The Battle Against Commercialization of Public Broadcasting

Review by

  Lee Artz

Purdue University Calumet

Recovering a public vision for public television. Glenda R. Balas. Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield: 2003. 155pp. $18.95 paper. (ISBN 0-7425-2387-X).

    For those concerned with the future of public broadcasting, understanding the long history of machinations by commercial broadcasters and their compatriots in public relations and various regulatory agencies is crucial. Balas's treatise on three revelatory moments that mark the character and context of regulation makes a vital contribution to that understanding. In contrast to the contemporary push for commercialization of public broadcasting promoted by advertising-funded media and regulatory agencies, which ignores or hides the rationale for more democratic broadcasting practices, Balas finds that "public broadcasting archives offer memos, reports, letters, speeches, diaries, news accounts, and videos of several hundred men and women who have produced compelling public interest broadcasting over the last seventy years" (p. 123).

            Indeed, one of the foremost values of this monograph is the presentation of historical gems of argument for public broadcasting that Balas has unearthed in her obviously extensive research into the history of public television. I cite only three of many instances, here. 1) In relating the debate over the Wagner-Hatfield Amendment, Balas quotes Armstrong Perry, from the National Committee on Education by Radio, who exposed U.S. radio practices favoring capitalist media as abnormal. Long before Clear Channel owned 1400 radio stations and seven private companies controlled international media flow, Perry observed that "the U.S. stands alone among the nations of the world in . . . placing radio channels in the hands of commercial concerns to be used as they see fit" (p. 26). 2) In a section on the "Historic Underpinnings of Publicness," Balas gives evidence that cultural diversity, commonality, and democratic discourses are not recent concerns, but have a rich and vibrant ancestry, eloquently expressed in a 1978 document, "Declaration of Principles," produced by a coalition of public television station managers. Balas selects an opening quote from the document: ". . . Only an informed and enlightened citizenry can shape its own future and assert the inalienable rights of individuals while guarding the essential interests of society. Knowledge and understanding are the foundations of a democracy. Public television offers a unique means for ensuring the integrity of these foundations. Owned and governed by nonprofit public institutions and motivated by the desire to respond to the needs of the public, it attempts to reflect the diversity of our people, the richness of our heritage, and the vitality of our culture; to provide a forum for many points of view; and to illuminate the common bonds that tie all mankind together…" (pp. 123-124). 3) Balas's exculpatory nuggets not only reveal that current controversies in public broadcasting follow the trajectory of earlier conflicts between public interest and private profit, but her discoveries also admit that other mass communication practices displayed their professional norms and ethical preferences early on: public relations founder, Ivy Leadbetter Lee served CBS and the corporate media by manipulating and reversing the "broad public support for the tenets of nonprofit radio" and "co-opted those precepts" for his own clients to maintain corporate dominance against public interest (p. 123), "effectively negating broadcast reformers' demands for channels of their own" (p. 55). Contemporary affiliation with the market by many public broadcasters, while the public is silenced, only underscores the symbiotic growth of public relations service to private media and "reproduces the goals of Lee's 1934 campaign: to represent public television as invisible and unnecessary" (p. 42).

            Balas selected three moments in the history of public broadcasting in the United States that express the conflicting philosophies, loosely represent the material interests of the antagonists, and set the parameters of each subsequent debate. She does not recount the battles nor the station practices of public broadcasting per se, an undertaking performed by others (e.g., Engleman, 1996; Godfried, 1997; McChesney, 1993). Rather, the strength of this book is in how Balas looks at the concepts at issue using the words and documents produced by the actors themselves: solid, clear, and irrefutable in citation.

            I have only one caveat. We must always recognize and understand the public in its social relations and concrete political conditions. Whereas Balas is rightly inspired by the passion and frequent insight of public broadcasting advocates, their voices (in historical context) would give some caution to Balas' more favorable assessment of their possible resolve and influence. The conversation on public radio may indeed have been "energetic" (p. 56) but it was restricted primarily to academics, educators, and media professionals (Ed Nockles of WCFL, notwithstanding; Godfried, 1997). The years of depression (1929-1933) were not conducive to organized labor, engaged public discussion, nor volunteer community engagement with federal agency hearings--the American working class in its majority was in survival mode at the very moment that corporate interests were hijacking the airwaves. Likewise, the social-political context of the 1950s conservatism, anti-communism, and distracting consumerism mitigated much of the possibility for wide public conversations on educational television. Even the lead up to the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act took place well before the political changes wrought by the social movements of the 1960s could permeate the larger culture and provide for a real public conversation on the possibility and necessity of public access broadcasting. None of this, of course, discounts Balas' impressive work and systematic narrative, rather placing the development of public broadcasting in the context of the concrete, material conditions of each historical moment would accent the dedication and insight of those fighting for public broadcasting in the face of serious institutional and cultural obstacles. Moreover, although public television and public radio may never have had a public vision (McCauley, Peterson, Artz, & Halleck, 2003), in part because the discussions have been led and/or subverted by dominant social class forces opposing democratic media, Balas' references to historical figures, groups, and social forces that represent the broad public indicate that a public vision for public television has always existed throughout U.S. history, providing lessons for the future champions of public media.

            In sum, Recovering a public vision for public television is a valuable contribution to the international discussion on public broadcasting, public communication, and public interest. By identifying impulses and options, by demonstrating the use and abuse of media regulation by corporate media, corporate PR, and their supportive politicians, and by unearthing shining instances of champions of public interest, Balas gives us all energy and argument for opposing the international slide to deregulation, privatization, and commercialization. The six-point plan for public broadcasting that Balas outlines goes beyond recovering earlier conversations by codified some of the earlier impulses into bundled proposals: public access to media; popular performance and media literacy; national and local media for conversations on political decisions; creativity in production; non-commercial public service commitment; and social-structural media change; proposals that could serve as a guide for public broadcasting in any nation.

References

Engleman, R. (1990). Public radio and television in America: A political history. London: Sage.

Godfried, N. (1997). WCFL: Chicago's voice of labor, 1926-78. Champaign: University of Illinois.

McCauley, M., Peterson, E., Artz, L., & Halleck, D. D. (2003). Public broadcasting and the public interest. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.

McChesney, R. W. (1993). Telecommunications, mass media, and democracy: The battle for control of U.S. broadcasting, 1928-1935. New York: Oxford University Press.