Defining Diversity, Defending Democracy

Review by

  Lee Artz

Purdue University Calumet

Media diversity: Economics, ownership, and the FCC. Mara Einstein. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum: 2004. 249 pp. $29.95 paper. (ISBN 0-8058-5403-7).

            Einstein's book is rich in detail (on regulatory rules, industry structure, and program selection process) as it sets out to defend the television industry and its deregulatory call for reliance on the market. If you measure diversity in broadcasting and democracy in communication by the variety of television genres in a given season, then this is the book for you. Einstein argues that the consolidation of the media industry does not affect the diversity of entertainment programming--a tough conclusion to accept for anyone looking for more than inane sit-coms, graphic police dramas, corporate sports, or a specific narrowcast hobby channel on network and cable television these days--but Einstein insists that she has "proved" that "consolidation is not having an effect on diversity of content" in either genre or style (pp. 177-178). In terms of program content, "it does not matter who or how many produce programming for network primetime" (p. 178). Roll over and wake up, Marshall McCluhan! The medium really is the message . . . or rather the profit motive of the owners of the medium, because "ultimately, the network's job is to make money and the best way to make money is to put on the best shows" (p. 196). And there's the regulatory rub.

            Having just finished Recovering a public vision for public television (Balas, 2003), I was acutely aware of Ivy Leadbetter Lee's PR work for CBS and how he redefined diversity on the dial as an issue of "program types" (Balas, p. 52) convincing the Federal Radio Commission that "capitalist broadcasters were more objective due to their lack of commitments to anything beyond regulatory gain" (Balas, p. 53). Einstein's solid, documented, chart-verified argument is a more refined and effective model of Lee's rhetorical move. She has taken diversity--a surely contested term ranging from freedom of expression, opinion, and public interest to a characteristic of ethnic, cultural, gender or other social marker--and defined, or rather elided the definition, to a characteristic of television program style and genre. Such a move, backed with substantial citation, allows diversity to be measured by the quantity of choices in television programming. From this perspective, ultimately the ideal public interest is to have programs "that could demand payment in excess of their costs of production and distribution" (i.e. programs that can make networks profits) "regardless of the similarity or dissimilarity of the programs and the size or composition of the audience" (Cass, 1981, p. 61, quoted in Einstein, p. 7).

            Thus, diversity has two possible components (far removed from diversity of ideas): 1) source diversity--the number of people and the number of types of people creating programming; and 2) outlet diversity--the number of channels broadcasting. Einstein accepts industry arguments raised early on in radio regulation that too many voices actually "meant nobody was getting heard" (p. 9), although she recognizes that the 1927-1934 decisions to license national networks "quashed any diversity from a multitude of outlets" and "hampered programming diversity" because broadcasting became "a business first and a public service second" (p. 11). Unfortunately, this brief admission of the limits of commercial broadcasting is bracketed as Einstein's affiliation with free market assumptions obfuscates the significance of diversity in programming: "no one can agree on what it is . . . what we really mean is the ability to speak freely . . . what we really want when we say diversity is quality programming, children's programming, or yes, even entertainment programming" (p 38). One would prefer that she begin the conversation about diversity outside the FCC/corporate boardrooms by listening to actual public conversations about diversity that are rich with criticism, observation, and suggestion (e.g. public hearings by Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting; any issue of Extra!; Balas, 2003; Engleman, 1996; Hoynes, 1994; McChesney, 1999). Unfortunately, the premise is set and well before leaving Chapter One we have cast aside any recognition or discussion of diversity of race, gender, class, or social and cultural experience that might appear in views reflected in programming content--all has been subsumed by a generalized public with an abundance of disparate voices necessarily represented by the sheer quantity of channels and programming genre.

            The rest of the book has considerable value in its historical narrative of the FCC's financial and syndication rules and the television industry's structure and response to FCC guidelines, including a sanguine presentation of the programming selection process. Einstein in fact does demonstrate that industry monopoly control has delivered diversity in content: if we accept the premise that diversity can be reduced to program genre. Using Dominick and Pearce's (1976) diversity indicator we discover that "diversity" peaked between 1968 and 1970 (tell that to African-Americans, Latin Americans, the working class, and women: we had "Julia"!), subsided with the rise of motion pictures aired during prime time, but rebounded again in 2001. Networks have occasionally erred by flooding the airwaves with situation-comedies or crime/detective dramas (p. 162), but now we are in the midst of a "diversity" trend (verified by an appendix on programming diversity, pp. 240-241.) Unfortunately, according to Einstein, "there are simply a finite number of truly talented television people" (p. 213) (consisting of mostly white males already employed by the networks?), so source diversity has likely topped out. Indeed, for Einstein, the expansion of available channels has already resulted in less than quality programming--but not because of media consolidation--because evidence "proves" that monopoly networks seeking to please mass audiences do the best job of providing diversity in programming. As presented, "there is no proven causality between media consolidation and a reduction in diversity" (p. 217). Again, one aches for a public forum of working class and black viewers talking with Einstein. A read of Habermas on the public sphere seems in order. Or a conversation with Douglas Kellner (on democracy) or any number of media researchers such as Mark Orbe (on race) and Richard Butsch (on class). Butsch's (2001) study of fifty years of network images of white working class males irrefutably illustrates a consistently biased rendering. Recently, Cambridge's (2005) exhaustive study of broadcasting in the 1990s discovered that "many voices of America's diversity are ghettoized" (248). Likewise, any number of contributors to anthologies on media, race, and gender (e.g., Dines & Humez (2000) could offer much to a discussion on diversity in content. Most would argue that genre diversity does nothing to inhibit network allegiance to a decidedly homogeneous ideology of hyper-individualism, atomized consumerism, and authoritarianism.

            Ironically, Einstein ends with a noble call for a new definition of diversity and a means for providing programming "content that puts public interest over the profit motive" (p. 226). Certainly this inside report on industry practices is valuable for understanding how television produces programming for profit, how far they can go to attract new audiences but "not alienate advertisers and some audiences" (Longworth, 2000, pp. 135, in Einstein, p. 204). However, just as public interest broadcasting, including diversity of voices and access to media production cannot be provided by network and media monopolies, so too guidance for securing the public interest and public access to democratic, participatory mass communication, including diversity in views, voices, and perspectives of race, gender, and class cannot be provided by those accepting the validity (or even the inconsequence) of network control over programming practices and content. A splash of reality by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (www.fair.org) or any independent media worker (www.indymedia.org) would really help clean up the murkiness.

References

Balas, G. (2003). Recovering a public vision for public television. Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield.

Butsch, R. (2001). Industry and image: Television and the working class buffoon in domestic sitcoms. In Communication and democratic society (L. Artz, ed.) (pp. 173-183). NY: Harcourt.

Cambridge, V. C. (2005). Immigration, diversity, and broadcasting in the United States, 1990-2001. Athens, OH: Center for International Studies.

Dines, G. & Humez, J. M. (Eds.) (1995). Gender, race and class in media: A text-reader. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Dominick, J. R., & Pearce, M. C. (1976). Trends in network prime-time programming, 1953-1974. Journal of Communication, 26, 70-80.

Engleman, R. (1996). Public radio and television in America: A political history. London: Sage.

Hoynes, W. (1994). Public television for sale: Media, the market, and the public sphere. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

McChesney, R. W. (1999). Rich media, poor democracy: Communication politics in dubious times. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press.