The paradoxes of public media

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I attended the Beyond Broadcast conference May 12 and 13 held at the Harvard Law School -- a well-attended and solid first-year effort.  The conference's subtitle, "Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture," the names of many of the organizers (Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, Center for Social Media at American University, Public Radio Exchange, Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, Project for Open Source Media, and Center for Citizen Media at the Berkman Center and UC - Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism), and the general tenor of many of the discussions left me thinking about what qualifies a medium as "public" these days.

My working definition of public media has been roughly synonymous with non-profit media, though the more common definition has been noncommercial media).  Both have the unfortunate characteristic of defining an important concept by what it isn't rather than by what it is.  And both have other problems.

Channel 4 in the UK and CBC Television in Canada have shown that you can run commercials and be nonprofit at the same time.  Professional public broadcasters in the U.S. run noncommercial advertising (that is, ads the FCC defines as of identifying intent and noncommercial because they ban calls to action, pricing and comparative information) we call underwriting.  Public broadcasting also engages in other commerce with their listeners and viewers by selling copies and transcripts of their programs.  That will increase substantially for broadband-delivered programming.

Some people, including many at the conference, believe that public media have a social mission and, in particular, a social change mission.  Dr. Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America had the most memorable quote of the conference in this regard when he said of public funding, "You can't speak truth to the Man on the Man's nickel."  That quote that can be deconstructed to reveal a lot about the assumptions inherent in this approach to a definition.  As with folk music, it's pretty hard to think how this definition embraces much beyond Left politics -- providing an interesting dilemma for the increasingly libertarian view of Internet policy held by many of these same people.

Professional public broadcasters broadcast programming produced by commercial entities some of them diverse media companies and others formed by independent (or formerly "dependent") producers.  At what point does a producer who sells a few pieces a year via PRX but otherwise needs a day job to survive cross the line from non-profit to for-profit?  When he or she can chuck the day job?

Some programming -- e.g., heaven help us, Lawrence Welk -- has had successful runs on both commercial and public television.  At what point does it become "public?"

Arguably, the most consistently mission-driven programming is not found on public broadcasting stations but on C-SPAN, funded from the profits of large monopoly cable MSOs.  And I've thought for years that the one of the best public television programs out there is Sunday Morning on CBS -- though its Sunday morning colleagues Face the Nation, Meet the Press and This Week would also be welcome on any public television station.

Television coverage of tennis began on public television, but then jumped to commercial television when it caught on, never to return.

I list all these paradoxes to make the point that we're probably not going to find a bright line definition of public media.  The availability of self-publishing for electronic media producers -- RSS, podcasting, video blogs, some 95 (I was told this weekend) Internet video distribution services -- not only obfuscates this further but  potentially atomizes the audience and economic return to producers for whatever public media are.

Updated 5/15/2006:
Even with that uncertainty about what it means, I've added a new Public Media category/tag to the list on the right.

Finally, after posting the original version of this from the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport last night, I boarded my flight west and opened Yochai Benkler's new book, The Wealth of Networks, to Chapter 2, which begins as follows:

There are no noncommercial automobile manufacturers.  There are no volulnteer steel foundries.  You would never choose to have your primary source of bread depend on voluntary contributions from others.  Nevertheless, scientists working at noncommercial research institutes funded by nonprofit educational institutions and government grants produce most of our basic science.  Widespread cooperative networks of volunteers write the software and standards that run most of the Internet and enable what we do with it.  Many people turn to National Public Radio or the BBC as a reliable source of news.  What is it about information that explains this difference?  Why do we rely almost exclusively on markets and commercial firms to produce cars, steel, and wheet, but much less so for the most critical information our advanced societies depend on?  Is this a historical contingency, or is there something about information as an object of production that makes nonmarket production attractive?

Hmmm.  Maybe there's an answer to the paradoxes in there somewhere.

Updated syttende mai (17 May, a special day if you're Norwegian):
Be sure to read Terry Heaton's new post, The internet is the new "public".  Link:  Pomo Blog.  --Dennis

Comments

[Steve Behrens]

Dennis, that's a great quote from Benkler. It would be pertinent to add that the Internet and the Web as well came out of the public sector -- the Internet from defense research, the Web from a European nuclear research agency in Switzerland and the first browser from an American research institution in Illinois. These institutions were interested in efficient dissemination of information for their own practical purposes. To the regret of commercial interests, this led to a Web that's lousy at protecting copyright and restricting the audience's access to competing information.

For-profit companies might have invented similar systems if they had been hired to do that, but instead they typically end up designing systems with the very different motivations of securing subscription fees or advertising revenues.

[Tom Ammons]

What about the intersection of private and public? If we were to offer a private broadcast service, let's say, pledge free public radio to those willing to pay a subscription fee, would we be forsaking a public mission or would we just be realistic about how a service has to be funded? Since there is no real option of having public radio funded with public (tax) dollars, why not go to a fee for service model? The public aspect of this is that by taking subscription dollars from listeners we are not dependent or subservient to private corporate interests for funding. This would insulate the media from use by corporate interests to further their specific agenda. Instead we would strive to serve the needs and interests of the public who subscribe to the service. Those who want a “free" service get something universally accessible but filled with messages which are not intrinsic to the mission which the station serves. In other words advertising