked for this job because I regard myself as the fastest draw on the New Frontier. Second, let me start a rumor. Like you, I have carefully read President Kennedy's messages about the regulatory agencies, conflict of interest and the dangers of ex parte contacts. And of course, we at the Federal Communications Commission will do our part. Indeed, I may even suggest that we change the name of the FCC to The Seven Untouchables! It may also come as a surpri~e to some of you, but I want you to know that you have my admiration and respect. Yours is a most honorable profession. Anyone who is in the broadcasting business has a tough row to hoe. You earn your bread by using public property. When you work in broadcasting, you volunteer for public service, public pressure and public regulation. You must compete with other attractions and other investments, and the only way you can do it is to
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prove to us every three years that you should have been in business in the first place. I can think ofeasier ways to make a living. But I cannot think of more satisfying ways. I admire your courage-but that doesn't mean I would make life any easier for you. Your license lets you use the public's airwaves as trustees for 180 million Americans. The public is your beneficiary. If you want to stay on as trustees, you must deliver a decent return to the public-not only to your stockholders. So, as a representative of the public, your health and your product are among my chief concerns. As to your health: let's talk only of television today. In 1960 gross broadcast revenues of the television industry were over $1 ,268,000,000; profit before taxes was $243,900,000-an average return on revenue of 19.2 per cent. Compare this with 1959, when gross broadcast revenues were $1,163,900,000, and profit before taxes was $222,300,000, an average return on revenue of 19.1 per cent. So, the percentage increase of total revenues from 1959 to 1960 was 9 per cent, and the percentage increase of profit was 9.7 per cent. This, despite a recession. For your investors, the price has indeed been right. I have confidence in your health. But not in your product. It is with this and much more in mind that I come before you today. One editorialist in the trade press wrote that "the FCC of the New Frontier is going to be one of the toughest FCC's in the history of broadcast regulation." If he meant that we intend to enforce the law in the public interest, let me make it perfectly clear that he is right-we do. If he meant that we intend to muzzle or censor broadcasting, he is dead · wrong. It would not surprise me if some of you had expected me to come here today and say in effect, "Clean up your own house or the government will do it for you." Well, in a limited sense, you would be right-I've just said it. But I want to say to you earnestly that it is not in that spirit that I come before you today, nor is it in that spirit that I intend to serve the FCC. I am in Washington to help broadcasting, not to harm it; to strengthen it, not weaken it; to reward it, not punish it; to encourage it, not threaten it; to stimulate it, not censor it. Above all, I am here to uphold and protect the public interest. What do we mean by ''the public interest"? Some say the public interest is merely what interests the public. I disagree. So does your distinguished president, Governor Collins. In a recent speech he said, "Broadcasting, to serve the public ·interest, must have a soul and a conscience, a burning desire to excel, as well as to sell; the urge to build the charac-
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ter, citizenship and intellectual stature of people, as well as to expand the gross national product. . . . By no means do I imply that broadcasters disregard the public interest. ... But a much better job can be done, and should be done." I could not agree more. And I would add that in today's world, with chaos in Laos and the Congo aflame, with Communist tyranny on our Caribbean doorstep and relentless • pressure on our Atlantic alliance, with social and economic problems at home of the gravest nature, yes, and with technological knowledge that makes it possible, as our President has said, not only to destroy our world but to destroy poverty around the world-in a time of peril and opportunity, the old complacent, unbalanced fare of action-adventure and situation comedies is simply not good enough. Your industry possesses the most powerful voice in America. It has an in· escapable duty to make that voice ring with intelligence and with leadership. In a few years this exciting industry has grown from a novelty to an instrument of overwhelming impact on the American people. It should be making ready for the kind of leadership that newspapers and magazines assumed years ago, to make our people aware of tl).eir world. Ours has been called .the jet age, the atomic age, the space age. It is also, I submit, the television age. And just as history will decide whether the leaders of today's world employed the atom to destroy the world or rebuild it for mankind's benefit, so will history decide whether today's broadcasters employed their powerful voice to enrich the people or debase them. If I seem today to address myself chiefly to the problems of television, I don't want any of you radio broadcasters to think we've gone to sleep at your switch-we haven't. We still listen. But in recent years most of the controversies and crosscurrents in broadcast programing have swirled around television. And so my subject today is the television industry and the public interest. Like everybody, I wear more than one hat. I am the Chairman of the FCC. I am also a television viewer and the husband and father of other television viewers. I have seen a great many television programs that seemed to me eminently worthwhile, and I am not talking about the much-bemoaned good old days of "Playhouse 90" and "Studio One." I am talking about this past season. Some were wonderfully entertaining, such as "The Fabulous Fifties,'' the "Fred Astaire Show" and the "Bing Crosby Special"; some were dramatic and moving, such as Conrad's ''Victory" and "Twilight Zone"; some were marvelously informative, such as "The Nation's Future," "CBS Reports," and "The Valiant Years." I could list many more-programs that I am sure everyone here felt enriched his own life and that of his family. When television is good, nothing-not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers-nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit-arid-loss sheet or rating book to distract
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you-and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland. You will see a procession of game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, Western badmen, Western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence and cartoons. And, endlessly, commercials-many screaming, cajoling and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you will see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, try it. Is there one person in this room who claims that broadcasting can't do better? Well, a glance at next season's proposed programing can give us little heart. Of seventy-three and a half hours of prime evening time, the networks have tentatively scheduled fifty-nine hours to categories of "action-adventure," situation comedy, variety, quiz and movies. Is there one network president in this room who claims he can't do better? Well, is there at least one network president who believes that the other networks can't do better? Gentlemen, your trust accounting with your beneficiaries is overdue. Never have so few owed so much to so many. Why is so much of television so bad? I have heard many answers: demands of your advertisers; competition for ever higher ratings; the need always to attract a mass audience; the high cost of television programs; the insatiable appetite for programing material-:-these are some of them. Unquestionably these are tough problems not susceptible to easy answers. But I am not convinced that you have tried hard enough to solve them. I do not accept the idea that the present over-all programing is aimed accurately at the public taste. The ratings tell us only that some people have their television sets turned on, and of that number, so many are tuned to one channel and so many to another. They don't tell us what the public might watch if they were offered half a dozen additional choices. A rating, at best, is an indication of how many people saw what you gave them. Unfortunately it does not reveal the depth of the penetration, or the intensity of reaction, and it never reveals what the acceptance would have been if what you gave them had been better-if all the forces of art and creativity and daring and imagination had been unleashed. I believe in the people's good sense and good taste, and I am not convinced that the people's taste is as low as some of you assume. My concern with the rating services is not with their accuracy. Perhaps they are accurate. I really don't know. What, then, is wrong with the ratings? It's not been their accuracy-it's been their use. Certainly I hope you will agree that ratings should have little influence where children are concerned. The best estimates indicate that during the hours of 5 to 6 P.M., 60 per cent of your audience is composed of children under twelve. And most young children today, believe it or not, spend as much time watching television as they do in the schoolroom. I repeat-let that sink in-most young chil-
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dren today spend as much time watching television as they do in the schoolroom. It used to be said that there were three great influences on a child: home, school and church. Today there is a fourth great influence, and you ladies and gentlemen control it. If parents, teachers and ministers conducted their responsibilities by following the ratings, children would have a steady diet of ice cream, school holidays and no Sunday School. What about your responsibilities? Is there no room on television to teach, to inform, to uplift, to stretch, to enlarge the capacities of our children? Is there no room for progran1s deepening their understanding of children in other lands? Is there no room for a children's news show explaining something about the world to them at their level of understanding? Is there no room for reading the great literature of the past, teaching them the great traditions of freedom? There are some fme children's shows·, but they are drowned out in the massive doses of cartoons, violence and more violence. Must these be your trademarks? Search your consciences and see if you carmot offer more to your young beneficiaries, whose future you guide so many hours each and every day. What about adult prograrning and ratings? You know, newspaper publishers take popularity ratings too. The answers are pretty clear; it is almost always the comics, followed by the advice-to-the-lovelorn columns. But, ladies and gentlemen, the news is still on the front page of all newspapers, the editorials are not replaced by more comics, the newspapers have not become one long collection of advice to the lovelorn. Yet newspapers do not need a license from the government to be in business-they do not use public property. But in televisionwhere your responsibilities as public trustees are so plain-the moment that the ratings indicate that Westerns are popular, there are new inlitations of Westerns on the air faster than tl1e old coaxial cable could take us from Hollywood to New York. Broadcasting carmot continue to live by the numbers. Ratings ought to be the slave of the broadcaster, not his master. And you and I both know that the rating services themselves would agree. Let me make clear that what I am talking about is balance. I believe that the public interest is made up of many interests. There are many people in this great country, and you must serve all of us. You will get no argument from me if you say that, given a choice between a Western and a symphony, more people will watch the Western. I like Westerns and private eyes too-but a steady diet for the whole country is obviously not in the public interest. We all know that people would more often prefer to be entertained than stimulated or informed.· But your obligations are not satisfied if you look only to popularity as a test of what to broadcast. You are not only in show business; you are free to communicate ideas as well as relaxation. You must provide a wider range of choices, more diversity, more alternatives. It is not enough to cater to the nation's whims-you must also serve the nation's needs. And I would add this-that if some of you persist in a relentless search for the highest rating arid the lowest common denominator, you may very well lose
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your audience. Because, to paraphrase a great Anlerican who was recently my law partner, the people are wise, wiser than some of the broadcasters-and politicians-think. As you may have gathered, I would like to see television improved. But how is this to be brought about? By voluntary action by the broadcasters themselves? By direct government intervention? Or how? Let me address myself now to my role, not as a viewer, but as Chairman of the FCC. I could not if I would chart for you this afternoon in detail all of the actions I contemplate. Instead, I want to make clear some of the fundamental principles which guide me. First: the people own the air. They own it as much in prime evening time as they do at 6 o'clock Sunday morning. For every hour that the people give you,. you owe them something. I intend to see that your debt is paid with service. Second: I think it would be foolish and wasteful for us to continue any worn-out wrangle over the problems of payola, rigged quiz shows, and other mistakes of the past. There are laws on the books which we will enforce. But there is no chip on iny shoulder. We live together in perilous, uncertain times; we face together staggering problems; and we must not waste much time now by rehashing the cliches of past controversy. To quarrel over the past is to lose the future. Third: I believe in the free enterprise system. I want to see broadcasting improved and I want you to do the job. I am proud to champion your cause. It is not rare for Anlerican businessmen to serve a public trust. Yours is a special trust because it is imposed by law. Fourth: I will do all I can to help educational television. There are still not enough educational stations, and major centers of the country still lack usable educational channels. If there were a limited number of printing presses in this country, you may be sure that a fair proportion of them would be put to educational use. Educational television has an enormous contribution to make to the future, and I intend to give it a hand along the way. If there is not a nationwide educational television system in this country, it will not be the fault of the FCC. Fifth: I am unalterably opposed to governmental censorship. There will be no suppression of prograrning which does not meet with bureaucratic tastes. Censorship strikes at the taproot of our free society. Sixth: I did not come to Washington to idly observe the squandering of the public's airwaves. The squandering of our airwaves is no less important than the lavish waste of any precious natural resource. I intend to take the job or Chairman of the FCC very seriously. I believe in the gravity of my own particular sector of the New Frontier. There will be times perhaps when you will consider that I take myself or my job too seriously. Frankly, I don't care if you do. For I am convinced that either one takes this job seriously-or one can be seriously taken. Now, how will these principles be applied? Clearly, at the heart of the FCC's
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authority lies its power to license, to renew or fail to renew, or to revoke a license. As you know, when your license comes up for renewal, your performance is compared with your promises. I understand that many people feel that in the past licenses were often renewed pro fonna. I say to you now: renewal will not be pro fonna in the future. There is nothing permanent or sacred about a broadcast license. But simply matching promises and performance is not enough. I intend to do more. I intend to find out whether the people care. I intend to find out whether the community which each broadcaster serves believes he has been serving the public interest. When a renewal is set down for hearing, I intendwherever possible-to hold a well-advertised public hearing, right in the com· munity you have promised to serve. I want the people who own the air and the homes that television enters to tell you and the FCC what's been going on. I want the people-if they are truly interested in the service you give them-to make notes, document cases, tell us the facts. For those few of you who really believe that the public interest is merely what interests the public-I hope that these hearings will arouse no little interest. The FCC has a fme reserve of monitors-almost 180 million Americans gathered around 56 million sets. If you want those monitors to be your friends at court-it's up to you. Some of you may say, "Yes, but I still do not know where the line is between a grant of a renewal and the hearing you just spoke of." My answer is: why should you want to know how close you can come to the edge of the cliff! What the Commission asks of you is to make a conscientious good-faith effort to serve the public interest. Every one of you serves a community in which the people would benefit by educational, religious, instructive or other public service programing. Every one of you serves an area which has local needs-as to local elections, controversial issues, local news, local talent. Make a serious, genuine effort to put on that prograrning. When you do, you will not be playing brinkmanship with the public interest. What I've been saying applies to broadcast stations. Now a station break for the networks: You know your importance in this great industry. Today, more than onehalf of all hours of television station prograrning comes from the networks; in prime time, tllis rises to more than three-fourths of the available hours. You know that the FCC has been studying network operations for some time. I intend to press tllis to a speedy conclusion with useful results. I can tell you right now, however, that I am deeply concerned with concentration of power in the hands of the networks. As a result, too many local stations have foregone any efforts at local prograrning, with little use of live talent and local service. Too many local stations operate with one hand on the network switch and the other on a projector loaded with old movies. We want tlte individual stations to be free to meet their legal responsibilities to serve their communities.
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I join Governor Collins in his views so well expressed to the advertisers who use the public air. I urge the networks to join him and undertake a very special nlission on behalf of this industry: you can tell your advertisers, "This is the high quality we are going to serve-take it or other people will. If you think you can find a better place to move automobiles, cigarettes and soap-go ahead and try." Tell your sponsors to be less concerned with costs per thousand and more concerned with understanding per millions. And renlind your stockholders that an investment in broadcasting is buying a share in public responsibility. The networks can start this industry on the road to freedom from the dictatorship of numbers. But there is more to the problem than network influences on stations or advertiser influences on networks. I know the problems networks face in trying to clear some of their best programs-the informational programs that exemplify public service. They are your finest hours, whether sustaining or commercial, whether regularly scheduled .or special; these are the signs that broadcasting knows the way to leadership. They make the public's trust in you a wise choice. They should be seen. As you know, we are readying for use new forms by which broadcast stations will report their programing to the Commission. You probably also know that special attention will be paid in these reports to public service programing. I believe that stations taking network service should also be required to report the extent of the local clearance of network public service programing, and when they fail to clear them, they should explain why. If it is to put on some outstanding local program, this is one reason. But, if it is simply to carry some old movie, that is an entirely different matter. The Commission should consider such clearance reports carefully when making up its mind about the licensee's over-all prograrning. We intend to move-and as you know, indeed the FCC was rapidly moving in other new areas before the new administration arrived in Washington. And I want to pay my public respects to my very able predecessor, Fred Ford, and my colleagues on the Commission who have welcomed me to the FCC with warmth and cooperation. We have approved an experiment with pay TV, and in New York we are testing the potential of UHF broadcasting. Either or both of these may revolutionize television. Only a foolish prophet would venture to guess the direction they will take, and their effect. But we intend that they shall be explored fullyfor they are part of broadcasting's new frontier. The questions surrounding pay TV are largely econonlic. The questions surrounding UHF are largely technological. We are going to give the infant pay TV a chance to prove whether it can offer a useful service; we are going to protect it from those who would strangle it in its crib. As for UHF, I'm sure you know about our test in the canyons of New York City. We will take every possible positive step to break through the allocations
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barrier into UHF. We will put this sleeping giant to use, and in the years ahead we may have twice as many channels operating in cities where now there are only two or three. We may have a half-dozen networks instead of three. I have told you that I believe in the free enterprise system. I believe that most of t~levision's problems stem from lack of competition. Tills is the importance of UHF to me: with more channels on the air, we will be able to provide every community with enough stations to offer service to all parts of the public. Programs with a mass-market appeal required by mass-product advertisers certainly will still be available. But other stations will recognize the need to appeal to more limited markets and to special tastes. In this way we can all have a much wider range of programs. Television should thrive on this competition-and the country should benefit from alternative sources of service to the public. And, Governor Collins, I hope the NAB will benefit from many new members. Another, and perhaps the most important, frontier: television will rapidly join the parade into space. International television will be with us soon. No one knows how long it will be until a broadcast from a studio in New York will be viewed in India as well as in Indiana, will be seen in the Congo as it is seen in Chicago. But as surely as we are meeting here today, that day will come-and once again our world will shrink. What will the people of other countries think of us when they see our Western badmen and good men punching each other in the jaw in between the shooting? What will the Latin American or African child learn of America from our great communications industry? We cannot permit television in its present form to be our voice overseas. There is your challenge to leadership. You must reexamine some fundamentals of your industry. You must open your minds and open your hearts to the limitless horizons of tomorrow. I can suggest some words that should serve to guide you: Television and all who participate in it are jointly accountable to the American public for respect for the special needs of children, for community responsibility, for the advancement of education and culture, for the acceptability of the program materials chosen, for decency and decorum in production, and for propriety in advertising. This responsibility cannot be discharged by any given group of programs, but can be discharged only through the highest standards of respeel for I he American home, applied to every moment of every program presenred by television. Program materials should enlarge the horizons of the viewer, provide him with wholesome entertainment, afford helpful stimulation, and remind him of the responsibilities which the citizen has toward his society. These words are not mine. They are yours. They are taken literally from your own Television Code. They reflect the leadership and aspirations of your
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own great industry. I urge you to respect them as I do. And I urge you to respect the intelligent and farsighted leadership of Governor LeRoy Collins and to make this meeting a creative act. I urge you at this meeting and, after you leave, back home, at your stations and your networks, to strive ceaselessly to improve your product and to better serve your viewers, the American people. I hope that we at the FCC will not allow ourselves to become so bogged down in the mountain of papers, hearings, memoranda, orders and the daily routine that we close our eyes to the wider view of the public interest. And I hope that you broadcasters will not permit yourselves to become so absorbed in the chase for ratings, sales and profits that you lose this wider view. Now more than ever before in broadcasting's history the times demand the best of all of us. We need imagination in programing, not sterility; creativity, not imitation; experimentation, not conformity; excellence, not mediocrity. Television is filled with creative, imaginative people. You must strive to set them free. Television in its young life has had many hours of greatness-its "Victory at Sea," its Army-McCarthy hearings, its "Peter Pan," its "Kraft Theater ," its "See It Now," its ''Project 20," the World Series, its political conventi~ns and campaigns, the Great Debates-and it has had its endless hours of mediocrity and its moments of public disgrace. There are estimates that today the average viewer spends about 200 minutes daily with television, while the average reader spends thirty-eight minutes with magazines and forty minutes with newspapers. Television has grown faster than a teenager, and now it is time to grow up. What you gentlemen broadcast through the people's air affects the people's taste, their knowledge, their opinions, their understanding of themselves and of their world. And their future. The power of instantaneous sight and sound is without precedent in man·kind's history. This is an awesome power. It has limitless capabilities for goodand for evil. And it carries with it awesome responsibilities-responsibilities which you and I cannot escape. In his stirring Inaugural Address, our President said, "And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you-ask what you can do for your country." Ladies and Gentlemen: Ask not what broadcasting can do for you-ask what you can do for broadcasting. I urge you to put the people's airwaves to the service of the people and the cause of freedom. You must help prepare a generation for great decisions. You must help a great nation fulfil! its future. Do this, and I pledge you our help.
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3. Baird, Frank L., "Program Regulation on the New Frontier," Journal of Broadcasting, 11, No. 3 (Summer 1967), 231-243.
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64. Dreher, Carl, "How the Wasteland Began: The Early Days of Radio," The Atlantic. 2.17 (February 1966), 53-58. 127. Krasnow, Erwin G., and Lawrence D. Longley, The Politics of Broadcast Regulation. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973. 156. Minow, Newton N., Equal Time: The Private Broadcaster and the Public Interest, ed., Lawrence Laurent. New York: Atheneum, 1964. 171. Pierson, W. Theodore, "The Active Eyebrow-A Changing Style for Censorship," Television Quarterly, 1, No. 1 (February 1962), 14-21. 187. Rosenbloom, Joel, "Authority of the Federal Communications Commission," in Freedom and Responsibility in Broadcasting, ed., John E. Coons. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1961. 198. Schwartz, Bemard, ThePro[essorand the Commissions. New York: Knopf, 1959. 238. Weinberg, Meyer, TV in America: The Morality of Hard Cash. New York: Ballantine, 1962.
It is a great privilege for me to be invited to deliver this important lecture at this year's Edinburgh Television Festival. I want to use the opportunity to offer a contribution to tackling a problem which is, I believe, increasingly disturbing in the current debate about the future of what we used loosely to call television and radio broadcasting and should now more compendiously call electronic publishing. The problem, as I see it, can be best summed up as a lack of perspective- both chronological and moral- in our perception of what is going on and of what we believe is about to go on. To put it more baldly, we give the impression of being constantly startled, unnerved and nonplussed by each successive revelation of the technological changes which are expanding the capabilities of electronic publishing so rapidly. We do not know what is going to happen next and we are certainly not sure what to think about what is already happening. It is not just that the mysteries and magic of the changing technology itself bemuse and amaze us. Nor is it just that existing institutions find themselves stupefied by the financial, commercial, managerial and creative questions thrown up by each new successive change in the technological possibilities. More profoundly, as citizens and as a society we too easily give the impression of people who feel that they are falling off the edge of a cosy, stable and familiar 'flat earth' into a fathomless abyss of unrecognisable and frightening no~elties. We seem to know that the old world is fragmenting and will disappear; but we seem to have great difficulty in thinking coherently and confidently about the principles which should operate in the new world as it develops. Indeed, we seem to have only the most hazy and unconfident sense of what those principles might be, if indeed any exist, other than a desperate attempt to graft the habits of the past on to the quite different future, hoping against hope that as little as possible has really changed. To anyone who doubts this description I commend the transcript, if there is one, of Monday evening's opening session of this Festival with 'The Insiders'!
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This broad caricature is - like all broad caricatures - substantially unfair, especially to numerous individuals who are grappling with great energy and imagination with the opportunities and problems created by the evolving technology of electronic broadcasting and who in the process display knowledge, understanding and optimism about the future. Nonetheless, a society has to be able to think together - though not necessarily to agree- about major trends affecting its own character and evolution. To do so there have to be some shared concepts and perceptions, the building blocks out of which intelligible and coherent debate can be constructed and from which the big decisions about the control and regulation of the activity in question can be made. There could scarcely be a better example of such an activity than the primary means of communication and publication within a society, especially when it is undergoing rapid change. The modest contribution that I would like to make - and that is my purpose in this lecture tonight - is to suggest that there is a helpful perspective in which current developments can be seen and that, when they are so seen, much of the bafflement and mystification about where we are going in electronic publishing will disappear, while at the same time it will become very much clearer what the basic principles are which society should apply in debating the future legislative, regulatory and institutional framework within which the technological potentialities of electronic publishing should be permitted and encouraged to fullil themselves over the next several decades. I by no means expect general, still less universal, agreement with the specifics of the analysis which I want to sketch out for you in this lecture. But I shall feel that the effort has been more· than worthwhile if it at least contributes to the debate being conducted with a more confident sense of historical perspective and with a more rigorous recognition of the already available criteria for choosing the principles which society should apply in setting and modifying the rules of the game for electronic publishing from here on. Let me start by inviting you to stand on its head the conventional perception that, in the universe of electronic publishing, it is the world in which we have been living which is 'normal' and the world into which we are now beginning to move which is strange or peculiar. Instead I ask you to consider the hypothesis that, on the contrary, it is the world in which we have been living, for nearly a century now, which is artificial and special and that it is the world into which we are moving which will be much more properly regard€d as normal and natural. Let me explain what I mean.
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Why do human societies have governments at all and why do they feel, to the extent that they do, the need for them? Whatever may be the factual historical derivation of the institution of government, the broad justification that most of us feel for the existence of governments at all is and only is that, at least in principle, they enable the individuals who comprise a society to live lives which are more satisfactory to them as individuals (though in most cases social individuals) than they would if there were no governments. We tolerate governments and we justify or condemn their actions by this broad criterion, although there is, of course, almost limitless scope for dispute whether any particular act, policy or programme does or does not satisfy the criterion. The broad kinds of activity which have been traditionally accepted as fulfilling the criteria are ·very well known: political relations with the outside world; defence of the realm; the making and enforcement of such laws and regulations as may be necessary and justified by the criterion mentioned; the exploitation of those 'public goods' and the correction of those 'external dis-economies' which, as is well known, even the idealised workings of the market economy cannot accomplish; the monitoring. and modification of the distribution of wealth and income in ways which affect the overall character of the society; and in several other ways. The presumption, however, in societies which adhere to this libertarian and utilitarian conception of government is that government action and involvement is not justified unless it can be positively shown to satisfy the condition that, however measured~ the sum benefit to individuals will exceed the cost. The notion that a government action could be justified because of some independent right or interest of government itself, conceived as something above and beyond the sum of the individuals in whose name it governs, is strongly rejected, in contrast with other political philosophies which do see government as the embodiment of some other or higher force or purpose than simply the welfare, however broadly interpreted, of the individuals who comprise the society. A classic example of an activity which is normally presumed not to require government intervention is communication. Second only, perhaps, to the right of individuals to think privately what thoughts they wish comes the right of individuals to communicate those thoughts with one another. The historic battles to establish this right after the invention of the printing press and the perception of the power and potentialities of what by the standards of those days may be called mass communication was, to be sure, long and bitter. But, for those who
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adhere to the libertarian and utilitarian tradition, it is not seen as a battle between two arguable propositions or legitimate interests, but rather as a simple struggle between a sound and fundamental ideal on the one hand and dark forces motivated by interest (or occasionally mistaken bigotry) on the other. We now regard it as axiomatic that mass communication of the printed word should be a free activity which does not require any general framework of government regulation or sponsorship, although according to our varying different individual points of view we may be more or less inclined to accept certain general marginal constraints on this freedom for such reasons as sedition, blasphemy, libel, race relations and national security. When communication and in due course mass communication by the new technology of wireless telegraphy became possible, the natural presumption of a liberal utilitarian society must surely have been that this raised no new question of principle so far as the legitimate role of government in the regulation of mass communiucation was concerned. What in fact brought government and the law-makers into the picture was not and should not have been any general perception that the character of mass communication by wireless telegraphy was so fundamentally different from mass communication by the printed word that it required a form of regulation not thought necessary or appropriate for the printed word, but instead was a simple fact of broadcasting technology. Since two signals could not be broadcast on the same wavelength in the same area at the same time without interfering with one another, some kind of wavelength policing was needed; and, therefore, some act of government was felt to be justified in the interests of the private individuals who comprise society for exactly the same reason that we feel government is needed and justified in imposing a 'keep left' or 'keep right' rule for driving on the public highways. The nineteenth century Wireless Telegraphy Acts, culminating in the 1905 Act, had this essential purpose and justification; and it has essentially been on this very narrow and specific foundation that the whole inverted pyramid of government and parliamentary regulation of broadcasting has since been built. There was and to some extent still is an inescapable need for someone to decide who should- and therefore who should not- broadcast on any given wavelength at any given time in any given area. In the absence of the theoretically possible alternatives of a lottery or an auction, the only available authority to make this decision was, in one form or another, the government. But of course, having once got into the act on this genuine but narrow
technical pretext, it will surprise no one that even in a pluralistic country governments and Parliament have moved forward from this bridgehead to· what is, by the standards of print communication, a massive control and regulation of the dominant forms of electronic publishing. I am not, of course, here talking about the kind of editorial control and crudely propagandist exploitation of radio and television which we associate with Eastern European and other totalitarian societies. Nor am I speaking of the kind of government regulation which is being hotly debated in the framework of UNESCO between the spokesmen of the Western 'free' societies and other societies who feel that governments are entitled to much more positive editorial control of radio and television, to say nothing of newspapers as well. What I have in mind is simply the contrast between the basic freedom to publish, to create a new publication, to contain in it any material whatsoever within the general laws of blasphemy, libel, national security, race relations etc., the contrast between all of that, whether in newspapers, magazines, books or any other form of printed publication, and the broadcasting framework as it has evolved through the granting of successive charters to the BBC, the creation of the Independent Television Authority and its development into the Independent Broadcasting Authority with _responsibilities for commercial radio as well as television. I leave on one side the draconian regulatory powers and monopoly position of the Post Office, now British Telecom, in relation to almost all other forms of private use of the airwaves and other telecommunication facilities for communication and even limited publication. It is quite simply impossible, as things stand, for any individual or private institution to communicate with his fellow citizens by way of broadcast radio or television unless he has either been appointed by a chartered or statutory body to do so or invited by someone else who has been so appointed. Moreover, any such communication has to conform, not merely to the broad general law affecting such matters as blasphemy, libel, national security and race relations, but also has to conform to a most elaborate series of formal and informal codes affecting the content, balance, timing etc, of such publications. My purpose at this point is not to evaluate or criticise these arrangements. I am aware that many people think they are justified and that there are some who even think that they still permit too much freedom to those who are allowed access to the airwaves. My aim here is simply to bring out the profound difference between the framework of law, regulation and government as it applies to print publications and as it
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applies to electronic publishing, at least insofar as electronic publishing takes the form of broadcast material.
without coming within the existing purview of the broadcasting regulators and, indeed, subject to one major once-and-for-all decision without the acquiescence of public authority in any of its other guises, whether as the guardian of wavelengths, way-leaves, the public purse or any other existing basis of gevernmental control. Video - both in its tape and disc manifestations - is already the most highly developed form of this new wave. Cable, satellites (especially Direct Broadcast Satellite services), teletext and other innovations are all contributing to what, from the cosy perspective of the 'closed circle' of the 'authorised' broadcasters, is regarded as the 'fragmentation' of the audience. Even moderate developments such as the Fourth Channel, the Welsh Fourth Channel and breakfast television, which involve no technological innovation whatever and which are twenty-four carat card-carrying creations of the traditional regulated system, are seen in some circles as threatening because they let newcomers, new ideas or new languages into the business or even, more simply, because they might cause the existing stock of jam to be spread yet more thinly. I will not dwell on ~he wetness, let alone the simple-minded fallaciousness, of that kind of reflex protectionism. This picture of an existing world of electronic publishing, dominated by authorised broadcasting, being gradually eroded and fragmented by technological changes which pare away cumulatively significant marginal slices of the traditional broadcaster's market - and predictably stimulate the historically familiar catalogue of demands for extended regulation, if indeed not prohibition, on every pretext of public interest known to man save the true one of resistance to competition - allied to the usual desire of every politician, busybody and self-appointed cultural and moral nanny to lay down what other people may and may not communicate to one another, this picture itself grossly underestimates the enormity of the change which is coming about. Quite simply, we are within less than two decades technologically of a world in which there will be no technical pretext for a government-appointed policeman to allocate the airwaves at all; and therefore, in turn, there will be no technically based grounds for government or legislative interference in electronic publishing, except insofar as the general laws of blasphemy, libel etc, which apply to print publishing are applied also to electronic publishing. To put it technically, 'spectrum scarcity' is going to disappear. In simple terms this means there will be able, in effect, to be as many channels as there are viewers. At that moment all the acrimonious and
Against this background, let us now begin to look at what current technological developments are doing to the potentialities of electronic broadcasting and thereby to our existing apparatus of concepts for controlling and regulating it. So far, we have had a world in which for most practical purposes electronic publishing was authorised broadcasting, both radio and television, in the strict sense of broadcast transmissions by authorised bodies across the airwaves to privately owned receivers. To this in recent years and increasingly have begun to be added a whole catalogue of actual and potential devices for enabling the public to enjoy the same or similar services by other means. It began with purely 'pirate' transmissions, which involved no technological innovation at all, but simply exploited jurisdictional or enforcement loop-holes in the existing system of regulation. These were variously dealt with by ignoring them on de minimis grounds, as in the case of Radio Luxembourg, or by gradual suppression by methods which were at least as indirect as the pirates' own circumvention of existing regulations, as in the case of Radio Caroline and its emulators. The advent of audio tapes was treated as if it were an extension of the gramophone record market rather than as violating the broadcasters' domain and therefore as not coming within the purview of the broadcast regulators. When cable television, under its original guise as 'pay television', first entered the debate a decade or so ago, nobody doubted that this belonged squarely in the regulated area of electronic publishing or, indeed, that it was entirely a matter for government decision whether or not the practice of such a black art should be permitted at all. Fortunately for the upholders of the ancien regime of regulated electronic publishing such experiments as were permitted were never sufficiently successful to force a major social decision on whether or how pay television should be controlled. Moreover, even pay television continued to present a solid, though narrow, pretext for official involvement in that the necessary cables to make it possible could not legally or practically be laid without the consent and probably the assistance of public authority. But now we are well and truly in sight of a world in which significant parts of electronic publishing can both legally and practically take place 224
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The News difficult debate about how many channels there should be, who should control them and have access to them and what should be allowed to be shown on them- to say nothing of which and how many traditional and new pressure groups are needed to squabble over these issues - all this can disappear. But it will only disappear if we all work, indeed fight, extremely hard i:o ensure that, once the technical pretext for policing electronic publishing has gone, the whole inverted pyramid of regulation and control, going way beyond the mere prevention of mutually jamming transmissions, is in fact dismantled. It will be an extremely hard fight because, the habit of regulation and control once formed and the vested interests which benefit from it once established, the regulators and beneficiaries are extremely reluctant to give up their role and their territory; and the politicians and legislators will be extremely reluctant to abdicate power and influence in a field which they know is important and which they are accustomed to enjoying. Let me add in passing that the beneficiaries of a regulated world are not by any means confined to the regulators themselves or to those whose commercial interests are thereby directly protected. All the other armies of lobbies and special interest groups, whether they represent shareholders, managers, creators, various echelons of employees or countless special geographical and other categories of consumers, all in varying degrees live off a world in which regulation occurs and in which it is thereby possible whether by lobbying, negotiating, persuading or even attending solemn conferences - to seek to determine the way in which the regulations are framed and enforced. But take away the honey-pot and the bees will disperse. There are only pressure groups if there are pressure points. Were we not being told on this very Monday evening that yet another new body was needed in order that the voice of the broadcasters themselves should be more loudly heard in the privileged arena of centralised regulation and control, a dub to which every interest groqp belongs, but in which not a single ordinary producer or ordinary viewer is to be found? Also Jeremy Isaacs, whom I greatly revere and who said many wise things, remarked en passant, 'Of course, we don't want unregulated Babe! here.' But I would say to him that the term 'Babel' can much more properly be applied to the squabbling of the politicians and the special interest groups over the control of the regulated system of authorised broadcasting than it can to free communication, whether electronic or not, between private authors and private consumers. Now let me try to sketch how this wondrous emancipation can occur, if not today, at least the day after tomorrow in terms of the eras of
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electronic p.ublishing; and I make only a small apology here for drawing on. some evt~ence I gave nearly five years ago to the Annan Committee, evtde~ce whtc~ must rank as one of the most purely solipsistic experi~ ences m the htstory of the written word. Rather before the end of the century, subject only to a very large initial capital outlay which could only be borne by society as a whole in the first instance it will be possible b~ fibre-optic technology to create a grid conne~ting every household m the country, whereby the nation's viewers can simultaneously.watch as many different programmes as the nation's readers can read ~tfferent bo?ks, magazines, newspapers etc. The only constraints, techmcally speakmg, will be the obvious ones that no one television set can simultaneously display more than one programme and that it may be. necessary to watch any given programme at a stated number of mmutes past the hour. There will doubtless also continue to be somewhat fewe~ sets than people, though by the year 2000 we may even have t~e wall-s~ze screen, for multiple simultaneous images, in general use, wtth the vtewers simply choosing which source he wants. In other words a television set (or radio) will be like a telephone iri that the user selects for himself the connection he wants· and it will be quite immaterial what connections other users wish' to make for themselves. In contemporary parlance, the number of channels will become, if not infinite, at least indefinitely large - certainly as large as the number of receivers. Imagine each set equipped with a telephone dial on which the code number of t~e desired programme or connection can be dialled. Imagine also ~he eqmvalent of a telephone meter monitoring receptions on each set, lmk;d to the c?de n.um~er of the it.e~ received. Imagine finally a ~entr~l. black box mamtamed by Bnttsh Telecom into which an mdeftmtely l~rge number of. programmes can be fed (either by lodging a tape or by dtrect feed for hve transmissions). The rest of t~e conditions for a free electronic publishing market, with consumer chotce and freedom of access, falls quickly into place. No gene~al. law~ are required other than those which already govern ~ubhsh.mg .(hbel, copyright, obscenity, common law, etc.), though there ts notht~g m t~e ~ystem to prevent Parliament making special laws for electromc pubhshmg; and some special laws may be needed to deal with copyright in a world of satellite transmissions and cassette copying, The only necessary function of the State is to lay a duty on British Telecom to provide and op.erate the technology of the system, to accept all programmes whtch conform to the law, to collect charges from the
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viewing public and, after deducting its own costs and any other approved taxes or charges, to pass what remains over to the publisher of each item. This, indeed, is the framework already adopted for the Viewdata system. Large and small wholesale publishers will be free to establish themselves. Many of them might well be best organised as workers' cooperatives rather than as limited liability companies. They, the publishers, will arrange and finance the preparation of the programmes, set the charges for them, advertise their availability and their code numbers and reward the authors and participants under freely negotiated contracts. Individuals who wish to make their own programmes will be free to do so though, as with books, they will either have to find a publisher or bear the costs and risks of publishing themselves. There is nothing in this system to prevent the State continuing to subsidise any particular categories of electronic publishing which are considered virtuous or in the public interest, even to the extent of ensuring that the equivalent of one or more whole channels of regular transmissions are available to the public without direct charge. Nor is there anything to prevent any other patron or sponsor from subsidising meritorious, or indeed meritless, productions. The BBC and the independent broadcast companies would presumably continue as major publishers on the new scene. But the IBA would disappear; and the BBC would cease to be a broadcasting authority with (self-) regulatory powers and duties, insofar as Broadcasting House can at present be said to exercise over the rest of the BBC analogous supervision to that which the IBA exercises over the ITV and ILR programme companies. As large independent producers the BBC and ITV programme companies would doubtless continue to set their own policies and standards; but these need not reflect any general state policy for broadcasting. The news and party political broadcasts could be catered for either under the general provisions above or by special provision. On the face of it there is no reason why the news should not justify itself commercially; but, if it is felt that it needs to be subsidised, this could be done by raising through the British Telecom charging mechanism a small levy on all other transmissions, which would be earmarked to finance news services. Party political broadcasts should presumably be financed by the parties (one would suppose at a loss), though Parliament could require British Telecom to make them available free to the viewer and to collect the cost direct from monies voted by Parliament.
The treatment of advertising raises no insuperable problem. Either Parliament could disallow advertisement altogether. Or it could require British Telecom to accept programme packages which included advertising material in natural breaks, in which case the charge to the viewer would be lower - or nil. It would then be up to individual publishers to decide whether or not they wished to include advertising material at intervals during their programmes. The viewers would be free to decide whether they thought this interruption worth the saving in charges or not. This extremely compressed sketch of a future market in electronic publishing is designed only to show that there is nothing God-given or immutable about the familiar duopolistic regime, a conclusion which can also be reached from other premises. At present, cumbrous giants battle for franchises of the air; and, between their occasional encounters, they are themselves besieged by multiple special interests trying to steer programme time and programme content more to their particular way of thinking. This process in no way guarantees, or even necessarily tends towards, the maximum satisfaction of viewers' p·references. Indeed, that is not even the objective of the present institutions. The addition of an extra channel, or even two or ten, would not change this essential pattern. Indeed, so long as electronic publishing is confined to a limited number of channels, there is a plausible argument that consumer choice is maximised by giving one or two authorities the duty to provide choice rather than by forcing several rival organisations to vie with each other for a limited mass audience. The argument so far has sought to show that, on certain assumptions about the development of telecommunications technology, a radically different organisation of broadcasting, seen as electronic publishing and modelled partly on print publishing, would be possible. But technical feasibility does not entail financial feasibility, still less desirability, (despite the widespread belief to the contrary). There are in fact two distinct financial questions about the scheme of electronic publishing sketched here:
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(a) Would the huge investment in the necessary telecommunications grid and in the change-over of the nation's receivers to the new system be justified after allowing for the earnings of the other non-publishing chargeable services which could be carried on such an electronic network? (b) Would the system of meter charging for viewing, augmented by specific subsidies on merit and, if allowed, by advertising receipts,
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generate the revenue necessary to support the required level of broadcasting? The first question is legitimate and important. The answer to it depends on many variables, whose values are certainly not known and some of whose values are probably extremely difficult to assess. Fortunately, society does not have to give a precise answer now, since final decisions will not be needed for a decade or so. But it is important to form a view about whether such an investment is likely to be within the realm of the possible or whether it is pure science, or rather financial, fiction. This will partly depend, of course, on the ~ost of the investment. British T elecom are able to give sketch estimates of this, at least in terms of orders of magnitude. It will also depend on how many other users there will be, in addition to- what we now think of as television services, for the new telecommunications infrastructure. The more there are and the greater the prospective yield from such other users, the smaller will need to be the specific return from sales of grid capacity to the broadcast public. Much may also depend on the rate of society's time preference used in discounting the future flow of benefits from the new facility. The arguments will be familiar to economists. The question about the adequacy of the revenue to be generated is only meaningful if it is supposed that there can be a difference between what the viewing public, together with public and private patrons and sponsors, as well as advertisers (if they are allowed), are willing to pay for broadcast material and the right quantity of broadcasting. It is possible to construct senses in which there could be such a conceptual difference; but it is not a distinction which is normally held to be generally meaningful in the provision of marketable services to the public, except in areas like national health or perhaps housing where some sense and measurements can be attached to the notion of the public's 'needs' as distinct from what the public will pay for (though some economists dispute even this). So, the short answer to the objection that the public would not want to pay for the amount of broadcast material which vested interests or wise men think should be provided is the same as the answer to any other entrepreneur who complains that the market will not bear as much as he would like it to: hard luck! Indeed, the argument can be pressed a little further. One of the great 230
merits of the system adumbrated here for financing broadcasting, as against finance which depends heavily either on the Government's taxing power or on advertising alone, is that it generates invaluable information about the effective demand for broadcast material and therefore about the scale of resources which it is right to invest and to use in supplying the material. Indeed, where this information is not generated, it is common for public authorities either to look abroad to see what proportion of their national incomes other countries spend on comparable facilities, where market choice does operate, or to corral the growth of expenditure into conformity with the average growth rate of the national economy as a whole (cf. the present plight of the National Health Service). Now that GNP growth is nil or negative this stifles what should be, by public preference, expanding services such as health and communication. Inevitably these proxies for direct evidence of demand lead either to more or to less resources being devoted to the service in question than the public wants; and there is no way of knowing whether it is too much or too little. One may_ guess, partly from overseas data, that in the areas of national health and broadcasting what we now get is probably less than the public would choose to spend and that in the areas of hard technology, such as futuristic aircraft, it is probably more. It would be better to know than to have to guess. This then leaves the question whether there are any good nontechnological-cum-financial reasons for going on as at present, in the sense of keeping electronic publishing under the degree of statutory supervision which the BBC charter and the Broadcasting Act have laid down even after the historical 'rule-of-the-road' reasons for this involvement of the State have become technically obsolete. People will answer this question according to their different political and social- philosophies. In the circumstances envisaged here for the end of the century there need be literally no limit to what can be published electronically, other than the general law and what the public (and others) will pay for. In those circumstances the only role of supervision is to prevent the publication of lawful material which the public would choose and pay for. Otherwise, supervision is wholly passive and merely reproduces what would happen under open publishing. To believe that such prevention of publication would be desirable it would appear to be necessary to believe one or more of the following propositions: 231
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It will be evident that none of these propositions appeal much to me. Few, in fact, would be found today to defend the first proposition as it stands. But there are many who, without perhaps admitting it even to themselves, adopt positions which entail this proposition; and it is better to see it nakedly for what it is, namely a complete rejection of the p~ilosophy of the primacy of the individual and of his liberty on which most people would claim that our society is and ought to be founded. The second proposition is rather more plausible at first sight. But this is only because the alternative system of electronic publishing suggested here is being construed as though it were still oligopolistic publishing, but writ a little larger. It will be asked how in practice can an indefinitely
large number of electronic publishers, to say nothing of countless go-it-alone authors, afford the hugely expensive overheads, such as cameras, studios, editing facilities and so forth, which television production requires. Only the few could do it; and competition among the few leads to homogenised products and neglible choice. Or it leads .to domination by big corporations. So the argument runs. This is mistaken. It will not be necessary for any but the biggest publishers to have their studios, etc., any more than every print publisher and author has to own his own press. It will pay entrepreneurs (as indeed it already does) to provide studio facilities and to hire them out to all corners. Small publishers and go-it-alone authors will rent what they need when they need it. Even that may be more expensive than printing and publishing a limited edition of one's own book; but then no one has a God-given right to use whatever resources he wants to indulge personal fantasies. Either one pays for those resources oneself or one persuades a patron to do so or one persuades a financier to do so in the expectation of a return. The argument for producer sovereignty, other than in a market environment which makes consumers sovereign, lacks any intelligible philosophical basis for its major premise - outside of certain religious orders which genuinely exist for the sake exclusively of fulfilment in work (i.e. prayer, contemplation, and so forth) and which literally produce nothing beyond their own meals, clothes and shelter that can be of material benefit to anyone {except maybe to God). For the rest the notion seems to be confusion. The exercise of producer power may well be in the selfish interest of individual groups considering themselves as workers in a world in which anonymous millions supply the things they themselves wish to consume; but it degenerates into nonsense if generalised into an economic basis of society. In practice in the broadcasting industry the argument, whether deployed by executives, 'creative' staff or manual workers, is no different from the special pleading of all manner of groups - from farmers to furnacemen and from opera singers to obsolete printers - to be preserved at the expense of the rest of society in their customary way of life irrespective of whether it any longer serves a useful purpose. Society may judge in some cases that it wishes to make such provision either out of compassion or from other reasons. But unless such arrangements are by nature exceptions to some more utilitarian general rule, the logical conclusion is the monastic life for all. The notion, therefore, that the unconstrained use of electronic pub-
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{a) that a man or woman does not always know what is best for him or her to receive; that someone else does know best {or at least knows better); that Parliament can embody that somebody else's knowledge in some general law or, more likely, appofnt him or her and their like to control what is available to the public; that Parliament will, in fact, normally appoint the right people and that the fact that Parliament thinks this someone else knows best gives Parliament and the someone else the right to deny the public access to the forbidden material - in other words, as Jeremy Isaacs put it so vividly 'We don't want unregulated Babel here.' {b) That free electronic publishing would in practice lead to a narrowing of choice, even in the new conditions described, as compared with what would happen under a benevolent supervision; that the supervision would in practice tend to be benevolent and that by preventing the publication of too many similar programmes of little 'worth' resources can be kept free {or, rather, not too expensive) for more worthwhile or varied productions. Or (c) that economic activities, of which broadcasting is certainly one in the sense that it uses scarce resources including labour to purvey goods or services to the public, exist primarily or exclusively for the benefit of those who work in them rather than for those who use their output and that workers are likely to have a better time of things working for a benevolent {perhaps malleable) supervisory authority, backed by the State and its taxing power, than they would have supplying a competitive market in which the consumer was sovereign and some big publishers, whether public or private, came to play a large part.
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The Political Economy of the Media II
The Political Economy of the Media II
The News
Electronic Publishing
lishing resources should be the sovereign right of creators and producers thus depends either on making a general rule of producer sovereignty or on a special case for adding broadcasting to the list of exceptions to the rule of consumer sovereignty. The general rule leads quickly to absurdity; and it seems hard to think of a less appropriate or deserving exception to the more practical rule of consumer sovereignty in economic affairs. Note also, however, that- given consumer sovereignty in a free electronic publishing market- there is no reason at all why many or even all of the producing units should not be workers' cooperatives, something which I personally strongly favour as a solution to the much broader economic problems of inflation, unemployment etc. It follows then that, in a world in which central supervision is not an inevitable by-product of some broadcasting rule-of-the-road, there will be no compelling need for continued monolithic (or indeed duo-, or oligo-lithic) broadcasting franchises. Once this is accepted, it can be seen that most of the problems which preoccupy public debate about the future of broadcasting disappear, at least if the time-scale is extended far enough into the future to comprehend the kind of developments envisaged here. For, most of those problems are problems about allocating scarce publishing opportunities between competing interest groups, whether established institutions, financial vested interests, worker vested interests, evangelical producers, Scotsmen, Welshmen, Irishmen, divines, educationalists, ethnic minorities or any other form of man-in-his-organisations as against man-in-his-home-wanting-to-sit-in-his-armchair-and-watch-thetelly. Once there is no allocation to be made, there will be no lobbies and so no headaches to be suffered in arbitrating between them. Only consider - the recent strange episodes surrounding the Monopolies Commission gives us a foretaste of what the problems would be if government had to renew, or not renew, The Times's charter, or to allocate the tabloid franchise between IPC and Mr Rupert Murdoch, or if areas of the country had to be exclusively shared out to Macmillan, Cape and Penguin. It is only by looking at it in this way that ~e liberating effects of escaping altogether from the need to allocate scarce electronic publishing opportunities can be fully appreciated. At the same time, of course, the power in the hands of the great allocator is liquidated; and Government, as well as the vested interests and busybodies who believe they can manipulate Government, will resist this. But this is scarcely an argument why society should bless such an
unnecessary exercise of power with spurious respectability. In conclusion, let me re-emphasis the obvious fact that this lecture is quite explicitly and deliberately futuristic. It is, as its title states, about the day after tomorrow. It has little or nothing to say about the preoccupations of broadcasters, viewers and regulators today, except in the very broad sense that it would lead those who agreed with the argument of the lecture to welcome the embryonic development over which Jeremy Isaacs is so ably presiding on Channel 4 and to wish him the very best of luck in his efforts. No one, therefore, should be disposed to ask with feigned astonishment how it is that the chairman of a company holding a franchise under the existing system is to be found advocating the eventual liquidation of that system. I have said nothing to suggest that the British system is defective or markedly less satisfactory than available alternatives under the present conditions. But there is, I hope, eriough of the existentialist in all of us to permit a man to be both company chairman and to think for himself as a citizen. There is no inconsistency, outside of a world of cardboard caricature functionaries, in operating within. the constraints of one system which may be appropriate to one set of circumstances and, at the same time, trying to think about how, in new and different circumstances, a new and different system might serve society even better. I certainly believe that we shall think more confidently and more coherently about the more immediate and obvious signs of the fragmentation of the system of authorised electronic publishing - video, cable, direct broadcast satellite services, etc. - if we :
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(a) realise that these are only the modest precursors of a much more fundamental transformation of the technological base of electronic broadcasting; and (b) recognise that, as that transformation fulfils itself over the next two decades or so, the world which we will be entering will, in fact, be a much less artificial one in which well known principles of consumer and producer freedom articulated through the proper operation of the price mechanism can and should be invoked to solve problems which have seemed so recalcitrant in the world of authorised electronic publishing and which seem so baffling to those who regard the new world as merely an extension of the old world with complications. Finally, however, those who care passionately for freedom in communication and publishing, whether electronic, print or simply oral,
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The Political Economy of the Media 11
The News need now to gird themselves for a prolonged struggle against old habits and vested interests in order to ensure that the new freedoms, which the new technology will make technically possible, are in fact translated into real freedoms for both producers and consumers under law. The belief that electronic publishing, especially by broadcast television, has mystical, hypnotic and unique powers is deeply entrenched in the political mind; and the desire to control and influence it will not be shed like an old skin simply because the technical need for a spectrum rule of the road and, therefore, for a spectrum policeman, has disappeared. The battles that were fought by the great seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century heroes of free speech and free publication will have to be fought all over again. I would foresee - and I hope - that this theme will be a recurrent preoccupation of successive Edinburgh International Television Festivals; and I hope that, by using this opportunity to air the question, I have not only done my modest best to pay tribute to the memory and the inspiring example of James MacTaggart, but have also done something to prompt that debate and to offer some concepts and principles which can give it shape and standards. The MacTaggart Lecture, Edinburgh International Television Festival, 1981
[17] /
Excerpt from Report of the Committee on Financing the BBC. 12.2 Broadcasting Aims and Broadcasting Hnance Viewer and Listener Sovereigmy 546. Faced with these technological uncertainties it would have been tempting to confine ourselves to a limited examination of the case for and against the introduction of advertising on the BBC in the years immediately ahead. But, although this has escaped allcntion in much of the public debate, our terms of reference go further. For we are asked to consider any other "proposals for securing income from the consumer other than through the licence fee"; and the advance of technology is increasing the range of financing options as well as of broadcasting systems (see paragraph I). Our terms of reference also require us to examine the financial and other consequences of any changes for a wide range of broadcasting and other media, and in particular their "range and quality". We therefore agree with those witnesses who have maintained that before we can devise guidelines for the finance of broadcasting, we have to specify its purposes. The need to be cautious and open-minded about technological possibilities makes it more, rather than less, important to be clear about aims and criteria. 547. The fundamental aim of broadcasting policy should in our view be to enlarge both the freedom of choice of the consumer and the opportunities available to programme makers to offer alternative wares to the public. The fulfilmen( of this goal, so far from being incompatible with public service activities positively requires them in a sense of "public service" which we shall explain below (sec paragraphs 580-581). 548. Our goal is of course derived from aims much wider than any applying to broadcasting alone. They are embedded, for example, in the First Amendment to the US Constitution (15 December, 1791). This lays down illler alia: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech or of the press ... " It is often taken by US writers to mean both that television monopolies are to be prevented and that government intrusion of a negative, censorious kind is to be avoided. 549. Another way of looking at the m alter is via the parallel with the printing press, which was subject to many kinds of regulation and censorship in the first two and half centuries of its existence (see paragraphs 16-27). The abolition ofprepublication censorship by Parliament in 1694-leaving the printed word to be regulated by the general law of the land-was described by Macaulay as a greater contribution to liberty and civilisation than either the Magna Carta or the Bill of Rights. • •History of Englm1d, Chapter XXI. ""While the Abb.!y was hanging with black for tht: funeral of the Quccn.lhc Commons came tu a vote which a11he time auractcd little aucntion. which produced no excitement. which has been ldl unnoticed by voluminous annalisls. and of which the history can be bm imperfectly traced in the arc;hivcs of Parliament. but which has done: mnn: for liberty and civilisation than lhc Grcal 01arte:r or the Gill uC Rights."
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550. Hitherto it has been very hard either to avoid prepublication censorship in broadcasting, or apply the spirit of the First Amendment, because of spectrum scarcity and the difficulties of charging viewers and listeners directly. Intervention and regulation have been required not only to secure public service broadcasting in our sense of the term, but even to simulate the effects of a functioning consumer market (see paragraphs 130-133). 551. Technological developments hold promise, however, of liberation from these constraints. There is at least a chance of creating a genuine consumer market in broadcasting combined wJth a continuation of public service, in the positive sense of secure funding of programmes of a demanding or innovative kind. 552. The dire.ct purchase of broadcasting services, as explained in chapter 3, requires the fulfilment of important conditions if viewers' and listeners' interests are to be made paramount. It is therefore incumbent on us to outline these conditions, particularly as the mere mention of a market in broadcasting services gives rise to much misunderstanding: (i) Viewers must be able to register their preferences directly and register the intensity of their preference. The only system which will fulfil these conditions is "pay per view". (ii) Effective provision of services presupposes freedom of entry for any programme maker who can cover his costs or otherwise finance his or her production. (iii) Operators of transmission equipment, where monopoly elements are likely to prevail, must have common carrier obligations to transmit programmes at prices regulated on public utility lines, perhaps by a body such as OFTEL. 553. The above are ideal requirements where direct purchase is appropriate, but they do provide a yardstick for assessing any proposed changes. Condition (i) emphasises that expression of preferences through advertising ratings can at best be indirect, and certainly intensity of preferences cannot be captured in a system financed solely by advertising. Conditions (ii) and (iii) offer the protection for the viewer against monopoly which could restrict choice and make programmes more cpstly to the viewer than they need be, always supposing that vigorous government action against monopoly and restrictive practices is available if necessary. If these conditions are to be fulfilled, the technical and economic difficulties· of developing charging systems must be overcome in the foreseeable future and spectrum scarcity radically reduced, either by the creation of more broadcasting "time" by further channels or more intensive use of existing channels. In short, a broadcasting market designed to promote the welfare of viewers and listeners certainly does not carry the implication that "commerciallaissez-faire" (explained in paragraphs 571-573) should take over.
A Technical Qualification: Theoretical Undersupply* 554. There is a technical economic problem associated with direct sale of programmes to viewers and listeners to which reference has already been made in chapter 3 paragraph 132. Once a programme has been produced the cost of supply to each additional viewer per showing is effectively zero. (This explains why US soap operas can be made available so cheaply outside American markets.) If charging were introduced, so the argument goes, television programmes would be under-supplied. The problem is not unique to television. It applies to all products, including books and newspapers, whose marginal cost of supply is well below their average cost. Television is an extreme case. 555. As already argued (see paragraph 132), subsidising a broadcasting company to the extent necessary to reduce the cost of programmes to zero to the consumer can itself bring about adverse effects on efficiency through the difficulty of being able to·a:scertain the minimum subsidy necessary to achieve this end. The subsidy would be all too likely to "pad out" costs and reduce the incentive to introduce innovations in methods of programme production and in the content of programmes. A related problem is the difficulty of raising revenue to cover the subsidy in a form which would not have further adverse effects on efficiency and which would not outweigh any gains from a superior relative price structure. In any case it would be difficult to justify a generalised subsidy to broadcasting alone. 556. It might be argued that under-supply would be less of a problem, even if no public subsidy can be justified, with an advertiser-supported system with no ditect charges to consumers than with a pay-TV system. This argument would only be a cogent one if there were an unlimited number of channels available and therefore is inapplicable to the present duopoly arrangements in the UK. Even if it were reasonable to postulate that the number of channels would increase, any advantages of no direct charging to consumers would be outweighed by the direct expression of consumer preferences which a charging system allows. •Paragraphs 554-556 arc mainly of lcchnical economic interest and can he readily skipped by the general reader.
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The Political Economy of the Media ll The Expansion of Tastes and Programmes 557. In expounding how the direct purchase of broadcasting services promotes the interests of viewers and listeners we do not stop at the idea of "providing the consumer with what he wants". There is a bad tradition in analytical economics of presenting the model of •·consumer sovereignty" as if consumers had only known and static wants. This ignores the important feature of the competitive market as a "discovery mechanism" for finding out by trial and error what the consumer might be enticed to accept (as well as the least costly method of supplying it) and for trying out new and challenging ideas. 558. The more thoughtful exponent of consumer sovereignty does not believe that citizens always know what they want or where their interests lie. Producers compete to persuade individuals of the existence and value of new or different kinds of experience. In the debate at the Cambridge Union in September 1985, the late Sir Huw Weldon rightly criticised the false dichotomy between giving the viewer what he or she wants and what he or she ought to have. According to Sir Huw, the producer or creator provides what is "in him to give". This is true of much creative entrepreneurship in general. The proviso in a market economy is that in the end a sufficient number of consumers have to be persuaded to take what the producer is willing to give. 559. In many areas of commercial life profit-seeking entrepreneurs are prepared to take a long view, often longer than that of governments, and not confine themselves to what is immediately remunerative. Indeed if this were not so all the great companies in the world would stop their research programmes to the immense benefit of their short term as distinct from their long term profits. 560. There may be-indeed there are-peculiar features of the broadcasting market, which discuumge the long view. But the need is to ascertain what these are rather than to assume that the short view is characteristic of markets as such. The preceding chapters have demonstrated that the insistence on quick mass market returns derives from indirect finance, via sales of advertising rather than of broadcasting directly to the consumer. When the latter becomes possible, and would-be producers can work with the assurance of access to common carrier facilities, then the existing broadcasting market may lose some of its peculiar features.
The Public Role in Broadcastillg Finance 561. We are clear that the component in consumer welfare which represents exposure to programmes which expand their range of tastes and preferences is of major importance. Our society will be the richer if it offers artists, teachers, entertainers, politicians and news gatherers, as well as producers of material goods, an opportunity both to stimulate and satisfy desires of which people were not previously conscious. The crucial question arising from this statement of values is to what extent, if at all, public intervention is required and in what form. Would it not be sufficient, in this context, to confine government activity in the broadcasting market to regulation designed to enforce the law of the land with respect to matters such as public decency, defamation, sedition and blasphemy and with respect to the prevention of monopoly? 562. The answer to the question is "no", if for no other reason than that viewers and listeners themselves may be willing to provide public finance for broadcasting activities in their capacity as voting taxpayers. (See paragraph 129 but also our views on censorship ip paragraphs 594 and 691.) A simple illustration makes our point. Many citizens who never go near our National Galleries value their existence and are prepared to contribute as tax-payers to their upkeep. Public patronage has long been a source of support for the Arts, alongside direct consumer support since the time of Classical Greece or earlier. (We will not, however, discuss whether Medici support for Michaelangelo or Esterhazy employment of Haydn should be described as public or private patronage.) 563. The Committee has its own views on the types of programme suitable for public patronage, and which form a large part of its concept of Public Service Broadcasting (see below). Four key words we would suggest here are knowledge, culture, criticism and experiment. To be more specific: (i) There should be news, current affairs, documentaries, programmes about science, nature and other parts of the world, as well as avowedly educational programmes, all of which require active and not passive attention and which may alsu cuntribute to responsible citizenship. (ii) There should be high quality programmes on the Arts (music, drama, literature etc) covering not only performance but also presentation of and comment on the process of artistic creation. (iii) There should be critical and controversial programmes, covering everything from the appraisal of commercial products to politics, ideology, philosophy and religion. 127
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The Political Economy of the Media I/ 564. The case for public support of programmes of this type can be accepted by those who believe that viewers and listeners are in the last analysis the best judges of their own interest, because:(i) Some people may come to enjoy what they do not do already as a result of new opportunities being presented. (ii) Some people will accept guidance or stimulus from others on matters where they perceive that their knowledge or taste is limited. (iii) Many people would like high quality material to be available even though they would not willingly watch or listen to it themselves in large enough numbers for it to be paid for directly (for instance the National Gallery example in paragraph 562). 565. Public patronage of broadcasting can go further. There may be a case for experimenting with types of entertainment or popular programmes of a different standard to the ones which viewers and listeners would have demanded unpromptcd. The only a priori stipulations are that state support should be direct and visible and not achieved by cross-subsidisation or "leaning" on programme makers, and that such patronage should account for a modest proportion of total broadcasting. 566. We have stated the case for trying to enlarge the range of choice facing the public beyond what would be otherwise viable. But we would also maintain that public intervention here should be of a positive kind and transparent, to help finance additional protluction, rather than of a negative, censorious kind, oblique and undetectable, which even the best system of regulation risks becoming. If one believes that people should be allowed to make their own decisions, and they appear content with a diet of manufactured junk food, then we can support all sorts of activities designed to enlarge their taste and inform them of the merits of other foods. But if after all these efforts they still make for junk food, that is their privilege in a free society. Access to Broadcczsting Services 567. It will be argued that the Committee's statement so far is primarily concerned with the efficient allocation of resources used in broadcasting through both private and public action, but ignores the question of the inequality of access to broadcasting services as a result of differences in income. The substitution of voluntary purchase of broadcasting services means that poor listeners and viewers will have to pay the same as rich listeners and viewer& for programmes and the rich will be able to afford a greater volume and variety in their broadcasting "diet". It is recognised by those who put forward this argument that the existing licence fee is regressive with resl.'ect to. in~me and this leads them to argue f?r the replacement of the licence fee by some form of chargmg wh1ch IS more closely related to means. A vanant of this argument has already been mentioned in paragraph 259, by which the licence fee should be abolished and the BBC should be financed out of general taxation. 568. The Committee accepts that a move towards a Pay-TV system might result in those on lower incomes paying more for broadcasting services both because of the: charges. introduced and their desire to alter their "mix" of the volume and type of programmes that they w1sh to enjoy. If Pay-TV had any adverse distributional effects then the Committee would prefer to see these taken care of by alterations in the tax or benefit structure or both, leaving those who were compensated in this manner to decide for themselves, in the light of their tastes and preferences, the amount and comp~sition of broa?casting services that ~ey wished to purchase. Similarly any change in the method of financmg of the public support for broadcas'!-"g does not preclude taking account of distributional effects. ~ndeed, _the proposal to use gen~ral taxation rather than a regressive levy would be one method by wh1ch pubhc support for broadcasting could be financed.
The Political Economy of the Media I/ 12.3 Implications for the Present System Commercial Laissez-Faire
571. The Committee's view of the aim of broadcasting, with its emphasis on reflection of the tastes and preferences of consumers must not be confused with what may be termed the "commerciallaissez-faire" system. Such a system would simply require that all broadcasting channels should be privatised and that the whole of broadcasting should be de-regulated without worrying about whether channels are financed by advertising or in other ways. 572. The view that commercialisation will in the end bring the main advantages of a genuine market is much more willingly accepted in the USA than in Britain and has a strong influence on the present US Administration's policies. A graphic statement of what the free market principle entails is found in the view of Mark Fowler, the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission for the USA. He characterises the traditional approach to broadcasting regulation as the "trusteeship model" in which exclusive rights to a frequency are assigned, having regard to the "public interest" rather than bought and sold in the marketplace. This has given the FCC the right to intrude into programme content on the ground that the "Commission is more than a traffic officer, policing the wavelengths ... (The 1934 Communications Act] puts upon the Com~ission the burden of determining the composition of the traffic", to quote a significant judgement of Justice Frankfurter. In Mr Fowler's view this judgement is misconceived, and, strictly interpreted, would be in conflict with the First Amendment of the US Constitution which states that Congress can pass no law which abridges freedom of speech and of the press. Mr Fowler proposes instead that access to the electromagnetic spectrum should be made as free as possible and that regulation of content should be eliminated. Market incentives will then act as a "regulator", by ensuring that consumers are.~r?vided with ':"h~t they desire. A_ bod¥ such as the FC:C should, he believes, confine its regulatory actlVllles to the ass1gnmg of property nghts m the spectrum m some appropriate way and to any intervention needed to sustain competition. Mr Fowler and his supporters are, however, prepared to countenance so.m_e subsidy for public service broadcasting, provided that interference in the marketplace is kept !o a mmtmum.
569. Another aspect of the problem llf access to broadcasting services concerns the location of viewers and listeners. There would be, as at present, considerable disparity in the costs of providing broadcasting services to different areas of the United Kingdom. Those companies charging for broadcasting services would be tempted to cover their costs by charging different prices in relatively low-cost and high-cost areas, to the detriment of the latter. This would be contrary to the principle of universality o.f access to broadcasting services. 570. The Committee accepts that there is a collective benefit in access to a considerable range of broadcasting programmes, particularly those which concentrate on matters of serious national concern, including news, educational and current affairs programmes. Its positio~ implies_that some measure of public support must be directed towards creating such access.or that some mtervenllon would be necessary in the charging system to achieve the same end. The prec1se a""!ount of.such support or the extent of regulation of charging is clearly a matter for debate. The Commtttee beheves that any such support or regulation should be made explicit and offers further suggestions on its extent in paragraph 699.
573. It would be easy to contract out of serious discussion of the US model, as now conceived by its regulators, simply by arguing that the US system is so different-some might say alien-to the UK system. ThC: ~mmittee, having placed s~ much emphasis on the importance of "consumer sovereignty", has an obhgatton, nevertheless, to explam why the Fowler model should not form the eventual aim of a gradual reform of broadcasting finance. There are two major problems about the model: (i) US TV is financed largely by advertising. This means, as we have stated bcforc,that television and radio stations direct their programming to satisfy the needs of advertisers. If viewers and listeners have access to a large number of channels offering a wide range of choice, the discrepancy between an adver.tiser-financed system and one of direct consumer sovereignty exercised by pay-TV is diminished. Whether it will be eliminated depends on the distribution of consumer preferences and the structure of programm~ cos!s, and of cour~e on whether concentration among channel owners or programme producers IS avmded. The expenence of Italy, where nearly 30 channels arc available to viewers in many areas, but where the Berlusconi group controls the main national private channels, is a warning here. (ii) An advertising financed system is more likely to provide for real consumer sovereignty in the US where the vast land area reduces the problem of spectrum scarcity. In addition, entry into the broadcasting _business is facilitated by the prospect of potentially large audiences. With a total of 6,000 radio stations and as many as 50 television channels in larger communities, the problem of coincidence of pre~erences of advertisers and viewers/listeners may be reduced. Any programme commanding a viable audtence may soon be able to find some means of transmission in the main US urban centres. Even then television financed by advertising could still turn out to be inferior to a pay-TV system with many channels. The difference remains that pay TV viewers pay for the programmes they receive whereas they do not pay for programmes financed by advertising. · (iii) In any case it will take us a good few years of growth of satellite and cable channels, and decline in the price of their reception, before the problems of spectrum shortages are overcome in the UK. There still remains the question of whether the market for programmes will be sufficient to attract new entrants on a sufficient scale to provide adequate choice and competition. Some members of the Committee believe that for this reason the US analysis will remain misleading for the UK alone, but might be more useful for Western Europe as a whole. Others believe tlmt the quest inn nf "Where will the prmluccrs come from?" a~d "How will people find time to consume their waresT' {sec paragraph 6111) could easily have been apphed to books at the time of the introduction of printing. In their view the root of the problem is not the size of the UK market, but the present difficulty of directly charging individual consumers at differential prices which reflect the intensity of their preferences.
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The Political Economy of the Media ll Public Service Broadcasting
574. The Public Service concept has for a long time been at the heart of the debate on broadcasting. We have referred to it in paragraph 563 but we have left its analysis until this stage of the chapter, not to belittle it, but on the contrary because it can best be understood in relation to the earlier discussion of consumer sovereignty and commerciallaissez-faire. 575. There seem to be as many interpretations of the concept of Public Service as contributors to the debate. It is worth distinguishing between Public Service as a set of institutional arrangments and "public service" as a shorthand way of referring to certain characteristic beliefs about the aims of such institutions and the methods by which they should pursue them. We start with the institutions. 576. The essence of the Public Service institutions has been that, under arrangements made by Parlia· ment in the name of and for the good of society as a whole, a non-commercial body or bodies are given the duty of serving the evident needs and interests of the public, as best these may be judged by the body or bodies themselves, and with whatever supporting financial arrangements Parliament may see fit to put in place. The public's needs and interests have been taken by Parliament (for instance in the BBC Charter) to consist in programmes which "inform, educate and entertain". The interpretation of these broad targets has been presumed to be the duty of the bodies charged with supplying, or supervising the provision of, programmes to the public. These institutional arrangments apply not only to the BBC, which has a direct responsibility for providing programmes, but also to the IBA, which is responsible for allocating ITV and commercial radio franchises, and for day-to-day regulation of the commercial sector, and which acts as a strict regulator of schedules, content and advertising time. Looser regulation applies to cable, DBS and community radio. (See paragraphs 2&-42.) 577. There is much more confusion about public service as an aim. Indeed BBC spokesmen have not always been as effective as they might have been in explaining it, either because they have been too vague or because they have claimed too much. For instance, some statements of the BBC Director General Alasdair Milne risk giving the impression that the viewer's or listener's main function is to react to a set of choices determined by the broadcasting institutions. • 578. We had some difficulty in obtaining an operational definition from broadcasters of public service broadcasting. But it would be unfair to dwell on this difficulty if only because the term "public service" is used in discussions of broadcasting throughout the world and its meaning is reasonably clear from its usage. Most broadcasters have insisted on:(i) The duty to "inform, entertain, and educate", a duty which is reaffirmed in the introductory section of the BBC Charter. (ii) The principle of geographical universality (see paragraph 569). In other words there is a commitment to. ensure that television and radio services reach as high a proportion of the population as possible.t
579. In the early stages of our Inquiry stress was laid by BBC representatives on the incompatibility of advertising on the BBC with public service principles. Any such move would, it was argued, drive both the BBC and ITV much further into a battle for ratings. Later more stress was laid on the argument that public service covered the BBC's light entertainment as well as other programmes and that the Corporation must not be drawn into a so-called "Arts Council ghetto". 580. The best operational definition of public service is simply any major modification of purely commercial provision resulting from public policy. Defined in this way the scope of public service will vary with the state of broadcasting. If a full broadcasting market is eventually achieved, in which viewers and listeners can express preferences directly, the main role of public service could turn out to be the collective provision outlined in paragraphs 561-566 of programmes which viewers and listeners are willing to support in their capacity of taxpayers and voters, but not directly as consumers. These would include programmes of a more demanding kind with a high content of knowledge, culture, education and experiment (including entertainment). •For instance: "Broadcasting is not a matter of one person sending a signal to another; or one household to another; it is a process or scauering and thus sowing seed far wide. Some will fall on slony ground and some on fertile ground. Broadcasting further means that the sower waits to see what grows." (Speech althe public meeting held by the Committee at Church Uouse. Westminster, 28 November 1985.)
tThe BBC Annual Report and Handbook 1986 indicates that coverage for BB Cl and BBC2 was estimated to be 99.1% or the population. The report goes on to say that it had taken 65 new transmitting stations to push the figure up from 99.0% to 99.1%.
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581. But in the highly imperfect broadcasting market we ~~ve known, a~d which sti!l ~xists, the role of public service is much wider. So long as the number of telev.tston channels ts severely hmtte? ~y s~ectrum shortage, and there is no direct payment by viewers and hsteners, an unregulll:ted a~verusmg-f~nance~ broadcasting system so far from satisfying consumer demand can actually dtstort tt. In parucular tt provides an inadequ~te supply of medium appeal and "minority ~rogrammes", whi.ch most people w~nt to see or hear some ofthe time (see paragraphs 299-316). In these cucumstances--qmte apart from thetr role in stimulating a taste for demanding programmes-the Public Service institutions have been necessary to provide the viewer and listener with what he or she wants as a consumer. The BBC and the regulate~ ITV system have done far better, in mimicking the effects of a true consumer market, than any purely !mssezfaire system, financed by advertising could have done under conditions of spectrum.shorta&e. To atd th~m in their task they have established systematic and frequent.market research, cov~nng audt.e!lce appreciation as well as ratings, of a kind that no new~paper ha~ avatlable on a .regu!ar basts. In. addttlon t~ey have provided more demanding programmes (for mstances m the arts), whtch vtewers and hsteners mtght have been willing to pay for in their capacity as taxpayers and voters, but not as consumers. 582. We would go further. The broadcasting authorities have not only mimicked the ""!arket; they have provided packages of programmes to audiences at remarkably low cost (measured by the hcence fee and by the implicit cost to the consumer of ITV advertisements (see paragraph 239) and judged by the ~tandards of other forms of leisure and entertainment and by international standards). We can also pay tnbute to the way in which the packaging of programmes has satisfied and develo~ed audience tastes. The inte~twining of information education and entertainment has broadened the honzons of great numbers of vtewers and listeners. The notion of cross-fertilisation of programme categories is inherent in BBC practice-and in ITV practice, to~r-and of great v~lue. Thu_s '!'e have ·:Yes, Mini~ter:•, a programme s~r.ies conceived as entertainment.but, some of us thmk, provtdmg effective education m the ways of Bnush government. Comparable examples can be found in "Crimewatch", "Tomorrow's World", "Mastermind", "The World About Us" and a host of other programmes. The cookery programmes-forerunners of "Food and Drink" and "You are what you eat"-began as furt~e! education.on BBC2 .in ~aytime. ~ut prov~~ so popular .th~t they were moved to peak timings. All that ts m accord wtth the Reilhmn tra~ttlon, denvmg from Rett~ s own dictum in 1924 that you have to mix a little education with a lot of entertamment, to carry people with you (quoted, among other places, in John Reith's Broadcasting over Britain (19~4, pp 147-8)*. It must be admitted that, today, entertainment values at times appear !o. h~ve taken. ov~r m s~me new~ and current affairs programmes, with the inevitable consequences of tnvtahty and dtlutiOn of mformauon. Broa~ly speaking, though, the concept of providing indirect education and information through some entertainment programmes still prevails. 583. The practice of providing a mixed diet at low cost is one that we ~ish to see continued. It is, in ~ur view, compatible with the recommendations that follow for fu!ure financt!lg of the BBC through subscnption. It is, indeed, important that in moving towards the changes of the mtd-1990s and later dcv~lopments discussed in this chapter we do not, prematurely, dismantle or destroy the "packaged" terrestnal broadcasting services that give good value today. t •fn Anthony Smith, British Broadcasting, David and Charles, 1974, pp 44-S. tVivid illustrations of achievement and criticism of the earliest public service broadcasting cin be drawn from two books. The first comes from Tom Bums, in The BBC: public instilulion and private world, ppl~20. when: ht: assesses Rcith's period (1924-38):
"More strikingly and more assuredly, the BBC had bc:gun-or atlc:a.st can claim lhe greatest share ir;-what amounh:d tn a cultu~al traru.forma· lion. What the Public Ubrarics AclS of the 1890s had achieved already for books was Clpped hy the BB~ m other !egards. 11 rc::~~ccd Ylrt~all~ to zero the marginal cost to every member of the nation of full access to an enormous cultured heritage: preVIOUsly avntlable to a pnvdcgcd mmonty. The clearest manifestation or the sheer cuhural gains achieved through broadcasting is, of course, !"us1c. Perhaps the gr~atest achtevcme~t of the. BBC has been to transform this country from what was musically the most barbarous nation in Europe mto what has sor_ne cla1ms '?be the mus1ca~ cap1tal of the world. Its role in the development or new forms of dramatic writing, und in new dramatic genres-and thus tn the warume and, cspeaally. post war development or the theatre-is less easy to assess, but it is certainly considerable:... Bunu goes on. however, to be critical of Reith"s approach to broadcasting on pulilical issues. These had already been covered in deaail in the famous study by RH Coasc, Brilish Broad<arling (Longman, 1950, p. 167 and p. 18'1):
No balanced appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of .. Public Service.. institutions should ovc:rlook the BBC's role in kct:ping Winshln Olurchill off the air before World War Two. Details were given hy Brcndan Bracken in a Commons Debate on 16 July _1~6. whl!n_ he relutt:d that Churchill .. implored the Govcrnor1 of the BUC tu give: him an uppurlunily to !Iota le tn the country lite d~:!>pcr.ue dangers at was cnh:rmc .upon hy th.c squalid policy of appcasemcnl. The BBC refused to give him an opp