This collection of essays offers the reader a wide-ranging discussion of the possible, and the appropriate, involvement of the audience in shaping the content of entertainment and journalism.
It is a fitting and useful update to Kathryn C. Montgomery’s seminal work, Target: Prime Time: Advocacy Groups and the Struggle over Entertainment Television (Oxford University Press, 1990, paper ed.).
Many essays, such as Michael Suman’s “Interest Groups and Public Debate,” contain a rich source of data and anecdote about individual advocacy groups and their activities.
Together they represent a variety of opinions as well.
At one extreme there are the activists and moralists who seek to prevent, or at least minimize, what they see as the anti-social and immoral consequences of the media.
Many of the authors reveal experience on more than one side of the issues. That has been my fate as well.
I have represented the industry as a lawyer, regulated it as a Commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, and worked in it as a host and editor (PBS’ “New Tech Times;” NPR commentaries). I have criticized it as an author (How to Talk Back to Your Television Set) and nationally syndicated columnist (“Communications Watch”), and tried to reform it (as Chair, National Citizens Committee for Broadcasting, which produced one of the few periods of reductions in levels of televised violence). I now lecture and teach about it in law schools (“Law of Electronic Media”) and elsewhere.
By design, I have no economic interest in these issues. I do not work for, represent, own stock in or otherwise speak for any telecommunications, mass media, or related industry or company. That doesn’t make me right. It just means that any misinformation or faulty analysis you find here is mine alone.
My bias, to the extent I have one, favors artistic freedom and diversity – while respecting the views of everyone in our democracy. I fought censorship as a FCC Commissioner (including my public attacks on the censorship efforts of President Nixon and Vice President Agnew). I have been associated ever since with Project Censored (the annual “Ten Best Censored Stories”) and many other organizations similarly inclined. I value my friendships within the creative community over the years.
That said, what sense can we make of the range of views represented by this book’s authors?
For starters, there is a need to listen, carefully, to those with whom we disagree.
We who value diversity, investigative journalism, artistic freedom and creativity would better serve our cause by being more aware of how rare and recent is our view.
That’s not to say we’re not right. It’s only to say we’re taking on thousands of years and hundreds of cultures.
Next to the biological preservation of our species, few drives are stronger than the desire to protect and perpetuate (for some, even proselyte) one’s culture. Parents as well as priests feel strongly what they believe to be their responsibility, as well as their right, to socialize their tribe’s next generation according to the values of the last.
Early Twentieth Century “country folk” resisted their children’s attraction to “evil city ways.” The Amish even turn their backs on agricultural modernity – thereby avoiding such concerns as “Y2K”! Indigenous Native peoples around the world (including our own Native Americans) struggle to hold, and pass on, ancient customs.
This desire extends throughout all socio-economic classes. Some families place a very high value on children practicing, and marrying within, the family’s religious faith. Others are equally insistent on their children preparing for designated professions through attendance at particular prep schools and colleges.
Tradition!
It was not, after all, very long ago in the human day that any heretical deviation from the dominant church’s theology was considered the crime of blasphemy. (Indeed, heresy, used as a pejorative, is derived from the Greek word hairesis, meaning “to choose for oneself.” So much for individual creativity!) Severe punishments, including painful death, were among the risks assumed by those who deviated from the politically correct views of the religious right of those times.
Criticism of government officials was punishable as sedition. Like licenses for broadcasters in America’s early 20th Century, only loyal and trustworthy printers were granted the licenses necessary to engage in the mass media of their day.
But before we engage in a unanimous sigh of relief we are no longer living in such times, reflect for a moment on the extent to which we still are.
From baby radio’s first squawking cries, most countries assumed, with little or no debate, that radio would be, as a matter of course, under the exclusive control of public corporations or the government. (Turning ours over to the Navy was a serious early option.) Not only was it unthinkable (in the literal sense) to permit radio’s commercial exploitation, all countries assumed that any force with this much potential for shaping the society required some form of societal responsibility and control.
Nor are these concerns matters of history, however recent. The kinds of political and artistic freedoms we take for granted are unknown in many countries in the world even today.
How many of the world’s six billion citizens have the opportunity to subject their leaders to the kind of media assault President Clinton endured during 1998-99 (for that matter, throughout his entire presidency)? How many would permit, as we do, everything from defamatory political commentary to embarrassing stand-up comedic ridicule? By contrast, in how many countries would the perpetrators quickly find themselves confronting the kinds of punishments meted out in merry old England?
Not only is there a near-universal resistance to cultural forces from outside one’s tribal racial, religious, ethnic, or other community. The cultural control formerly (and, to some extent, still today) exercised by kings and tyrants has, in democracies, been passed to the body politic.
There has been a three-dimensional explosion in the spread of democracy – that is, a presumed right of “the people,” and each individual, to influence, if not control, the things that matter in one’s life.
“Dilbert” notwithstanding, distributive decision making, rewards for suggestions, protections for “whistle-blowers,” and innumerable legislative protections have even brought a measure of worker participation to private corporations.
Although libertarians and conservatives may take a different view of the matter, for the most part Americans accept the notion of public ownership – with its attendant democratic control – of highways, schools, libraries and parks.
This is not a diversion from our subject.
I mention these trends because we are living at a time, and in a country, in which Americans assume that “things that matter” – from the street light on our corner to the curriculum taught by our kid’s third grade teacher – should reflect, at least to some degree, their own concerns and desires.
Which brings us to the entertainment media. For among the “things that matter” few, if any, matter more than does media.
As someone has observed, even if television doesn’t tell us what to think, it certainly tells us what to think about. We see its influence in speech patterns, hair and clothing styles – and, as the advertising industry persuades manufacturers, buying patterns. Teachers report the shortened attention span of students from kindergarten on – not to mention the problems TV helps create for teenage girls, poignantly described in Mary Bray Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia. Public health officials bemoan television-induced obesity in children, and a variety of self-induced illness and disease in their parents. Others are concerned about stereotyping (e.g., of race, gender, or age), declining moral values, crime and violence. (As Al Schneider acknowledges, “Television does offer role models and influence people’s understandings.” He sees “its impact on society.” However, in fairness to his position, he also believes that ”television should not be held responsible for solving all of society’s social problems . . ..”)
Given television’s influence and consequences, the remarkable fact is not that there are media reform advocacy groups (and individuals) in a democracy. The wonder is why there are not more of them. (As I used to argue to other organizations’ leaders, when building media reform coalitions, “Regardless of what your first priority may be, your second priority simply has to be media reform.”)
At least one of our authors, I was pleased to discover, recognizes this democratic pressure: Thomas Streeter (“What is an Advocacy Group, Anyway?”). He says, “It’s not wildly idealistic to envision a society in which the organization of the media is a matter subject to full, open, public debate. . . .[T]here is genuine popular enthusiasm for democratic control of media organization.”
When a high school class picks a band for a dance, or a church selects a soloist (or minister) there may or may not be “artistic freedom” for the performer, but there is tribal control.
So long as artistic creativity, performance, or publication takes place within the tribe it creates no inter-tribal conflict or stress. The tribe, through whatever its formal or informal governing mechanisms may be, will have a measure of consensus about the acceptability of its artists. The “tribal marketplace” really is an adequate regulatory tool.
In short, “media” is not the problem. It is the “mass” in “mass media” that creates the conflict; the invasion of formerly inviolate tribal territory.
Carol Altieri well describes the conflict this creates for her, within CBS.
And Michael Curtin’s thoughtful portrayal of the evolution from a three-network economy to a marketplace of multiple-channel cable and satellite distribution systems does not necessarily support his assertion that television today serves “niche marketing.” However many channels there may be – and notwithstanding his examples of “Ellen” and “TV Nation” – tribes are still, for the most part, left unserved (not to mention powerless) with programming that may, literally, be reruns of old network programs (or programs modeled on them).
When a sound truck can be heard throughout a community, a television station’s programming reaches a region, a satellite’s “footprint” covers a continent, tribal control is lost.
But the desire for it is not. Just as it is true that “You have not converted a man because you have silenced him” [John, Viscount Morley, “On Compromise” (1874))], neither can you convert by cacophony.
A broadcaster once told me, “You’re not paranoid, Nick, you’ve got real enemies.” So it is with today’s tribal spokespersons, such as Ted Baehr. As William Donohue explains in “A Catholic Look at the Entertainment Industry,” their values, traditions, and culture really are challenged and eroded by mass media. And Laurence Jarvik (“Open Hollywood to Social Conservatives – Or Else”) suggests the industry better respond.
The product of mass media cannot be value neutral.
That, if true, many of these positions square with my own ideological orientation is, or should be, irrelevant. As a public health person of sorts I have tracked, and supported, Sonny Fox’s (and others’) use of the soap opera format in third world countries to impart population control and other information (“Using Soap Operas to Confront the World’s Population Problem”), and Jay Winsten’s public health efforts (“Harvard Alcohol Project: Promoting the ‘Designated Driver’”).
No, the point – scarcely controversial by now – is simply that mass media does, necessarily, tend to reflect the conscious and unconscious values of its creators and owners.
(It is not clear, for example, whether Mickey Gardner’s objections to a “values agenda” (“Public Policy Advocacy: Truant Independent Producers in a Federal City Fixated on a ‘Values Agenda’”) is an attack on anyone’s values or only the values of democratically elected representatives as distinguished from the values of non-elected corporate executives.)
Are there exceptions?
Curtin says he is “not convinced that ownership of a media conglomerate provides centralized control.” With respect, I disagree. Even Mickey Gardner – for the most part “pro-industry” – believes that “the media consolidation and increased vertical integration . . . raise the serious prospect of diminished program diversity . . ..” (And consider Al Schneider’s story regarding the influence of the ABC president’s wife, Isabelle Goldenson.) Michael Suman agrees: “concentration of media ownership also points to less diversity of opinion.”
There may be exceptions (before someone is fired); there may be a corporate decision that, for this time and place, the appearance of openness to self-criticism and diversity, or of editorial boldness, is of greater value than short-term profit (or avoidance of loss). But it is clear that – however management may choose to define it – maximizing the global media conglomerate’s corporate profit ultimately will be what drives content decisions. As Michael Suman has observed, “What most determines what ends up on television is the bottom line” (“Interest Groups and Public Debate”).
Consider Gabriel Rossman’s interview of Bill Horn, speaking for the gay and lesbian organization “GLAAD” (and Al Schneider’s report of ABC’s response to gay and lesbian pressure). They review the history, and continuing need, for such an organization. Why is it still needed?
Because a producer who’s on the fence about the treatment of a fictional homosexual in a script written in West Los Angeles may end up affecting the treatment of an actual homosexual on the fence in the wild west of Wyoming.
It is not enough to remind such a victim (if they’re still alive) that the TV set has an “on-off” switch, that an individual does not have to watch a program she finds distasteful, that parents should control their children’s TV diet.
John Prine once wrote a song advising us to “blow up your TV.” The point is that even those who accept his counsel continue to live in a televised society in which most of their fellow citizens’ experiences and beliefs have been, at least to some extent, mediated.
In short, even if Congress had not put the phrase into the Communications Act of 1934, there is, inherently, a “public interest” in the content, and consequences, of our entertainment industries.
Of course, even if describing a problem is a good beginning, it does not constitute a solution.
How can we balance these seemingly irreconcilable drives of (a) tribal integrity, (b) artistic freedom in the mass media, and (c) global multi-media conglomerates’ need to profit maximize?
With great difficulty.
1. Government regulation. Whatever may have been the wisdom, integrity and possibility of government regulation of program content when the three networks’ affiliates were “television” for most viewers, that is no longer possible today.
Rex Heinke and Michelle Tremain (“Influencing Media Content Through the Legal System: A Less Than Perfect Solution for Advocacy Groups”) have done a thorough job of laying out the history, law and reasons why. They conclude: “the courts are an increasingly inhospitable place to address the concerns of those wishing to change the way the world views them.” So I will just add a few words of my own.
There are legal as well as administrative hurdles to government regulation of 500 channels (what Michael Curtin calls “a blizzard of options”). In the 1960s “the networks” – which were not, after all, “licensed broadcasters” – were regulated by the FCC (a) by virtue of the network “owned-and-operated” stations (which were, of course, licensed), and (b) the legal two-step of regulating the contract terms entered into by station licensees (which the FCC could regulate).
This is not to say that a rationale could not be found, perhaps, for governmental regulation of, say, ESPN or The Comedy Channel. It is only to say that a program supplier is not, per se, a “broadcaster” required to be licensed under the terms of the 1934 Communications Act.
Law, wisdom and ideology aside, the prospect of an FCC trying to regulate program content in a 500-channel world strikes me as an administrative nightmare – if not, indeed, an impossibility.
And we have, so far, assumed that what we are talking about is “television” – albeit a form of video entertainment that may come to us from the Internet, telephone company, communications satellite, coaxial cable or optic fiber, rather than conventional over-the-air broadcast.
But “convergence” is more than a buzzword. Video is, today, not only a commercial import to our TV screens in real time. It may be a rented (or owned) videotape – or output from our own video camera. It may come from a CD or DVD disk – or off the Internet.
Indeed, video distribution via Internet may, someday, render obsolete much of what we write here today, navigating as we are by a rearview mirror focused on our experience and expectations regarding “television” and “cable.”
It is already possible to watch regular cable TV on our computer screens (not to mention the video clips we can download from the Web). To complete the circle, we can also, if we wish, get a device to view our Web surfing on our conventional TV screen.
And all of this can be miniaturized into shirt pocket, or wristwatch-sized devices – or wall-sized screens in home entertainment centers.
We won’t even begin to describe the additional range of games and other entertainment played on independent devices, or TV screens, or stand-alone computers – and those involving Internet-connected players.
When one considers the full range of what would need to be “regulated” in order to minimize the adverse effects of the media, most broadly defined, it becomes an even more impossible task.
Finally, it is not clear why the FCC would bring any more enthusiasm to this task than it has over the years to any other involving public interests opposed by corporate interests.
As a part of an overall strategy media reform advocates will want to continue to include letters, proposed regulations and legislation, and litigation. The example of Peggy Charren’s accomplishments with Action for Children’s Television is reason enough to fight on. Decades after “deregulation” there are still some regulations, and public-minded officials, in place. Using them may, if nothing else, at least attract the attention of industry management (and possibly journalists) in ways that may promote reform.
But they are unlikely to be adequate alone.
2. Boycotts. Robert Pekurny’s piece (“Advocacy Groups in the Age of Audience Fragmentation: Thoughts on a New Strategy”) paints a pretty gloomy picture of the utility of boycotts. I won’t repeat his arguments here, most of which I find persuasive. (But see Al Schneider’s description, from within ABC, of the impact of advertiser pressure.)
However, my own experience in the 1970s, with the National Citizens Committee for Broadcasting, was that
Even if the boycott, as such, has relatively little effect on revenues, the publicity it engenders may move a public-relations-sensitive executive to action – and help an organization with membership building.
Toward the end of Michael Curtin’s piece he offers an innovative approach to what might be called a “reverse boycott” that any media reformer would do well to ponder.
3. Picketing, street theater, and other creative change strategies. It’s not necessary or appropriate to review here all the techniques developed over the years by community organizers and social change artists. There’s a body of literature on the subject. Meanwhile, the range is limited only by one’s imagination, experience, talent, courage and budget. Properly conceived and executed there is no reason to suspect such strategies could not have an impact in any age.
4. Letter writing. It’s true that postal rates continue to climb. But they still have a long way to go before reaching the levels of many corporations multi-million-dollar budgets for advertising, public relations and lobbying. So long as you don’t expect too much from a letter, envelope and stamp, the time and money can have a disproportionate impact. If your e-mail is free, and your recipient can receive it, the benefit-cost ratio is even more favorable. At a minimum, most recipients at least keep a tally; and occasionally an individual letter is read and moves an executive to action. Letter writing campaigns, like any other technique, will benefit from strategic thought and planning.
5. Meetings and conferences. For those with the ability, money, time, and access the kinds of individual meetings with writers and producers described by Robert Pekurny (“Advocacy Groups in the Age of Audience Fragmentation: Thoughts on a New Strategy”) can, of course, be most effective.
If it is possible for individuals with a common interest to find each other, and organize, they may be able to afford to have their own “ambassador to Hollywood.” As a practical matter, however, such personal contact is not a meaningful opportunity or option for most members of the television audience.
Certainly Pekurny’s suggestion of positive re-enforcement and awards can’t do any harm. And Gabriel Rossman offers his own analysis of “cooperative” tactics.
For what it is worth, over the course of my lifetime to the best of my recollection I have always begun with the cooperative approach in any of the dozens of situations in which I have found myself responsible for bringing about change. It’s my favorite strategy. It’s sensible. It saves time, effort, stress and money, and is an all-round more civilized way to live.
Sadly, however, I have all too often found myself confronting administrators and adversaries on the other side of the table with whom cooperative strategies simply do not work.
It has been said that a successful administrator “needs gray hair so as to look wise and hemorrhoids so as to look concerned.” All too many show evidence of neither.
They may display arrogance or avoidance, complacency or control, defensiveness or duplicity, elusiveness or evasiveness, feigning or fear, ignorance or indecisiveness – or all of the above. They may be manipulative and myopic, resistant and repressive – need I complete this alphabetical list? Presumably you have encountered one or two such individuals yourself.
They are simply unwilling to try the successful administrative strategies of cooperation, fairness, inclusion, justice, openness and responsiveness.
In fairness, it may well be that this is simply their reaction to being consistently overworked, the target of irrational and hurtful criticism, and repeatedly disappointed by the individuals they have treated with kindness, reason and trust.
Or it may be that these are merely natural human tendencies, so common and widespread as to make almost meaningless any effort to label individual administrators.
Whatever the case, my suspicion is that a good many of the organizations Rossman describes as using the tactics of “hostility” may, like I, not be using them as a matter of first and favored choice.
It’s just that having tried the cooperative approach with such people, one soon – however reluctantly – comes to the conclusion that the only ways to bring about change, with them, are boycotts, lawsuits, legislation, regulation, shareholder actions and embarrassing media attention.
6. Organizations. Although relatively obvious, it should perhaps be mentioned that the successful impact of many to most of the activities just described require (or will at least substantially benefit from) organizations of one kind or another. Peggy Charren has offered us some very useful “Principles for Effective Advocacy from the Founder of Action for Children’s Television.” And note that an “organization” can gather leverage from coalition efforts as much, and perhaps more, than from its own “members.”
When I chaired the National Citizens Committee for Broadcasting (NCCB) in the 1970s we were successful in reducing levels of violence in network entertainment programming. We used direct mail to build a membership base and fund our activities. But as I sometimes said at the time, I always found my influence with Congress to increase substantially when I could walk into a congressional hearing room with “the other NCCB” (National Conference of Catholic Bishops) on one arm and the AFL-CIO on the other.
It’s not just a matter of the “numbers” of persons affiliated with the organizations. In my experience the more broadly representative a coalition can be (e.g., in terms of politics, socio-economic class, ideology, or race/ethnicity/gender) the more it deserves to be listened to.
7. Education. Given the proliferation of available media, described in paragraph 1, above, I sometimes think the only truly effective, long-term strategy is education. As Michael Curtin puts it, “to help citizens make sense of the options available to them.” If it is important that increasing shares of audience eschew the trivial and the tawdry, and prefer the virtuous to violence, developing individuals with the education and inclination to do so voluntarily may be the last best hope.
Perfect solution? Of course not. One might as well try to educate the fish in the sea about the virtues of life on a dry land they have never seen and cannot survive. Changing attitudes and tastes about the mediated environment through which we swim, while we are swimming in it, is kind of like trying to change a flat tire on a moving car.
But if it could be done it would provide a solution that would have the virtue of elevating media taste and utility while maintaining, indeed enhancing, the individual freedom of creators and audience alike.
So, what else might we do?
There is no magic solution. As described above – indeed, throughout this book – the best strategy is multiple strategies.
But there is an additional idea I’d like to throw into the mix – not as an alternative, but as a supplement: an organization to which individuals, and organizations, can take their complaints about the media.
The Hutchins Commission, and others over the years, have proposed something analogous called a “News Council” for complaints about newspapers. Where tried (Minnesota at one point) it has had mixed success.
In Great Britain it takes the form of the Broadcast Standards Commission.
There is enough to this idea to be worth our thinking about for the entertainment industry.
It’s a way of turning down the volume on what Gabriel Rossman describes as “hostile” strategies, and Michael Suman fears will produce self-censorship.
It is an effort to balance respect for tribes with creative freedom.
It does that, for starters, by avoiding the use of “government” – the great concern of Mickey Gardner and others. It also avoids funding, and control, by “the industry.”
It might be funded, for example, by one of our nation’s public-spirited and well-endowed foundations.
The “council,” and its supporting staff, would be made up, presumably, of “the good, the true and the gray” – that is to say, prominent individuals who have not been identified with, and are not perceived to be, spokespersons either for the industry or media advocacy groups. Indeed, they would be chosen as individuals, not as representatives of any organization. Of course, they should represent, to the extent possible, the demographics of America.
To relieve the creative community’s anxieties the organization would have no legal, or other enforcement, power.
Once adequately promoted by the news media, so that the audience knew it existed, the Council could perform the role of an entertainment industry ombudsperson. That is, it would be the place that critics of the entertainment industry could go with their letters, e-mail, phone calls, and surveys. Academics could contribute relevant research.
Sometimes the Council would simply count letters – not unlike what networks have always done. At other times it might request (not demand) a visit with a studio or network executive, producer or writer. With proper funding, it could also do surveys and other research.
When complaints warranted, it could make an effort at fact finding (without any right of subpoena) and issue such reports as it thought useful and appropriate. Its impact on the industry, however, would rest solely on the persuasiveness of the data, the reasoning in its reports, and the news media’s willingness to cover its activities.
Some of our authors have described the lengths to which industry representatives now go to gather public input. Norman Lear had an assistant who functioned as, in effect, an ambassador to the outside world of various special interests. It was reported that the producers of “Prince of Egypt” consulted with hundreds of representatives of various religions.
Properly perceived, the Council – although not controlled by the industry – could serve the creative community in constructive ways as well. It could provide, in a totally unbiased and non-ideological way, a type of public input that the industry appears to seek anyway. Moreover, it could organize that input, put it in context, and make sense out of it. It could help the industry to avoid dealing with what Lionel Chetwynd characterizes as “every group of three people or more who think they know best” – while giving voice to the three people who do.
More important, it would provide some opportunity for democratic input – although not control – by an audience that often, now, feels marginalized, trivialized and helpless in dealing with global media conglomerates.
Media can be “pushed” or “pulled.”
Conventional television programming (or “spam” on the Internet) is “pushed” – that is, made available, as broadcast, when a receiver is tuned to the station.
Books, videotapes, and the results of Internet “search engine” research are “pulled” – that is, they are brought into our lives, and consciousness, because we have selected them, at the moment we want them.
To the extent that future technology, and media education, turns our mediated lives into a media economy that is increasingly “pull” rather than “push” the demand for audience control will diminish proportionately.
Until that happens, however, the struggle between artist
and audience, democratic control and artistic freedom, will continue.
______________________
* Nicholas Johson, former commissioner, Federal Communications
Commission and author, How to Talk Back to Your Television Set,
now teaches at the University of Iowa College of Law in Iowa City. For
more detail see his Web page: http://soli.inav.net/~njohnson Email: njohnson@inav.net