Building a multi-platform media for—and by—the public

Commercial broadcasters make for bad trustees. Let's find another way

At first glance, the new rule approved last month by the Federal Communications Commission requiring local television broadcasters to make public their records on political ad spending might seem revelatory. But in reality, it represents a very modest change to longstanding policy. Broadcasters are required by statute to maintain a file in paper form that documents information about political ads, such as the sponsor, the amount paid, and the time slot; the new FCC rule simply requires that stations post this information online, rather than keeping the files in a back room collecting dust.

What is startling, by contrast, is the fierce response of the industry and its allies to this modest change. The National Association of Broadcasters has filed a court challenge to block the FCC’s decision. And earlier this month, Congresswoman Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo.) inserted a provision into a federal budget bill, which was later removed by the full committee, that would strip the FCC of its ability to enforce the disclosure requirement.

As Steve Waldman has written in CJR, for more than 50 years, television broadcasters have been allowed to use the public’s airwaves for free—based on the understanding that they would give something back to their local communities. These public service obligations, such as covering current affairs and providing children’s programming, are the foundation for broadcasters’ special status as trustees of the airwaves, a principle first established in the 1927 Radio Act. But the fact that over 35 percent of commercial broadcast stations do not provide any local news programming demonstrates that the trustee model is broken—and the broadcasters’ opposition to mere online disclosure of data they were already obligated to collect and make public underscores just how broken it is. If the broadcasters fight simple transparency requirements, should we ever expect them to dedicate significant time and resources to programming that informs the public?

Public interest advocates, along with a few former FCC chairmen and commissioners, have long aspired to enforce more rigorous public interest obligations on broadcasters. But these efforts have met little success, because of the challenges of enforcement and the incentives that profit-seeking companies face to prioritize low-cost or entertainment-focused programming.

Rather than trying to patch a broken system, policymakers should instead consider options that would require broadcasters to give back something more concrete in exchange for access to the public airwaves. An alternative approach: in lieu of public interest obligations, assess an annual spectrum fee on commercial broadcasters. This idea has long been championed by Henry Geller, the former general counsel of the FCC, who argues that “instead of trying to make broadcasters play by rules, we should just make them pay a reasonable fee to support public broadcasting.”

Geller’s views were no doubt shaped by more than a decade spent working as an attorney at the Federal Communications Commission in the 1950s and 60s, including when then-Chairman Newton N. Minow delivered his famous “Vast Wasteland” speech to the NAB convention in 1961. But Geller’s perspective remains relevant today. And his alternative model—supplementing ill-enforced public interest obligations on commercial broadcasters with annual license fees, which would be used to support non-commercial outlets—could breathe new energy into the very idea of public media.

Even as the disruption brought by the digital age has often brought new pressures to bear upon quality journalism in commercial media, the Web has remade the landscape of free expression, access to news and information, and media production. Nearly anyone can become a producer and distributor of news today. These changes require us to expand our notions of public media beyond its historic format of mission-oriented, non-commercial broadcast media produced for the public, to include media produced by the public for civic purposes across multiple platforms.

As the scholars Ellen P. Goodman and Anne Chen have recently written, the modern media environment requires us to consider public media as having four layers: “infrastructure, creation, curation, and connection,” which produce content that will be distributed across “newly reconfigured public media networks.” These ideas are still nascent, but the core concept is that we have to let go of the idea that public media is solely the responsibility of a small number of broadcast entities. We need to fund entities that support each of these “four layers.”

What might this look like? Imagine a multiplatform public media that combined the production quality of PBS’s “American Experience, the reporting quality of NPR’s Morning Edition, the content curation of Wikipedia—and the level of community engagement that exist for some public access cable television channels and low power FM radio.

In some communities there is already institutional movement in this direction, ready to be supported with more funding. Public Access cable (PEG) television channels, funded almost exclusively out of franchise fees levied by local or state governments for access to public rights of way, are expanding beyond their traditional cable programming to include other media platforms such as radio. In Davis, CA, the PEG station Davis Media Access also houses the local low power radio station KDRT, which offers locally produced musical, cultural, educational, and public affairs programming. Media Bridges, the PEG channel in Cincinnati, OH, operates a low power radio station, WVQC, that features local artists and musicians. Imagine if these entities were funded to partner with the local public radio and television stations. You would have the reach of public television and radio with the local content and grassroots engagement of community media.

Similarly, what if meaningful resources could be brought to entities like the Triangle Wiki in North Carolina or the Davis wiki in California, helping to embed these online platforms and the critical community information they provide more deeply into the media fabric?

There are many other examples around the country, such as Access Humboldt, a community access station that is exploring provision of broadband connectivity through its Digital Redwoods project in the far north of remote Northern California; or the Grand Rapids Community Media Center, which has a local radio station, two public access channels, and a theatre. If we added to this media platform the incisive reporting, delivered by journalists hired by the media center and based locally, we would have the type of locally-oriented programming and civic engagement envisioned by Congress back in 1927, when it attempted to create a communications framework to benefit the public interest.

And if the obstinacy of the NAB to accept minimal transparency rules is what drives us there, then perhaps we should be grateful.

For more on these ideas, read the full paper from the New America Foundation.

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Benjamin Lennett and Tom Glaisyer collaborated on this article for CJR. Lennett is policy director for the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation. Glaisyer, a Media Policy Fellow at New America, coordinates the Media Policy Program at the foundation's Open Technology Initiative. Tags: , ,