A new public media

Ellen P. Goodman

For this, my first ever blog post, I wanted to share a few thoughts about the need to radically reform our system of public service media for the digital age. Last week, the GW Law Review hosted a symposium to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Jerome Barron’s important article Access to the Press: A New First Amendment Right. Several of us explored the question of what media regulation might mean in a networked environment, and converged on the idea that traditional broadcast regulation, which assumes content scarcity and captive audiences, is of limited use today in achieving the kinds of democratic values that Barron advanced. I’ve suggested before that noncommercial media subsidies have increasing importance for media policy as the case for regulation weakens. The problem is that the existing funding and organizational structures we have today, which are designed for a broadcast-based media space, are not up to the task.

It happens to be the 40th anniversary of the Public Broadcasting Act this year too. The 1967 law codified what had already emerged as a system of public broadcasting built around local broadcast stations. The Act created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to funnel federal funds to these stations and to PBS -- the national programming aggregator. This system has worked quite well, notwithstanding the periodic controversies about programming choices, objectivity and balance, and the rest. It has worked even though it hasn’t always been clear whether the purpose of public broadcasting has been to give mass audiences programming they want but can’t get from commercial broadcasters (e.g., kids programming), or to give mass audiences programming they don't want but ought to have (e.g., documentaries), or to give niche audiences programming the market won’t provide (e.g., opera). Whatever our take on these questions, the public broadcasting system has served an important function as a non-market participant in the production of mass communications. This has been especially true, I think, in the areas of kids programming and American history.

What now if public television, which is the medium I want to focus on, wanted to remake itself for the digital age? What if the existing players, or some new set of players, wanted to make considerable investments in noncommercial media in broadband, mobile, etc… The BBC is trying to do this, with its emphasis on new media. You can see from BBC Controller Simon Nelson’s recent speech that the BBC’s new slogan is “find, play, share.” You can see too that the BBC recognizes the importance of search and audience participation in the mission of public service media. The British regulator, Ofcom, has issued a very innovative discussion paper on “A new approach to public service content in the digital media age,” considering what institutional arrangements would foster the creation, distribution, and re-use of public media content across digital networks.

Of course PBS and its member stations already use the Internet heavily, often to great effect. But the main work of public TV remains broadcasting and broadcast content. New media platforms amplify and extend content that is by and large designed for traditional media, not for a world of searching, linking, sharing. To return to the question I asked – what if PBS or its member stations or some new entity wanted to change the game? The Public Broadcasting Act would make it difficult because it makes the physical act of broadcasting – the transmission technology – central to the funding and operation of the system. In addition, the copyright laws applicable to public broadcasting are designed around the broadcast transmission of content by local stations. Sections 114(b) and 118 of the Copyright Act allow public broadcasting stations to use sound recordings and certain other content without clearing rights – saving them from a task that might be cost-prohibitive or impossible. The two sections work a little differently, but in general the special dispensation applies only to content transmitted by means of broadcast or by broadcast licensees. So online material and even DVDs have to go through a very different rights clearance process. What was supposed to be a subsidy to public media is now only a subsidy for the subset of public media that is broadcast.

Public broadcasters and their supporters are working to modernize the relevant laws for the digital environment. Is incremental reform enough? There are good reasons to keep our current broadcast-based system for the short-term until broadband penetration increases, but isn’t it time to design a public media policy for the post-broadcast era? Ideas we might consider are: a spectrum play whereby public broadcasting gives up some spectrum (and stations) in return for content and technology funding; new noncommercial ventures (especially those supporting investigative journalism) become eligible for funding; a more thoughtful and systematic linkage between public media policy and copyright policy; a connection between public media policy and spectrum policy; etc… I know a lot of people are thinking along these lines and would benefit from hearing each other. We will not be able to rely on the FCC to play the convening function that Ofcom has played in assembling ideas.

Labels: media policy

Posted 10:56 PM by Ellen P. Goodman [link]