Session II: Media Systems and Technologies in History
Session I: The Question of the Media and the Public Sphere: The Idea of the 'Public Sphere'
Session III: The Concept of "Media" and "Mediation"
Session IV: Types and Forms of Discourse
Jeffrey Goldfarb:
There is reason to the madness of bringing all of you around the table. In fact I think we all do address the problems from different intellectual traditions and different empirical and historical focuses on the issue of media and the public sphere within a normative horizon of democracy. Last time we approached this problem from a fairly high theoretical level which was the kind of discussion that made some people very comfortable, especially people who find their professional address to be on 14th and 5th Avenue. Some people were uncomfortable because they felt that though the topics of the public life and media are of interest to them, the level of abstraction was somewhat elusive. I think our task is to be informed by that level of abstraction at the same time that we engage in specific empirical studies. That is what we are going to do today. We want to include among our nation-state societies comparisons the United States and that is what in fact we are going to do today. Again, in addressing our Mellon benefactors, we are going to do it by not only the electronic media which is probably the primary focus here, but we are going to do a comparison today that will look at the problem of the public, the project of democracy, the media of newspapers at the turn of the century on the one hand, and public television in the 1960's to the present. I think what you will find, that although Richard [Kaplan] and Bill [Hoynes] are studying different forms and different places in some ways but definitely at different times, that they do address the theoretical issues that we were addressing last week. In that way we will continue our work. That in fact the project, the compatibility of their two empirical studies, came to light when the issue of the constitution of the public sphere in democratic societies. It is that topic which they are going to address today. The hope is that the presentations will be brief so that we can do a lot of work together around the table today.
Richard Kaplan:
Both Bill and I see our projects as an appropriation, derivation, a kind of application [of] some of the ideas from last week of civil society and the public sphere. I was at an amusing lecture by Jay Rosen who talked about the movement he helped to invent on public journalism. He said, We formulated these ideas and we realized that once we threw them out into the world they were no longer going to be ours. We were going to lose control. We would no longer be able to say that this is the right interpretation or this is the wrong interpretation. There were going to be misrepresentations, stereotypes, caricatures, corruptions, and perhaps that is also true today of our appropriation of civil society and the public sphere. At least since we are both drawing upon Cohen and Arato's work at least to some extent. It is an attempt of an application of thinking through some ideas of the politics of the press.
I wanted to say something about the context of my work, just a couple of sentences, since after all when you write about a specific field you address really the people who are doing press history and I was trying to argue against some other interpretations, naturally. I saw these interpretations as economic, evolutionary. They had a certain kind of natural model of development. The oldest and most traditional one just said simply something like the development of the press market, development of commercialization, rise of advertising revenues. Professionalization of the press and reporting helped to liberate the press and create a free press. Liberate it from political control. There is a natural, evolutionary model, a kind of Whig account, and I want to argue against that. There is also a more recent kind of economic account which is in some ways just a reversal of evaluations. There is continuing capitalist corruption of the press. That the press has been removed from perhaps its glory days of political advocacy when it could address forthrightly citizens, pick[ing] up important political issues. But now it's been subject to corporate control and that's just the way it's going to be in a capitalist society. So I want to argue against any unilinear, economic, evolution and I am hoping to employ some sort of tripartite categories of civil society, like civil society, state, and market, and see perhaps if there is variable combinations even in a democratic, capitalist society like ours. So that was some of the back ground things and then in at least our preliminary thinking there were some issues which were raised which could be taken up fruitfully by the group here. One is the type of regulation, types of systems that help constitute the media, say whether it is market subordinated or subordinated to a party or parties. What types of regulations constitute what types of constraints are set up in media content and what are the consequences. And correspondingly are there moments of crisis and change and how do we explain those within the media. I am certainly speaking about a moment of change and Bill is speaking about a moment of innovation and crisis. With that could perhaps be connected to a theoretical framework which is working in my paper which is the idea of party systems. That there is a long terrain in American political history of certain kinds of systematic periods of relative stability and change and those revolve around various changes in social coalitions underlying parties and the relevant strengths of parties and the prominence of parties in the American public life. So one could perhaps speak today of the crisis of the democrats, of the welfare state, and the crisis of parties as a form [of] political integration in public life and what consequences that has for journalism in this context or public television as funding as insulation in political attacks. So yes, moments of crisis and change within the media and press. And the last aspect addressed much more by Bill was what ways can the press and media contribute to public life. He has a long discussion about this but I think also in looking at my case studies there is different ways that the press in the 19th century contributed to public life by its focus on issues, by its strong advocacy, by its addressing a select group of readers as its peers and equal citizens. So there is some idea of the ways the press normatively contribute to public life.
Bill Hoynes:
Let me just say a couple of background things myself. I started thinking about public television about ten years ago seriously. I watched it as a kid. The two kinds of questions or sets of questions that led me to think seriously about it was first, Todd Gitlin's book Inside Prime Time on Network Television which some of you may be familiar within which he argues that you can't understand the decisions which are made, that get made within the television industry, unless you understand the kind of commercial logic that operates in essence among the programmers, among the network executives, etc., down to the writers and producers. I find it still to be a compelling analysis, even though it's been out of print for ten years, even in the era of 100, 200, 500 channels, of the ways in which commercial logic shapes perhaps, not dictates, but shapes the kinds of programming that we end up with. But in reading the book and teaching it and thinking about it it was clear to me that this wasn't easily applicable to public forms of broadcasting, to PBS or NPR, when we talk about radio. So the second piece was work about public broadcasting, and surprisingly [I] found virtually nothing. In fact the most interesting piece I found was a piece written by a couple of mass communications scholars, that said that since the early 1970's there was virtually no scholarship on public television. They documented the great interest in public TV from say 1968-1972 or 1973 among sociologists and mass communication scholars and then show how in the United States we paid very little attention to it. Well, of course there was an interesting and theoretically well developed scholarship in Europe about this at the same time. So what my work tries to do, and I guess you read a little bit of it, is tackle from two different angles what is the relationship potential between public television and democracy. On the one hand, I asked questions about how can and how is public broadcasting, and in this case I mean the system that we think of as associated with PBS, how is it organized economically, socially in order to make it more likely to contribute to a democratic public sphere. The second question which I asked, which I won't talk about much today, is what is the content of public TV. If we take it seriously that it is somehow going to contribute to democracy in ways that many critics have argued, network television does or doesn't do well enough. So how well is it doing? How can we evaluate and measure it? What kinds of tools do we need to try and do that?
So let me talk a little bit historically and I actually have this tendency which I learned a long time ago to talk forever so I won't. I'll talk only for a few minutes. Let me talk a little bit historically about where public TV comes from, what kinds of questions come up when we take seriously public television as a potential contributor to a democratic public sphere. The early vision of public television say in the mid-1960's, say from 1965-1967 in the United States, is quite Utopian. For people who haven't read or heard about the Carnegie Commission's Report from 1967 "Public Television a Program for Action." It's kind of fun to go back and read it because the language is so optimistic in ways that we would be very unlikely to read anything like that today. So I found it nourishing myself to read this stuff when I was starting to feel too cynical. The early proponents of a public television system argued that we needed non-commercial television and that it was central to a healthy democracy. But that we needed non-commercial television that wasn't state television. So they had a critique of the BBC and the European model but they argued that the commercial model in the United States that had grown up with radio was problematic. What's interesting is that they essentially argued that we need an alternative to that commercial model instead of replacement for it or reorganization of it. And that has been one of the recurring questions in having this alternative. How marginal is it both politically and in the world of scholarship. It has been remarkably marginal except for some brief moments. Sometimes people point to Watergate, the hearings around Watergate: PBS broadcast all of them live. Which many argued would not have happened on the networks at the same time.
So this goes back I suppose where people trace it to, or at least one place where people trace it to, is the chair of the FCC under Kennedy which now everyone quotes 35 years later, calling commercial television a vast wasteland. Many people thought he didn't have much of a way of reconceptualizing television but he provided a critique of what commercial television was doing that was widely accepted within the Kennedy and later Johnson administrations. That television was somehow not living up to its great potential. And this is part of the much larger forty-year contest over the organization of broadcasting. I would recommend to people, I think Timo sent this out in his email, Robert McChesney Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy that is a careful study of 1928-1935 and the policy debates then that he argues cemented radio and then later television as a commercial industry.
So what was going on during this debate? Well, one, before 1920 there was a debate about who would control radio. How would it be organized? In fact the real innovators in early radio were these real amateurs, people referred to as radio boys. I guess they were mostly young men or the HAM radio folks who really developed the technology and started to think about how to have radio be more than just point to point communication. Which is what the early Mark Honnig(?) and others thought it would be. So there is a kind of contest between 1900-1920, 21, 22 or so between these amateurs and Mark Honnig and the military which actually thinks radio should be monopolized by the US government. In fact during World War One some hundreds of radio stations around the country, they weren't even called stations then, but amateurs who were broadcasting around the country were shut down because the Navy suggested that it was too dangerous. Then what happened is that most of them ended up going to work for the Navy and to use their innovative skills and to develop them further within the military. After World War One the US government is worried about Mark Honnig a foreign company dominating the radio business so they incorporate RCA the Radio Corporation of America with the help of what ATT, Westinghouse, and GE. It's kind of funny that it's the same names you hear about today when you talk about who's owning the media business. And a corporate interest involves in response to either "foreign interests" or "government interests" or these amateurs and they begin to argue that they are the representatives of the national interest.
In the late 1920's Herbert Hoover, who is then secretary of commerce, or really is up to about 25 or 26, holds a series of hearings, conferences on the future of radio and what evolves from these conferences is the notion that corporate radio represents the general interest whereas the alternative which are these amateurs or labor groups, religious groups, educational groups, represent special interests. That in fact the radio should be used for the general interest, for a mass audience, not for propagandistic or special interest oriented broadcasting. Now this leads to the Radio Act of 1927, the federal Radio Act which creates the Federal Radio Commission which is the precursor to the FCC now which came along in 1934. So between 1927 and 1934 there is a debate about whether or not groups like educational groups have been left out of all this. In essence the underlying question is: If radio is such a powerful medium, should it be used for something other than mass audiences and selling commercial products? Incidentally, the main product that was being sold was radios themselves. So the idea was to have programs so the people would go out and buy the sets. And as late as 1935 Senator Wagner introduces legislation which would make all previous licenses for radio null and void. And would reopen the question of whether or not the broadcasters of the United States should be organized on commercial lines. It was also supposed to set aside 25% of all the top frequencies on the AM frequencies for educational institutions. After lobbying from the national association of broadcasters it fails, historians argue that this is pretty much the end of the story.
I'm not so sure it's the end of the story because the story evolves throughout the 40's and 50's. In the 50's, when television is now in most homes, the national association of educational broadcasters and a variety of other educational groups argue that television now is such a powerful medium that we have to do something with it for educational purposes. There is always this thing lurking in the background about protecting children and all that which I think is important here. Ultimately, in 1952 get over 200 stations set aside for educational use. But there aren't educational stations at the time, there aren't the resources to actually use these stations, etc. So finally in the 1960's, under the Great Society, there is a sense that indeed we must do more than just set them aside: we have to fund them and provide resources. So that there can be educational television. And this is what leads to the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. Many people argue that the key to the Public Broadcasting Act, and I guess we could talk about this, was that there was an emerging sense that government could do good, not just bad, evil, however you want to characterize the discussions today out there, and that in the context of a highly developed commercial television industry it was doing much more harm than good by just allowing the airwaves to be controlled by these commercial interests and having very minimal forms of regulation. So it's surprising but the debate only lasts a few months, the national debate and the Public Broadcasting Act passes quite easily in 1967.
So what's the point of it? Well, there is a variety of perhaps different and conflicting points of having federally funded public television. What it was supposed to do was provide resources for programming and provide an interconnection so there could actually be a national system where everyone in the country could watch the same programs instead of having locally produced programs or programs sent by US mail that would take weeks sometimes for them to air in another city from where they were broadcast. So what was the point of it? Well, one was to program for what were called "underserved audiences". Which I think in essence what we would say now is that we need to reach more diverse audiences then the mass audience generally conceives of. Two, was that the programming, the content itself, should be more "diverse." That this should be a forum for diverse public expression and that in fact perhaps even more than just public expression that public TV could be a forum for deliberation for a broad-ranging public discourse. And there was great hope, maybe naivetŽ, about the possibilities of public television being a place where people actually talked to each other. Not just a place where programs were made by professional producers who then sent out their messages to a passive audience. There was an idea that public TV could be educational, in a narrow sense, that is in terms of having instructional programs and that in fact the airwaves are so powerful that we should make forms of education, including higher education, available to people who either couldn't afford them or were regionally far away from them. So we would use the public airwaves for educational purposes.
There was a sense that broadcasting should somehow become more accessible particularly at the local level. That is to say that local stations should provide opportunities for people in the community to come and make programs. It is interesting that this is what has started with public access TV but nobody watches it. The idea was that public broadcasting might do this, instead of what public access does with each little municipality, would do it for a whole media market and provide opportunities to people in the New York area or the Boston area or the San Francisco area to actually organize themselves and then go and use the public airwaves to express themselves and communicate with others, raise issues, etc. There was a sense that public television needed to be and could be autonomous from advertisers which was the principle discussion from government, which we could talk some about what it means to have a public or federally funded television system, but one which is not government-run or -controlled. Certainly that was their idea. And also from the sensibilities of the mass audience and it was supposed to be autonomous from having to attract a mass audience.
Now what did this ultimately add up to? It added up to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which was created in 1967 and the point of this, which is somewhat convoluted, but the point of this was that Congress would appropriate funds given to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting doesn't produce any programs as you probably know, but it then gives funds to people who produce programs, and the language that they used at the time was that the CPB was supposed to be a "heatshield". It was supposed to protect, insulate public broadcasters from government pressure. It hasn't done such a good job with that. There has been increasing government pressure in the last seven or eight years, and in particular on the CPB and on PBS. PBS was started a couple of years after CPB, when the local stations had the sense that they need to be organized at a national level. So basically what happens is that Congress gives money to the CPB, and the CPB gives money to the local stations, and the local stations pool their money and create PBS. So it's given to a centralized institution that gives it out locally and then the local groups decide to recentralize it. There has been a big discussion since PBS was created in 1969 and NPR in 1970 about the relationship between local and national, and whether or not it is possible to have broadcasting outlets that contribute to a democratic public sphere at the national level or whether they have to be locally oriented. My own view is that this is as much a way of protecting PBS and NPR from political pressure as anything as having a diverse range of targets that the President and Congress could go after, instead of it just being at the national level.
The original plan for public broadcasting was to have, and the language they used was this, to have long-term stable funding. Which would allow it to remain at least largely autonomous from the need to cater to government and to attract advertisers, and this has never happened in the, now I guess it is thirty years since the Public Broadcasting Act. It has never happened and there is a variety of explanations for why its never happened. It seems that the most compelling explanation is that Congress didn't want to give money away in ways that they couldn't control it. When Johnson apparently proposed that this might be worth doing, the leaders of Congress laughed at him. They thought it was absurd. At least this is the way that Bill Moyers tells it, and he was in the Johnson White House at the time. So it ends up that the story gets told that it was never perceived to be politically feasible to do this. Nonetheless, it keeps coming up. Every three years we have a debate over funding for public broadcasting and this question keeps coming up. If you want it to be autonomous, how can you structure it to be autonomous? It seems to me at least that no one is willing to do what we need to do; what we've come to recently is in 1987 in the US Senate a bill was proposed that would have taxed the sale of television and radio licenses and used those revenues to support public broadcasting. You can think of a variety of other options; I mentioned in the chapter I think that you read, that the original proposal was a tax on television sets. Whenever you purchased a television set it was going to be a 2% excise tax and that would go to fund public broadcasting. There was a sense that the European model of an annual users fee would not be feasible in the United States. As it turns out now the federal revenues that go to public broadcasting are about a buck and a half a person in the United States versus 20 times that in European countries. And this is still contested. What is the NEA now, 95 cents a person or something like that, an adult, and that is contested as well. So PBS, CPB and NPR, the whole range of institutions, has had a very difficult time expanding the commitment to public funding, but they haven't had a very difficult time expanding the amount of money. One of the difficult questions has been, they continue to grow financially but they never grew in terms of their independence or autonomy. They have always continually faced these same questions.
So what kinds of questions do these ultimately raise and maybe we will want to talk about them here. Most generally it seems to me that in the 30 years of public broadcasting's history, particularly television's, and I would say particularly television because the production cost is so much higher than that of radio and therefore they are much more dependent upon funders then NPR has been. PBS and its affiliates have become increasingly focused on the need to survive in a hostile economic and political environment and this was built into the system 30 years ago. Which seems to me to undermine, not entirely, but substantially the possibility for the system to do the things that it would have to do to contribute to a more democratic society. That they focus inwardly on protecting themselves at most turns, not at every turn and that this is becoming increasingly severe. So what are some of the questions that we need to ask about this. One, is public broadcasting "elitist"? It has been one of the major criticisms of public broadcasting since its founding, and if so, what does that mean and does it matter? Some in public broadcasting have argued that we are and we should be. Others have said that we can never have public support if we are not more populist. Surprisingly those who make the loudest arguments about public television being elitist have been Gingrich and his fellows in the Republican Congress. It is a striking point it seems to me that that has been one of their major claims to why we should do away with public TV. A second question is with all these new technologies what role does public television have in an era which we used to call cable and now it's fiberoptics, then the internet. Is public television becoming duplicative of what is already there? Is there a role for it? My own view is that the answer is yes although I don't think the people within CPB have figured out what it is yet. In part because they are so concerned about their survival. What possible sources of funding are there? Is federally appropriated money the only source of reasonable funding for a public television system? The other two major sources have been viewers like us, subscribers or members who give their money, corporate underwriters increasingly, and I guess another very funder has been state governments who have supported through state university systems a good many of the public television and radio stations. So the question is, is there public money and if not are there other sources of money? What kinds of strings are attached to public money? Is it even possible at this point in the 1990's to have a political fight over public money over public broadcasting? In 1992 they looked like they were about to be wiped off the face of the map but they ended up not only surviving but getting an increase in funding. Three years they survived but their funding was substantially cut. So I suppose we could say they are hanging in there. Another question is who is the public in all of this? What is the relationship between public TV and its public? Last time we talked about the differences between citizens and audiences in all of this. Or between audiences which are conceived as markets, versus citizens or the public. Public broadcasting started with a vision of the public as citizens who are not an undifferentiated mass but actual people who might participate in the system. That has pretty much gone away and the system itself generally now sees itself as producing programming for audiences that they might not get elsewhere so the question is how does that relate to a public that is in anyway different from or can be different from commercial television. I guess, finally how to evaluate success? How do we even make sense of whether a television system, a public radio system is contributing to the democratic public sphere? I've argued in my own work that one of the central ways to do that is to evaluate the political and demographic diversity of the programming, of the imagery, of the content and that this is an important measure of the degree to which public television can contribute to democracy. Not in any narrow ways of quotas but actually of ideas. Is there a broader range of ideas on public television? Can we see it and where? And I guess finally is there such a thing as "public interest?" And if so, what is it? The entire history of American broadcasting regulation has been based on the concept of the public interest but there has never been a clear definition of what it is. Not either among people in the regulatory agencies, among people in political institutions or broadcasters themselves. So there has been quite a fight over what the public interest is and what it might be and ultimately why it might matter to try to invoke the public interest. So I guess I will stop with those questions and hopefully we can talk some about all of this.
Goldfarb:
I would like Richard to say something because when I was reading his manuscripts it struck me that, first of all, in this moment of crisis and change which he analyses in the Detroit newspapers, that there is this well-known shift between a journalism that is explicitly partisan and connected to political projects to a journalism that is somehow more recognizable as American journalism. A journalism that stands above the field and kind of provides an opportunity, an objective opportunity for all legitimate fit forces "all the news that is fit to print" in New York to articulate their positions. And I know that this story is well told many, many times in the history of journalism. In sociology it was told by Schudson and I know that your work is in some ways, that you understand your work in some ways as being a criticism of Schudson's position. It seems to me that your criticism of Schudson actually addresses Bill's last points. This whole question of how do we know when public television, public journalism or public media is a success and serves the public interest and something to do with the field of politics and how that field of politics and the field of the public is not only conceptualized, but how it is constituted in journalistic action. So I thought it would be helpful for us to kind of see the connection between the two papers if you can kind of explain what you've added to this history that for example Schudson tells.
Kaplan:
Well, yes Schudson is the big book in the social history of the news. Even though he recanted on his own story line. He's a smart guy and I'm indebted to him.
Goldfarb:
He's [Schudson] is probably going to join us sometime next semester.
Kaplan:
In some ways I just took his paradigm and moved in seventy years since he was way off. He tries to situate the emergence of what we might understand as the modern news media, American news media. In 1930, unlike in previous press histories he looks at the social and political context and says in 1930's that there is the Jacksonian revolution, in other words just an expansion of the market, democratization of the polity and the press in many ways reflects this expansion. News, in itself, becomes interesting to people and something to read because now they are participants in the shared economic life and the shared political life. And also with the expansion of the market there is also this new economic basis for freeing newspapers from political control. Also there is a deep politicization that occurs at that time according to Schudson that the mass parties have a way of reducing politics to the pursuit of interest and not a matter of contention and deliberation. Also there is the story of Arendt in there that he is drawing upon. In any case once this new political, economic context emerges then the press can assume its role like today of being a kind of de-politicized authoritative interpreter of the facts over the American citizens. He simply accepts that the media is there for free and that politics has been kind of displaced from American life. It is the kind of what Dahl consensus pluralist interpretations of American politics. That essentially sees that because of shared values we don't have major issues of contention, that in many ways technical issues govern American politics and that is how it should be and proper. So I wanted to argue against, beyond his timeline, that the press is always permanently embedded in some aspects of the public sphere. Issues of contention that in spite of their authoritative technical discourse of saying well we have selected what are the most important facts of the day and that it is just a matter of neutral, technical decision making that those are politically constituted. There is always issues of contention that the press is always one contending party in the public arena that has it's own legitimacy attacked by say Newt Gingrich attacking Connie Chung to whatever petty melodrama that was. But that there is always a matter of contention about what will be the narratives that we are going to have today even if it is played out through a certain kind of apolitical, nonpartisan language. I suppose that is what you are referring to.
Goldfarb:
One thing that strikes me is that in that technocratic field I mean certain types of contentions are taken as being politically contentious. And that you tell it very precisely that in the history of that family, the Scripps family, how they really decide what contention. At one point, in this point in time there is a significant socialist movement for example. I mean there really was at this time in urban America a significant socialist movement but this press defined objective journalism as telling two stories simultaneously. Somewhat different, then, the way stories are told now. On the one hand the democratic story and then on the other hand there was the republican story. And you get objective reporting if you heard, if you pick up your paper and you read both of these stories. An awful lot is being excluded by that move. That was very real at the time and it is quite an assertive, constituting a move on the part of the newspapers. It seems to me, especially as some of us, I have hot and cold times with this, but some of us have a daily routine, sort of at the beginning of the evening one turns on the Lehrer report. Now it's the Evening News or whatever it is with Jim Lehrer. There it is exactly that same process of public television defining the public realm and what politics is to be. It strikes me as being quite similar and Bill's critique of public journalism, and public broadcasting is exactly that it is doing that.
Hoynes:
In these debates it constitutes the same set of positions day after day, week after week, year after year based on the same principles that Richard is talking about. The leadership of the Republican versus the leadership of the Democratic party. In large measure, not entirely but in large measure routinely leaving out the voices that fall outside of that. Interestingly, people like Lehrer defend this position and say this is the right thing to do because these represent, when it comes to talking about national issues, these represent the mainstream positions and this is what people need to know. If mainstream positions change from below, then a program like his will represent those changes but not until these principle in his view, positions are changed. Instead of seeing them as constituting this discourse they see it as just reflecting it.
Robin Wagner-Pacifici:
I guess one question I came away from with the readings: whether or not there is anything intrinsically better about a newspaper that does or does not explicitly reflect a political, ideological position that may get attached to a political party. I guess within it that, the more invented question within that, is okay if you decide that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the papers rather than just coming right out and saying we are representing X party. If you are interested in X party, read our paper, then you will find out what that world view is constituted of. Then there is the problem in the American context, not explicit, or implicit and unacknowledged relationship, but rather the narrowness of the political spectrum in the United States. And that if we had a vastly wider political spectrum of parties from left to right, or wherever they are constituted now: would it then not be problematic for a newspaper to just say we are the mouthpiece of this particular perspective. And I couldn't quite get that from the readings that you gave us. I'm just curious about what your views are.
Kaplan:
I see no reason why I should answer that. That is a question for the seminar.
Ron Jacobs:
If I can amplify on that and may make it a more general question that we can all discuss: It seems that on the one hand you've got the issue of partisanship and collective identity, and then on the other hand you've got the issue of the press and the public sphere. Oftentimes, maybe it is because we map an Anglo-American model of the press onto our discussion of the public sphere, we assume that the press has to do with impartiality and that this is sort of a natural evolution. So that Lehrer would talk about, if it's narrow then this is because the public sphere sort of represents these largest interests, but at the same time there are all these other smaller publics, all these other smaller presses which remain partisan, right? And they remain partisan in a way that is I think organized around a particular type of collective identity. The question seems to be, is it possible to maintain maybe a network of smaller, local partisan press publics and then have them have some kind of influences on these larger impartial press publics if we thought that that was a positive thing? I mean, when I read your book, Bill, I kept thinking about the example of Canadian broadcasting rights which in terms of its English language component has been an abject failure and in terms of its French language component, which is strongly oriented towards sort of a common cultural identity, has been much more successful, but it was much more limited and much more local and much more particularistic in its emphasis. So, the African-American press being another example of something that has been particularistic, organized around a particular collective identity and has been more partisan the whole time but sort of nurtures possibly the creation of representatives who could speak to the larger public if only they would let them speak. Or those small, occasional instances when they would allow them to speak. It seems like an issue that maybe people haven't resolved yet. Because maybe there is at some level a commitment to impartiality, a commitment to objectivity which sort of blocks our attempt to really understand the role of the partisan press in a modern civil society.
Hoynes:
[. . .] the debates, the national debates in Congress take this issue up every three years about funding--whether or not public broadcasting both radio and television are sufficiently objective. Are they sufficiently "balanced"? And so there ends up being these questions about how would you evaluate whether or not they are objective or balanced. Is it in each individual program? In each documentary dramatic series or news account? Is it across some time period of the schedule, every week or every month? Is it in fact what balance really is or objectivity really is as wide a range of expression as seems "responsible." Or reasonable or legitimate? And they can never really figure this out, so in the 1992 legislation that funded public television Congress authorized the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to evaluate whether or not the programs were sufficiently objective and balanced and to eliminate "bias" from the programs. And then to report back to Congress so Congress could take remedial action to deal with whatever kinds of biases or lack of objectivity or lack of balance. Ultimately what happened was that CPB didn't even know how, they opposed this idea anyway, but they didn't know how to do it. Fortunately, in my view, it never happened. But I think that Ron is right that there is a question here about how much we take for granted. Impartiality, objectivity as being what constitutes news at least, and or public affairs kinds of media even more generally.
Laura Bunt:
I have a kind of technical question, but it might address some of what you are saying. What exactly is this structure of public television in terms of who makes the decisions about formatting, especially opposed to say ABC or commercially oriented networks?
Hoynes:
Well, public television was never, at least this is the folklore, was never supposed to be a fourth network. Now, I don't know how many networks we have, so now it would be like the 6th or 7th network, but it was always supposed to be local in orientation. And that is why there are these questions about centralized funding, local stations, and then trying to recentralize funding. Put it this way: even now in 1997 there is not a public television schedule that is adhered to widely in the big cities; it is so if you are in New York, LA, Chicago, San Francisco; you will probably get the same programming from say 8-11 p.m. on weeknights, but a lot of smaller cities still don't adhere to a national public television schedule. They put programs on when they want to put them on or they put on locally produced programs. So there is much more local autonomy in the public television system, and in part it is because the cost of not adhering to what PBS is suggesting is not very high. For the network affiliates, if you decide not to clear the network programs they might go look for someone else to be their affiliate. Although increasingly there are no free ones out there. But you probably all know what happened with CBS a couple of years ago. They lost many of their big city affiliates and they ended up on UHF stations instead of VHF stations in places like Milwaukee, several big midwestern cities, because interestingly CBS lost football is what happened. So the big stations who wanted football switched to Fox. So with PBS they really don't have alternatives. PBS has nowhere else to go so there aren't really any consequences for local station managers when they decide what to do or what not to do. Now, as a quick aside, between 1974 and 1990 there was this set-up called the Station Program Cooperative, where essentially the local station managers got together once a year and they bid on programs saying, yes, I would be willing to pay for this, I would be willing to pay for that. So there was somewhat of a democratic mechanism by which programs were funded nationally. The folks at national PBS decided that this led them to be too timid because the local stations were too nervous about programs that might be controversial in their local communities, so they tried to raise some national money to program nationally and they did get some national money, both from corporate underwriters and CPB, so if there is a tension there, much more between national and local, then there is at the network level where it is much more nationally oriented. The local stations don't have that much autonomy in principle at least. Does that roughly answer your question?
Bunt:
I guess more what I was getting at is that I know that they produce a lot of their own programs and so forth. So is there any kind of specific governing body? Is it that faceless?
Hoynes:
Who's the they? The local stations?
Bunt:
No, I mean a lot of that PBS programming specifically are produced by PBS, so who is it that is making those decisions? I mean they had this series on the Civil War last year. I mean who is it? Is it a group of educators, so forth? Are they within the government that specifically is making those decisions of what gets made?
Hoynes:
Really, no one within government is participating with those types of decisions. I mean there are a variety of mechanisms by which this happens. One is someone like Ken Burns who makes the Civil War happen and goes out and beats the bushes to raise money, and he raises a lot of it from GM in that case. But he also raised it from PBS's national production budget. So there is national, and that then is at least one step removed from government. Congress gives it to CPB, CPB gives it to PBS, PBS puts it in the national production's budget, and then the dole it out to projects which they think are good, but it's not enough money for Burns to make the Civil War. There are very few programs which are made only with system, public system, money. In fact, the one major program that does this is Frontline, the public affairs documentary series which hasn't had to seek external funding. When I talked to people at Frontline they told me that they tried to seek external funding and they got one year's worth of funding from some insurance company, but that they were never able to get anymore, so that in fact the story that they haven't needed to seek external funding only comes after they had no luck doing it. But in any case there aren't government folks making these decisions. A lot of the programs that are on PBS are not originally PBS programs. They are independent producers who have their own production companies who raise money. Some of it from within public broadcasting. There is an organization at the Corporation of Public Broadcasting called the Independent Television Service, ITPS that Patricia Aufderheide has an interesting article about five, six years ago in Critical Studies of Mass Communication which doles out money directly to independent producers trying to enhance the diversity of the programming on the system, within the system. But government bureaucrats, government policy makers, don't make any decisions about programs; they do argue about them though after decisions are made and talk about how awful they have been, the decisions. So this leads to some often severe and some more indirect pressure on those people who do make the decisions, because they know they are going to have to pay for it later. Sometimes literally with dollars, but at least pay for it by political pressure.
Andrej Skolkay:
I am just frustrated with that question of financing in public broadcasting because even in Central and Eastern Europe, former Communist countries, it is usually financing in the last resort is government . . . It is surprising for me because I didn't expect such problems here. I just want to mention that Sweden accidentally passed a new law that changes tax structure of Sweden to a foundation, even though Sweden has no problem with censorship issues or others. Their government is very open. They wanted to change it because they wanted to guarantee the independence of Swedish television and radio, public radio and television, in a way that financing is the most important issue. [. . .] I think there are some more issues here like image making and populist politicians on the one hand which effectively apply to radio and television in post-communist countries. In many countries like Yugoslavia, for example. This is one issue. The second issue is basically the speed of flow of news or information which not necessarily relates to television, but in general terms to society, now that everything is quicker and moves faster, so these two issues in themselves, I would say, maybe they emulate your thesis or belief that television itself . . . that television as media is much different than print media, because it is really difficult to argue rationally on television, less so on the radio. I just wonder what you would consider an ideal type to situate within your thesis.
Hoynes:
It's a good question. Writing about public television brings with it a lot of snide comments from people who think that no one cares about it and that it is a thing of the past, and that it is elitist and small audience. People made fun of me for carving out this little bit of television that someone else might take seriously. And that others argued, kind of Postman argument, that this notion of serious television is a contradiction in terms. I think it is a question that a seminar like this needs to take seriously. It's whether or not it is possible to have broadcasting and, let's say, television in particular actually be something that, we would say, makes a positive contribution to a democratic public sphere. Many would argue that in fact fundamentally it can't, because some of the reasons you are suggesting. That television entertains, it trivializes, the images are too powerful. I guess I could cite others who have argued that this is only part of the story or I could just assert it myself. I know that I can defend it pretty well but it seems to me what really matters is how the technologies are organized and used, instead of what they are inherently. Which is to say it might just be a sort of naive optimism that I think it is possible to have a television that is democratic in some sense. And not just on public television. I think that the idea of is it possible for public television to contribute to democratic deliberation, is an important question, and one that for a long time people thought the answer, to was yes; more recently I think people have been arguing in certainly the United States, there seems to be a growing consensus, that maybe television can't do much more than entertain us and give us some relaxation time. But I think my own view is that it is really crucial to try and think about the possibilities of organizing a television system and a radio system which provide the possibility for expanding the range of public discourse. And again it is probably faith as much as anything else that makes me think that it is possible to do it, but I also think there have been moments where we have seen this possibility. And they may only be moments, but I don't want to give away the strong and say that print is really what matters. In fact I would say ultimately that if print is where serious public discussion can happen, then we are in real trouble. And I don't think we are in that bad of trouble. Or I hope that we aren't.
Paolo Carpignano:
Maybe a couple of general points, maybe theoretical points. Maybe just as a question, just as a theoretical question, it might be that the relationship between the public sphere and media has to be evaluated also from the point of view that it was the nature of the medium and to what extent the medium, is not just changing technology but changing technology, might or might not contribute to a democratic public sphere, but whether the very notion of public sphere historically determined is tied to a particular state of the social mediation or that kind of technology or that kind of form that for instance the news takes--the news takes as a historically determined form of communication. So if you look at it from this point of view, maybe the issue of objectivity, I mean if you look at it from this point of view what is important in his [Schudson] approach is that he defines objectivity as an historically determined ideology that becomes into being from one particular point or certain socially historical reason. Maybe also reasons that have to do with a particular medium through which these ideas, this ideology of objectivity, is expressed.
And it seems to me that the question, and I agree very much with this periodization which has been made between the role that the press has and the content that the press has in the 19th and 20th century. It might be that the transformation today is not so much in the way that the press is used or the way that the press contributes or does not contributes to public debates or democratic public sphere, but in the very form of news as a form of communication that inevitably establishes an institutionalization of reporting of events. Establishing representation of events, institutionalizing reporting, and that is what the press is based on, the equivalence of events, and that corresponds really to the forms of the institution of the public sphere. Even at the level of the association and organization. I mean, think about the fact that a party, at least certainly the way a party operated in labor organizations in the 19th century. [ ? ] very much on this notion that you have a social, which is a collection of equivalent events that you can manage in the form of representation. So that the party functions in exactly the same way as the press functions in the terms of communications and party platforms and delegations. I mean the forms of representation that mirror in a way the way in which the social is seen as an equivalent that can be reported and managed. The crisis of the public sphere as well as the press that somebody like Lippmann identifies at the beginning of the 19th century has to do with the fact that that equivalence on which that notion of the social and the notion of reporting objectively was based, collapses in the face of a social transformation which is obviously not as manageable, and therefore events that are not as manageable as the objectivity of the reporting might have assumed. And that not by chance this corresponds to the development of the mass media system that in a way transforms the role the press has. The point that Richard was making in the paper was that we have to look at the forms of mass entertainment for instance, that, and the development of mass media in the 20th century also, as forming an awareness of certain kinds of working class culture, is expressed even in a bleak form. So the press, the news as a form of relationship between events and the representation in a way cannot be assumed as always valid. So today when we talk about news, it is the same as the news that we were talking about before; television news, it seems to me it is not an oxymoron, certainly it is questionable whether television can function in the same way that the print media functioned in the 19th century. Because it is different the way that people experience the reality through the media such as television for instance, and therefore it might be that forms of representation of the social and forms of representation within the public sphere are undermined precisely by the different types of social experience of communication that the new media has introduced and have formed and created in forms that are not reducible to news, whatever the content of that news is. So it is not a matter of expanding the amount of sources, but understanding that for instance the alternative press, which is something, I agree with your [Jacobs] point, is something that is valuable also to the extent that it is not the reproduction of news in a limited public sphere but it is a type of expression of identities that goes beyond the very form or equivalency that the news as an historical form has created.
Kaplan:
It seems to me that you are only describing the United States. It seems to me that it is the place where objectifying news has its most realization, so I don't see how it corresponds to the type of news that you are ascribing to any type of media, since it varies. I mean, it varies within print, that there is always the case where the reporter pretends to that he or she is disconnected from the event and therefore the events are all equivalent like you are saying and not part of an overarching narrative. . . . The form of representation of the news changes over time for each specific medium, so I'm not so sure how it correlates to any medium, and also I am wondering how it deals with the fact that there is always a current countertradition different from journalism, like you are saying, that the idea that the reporter presents an authoritative objective can't really account for the way news is constructed, and so that at certain points that kind of journalists rely on macronarratives which are taken from, say, the political sphere or narratives of the country, become manifest, say, in moments of crisis, that all ideas of media events is the counter-narrative and it is a moment when the journalist say, well okay, we are not distanced now, it is a time for us to celebrate or condemn say Diana's death or the inauguration of the President used to be a big event that somehow went outside the typical narratives and said instead this is a crucial narrative for our country. Now we can use an emotional voice, now we can bring our own personal evaluations as participant members of a nation. So there is always a countertradition that is operating with the press because its own major narrative that we are a distant, objective, just recounting various equivalent events cannot really account for its own practices. So it seems to me that there really is no correlation between any specific media and any specific discourse.
Wagner-Pacifici:
There is an idea that I've been playing around with in my head. I don't even know if it is true but I will toss it out. It strikes me that regardless of the differences in experience in particular kinds of media, there is a kind of point of purchase difference between buying a newspaper and watching television. And this relates to issues with regard to the public and private realms that come up in both of your readings. It strikes me that even if you subscribe to a newspaper, there is a fairly good chance that your neighbors will see it in your driveway or in your mailbox. At some intersecting point that is going to be a visible part of who you are and how you relate to the world and what are some of your political or quasi-political choices. Certainly buying a newspaper at a kiosk or at a box is a very potentially public and potentially damning type of act. I remember that in the late '70's in Italy, people would buy newspapers and then they would fold them in very careful particular ways so that you wouldn't actually see what the title of the newspaper was if you happened to be on a bus that was riding through an area that was known as a Fascist quarter. People were beaten up typically for having the wrong newspaper, so there is this [statement of] I'm going to take responsibility in public for my choices. Whereas television, it strikes me that nobody needs to know what you are watching. There is no necessary point of purchase or point of choice where it is potentially or actually the case that your neighbors or your colleagues will know that you are watching McNeil/Lehrer or whatever. So I just wonder how that kind of public-private sphere distinction might actually play some role or does it play some role in determining the kind of qualitatively different experience in buying and reading a newspaper as opposed to turning to a particular channel rather than to another one. And whether that has any impact at all on our notions of participation in public sphere.
Arato:
Well, my question was going to be very simple, but then what Paolo said made me think that perhaps I should try to see how that question can be brought together in what he said. So let me ask the question and then I will try to say something on what Paolo said that might be a way of answering it, and I wonder if that is a good way or would be acceptable to the panel.
The question is really: given what one could say about 19th century newspaper and the model of the public sphere, and which after all was not invented by Habermas, I mean it is there in late 18th century thought, it is a minor cord in liberal democratic thought historically but an important minor cord given that how is it that a certain kind of culture critique of the press doesn't develop and it does develop in a way but to the extent that it develops and you see it above all in writers like Balzac. How impressive Lost Illusions is in terms of his critique of journalism, and it goes on for 40-50 pages, which is unbelievable really, how powerfully condemnatory and sharp this analysis of someone who actually knew the thing from within. So its not that he really was just approaching it from the outside. Given all that there is nothing like the effort to create public newspapers, which would mean that given the degenerating and negative effects of the commercial press and all that it is about, why not establish something clearly not governmental newspapers? There's always attempts at that and generally speaking they are failures, but this other kind of thing, somehow finance in some collective way. . . . So why not then and why, in the case of TV aside from everything else that we could say about the need for regulating a scarce medium, is this idea which is the way that you [Bill] posed it is so clearly, in line with this liberal democratic minor chord. How is it that this idea gets articulated and insisted on and continues to survive?
On the basis of what Paolo said I think one would be able to answer the question, but would answer the question in such a way that would essentially say that the whole effort is doomed to failure. One could answer the question because one could say that in the context of one way of constituting news and one way of constituting public discussion, which on an empirical level rested at least on a large multiplicity of journalistic voices forming some kind of marketplace of ideas, were in the context of the 19th century. And in the context of at least that type of commercialization, the original idea could be maintained in tact. Somehow amidst all that one could say critically, still something like a public open to a wide variety of voices, wide variety of divergent views and expressions was still there. But on the other hand if it is the case that TV, through its very nature, I think this is his perspective, changes the idea of even what is news and creates a context in which the meaning, the very meaning of public, has to be rethought because now what it occurring is so fundamentally different on the level of communication than what existed before historically. Then to return to that idea, in the form that the makers of public TV had returned to it, would be doomed to failure because they are trying to maintain a model that was valid in the age of journalism but a wide plurality of voices, relatively equal voices, was possible, where to some extent you really couldn't speak about the press making the news, where in some ways or another one had a duality of event and communication. But once these things are no longer given, and one could mention both structural features and features of content, though I think one could explain why people will in such a context have an ideal like public television, have a project like public television, because historically something has existed once and they would like to have it again. Perhaps in a new context it is really impossible to recreate that and using the means of the electronic media to create really a newspaper type public sphere inevitably creates a very small elite context within which some people can feel comfortable but it can have no effect on TV writ large. I mean that would be the way that criticism would go.
Hoynes:
Let me just say something about this idea of public newspapers. I mean I think clearly both Paolo and Andrew are right that television news even, they don't sit down and read the newspaper out loud, right? It becomes different. Early on, that's much more what it was like, so I don't know if it's an inherent property of the technology or not. I mean Postman argues that television is most likely to be a serious contributor to the public sphere when it approximates radio: when it is less visual or image driven, which I don't think I accept, but in any case in this historically specific post-World War Two United States, and particularly since the 60's television news has been different. It's constituted what the public is differently and develops into a different kind of form, but the question for a non-commercial public broadcasting or a public form of broadcasting I think needs to expand the vision which I think it has well beyond news, to talk about other forms of communication. And in fact at its best that's what its done. We've had long-form documentaries, which is the easy one, and it's a lot like news. But personal video essays, point of view essays where people actually, it's more identity oriented expressions. More kinds of possibilities of showing debates and discussions within either official or unofficial agencies. Even forms of popular culture that are more based on drama or what we would think of as fictional entertainment media. It seems to me it can still contribute to a democratic public sphere and probably has to. I think you are both right that if it just approximates what an earlier generation of news was it is doomed to failure. I guess the question is, what is available within the technology of television?
Arato:
If I could just rephrase one aspect which I wasn't very clear [about]. If you have a variety of newspapers, especially a press which is to some extent a political press, with parties having newspapers and so on, you can basically go on and have your event or whatever you do and try to appeal to the immediate people who are present, and you have a chance to be channeled in a way that you want to because there is political newspaper for your group. Or there are many newspapers that compete, and some of them do it. In the context of TV we have seen this so often: now basically you plan your event for TV. That's the most important thing that you have to worry about: how is it going to appear on TV. One thing of course that happens to your immediate audience, and it might matter a little bit, but you see increasingly what really matters is how it's going to be portrayed because you feel that that medium is so intrusive and so able to construct the event on its own that you have to second guess it, you have to jump in front of it, you have do something before it. And so you begin to produce your own TV program instead of your political event, and say party conventions become programs in a way already. The issue is who will run the program: the TV producers or your producers, and there is a fight. But in a way if you are successful you are going to run your own TV. Now, if you come from the outside and try to apply journalistic criteria from before and you try to present this either objectively or from many different points of view, somehow the structure is not going to be suitable for that, and only immense boredom can result from giving all that time to something which really just deserves soundbites and not much else because that's how they produce it in the first place. So I think that is the issue somehow, whether the medium is the message, in the way that once the medium has become so obtrusive, can you still recover the message as a message which is part of the flows of democratic society? Or are you really a prisoner of what has been constructed by the others, in which case you can't do what some of these projects are that you mentioned earlier, or that the founders of public TV wanted to do. Now it's another question whether you can do something else. But whether these projects that come from the tradition of the ideal of the liberal democratic public sphere so obviously, if that is a viable one. That was really my question, not whether public TV could be successful or not.
Goldfarb:
If I may just think about very specifically about what Robin said and kind of engage this discussion. You walk around the streets in New York and people are carrying their Channel Thirteen bags. If you are right, or if Paolo is right about, let's not say absolute necessities of media but the propensities that move us in one direction or another, they are subversive acts. People who carry around their Channel Thirteen tote bags are engaged in a kind of subversive act. You very naturally, if you are reading the New York Times or the Daily News or the New York Post, then it is subversion to try and hide it. My point is, everything that Andrew said in its essentials, and Paolo referred to this what Lippman said about the technology at the end of World War One. This was before television and really before radio, but with public relations and mass communications, modern propaganda, and essentially his answer was to give up on democracy. And what strikes me is that something that doesn't resemble for me or is not identical with a democracy that I could dream of with a robust public sphere, a real polis where citizens come together and talk to each other in a reasonable fashion or over long periods of time and think and act in concert-well, nothing like that exists, but something more democratic than less democratic is associated with actually existing democracies, and it seems to me that the way that is done is accomplished despite these propensities in modern communications. Are the accumulative consequences of such subversive acts as carrying the Channel Thirteen tote bag, but more important than carrying the tote bag is to create channel 13 or public television. More important is to subvert the necessitates of commercial television and actually create forms within the limits within commercial broadcasting, and create works within the limits within commercial broadcasting, that actually open up possibilities of deliberation, and it happens all the time. And that's what, if you speak to journalists who work in the media, many of them, we get a little less technical in our use of social science, but many of them who would take part in this conversation very, very rarely understand exactly what the issues are and would see their battles with the network and their producers being about creating something that is of value, something that will inform the public. I read Bill's story and it in ways it's kind of a sad story. All this erosion of this grand project which was formulated in the mid-late, 1960's but then on the other hand something that is in relation to the rest of broadcasting, and as it appears to previously existing socialist societies looking at this system. It is a system that has been subjected to a lot of compromises and qualifications, yet nevertheless not only McNeil/Lehrer but also Frontline continues. And a point of view continues these very provocative programs. And then, as far as there is a generalization, it is true that in comparison to the viewership of commercial stations it is relatively insignificant, but I think if you take together, maybe especially public radio, but also public radio and public television, you know we shouldn't be naive democrats we should be sociologists and there is such a thing in this sense, I mean I don't want to recommend people being sociologists and not democrats that the way a society deliberates is not with everyone being equal. There are people who take part in deliberations and can actually shift the common sense and it strikes me as for example the common sense that shifted, to my dismay, about where marketization is the answer to all problems, but there was such a shift and it may have to do with structural factors but I don't think only that, I think it has to do with very, very successful use of argument so that through certain media became persuasive that the answer to all problems is privatization. It strikes me that these fora that exist in public television and public radio, books, newspapers still provide that opportunity, but with their significant constraints such as the one's that Bill and Richard have point to.
Arato:
Do you [Hoynes] have any sense of what segment of the political class actually watches public TV? [. . .]
Hoynes:
Well, it really changes from the type of program. But if you are talking about the news and the public affairs documentary type programs, you know it is a disproportionately upper-income, professional occupation, highly-educated, urban audience. Disproportionate but not even majority. It is certainly more than you would think of if you were thinking it should be more equally distributed.
Arato:
No, I was thinking what Jeff was thinking, and that is that opinion makers can make a big difference if this small public is their public.
Heloisa Pait:
I think if I understood Carpignano I think what he said doesn't, from what he said we cannot conclude that we have to get rid of public television or that watching television is a form of resistance. I think also that in public television people have been doing very creative things. Things that you call sexy in your [Hoynes] book. I think it's not, there is not really this separation: public television is dull and commercial television is sexy. I think there is a lot of stuff that actually was first tried on public television and then became commercial. I guess the other way around is also true, so I think that it would be interesting to see what is the actual relationship between these two forms of creating formats and creating programs and how they interrelate. Also related to this, I think it would be interesting to see how public television in different countries has been successful in selling their programs in the way that commercial television has been. At least I know that BBC is a great exporter at least in Brazil I guess, that commercial television is much more successful in selling programs abroad than public television, although I think Brazilian public television could try to solve some of their financial problems as you described public television in the US is also facing. Trying to reach markets elsewhere. I think in your book you are too limited to the local and the national and I think the problems of public television are both global and the solution could be more global. I think that's it, I think I missed a little bit of these connections, commercial and public, national and international.
Hoynes:
[. . .] is read more about the global literature but interestingly most of that is nationally specific too. People writing about German public television, or British public television. I think maybe you are right that creative solutions are going to cross national or global in some sense. Let me just say something about your idea of being dull. When I talk to people who produce the national programs some of them held this up as a great virtue. Being dull and boring. I can see where you would think that I brought in this discourse. I think what I am trying to suggest is that there is a sense within public broadcasting that the fear is if they give up their identity as being "boring," that they are going to lose what makes them different. I agree that's problematic and in fact in order to have a successful contributor to the society they have to do more than say we are going to carve out a little boring niche that only a few people are going to pay attention to. Although interestingly those people may be people who are quite influential, and probably are more likely to be influential but it gets back I think to some level of this relationship between news and public affairs versus entertainment. How do the two collide with each other on television? Public broadcasters have not been very creative about thinking about how they collide on television. In fact again I think it's because they are afraid of the regular claims that get made, that as soon as they stop doing what we already know them to be doing, they are obsolete. It is one of their underlying fears. It's that they should do the same thing they've always done. As soon as they stop doing what they've always done, what makes them different from what any other cable or satellite station is doing? So I think this is about what I talked about very early on, is that the survival, part of their strategy for trying to survive is by holding onto this very small dull niche. But it's probably not going to work and I think increasingly people are convinced there, within the system, that don't think it is going to work.
Auette Baldauf:
In the meantime I have accumulated a lot of answers. I hope that I will be able to make one argument out of it. I wanted to comment on your argument before, that it seems to me that one starting point was that you have this distinction between style and aesthetic and the message. Maybe it would be productive to think them together and see that styles and aesthetics on TV is also a political message. And see the two categories and how they overlap. And then what you [Goldfarb] said in terms of we carry Channel Thirteen bags and it's a subversive act. Yes, well first of all because you [Wagner-Pacifici] said it is subversive to people who hide their newspapers and that's what makes it so different from TV. It seems to me that a lot of people watch TV in order to communicate or participate in a conversation the next day. So the social implication of TV is as strong as it is in the newspaper. But if you would like to participate in a certain group the next day and participate in that communication then you might just decide. And the third point, I don't think that there is something like a subversive act in itself. It really depends on the context, where I walk around with the Channel Thirteen bag, so to end up with my general argument, is I think it would be really helpful to take very seriously what we have been speaking about in the last meeting. What it actually means to talk about public spheres and multiplicity. And really consider it as something, and I've heard in your argument, when you were talking about different competing or counter narratives constructing different political identities, so I think it is really helpful to not consider public TV or public radio as this homogenous cultural package that is only structured along this axis: either democratic or republican. That was sometimes what I heard in this debate but really see as intersecting with a lot of different axises like gender or race or ethnicity. And also maybe not even mass media and alternative press. I have been working in a lot of alternative presses and also public radio and I think never in my life did I get so censored like in Austrian public radio, working with ten guys.
Kaplan:
I also want to draw on something that Ron was saying and maybe I though it was kind of an answer to Andrew's remarks about the media starts to raise the level of the bar at which legitimate voices are allowed entry into the public space that at least as defined by the media. That maybe there is a development of specific media logic which seems to make various social movements or groups conforming to it no longer frame it in terms of their own understanding of the political debate, but try to construct an event that is, say, reportable. So the question is, kind of, what is the relationship between the groups forming down the multiplicity of publics that form again, having their deliberations and discourses and perhaps having their newspapers, and at what point can they be considered to be legitimate voices that can enter into the more mass media public sphere? It seems to me actually that at least in the print media the bar has been lowered, that there has been a greater pluralization of the media, greater pluralization of voices that are allowed to enter. Clearly the New York Times, its specific news agendas, are not just set by the parties or politicians but various professional groups and various associations, and that when there is a movement or at least a demonstration on the level of a million women or million men march, the kind of reporting is now in some sense respectful, at least it wants to. At least now it frames, trivializes and distorts, but also it gives some space and attention to. Still it is a question about what is the relationship between the two. What are the principles, what is the mechanism of exclusion, I'm not really sure what it is. I mean on one hand clearly commercialization and speaking to such a mass audience, where various movements are seen as irrelevant, allows a certain spectacle of the movement to play out on TV as kind of just trivial or deviant. It seems to me that that would be the question. Not just acts of subversion, but kind of levels of organization within civil society, and what principle allows them to gain entrance.
Carpignano:
I hope that we are not developing a kind of narrative here where the difference between one medium and another, namely the press and the television, is such that the press cannot lower the bar, or as a medium as capable of lowering the bar or whatever, the historical changes, because it provides a variety or plurality of possibilities and television is a sort of a totalitarian medium that makes much more difficult for the variety of public spheres to find an expression unless they become a media event or they adapt to the format so to speak. My argument would be exactly the opposite, and in that sense very different from any approach like the Postman approach that you mentioned several times. In fact, I would go to the extreme that it is not a matter of a totalitarian medium that requires subversive acts that sort of bypass the medium. I would say that television as such, historically, is a subversive act, as extreme as that might seem. Subversive act in the sense that it does subvert a certain kind of relationship with the event that inevitably the press is limited to have, because of its very technology as well as social context and institutional formation. So the question or reporting the event and the question of institutionalizing the reporting television is drastically different because television in itself is series of events in which the viewer himself/herself or the viewing audience, or whatever you want to call it, is part of the event. With all kinds of implications that of course you have. So if that is the case then television is a terrain of policy subversion in the very existence of the medium and the kind of social literature it institutes. And certain kinds of identity formation as well as public sphere and so on are understandable only within this context of this subversive medium. Subversive again in relations with reality context or social context. To the point that you can come to the conclusion that Josh Gamson has just written that the dreadful talk show could become for instance an act of subversion in the experience of that particular format, and the kind of consequence that it has in terms of the plurality of social identities, and I think that it is within this context that the notion of public sphere, democratic public sphere should be analyzed. In other words it's not a normative idea of public sphere that has to applied and has to be seen in terms of whether or not we can achieve through one medium or another. There has to be a definition of the public sphere that takes into account the variety of forms of social communication that the medium like television provides, and therefore it might be that the very definition of the public sphere has to be at least revised if we have to look at it from the prism of the social relationship that the medium of television provides.
Jacobs:
I think that is a really important point that sort of these different forms of mediation exist in relationships with one another. So it's not just the technology but it's not just the social, but in fact if you think about television news relative to print news, then television news arises in the context where it has to develop a distinctiveness vis-a vis print news. It is not just the technology of immediacy but that it is the possibility of distinctiveness vis-a-vis immediacy, becomes a possibility for television news which becomes significant when they then reorganize their news gathering resources so that 80% of them are devoted to the possibility of being there within 30 minutes. I can tell you from ethnographic research that I have done that is in fact the case with a lot of television news. So that it is not that the one is necessarily this and the other is necessarily, that but they exist in this relationship of distinctiveness.
The other thing would be the possibility of one medium with greater diversity of voices versus another. Again I think it has to do with the relationships of distinctiveness relative to one another, and I'll give a very simple example. After the 1992 uprising in Los Angeles, if you were to compare, say, ABC news, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, New York Times, etc. you would find at least initially in the first month the one that had the most diversity of voices was ABC News, and it was via Nightline and it was through a notion of what could be distinctive would be bringing these incredibly diverse voices together in a highly emotional context and having them try to talk to one another where Ted Koppel gets to be the rational voice. But it was quite an unusual thing, where ABC has the greatest diversity of voices. I wouldn't think that that was the norm. In fact I wouldn't expect that you would find it the norm but the possibilities are there.
Goldfarb:
When I first mentioned the idea of a subversive act, I mean it was within a very, very specific context and that is that simply Robin observed a certain relationship between the necessary form of media and the effects it has upon publicity and identification to the other. I just wanted to point out that, not as a large subversion but just in terms of that, and only in terms of that observation, we human beings as individuals are creative enough to reverse the relationship. We have that capacity. I am very interested, no matter what the media form, how we human beings have that potential to reverse what seems to be a general propensity and that when we reverse that general propensity with consistency we actually create different types of relationships. And I think as we consider the relationship between media and democracy we have to pay a lot of attention to those acts of creation, creativity constitution. Then in some ways, I haven't read Josh's work, and I'm actually very excited to read it because I read his earlier work but I have no doubt that different programs on television provides some possibilities for diversity--Ted Koppel and the Los Angeles events, but there is a lot of qualification in that. Diversity maybe but really what type of deliberation is going on in that diversity. How democratic is it, given the performance that Ted Koppel plays in bringing these people together. I think that is terribly important. That if we are concerned about the relationship between the media and democracy maybe there are different discussions that are happening, but does this have anything to do with the potential effectiveness of democracy. Does it have anything to do with the capacity for self-rule? A capacity that we would want to support. I don't have an easy answer to that. I am saying obviously: a la Postman, no. No, I think this is a real question. But I get worried. I read and actually quote with derision something that Stanley Aronowitz wrote about Oprah Winfrey and some other talk show celebrity being the only place, the most creative place in America for free discussion. On occasion that certainly does happen. There are interesting moments when talk TV opens up a field but that's not mostly what it's about. It seems that if our concern with democracy is something other than operational, if it has something to do with normative commitment, I really worry about when I don't have a certain answer about what has happened to our capacity to talk to each other. In the quality of that talk and the impact that has on our capacity for self rule that is in some ways something that one could support.
Arato:
I think Paolo to some extent misunderstood me. The story I told, tried to tell, was not that of a liberal media against a totalitarian one. Although from the point of view of the people who might have perceived the project of public TV, although I don't think they thought of it as totalitarian, still they were very much in line with, say, Habermasian theses about the structural transformation of the public sphere and they wanted to recreate something which they believed. From that point of view it might look that way. But the point I was trying to make, though relatively neutrally, is that if the meaning of event decisively changes, isn't it doomed to, isn't it an effort based on one way of constructing the event in a context, which events are constructed, doomed to fail. I think even what you said, Paolo, could be used as the basis of an argument that given this new but subversive character of TV and contemporary mass media, it would be absurd to try and improve upon it and improve on its democratic quality by somehow importing in it ideas which if it had a context it was in the 19th century and some completely other media world. Now, I think it is worthwhile though on some level to ask, is the current media world really subversive of what first of all. Of dominant discourses, dominant ideologies, dominant ways of seeing the world, or is it really the dominant way and that something else would be subversive in that context? If you something is subversive then you have to say in relationship to what, and I don't quite see that, the doubling style and discourse. But in this case I think that view would double the discursive world in a way that I don't quite know what it would be, because what is it subverting, what is this thing subverting? I mean, I can understand Jeff's point, although I think it is overoptimistic on some level that PBS could be a subversion of the world of TV writ large because I know subverting what. But what would TV writ large be subversive of, and that's the question. One the other side the normative issue: we are not entirely free. Obviously, from the point of view of a Habermasian normative structure, one would judge the thing one way and from another point of view some other normative theory, one would judge the thing some other way. We can even warn against bringing in normative theories but I think the problem is a very specific one because we do have institutional structures in place. We do have representative democracy in place. And representative democracy is not very representative and historically people knew that it would not be and one of the ways of controlling it or making it more democratic, that's the traditional conception, we didn't stress that in our presentation of Habermas, is precisely through the public sphere. If anything can make this thing work in a controlled fashion, that it resembles in some way democratic ideals, then it is through public controls, public accountability, public transparency. All these things that were developed in relationship to the model of democracy that to some extent we still have. Now, if that is all impossible and I think the effort of public TV was to make it somehow possible. If that is impossible then we have to say, then in what sense does the contemporary world of media represent some kind of democratizing role in relationship to institutions which are here to stay? And which in any case would be very difficult to improve on globally, because I really don't see how contemporary news, as it is, how contemporary entertainment, as it is, plays very much of a control role or very much of a disciplining role, very much of a democratizing role in relationship to the institutions, the globally democratic institutions that we have. On the contrary, I think they get very much a free ride.
Baldauf:
I don't think I would raise the question in these terms like what is TV, what is the subversive role of TV? What is the subversive role of TV writ large? My argument was much more: we have to look at the particular event and see the context. My argument was that the medium itself doesn't have a subversive or affirmative or disciplining tool. Which is in contrast to your argument, I guess, because you think in itself it is subversive.
Martin Plot:
One is related with this political response to the changes that Richard introduced in public life and public possibilities. I think we have to take as a fact that television introduced a change in, let's say, the conditions for possibility for politics. I think there is a qualitative difference between reports of an event and covering an event as we discussed with Paolo. Even what TV can do by putting it into real time, at the present with the mass audiences. Of course there are a lot of things that we could say about that, but that is new. That is new that it isn't in the press. So that question that it is a political question. Is the response of American parties the unique response possible to these changes? . . . Is that response the only response possible? In my view of Argentinean politics, I think that is a huge possibility. That is the most frequent response to these contemporary conditions of possibility for politics, but there are others. There are always surprises. There are always surprises and if surprise is not the principal act of politics, what is. To introduce new things in collective life. Really, I think TV has a direct relationship to that with appearance in front of the mass audiences of public of new meanings. That is one thing I wanted to show, so perhaps that is a political question and not only a media question.
The other short thing is that perhaps there is a misunderstanding in trying to develop a sort of public sphere in the Habermas way of seeing it only in one politician. Perhaps what the politicians should do is to do what it is its principal advantage. Is to be free at least that should be the principal advantage to be free of economic limits. How can politicians can be free of economic boundaries is another question. But if that is possible, what politicians should know is that the public arena of TV is not limited to itself. So what the influences should be broader than in itself so you have to try and push the whole share of public . . . the whole space of TV to diversity, pluralistic acceptable to creativity. . . .
Kaplan:
It strikes me that there is a certain kind of blindness to conceptions of the logic of media forms. One blindness is historical and it seems to me that one could go through the history of newspapers and find some of the traits existing presumably ascribed to TV back then. That is why I tried to include something about some aspects of the newspapers and the kind of sensational coverage like the personalization of politics, the experience of a media event where there are certain kinds of events simultaneously. In addition I think words have the power to create this sense of real events and unfolding in time in fact that is part of the ideology of the news for a long time. That we are giving you the event as it occurs. So it strikes me that one idea of media forms with specific logic is that it has a sort of historical blindness that sees attributes of TV as too specific to TV but in fact they were prior. And also this kind of interrelationship between parties in politics and TV, it seems like just the introduction of TV and that then parties have this reaction, but there is, in the current political context, there is massive transformations in our set of political institutions that has some of their own logic say for the falling of support for the Democrats because of certain issues they are pushing, like civil rights and taxes, that helps create a new context for ways that political representation would be created in the public sphere. That is part of the subversion that I think is being attributed to TV. So it seems to me that by point of media forms often a kind of blindness to the kind of prior historical context and also change in political institutional context which shouldn't be neglected. On the other hand your points have a lot of strength.
Hoynes:
I think that not just in the United States but throughout
the world there is a crisis of public institutions, and the question is
for me not so much whether to defend or not PBS; in fact in the same week
I could be talking to someone who thinks I am a scathing critic of it and
someone who thinks I am an apologist for it. I always get stuck on this
and I don't know how to respond to people trying to suggest that I am either
apologizing for PBS or criticizing it. So I think the question at least
in my mind of what is important about what people have been saying is to
think about television as an institution and what are its possibilities
or what are our possibilities for using it, communicating through it, interacting
with it in ways that enhance democracy. My own view is that we need to
think about the kind of constraints on different television systems, both
economic and political constraints, to see where we can carve out or maybe
we can push the limits of, as you are suggesting. I mean PBS once did have
a notion of being experimental and innovative. It doesn't anymore, because
that is at odds with the idea of trying to be boring, but that where are
the spaces that are most likely to be open to democratic possibilities.
That is my agenda about trying to think about public television, it is
suggested that we should have an exclusive focus on it, but I think it
is our best shot. I know some people who are arguing not so anymore. That
in fact if you look politically, commercial television might have more
opportunities, that it is possible to sell broader ideas in a commercial
market than in a highly regulated political market like PBS. I actually
don't buy that argument, but I think we have to try think about where the
places are, that there are possibilities. Instead of just assuming that
they are not there, or just suggesting that they are in only one place
like public broadcasting.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |