Copyright by Rebecca Suzanne McInroy 2018
The Report Committee for Rebecca Suzanne McInroy Certifies that this is the approved version of the following Report:
On Podcasting and Intervention: Re-imagining the Value of Public Radio in the Information Ecosystem
APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE:
Mary Beltran, Supervisor
Ben Carrington
On Podcasting and Intervention: Re-imagining the Value of Public Radio in the Information Ecosystem
by
Rebecca Suzanne McInroy
Report Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Arts
The University of Texas at Austin May, 2018 Dedication
For Chloe Violet McInroy
“Never, never, never give up.” -Winston Churchill
Acknowledgements
I could not have finished this degree without the continued encouragement, guidance, and enthusiasm of so many people along the way. Michael Kackman, Dana Cloud, Mary Kearney, and Paul Stekler, early on you never gave up on my ideas or me. Mona Syed you are a beautiful human and kept me on track. Karin Wilkins, your friendship, support, and undying belief in the significance of public education are invaluable. Raj Patel and Tom Philpott thank you for your respect, laughter and constant focus on social justice (also thanks for introducing me to our great philosopher Slavoj Zizek). Thank you to Art Markman and Bob Duke for taking a chance on a young producer, and for including me as an academic in our work. Erin Randall, thank you for your friendship, your willingness to collaborate without a roadmap, and for your incredible heart. Owen Egerton, thank you for trusting me with your limitless talent. Carrie Fountain, thank you for your hilarity and for sharing poetry as a revolutionary act. And Neil Blumofe you are an unwavering light in all. Thank you to everyone at KUT and KUTX Radio. Especially Hawk Mendenhall, for trusting my work and my ideas, and for being the best boss a person could ever ask for. For all the enthusiasm, conversations and partnerships thank you: Joy Diaz, Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon, Alain Stephens, Michael Lee, Jay Trachtenberg, Jake Pearlman, Amy Chambless, Peter Babb, Elizabeth McQueen, Jimmy Maas, Matt Munoz, Stewart Vanderwilt, Laura Rice, David Alvarez, Margo Shaw, Laura Willis, Rebecca Ouellette, Ben Philpott, Todd Callahan, John Burnett, Michael Crawford, DaLyah Jones, Jack Anderson, Gabriel Perez, and Stephen Rice. v Thank you Ben Carrington for saying yes to our project, for your rigorous academic work, and your love of Stuart Hall. Maggie Tate and Anima Adjepong thank you for your earnestness to push me to do the show we all wanted to do, and for your deep well of knowledge, friendship and enthusiasm. Thank you Mary Beltran for your attention to detail, your astute insights, and for seeing me through to the finish line. Finally, thank you Olga Maier for being my first true comrade. Thank you to my mom, Pauline Moermond, who has filled out countless applications for me, always supports my education no matter what, and has listened to endless rants about media theory, Marxism, and Public Radio and has never once judged me. Finally to her father, my late grandfather Sidney Watkins, whose spirit and belief in the lifelong education for everyone regardless of race, class or gender runs throughout all the work I do.
vi Abstract
On Podcasting and Intervention: Re-imagining the Value of Public Radio in the Information Ecosystem
Rebecca Suzanne McInroy, MA The University of Texas at Austin, 2018
Supervisor: Mary Beltran
In this thesis report I examine the role of public radio in an information ecosystem. I ask what it means to be “public” in the era of podcasting, when audiences could be across the street from you or halfway around the world. I also look at what “public” radio stations are responsible to when their audience is both more fragmented—because they are not connected geographically—and more streamlined—because they unify around specific themes, ideas or shows more than ever before. Finally I explore how public radio stations, by re-imagining their role in this ecosystem, can focus more attention and resources on developing content that aligns with, “the mission of NPR [which is] to work in partnership with Member Stations to create a more informed public — one challenged and invigorated by a deeper understanding and appreciation of events, ideas and cultures.” I demonstrate how stations and universities can partner to develop programming by offering examples of programming I’ve been developing over the last 10 years at KUT Radio in Austin, Texas.
vii
Table of Contents
On Podcasting and Intervention...... 1
Bibliography ...... 31
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On Podcasting and Intervention: Re-imagining the Value of Public Radio in the Information
Ecosystem
“There is no human activity from which every form of intellectual participation can be excluded: homo faber cannot be separated from homo sapiens.” –Antonio Gramsci1
As I was preparing for a trip to Jamaica recently a friend and colleague of mine from KUT, the National Public Radio affiliate station in Austin, Texas, asked me to do him a favor. He had lived in Jamaica during the 1980s and he wanted me to check out what was happing on the radio stations in Kingston when I got there. He said, “Tell me what people are talking about, and what music they’re into.” He wanted to know what the
‘talk of the town’ was, the currents of the community, and the soundtrack of daily life in
Kingston. His desire to tap into the vibe of Jamaica through the local radio stations reminded me of something Susan Douglas wrote about radio in her book Listening In:
Radio and The American Imagination.
Few inventions evoke such nostalgia, such deeply personal and vivid
memories, such a sense of loss and regret…In other words, while it has
become commonplace to assert that radio built national unity in the 1930s
and beyond, we must remember that what radio really did (and still does
1 Gramsci, Antonio, Quintin Hoare, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. New York: International Publishers, 2005. (9)
1 today) was allow listeners to experience at the same time multiple
identities—national, regional, local—some of them completely allied with
the country’s prevailing cultural and political ideologies, others of them
suspicious of or at odds with official culture.2
It is this idea of the production and re-production of multiple identities, imagined communities, and educational opportunities, realized through radio broadcasts and through podcasts, that so intrigues me. Yet, Douglas warns us against critiquing audio content, including radio, podcasts, streaming, audio books and the like today, through such traditional lenses. That is, we must look at the way in which each generation produces and uses media, specifically audio in this case, to share ideology, solidify hegemony and reproduce social and political ideas and identities. For example, the Brexit referendum in the U.K. and the election of Donald Trump in the U.S. were populist movements that seemed to come out of nowhere when pollsters, researchers, journalists, pundits, and academics were trying to assess national sentiments through social media and mainstream news sources. However, for those listening closely to audio, the ideas and ideologies undergirding conservative right-wing movements signaled a sea change loud and clear.
In his article, “Waking People Up! Conspiracy Radio and the Contemporary
Public Sphere,” Michael Kackman describes what he calls patriot radio; he traces the roots of right-wing ideology radio through the anti-Semitic rants of Father Charles
Caughlin, the rabble-rousing 1930s radio priest (for whom the phrase “lunatic fringe” was coined), to the far-right radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and our current
2 Susan J. Douglas, Listening in: Radio and the American imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. (3-24)
2 political moment. “Today,” he writes, “broadcast radio is an essential part of this movement’s discourse of public engagement, but the actual broadcast signal is less important than ever. “3 The distribution models of many conservative radio talk shows, he argues, utilized conventional commercial AM & FM radio stations, low power FM
(particularly utilized by stations affiliated with evangelical churches), unlicensed “pirate” stations, shortwave, internet streaming, iPhone and Android apps, and call-in listening, which allows listeners to simply call a phone number to listen to programming live. The goal of this production and distribution model was widespread availability, especially for those who are otherwise off the grid.
The effectiveness of Trump and the right wing to solidify an anti-immigration, protectionist, and populist platform among its base through radio, as Kackman demonstrates, should give cultural and media scholars, producers, and journalists pause.
How much significance do we, in the media and as academics, give to audio content when we think about cultural identity for example? We should be listening as closely as we are watching and reading because it is easy to take for granted audio production and consumption, one reason being it is hard to keep up with the swift ways in which audio production and consumption transition.
In the 20 years I have been in audio production, working for public radio stations,
I have seen the platform and distribution models change rapidly from analog terrestrial radio, to digital radio and internet radio, to podcasting. This has had a massive impact on the ways in which audio is constructed, distributed and perceived. For example, when I
3 Kackman, Michael. "Waking People Up! Conspiracy Radio and the Contemporary Public Sphere." Flow Journal: A Forum on Television and Media Culture (web log), October 16, 2011. Accessed November 12, 2016. http://www.flowjournal.org/2011/10/waking-people-up/.
3 first started in radio in 1998, I produced feature audio content for air. I was limited to a span of 2-10 minutes depending on the radio show clock that my piece would be a part of. The piece would air once or twice during the day, after which it would be archived on a CD. Today I produce seven programs that span from live discussion programs to 4- minute features, and various long-form interview and documentary programs. All of them can be edited for broadcast, and all of them are archived on various podcasting platforms online.
We should also consider the interconnectedness of media texts with multiple platforms such as radio programs that also have podcasting elements, videos, blogs, the social media conversations happening around content, and the component of live community events that both utilize already produced content and are sources of content that can be used in other productions. This would allow media researchers to get a better perspective of the conversations happening around content as well as in the mainstream presentation of the content. For example, a radio program might air a 10 interview that may include an unedited or less produced version as a podcast. This podcast could contain more opinions or ideas that give you a better understanding as to the context of the discussion.
The rapid change in production and distribution models has had enormous effects on the audio media landscape in the US in the last 20 years; not only in terms of the content as I described, but for public radio specifically, also in the more nuanced re- shaping of its value system and worth. Specifically in new economic exchange systems like those of the “attention economy.” As Herbert Simon, who coined the term in a 1971 lecture, illustrates,
4 …in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth
of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes.
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of
its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention
and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance
of information sources that might consume it.4
What this means is that as the media landscape changed and developed into the world we have today—where news updates are constantly sent to our phones and computers, where reporters follow the President’s Twitter feed to find out his stance on policy, and where everything from our friend’s Instagram pictures, to new available podcasts, to texts, to
Facebook status updates and more are competing for our attention equally—questions of significance and value have been replaced by a relevance based on shares, likes, and views.
The media today are not only in a state of crisis, with President Donald Trump accusing news organizations such as The New York Times and CNN of being “fake news,” but media literacy is so substantially low that a research study conducted by
Andrew Guess, Brenda Nyhan, and Jason Reifler, titled Selective Exposure to
Misinformation: Evidence from the consumption of fake news during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign,5 found that one in four Americans visited a fake news website between October 7 and November 14, 2016. This tells us that understanding and
4 "Welcome to Knowvation." Welcome to Knowvation™. Accessed April 21, 2018. https://digitalcollections.library.cmu.edu/. https://digitalcollections.library.cmu.edu/awweb/awarchive?type=file&item=33748 5 Guess, Andrew, Brenda Nyhan, and Jason Reifler. "Selective Exposure to Misinformation: Evidence from the Consumption of Fake News during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Campaign." Http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/fake-news-2016.pdf. Accessed April/May, 2018.
5 articulating the relevance, significance and worth of media productions and news stories, even media organizations like public radio, through a standard economic lens where
“attention” is the commodity, no longer provides any substantial information about the worth of media in society today. A documentary I may produce for public radio is not the same as the YouTube videos my 10-year-old daughter produces for her friends, but how do we articulate this? Even in public radio it is hard to get away from what Junot Díaz calls the “Totalitarian Axis of Like.”6
What I propose is that we begin to look at the media outside of economics and rather through a lens of ecology. In their 1991 book, Information Ecologies: Using
Technology with Heart, Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O’Day present a model through which we can better understand the purpose of media organizations like public radio. They define information ecology as a system of people, practices, values, and technologies in a particular local environment. “The spotlight is not on technology, but on human activities that are served by technology.” They talk about libraries as specific information ecologies as they have books, magazines, computers, and other forms of media, but their core value is to provide access to information for all clients. “The value,” they write, “shapes the policies around which the library is organized, including those related to technology…people come together guided by the values of the library.” 7 The authors do not discuss radio or public radio in their proposal, however. I argue that presenting public radio as unique “species” if you will, within the information ecosystem, we can find a better language to articulate the relevance of public radio in the US today. If we create a
6 StrandBookStore. "Junot Diaz and Hilton Als." YouTube. April 15, 2013. Accessed April 21, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLhpASeC9JI&app=desktop. 7 Nardi, Bonnie A., and Vicki ODay. Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000. (49)
6 framework to imagine public radio as an endangered species in an information ecosystem, as opposed to trying to articulate its relevance in an attention economy based on neo-liberal economic values, we can better understand its purpose and why we must protect it before it becomes extinct.
So what is the role of public radio in this information ecosystem? What does it mean to be “public” in the era of podcasting, when your audience could be across the street from you or halfway around the world? What “public” are stations responsible to when their audience is both more fragmented—because they are not connected geographically—and more streamlined—because they unify around specific themes, ideas or shows—than ever before? And how can public radio stations, by re-imagining their role in this ecosystem, focus more attention and resources on developing content that aligns with, “the mission of NPR [which is] to work in partnership with Member
Stations to create a more informed public — one challenged and invigorated by a deeper understanding and appreciation of events, ideas and cultures.”8 And finally, why is it important that this type of media exists today? It is in relation to this last question that I would like to begin proposing the relevance of public media in the US today, by looking backward at the reasons why I’ve invested my entire professional career in this field.
My grandfather was born in Neath, Wales, on November 9, 1915. At 14 he left school and went to work in the coal mines. He used to tell me when I was a kid that what motivated him to leave the mines and go back to school were the night classes for the miners he attended, which were set up by Anuerin Bevan.9 He took courses on
8 "Our Mission and Vision." NPR. June 20, 2013. Accessed April 21, 2018. https://www.npr.org/about- npr/178659563/our-mission-and-vision. 9 My research on the exact details on these classes is inconclusive. Some preliminary correspondence with Curator Ceri Thompson from the Big Pit: National Coal Museum in Blaenafon and with Joanne E
7 Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Moliere. These discussions gave him a sense that he could do more with his life than work underground for very little pay. My grandfather’s dedication to the belief that access to art, literature and education should be granted to anyone, no matter what their economic status or geographic restrictions, was the reason I started working in public radio in the late 1990s.
This is similar to the perspective of William Siemering, one of NPR’s founding board members, who Ralph Engelman describes in Public Radio and Television in
America.10 “Siemering,” he writes,
grew up in the 1940s and early 1950s in the Midwest near the transmitter
of WHA, the leading educational radio station of the land-grant
universities. The station at the University of Wisconsin exercised a
profound influence on Siemering's interest in radio and his view of its
potential. He recalls that farmers listened to the special agricultural
broadcast at noon, and he notes the impact on his family of the station’s
goal of taking culture to the people.
In bridging that gap between the “haves and have-nots” when it comes to knowledge of the arts, literature, science, current events, and music, National Public Radio, and programs like All Things Considered, which Siemering developed, were conceived of as
Waller from the South Wales Miners’ Library reveal, that he may have been referring to The Plebs classes that originated amongst working class students at Ruskin College, Oxford. And there were many associations in South Wales, or the Workers’ Educational Association which held a variety of evening and day classes near Neath. Classes like these are also associated with Left-wing revolutionary activity in Wales especially between WWI and WWII. See also: Smith, Dai. Aneurin Bevan and the world of South Wales. Cardiff: U of Wales Press, 1993. Print. Rose, Jonathan. The intellectual life of the British working classes. New Haven: Yale U Press, 2010. Print. H.G. Williams, H.G. "Learning suitable to the situation of the poorest classes: The National Society and Wales, 1811-1839." Welsh History Review 19.No. 3 (June 1999): 425-52. Web. 10 Engelman, Ralph. Public radio and television in America a political history. Enskede: TPB, 1999.
8 doing what Bevan’s miners’ classes were set up to do: providing resources to, as
Siemering said, “enable the individual to better understand himself, and his government…and his natural and social environment so he can intelligently participate in effecting the process of change.” 11
Following World War II, educational radio stations in the United States set up by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) attempted to maintain FM signals with the help of government and foundation funding. Many of the NAEB stations were located on college campuses across the US; because they were understaffed, underfunded, and competing with the increasing popularity of television, they struggled to maintain consistent quality programming. However, through the efforts of the National
Educational Radio (NER) division of the NAEB, Congress was swayed to acknowledge the significant achievements and untapped potential of educational radio in spite of its neglect. National Public Radio (NPR) later emerged out of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 to unify the identities and missions of educational radio stations that were receiving money from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting—a non-profit, non governmental entity set up to disperse funds for the development of public radio and public television under the ‘67 Act.
Despite the idealized vision of educational content on NPR and its roots in educational programming, educational content on public radio has been an afterthought.
For example, the KUT program The UT Forum Series12 produced a vast archive of
11 Engelman, Ralph. Public radio and television in America a political history. Enskede: TPB, 1999. (91) 12 "A Guide to the UT KUT Longhorn Radio Network Records." University of Texas Libraries. Accessed May 29, 2017. http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/utcah/00508/cah- 00508.html.
9 interviews and lectures with people such as Hunter S. Thompson, Maya Angelou, and
Stokely Carmichael, which aired late at night and were not edited. They existed on the airwaves to fulfill a quota and substantiate funding, but were disregarded when it came to show development or syndication.
Meanwhile the fiscal Year 2018 budget proposal by the White House, citing a combination of station fundraising ability and diminishing need for the services, calls for the elimination of CPB funding following a one-year wind down.13 Also, in recent consolidations of public radio stations, mainly in the Midwest,14 in approaching digital radio policy,15 and in discussions of innovation, and podcasting strategy,16 NPR and public media are now more driven by “shares,” “clicks,” “likes,” and a need for funding and growth, than they are by the principles of public education. There may no longer be even the need to pay lip service to educational content.
However, it may be in returning to the premise of connecting “town with gown,” in line with the idea of information ecosystems, that public radio stations will ride out the wave of cuts in funding and increasing attacks on public media and journalism. Public radio needs to stop competing with the detritivores of the information ecosystem, such as
13https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/omb/budget/fy2018/msar.pdf#p age=106 14 Bornstein and Associates , comp. "Iowa Public Radio Final Report ." (November 2004): n. pag. Web. 15 RICHARD REDMOND, RICHARD. "DIGITAL RADIO – A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE ." Gates Air (n.d.): n. pag. Web. 16 This is an ongoing discussion in public radio and I will cite for my thesis notes from conferences, trade journals such as: Editor, Dru Sefton Senior, April Simpson Associate Editor, Tyler Falk Assistant Editor, and Doug Halonen. "For people in public media." Current. N.p., 15 Jan. 2017. Web. 17 Jan. 2017. And dialogue that National Public Radio is having on its website, for example: "Why NPR Changed How It Talks About Podcasts." NPR. NPR, n.d. Web. 17 Jan. 2017.
10 cat videos, porn, and even breaking news, and start seeing their role more akin to that of the honey bee, which are responsible for one out of every three bites of food we eat.
In seeing how important local, community based programing is to the health of the information ecosystem, public radio directors might invest more in utilizing their production and network capabilities, their position in communities, and their relationship to public universities in order to produce more high-quality, collaborative educational content for mass distribution, especially through podcasting. If stations do not recognize this, they are at risk of becoming irrelevant. If public radio remains true to it s roots of public service, especially for the working class and those who are often left out of the mainstream media conversation, it may have a chance. However, if it succumbs to the need for celebrity, if it panders to certain audiences over others, and if it relies on hit shows to bring in the money, it may lose its way and its authority. However, the authority of national public radio along with the status and credibility of local affiliate stations perhaps should be called to account.
Take for example the current #metoo #timesup moment. In an op-ed I published at alternet.org17 I argue that when we look at the development of white liberal masculinity through the lens of public radio, we see the impact of a standard language model on perceived norms of legitimacy and authority.
As listeners, we may not have even noticed the imbalance of power in this
representation. The voices on NPR—Bob Edwards, Scott Simon, Garrison
Keillor—give us the illusion of security. We could trust them. They would
protect us. They sounded so smooth as they lulled our critical minds to
17 https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/how-public-radio-became-voice-patriarchy
11 sleep. We didn’t realize that the bastion of grassroots media and integrity
were “publicradiosplaning” issues that impacted women, immigrants and
voices of color.18
I also cite a piece published by the NPR Ombudsman in April 2017 that reported that
…according to NPR's human resources department, of the 350 employees
in the news division as of Oct. 31, 2016, 75.4 percent were white. Asians
made up 8.3 percent of the staff, followed by blacks or African Americans
(8.0 percent), Hispanics or Latinos (5.4 percent), those who identified as
two or more races or ethnic identities (2.6 percent) and American Indian
(0.3 percent).19
So what does this breakdown tell us about who has authority and legitimacy in this space and whose voices are seen as periphery? Douglas talks about the idea of
“auditory voyeurism” when she discusses the relationship between black performers and white DJs in the 50s. She writes, “Since radio simultaneously reinforced and perpetuated racial stereotypes while also making African Americans enormously popular, we need to contemplate the consequences of this auditory voyeurism, for black and white listeners, and for black performers.”20 I argue that we also need to contemplate this idea when we look at NPR features and news stories. That from the conception of All Things
18 McInroy, Rebecca. "How Public Radio Became the Voice of the Patriarchy." Alternet. Accessed April 01, 2018. https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/how-public-radio- became-voice-patriarchy. 19 Jensen, Elizabeth. "NPR's Staff Diversity Numbers, 2016." NPR. April 21, 2017. Accessed April 01, 2018. https://www.npr.org/sections/ombudsman/2017/04/21/508381413/nprs-staff-diversity- numbers-2016. 20 Douglas, Susan Jeanne. Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination. Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2005. (18)
12 Considered in the 1970s, it has presented a core/periphery relationship between the host and the subject that reinforces racial, gender, and class divides.
Consider the opening billboard of the first All Things Considered broadcast. This is also an example I bring up in the op-ed I referenced.21
We hear a standard for what authority sounds like embedded in the way
the information was, and is, presented. Host Robert Conley, a calm, white
male voice, introduced the stories of the day. The first clip was the voice
of an African-American woman “we call Janice,” who explained what her
life was like as a drug addict. Conley came back to tell us more about
Janice and then revealed that we’d also hear from a farmer and from anti-
war protesters. It’s a structure that presents the role of the host as the
ultimate authority, one that contains in it messages about social identity,
legitimacy, and honesty. The host’s voice is the core, while others’ voices
are periphery and spectacle, like those of Midwestern farmers, black
women, poor people, and foreigners.
As you can see, inherent in the format of the programming there is a core-periphery relationship that establishes a standard language ideology. It reinforces notions of who has authority and credibility, and serves to normalize and support systems of oppression, in line with Rossini Lippe-Green’s argument in her 1997 book, English With an Accent:
21 Memmott, Mark. "Happy 40th To 'All Things Considered'." NPR. May 03, 2011. Accessed April 01, 2018. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2011/05/03/135957883/happy-40th-to-all-things-considered.
13 Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States.22 This is an important legacy and is just beginning to be redressed in public media—especially through podcasting.
Podcasts are relatively cheap to produce if you have a recorder, a computer, and access to the Internet. This puts the means of production and distribution in the hands of the host, and because there are very little bars to entering this space anyone who wants to have a show can. For public radio stations who have access to equipment, skilled editors and producers, and in most cases ambitious reporters, and hosts, podcasting can allow a space for discussion that is outside of the limitations of the clock and the of the FCC.
Stations are also more willing to take a chance on a host without a lot of experience, or with an accent or dialect that they might not put on air. Having this space to practice craft is also a huge stepping stone on the road toward getting more voices on the air.
However, this is a tricky space, what Stuart Hall might call a conjuncture. There is an opportunity for public radio to branch out and create more socially conscious, educational, community focused programs that have a wider reach than terrestrial radio.
At the same time this freedom affords public radio producers the opportunity to create for the marketplace as independent producers. But what could this mean with respect to the role of public media organizations, and specifically public radio today?
Public media producers today are finding themselves in an interesting position.
They have the skills and opportunity to produce high-quality audio content as independent podcasters who no longer need to be associated with public radio stations in order to distribute their content. And as public radio stations around the country stand to
22 Lippi-Green, Rosina L. English with an accent: language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States. London: Routledge, 1997.
14 lose their federal CPB funding, more and more producers are taking their skills to the private sector. Companies like Gimlet Media,23 Pineapple Street Media,24 and This
American Life25 are now independent and no longer are accountable to “the public” in a way that public radio stations are.
In an article for The Current in 2015, Ira Glass, the creator of This American Life, argued that public media was ready for capitalism:
Our message was: Public radio would like more of their [underwriters,
funders, investors] money. I stand by that. I don’t think that’s bad for
public radio. I don’t think we’re heading into some corny apocalypse
version of public media where our values will fly out the door. I think
public radio will handle this new revenue the way we’ve handled all the
money we’ve brought in until now: We’ll use it to make the same
idealistic and ambitious stuff we’ve always made.26
Let’s say he’s right, public media ideals don’t change as it seeks to sell its wears to the highest bidder. Maybe we can rely on public radio stations across the country to remain loyal to their mission and embrace community-based educational programs in the free market space. But what happens when we turn the question around? Public radio may be ready for capitalism, but can a democratic society survive capitalism without public
23 "Gimlet Media." Gimlet Media. Accessed March 18, 2018. https://www.gimletmedia.com/. 24 "Pineapple Street Media." Pineapple Street Media. Accessed March 18, 2018. http://pineapple.fm/. 25 "This American Life." This American Life. Accessed March 18, 2018. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/. 26 Glass, Ira. "Ira Glass: Public Radio Can Capitalize on Its Popularity without Selling out Its Mission." Current. May 21, 2015. Accessed March 18, 2018. http://current.org/2015/05/ira-glass-public-radio-can-capitalize-on-its-popularity-without- selling-out-its-mission/.
15 radio? It is only through realizing the role and value of public radio, public media, libraries, and public schools, in the informational ecosystem as it exists in this country that we can respond to Glass, by saying, no! Public radio is not a shark, it’s a bee, its purpose is to pollinate, not profit.
In November 2017, I attended the Third Coast International Audio Festival27 in
Chicago. I was hoping that some of the panels would address these questions. To my dismay, they were all focused on production. Some on ethics in production, but the majority of them were on how to gain audiences for your podcasts, how to create gripping content, how to coach your hosts in voice tracking. The conversations were around producers who had worked for public radio stations in the past but then decided to create content for profit as independent podcasting producers. I spoke with Jenna Weiss-
Berman, the co-founder of Pineapple Street Media, about her goals and concerns for her company. She talked about the possibility of selling shows as pilots for television, films, and so on. She spoke of how to retain rights to the content as producers and show creators. And she spoke of how she is working with celebrities like Hilary Clinton to make a space for the company in the marketplace. This was a common sentiment, maximizing the powers of storytelling and making money. We must also ask, what are the more nuanced implications of changing the structure of the funding models for the value systems of public radio? Producing “hit” shows shifts the public radio value system away from community-based programming, thus prioritizing star power over social good.
27 "2017 Third Coast Conference." Third Coast International Audio Festival. Accessed March 18, 2018. https://www.thirdcoastfestival.org/overview/conference/_2017-third- coast-conference.
16 In more and more cases, the “Public Radio” you hear is outsourced. To be sure, these companies produce fantastic programs. Many of the reporters and producers working for them at one time worked at local public radio stations. Their standards for accuracy and quality are very high, but their mission is different. They are not responsible to the communities of listeners who support their public radio stations, yet they bring in the buck.
If we really want to change behavior, we need to change our environment. We have to face the stark reality that public radio needs federal funding because it might go away otherwise. Community support, that is, underwriting from businesses and citizens, is crucial because it allows public radio to grow and expand. Funding from the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting and funding from public universities and public institutions is critical because it maintains that growth and expansion is driven by educational and informational priorities as opposed to market forces.
So how do we turn the tide of commonsense at this conjuncture and reinforce the role and value of what it means to be a public media organization today? What does community-based content for the public good look like in this ecosystem? How can universities, public radio programmers and producers, artists and activists who are working to develop social programs and build and educate the public take full advantage of resources and podcasting capabilities for public education and social justice? In this rapidly changing world of production technology and distribution platforms the notion of
“public interest” should be reconsidered also.
17 Public service, as was negotiated in the Radio Act of 192728 referred to the communication relationship between vessels and sea and ship stations. License renewal for these stations was based on how well the stations met this criteria:
Every shore station open to general public service between the coast and
vessels at sea shall be bound to exchange radio communications or signals
with any ship station without distinction as to radio systems or instruments
adopted by such stains, respectively, and each station on shipboard shall be
bound to exchange radio communications or signals with any other station
on shipboard without distinction as to radio systems or instruments adopted
by each station.29
In 1972 it was suggested that the FCC consider public service again for license renewal from a programming perspective: “Operators should develop substantial local, public service programming designed to meet the particular tastes, needs, and interests of the community they are licensed to serve.”30
I mention these two examples to illustrate that the definition of public service and public interest has changed based on how the media and society has changed. In public radio was must continue to revise the notions of “public,” “radio,” “service,” and
“interest” in the information ecosystems we are creating content for. Are we once again
28 "Federal Radio Act 1927." FCC PUBLICATIONS: FCC Rules and Regulations, Radio Act, EBS and more. Accessed May 28, 2017. http://www.americanradiohistory.com/FCC-Publications-Guide.htm. 29 FCC PUBLICATIONS: FCC Rules and Regulations, Radio Act, EBS and More. Accessed April 24, 2018. http://www.americanradiohistory.com/FCC-Publications-Guide.htm. 1927 Federal Radio Act
30 FCC PUBLICATIONS: FCC Rules and Regulations, Radio Act, EBS and More. Accessed April 24, 2018. http://www.americanradiohistory.com/FCC-Publications-Guide.htm. 1972 Interpreting FCC Rules (p. 63)
18 in a proverbial “wild west” of broadcasting, the same landscape that some in Congress saw as “chaotic” at the turn of 20th century, prior to The Radio Act of 1912?31 And if so, what does this mean for public radio as a provider of educational content in the 2010s?
I have been thinking about these questions a lot as a public radio producer, show creator, and host. I argue that public radio stations, because of their history and associations with public universities and because of their non-profit status as well as their production practices, are uniquely positioned to provide educational and community- oriented services and programs under a mission they inherited from the National
Educational Radio Network on February 26, 1970.32 It is imperative that public radio stations provide a space for public education, and well as news and information, similar to that of the Open University in The UK, where Stuart Hall was a professor from 1978 until 1998.33 Hall believed providing access to education for everyone in society, regardless of class, race or gender, was an important part of what it meant to be a public intellectual. Hall’s ideas about public education are inline with Antonio Gramsci’s thoughts on education. In essays on education from his Prison Notebooks Gramsci reinforces the priority to build intellectuals from within the working class, provide them with a comprehensive—what we would now call liberal arts educations, that would allow
31 Following the sinking of the Titanic this act mandated that radio stations in the United States be licensed by the federal government, as well as mandating that seagoing vessels continuously monitor distress frequencies. See http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-FCC/Radio-Act-of-1912.pdf 32 McCauley, Michael P. NPR: the trials and triumphs of National Public Radio. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 33 "Stuart Hall." OpenLearn. Accessed October 13, 2017. http://www.open.edu/ openlearn/profiles/guest-1251.
19 them, “the fundamental power to think and ability to find one’s way in life.34” The way that Gramsci saw access to this basic form of public education as vital to addressing social and political inequality is how Hall interpreted his work as an educator for the
Open University. Speaking on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs in February of 2000, Hall said,
I felt I was a good teacher. I loved my time at The Open University. When
I left the center I wanted to go not to a place where I taught very bright
students who’d already had many of the opportunities. I wanted to take
those ideas into teaching people who had no formal educational
background. I loved being a teacher. 35
You might be wondering why I would bring Stuart Hall in to this discussion, when his work could easily illustrate almost any of the points I have made about the media, ideology, and social and political sentiment thus far. I am using him as an example of a public intellectual who has used media, in many forms, for public education. If he were alive today he would perhaps have a podcast of his own. Also, if it wasn’t for Hall I would not be writing this report for the potential of public radio and podcasting as an educational tool today.
Stuart Hall
34 Gramsci, Antonio, Quintin Hoare, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. New York: International Publishers, 2005. (p. 26)
35 "Desert Island Discs, Professor Stuart Hall." BBC Radio 4. February 18, 2000. Accessed October 13, 2017. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0094b6r.
20 As a graduate student I was introduced to Hall through “Encoding and
Decoding,”36 his work on semiotics, and the various ways to understand how media has different meanings based on who is interpreting it and how they are reading it. I also appreciated how he demonstrated the ways that power is reproduced through popular culture and the media. Hall’s biography as a man from Jamaica who came as a colonial citizen to London, where he felt both “in place and out of place at the same time,” spoke to my sense of displacement growing up with immigrant parents in Iowa. But it wasn’t until listening to him talk about multiculturalism, Thatcher, economic police, identity, and other topics on BBC radio programs like Thinking Allowed37 and In Our Time,38 and then talking about his life in music on other BBC shows like Desert Island Discs, that I really understood his project as a public intellectual. This is what reinforced in me, my position as a conduit for public education through my role as a public radio producer and host.
From the 1950s when Hall arrived in London as a Rhodes scholar, he grappled with questions of identity, culture, power, the legacy of embodied colonialism, and the role of memory and imagination. In “Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands,”
Hall describes the lasting impact of his move from Jamaica to London as, “a journey to the shattering of illusions, inaugurating a process of protracted disenchantment…The
36 Hall, Stuart. "1980[1973]. ‘Encoding, Decoding.’ In Culture, Media, Language. Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-1979, Ed. by Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 128-138. London: Routledge." The Discourse Studies Reader, 2014, 112-21. doi:10.1075/z.184.211hal.
37 "Thinking Allowed, Stuart Hall (1932-2014)." BBC Radio 4. February 17, 2014. Accessed October 13, 2017. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03tt50m. 38 "In Our Time, Multiculturalism." BBC Radio 4. May 13, 1999. Accessed October 13, 2017. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00545hw.
21 episode was painful as well as exciting. It changed me irrevocable, almost none of it in ways I had remotely anticipated.39”
His journey to the metropole from the colony of Jamaica and the role that experience played in Hall’s intellectual development cannot be understated. In a lecture
Hall gave in 1983 at The University of Illinois, just published in “Cultural Studies 1983:
A Theoretical History,” Hall outlines the origins of Cultural Studies as being cut from the same cloth as his questions of identity from his youth. “Cultural Studies,” he writes,
“attempts to find the common forms of experience and the shared definitions by which a community lives… Practices are not simply the result of an individual having been placed in a physical, economic, or material, space but of an attempt to live socially in ways which reflect how we understand and experience our circumstances.”40
Among other things he is known for his role in establishing the New Left in
Britain, his groundbreaking analysis of Thatcherism and authoritarian populism, his critical look at the media’s role in the increased policing of black bodies, and his understanding of the power inherent in culture and representation. Yet, what continues to speak to me about his legacy is the way in which Hall was always looking for a “way in” to figure out how the Left could better position themselves to respond to changing times with more social and humanitarian answers than the market-based and authoritarian solutions posed by the Right.
39 Hall, Stuart. "Familiar Stranger." 2017. doi:10.1215/9780822372936. (p. 149)
40 "The Formation of Cultural Studies." Cultural Studies 1983: 5-24. doi:10.1215/9780822373650-002. (p. 33)
22 In an essay entitled “The meaning of ‘New Times’,” Hall describes the reason for always asking the question of relevance and meaning in changing times:
How new are these ‘New Times’? Are they the dawn of a New Age of
only the whispers of an old one? … They [these questions] are worth
asking, not because ‘New Times’ represents a definitive set of answers to
them or even a clear way of resolving the ambiguities inherent in the idea,
but because they stimulate the left to open a debate about how society is
changing and to offer new descriptions and analyses of the social
conditions it seeks to transcend and transform.41
Hall saw politics and power in all elements of social interaction, from the mundane and everyday to the global expansion of free market capitalism. He incorporated his life into all of his work and interrogated where and how power is produced, re-produced, and practiced.
In a conversation I had with his wife Catherine Hall, at a Stuart Hall conference in
Jamaica in the summer of 2017, she told me about how difficult it was to raise children when both parents were working full-time and part of social justice groups. She said how
Stuart had to rethink what it meant to show solidarity as a father, as an activist, and as an intellectual. He saw culture and cultural studies as an attempt to understand the reproduction of dominant ideologies, as well as how resisting power and claiming new identities can also be done on and through cultural platforms.
41 Hall, Stuart, David Morley, and Kuan-Hsing Chen. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1996. (p. 223)
23 The more I read of Hall’s work and the more I research his life, I become increasingly shocked as to why more people in my social circles and in my profession, as a journalist and producer in public radio, don’t know more about Stuart Hall, especially his work on policing and the media. His analysis of Thatcher and neoliberalism also seem timely and poignant. In 2014, when Hall passed away, I set out to produce a live discussion show on him for a public radio program I produce and host for KUT Radio called Views and Brews. It was a show that would become a fruitful collaboration, culminating in a discussion program, a radio documentary, and six personal interviews on
Hall, titled Stuart Hall: In Conversations.42
The Project
In 2012, KUT radio obtained ownership of The Cactus Cafe, a small historic bar in the Texas Union on the campus of The University of Texas at Austin. Wanting to utilize the space on nights when they were not set aside for live music performances, the program director at KUT asked me to come up with an idea for a show that would be taped live at the Cactus. In March 2012, we recorded the first live discussion program for a series called Views and Brews.43 The show was on the past, present and future of radio, and I interviewed radio historian Michele Hilmes in front of a live audience of about 50 people. Views and Brews is now in its 5th year, and the topics we’ve discussed range from
42 "KUT » Stuart Hall: In Conversations by Ben Carrington & Rebecca McInroy on Apple Podcasts." Apple Podcasts. Accessed April 24, 2018. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/kut-stuart-hall-in- conversations/id1170188039?mt=2.
43 "Views and Brews." NPR. Accessed May 29, 2017. http://www.npr.org/podcasts/ 381443480/views-and-brews.
24 healthcare in Austin, to the history of the world with Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, to the jazz during the atomic age.
Having this show as a platform has allowed me to create content for KUT in collaboration with the community and the University of Texas. Views and Brews44 is now a podcast series, available on iTunes and the NPR website. I’ve also created spinoff radio and podcast productions as well from panel discussions we’ve had at the Cactus. One podcast and radio show is on the topic of psychology, called Two Guys on Your Head,45 with two UT professors, Art Markman46 and Bob Duke.47 Another show on global food systems, food justice, and the history of capitalism, colonialism and death through the lens of food is called The Secret Ingredient.48 I host this program along with activist and writer Raj Patel49 and food and agriculture correspondent for Mother Jones Magazine,
Tom Philpott.50 Other shows created out of Views and Brews programs include Liner
Notes,51 a jazz history podcast hosted by Rabbi Neil Blumofe;52 The Write Up,53 a
44 "Views and Brews." NPR. Accessed October 13, 2017. http://www.npr.org/podcasts/ 381443480/views-and-brews. 45 "How To Say 'No' And Why It's Important." RSS. Accessed May 29, 2017. http://kut.org/term/two-guys-your-head. 46 "Arthur B Markman." UT College of Liberal Arts:. October 12, 2017. Accessed October 13, 2017. https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/psychology/faculty/markman. 47 "Robert Duke." Butler School of Music - The University of Texas at Austin. Accessed October 13, 2017. http://music.utexas.edu/about/people/duke-robert. 48 The Secret Ingredient. Accessed May 29, 2017. http://thesecretingredient.org/. 49 Raj Patel. Accessed October 13, 2017. http://rajpatel.org/. 50 Philpott, Tom, Patrick Caldwell, Noah Lanard, and Kanyakrit Vongkiatkajorn. "Tom Philpott." Mother Jones. Accessed October 13, 2017. http://www.motherjones.com/author/tom-philpott/. 51 "Liner Notes." NPR. Accessed October 13, 2017. http://www.npr.org/podcasts/381443478/liner-notes. 52 "Rabbi Neil Blumofe." Rabbi Neil Blumofe | Congregation Agudas Achim. Accessed October 13, 2017. http://www.caa-austin.org/?q=rabbi-neil-blumofe. 53 "The Write Up with Owen Egerton." RSS. Accessed October 13, 2017. http://kut.org/topic/write-owen-egerton.
25 podcast on writers and writing hosted by novelist and filmmaker Owen Egerton;54 and In
Perspective,55 which I hosted and produced in collaboration with The Texas Humanities
Media Projects 56 that turned to the field of the humanities for a better understanding of current events and issues.
It was for Views and Brews that in December 2015 I asked Dr. Ben Carrington to participate in a show on Stuart Hall. I wanted to discuss Hall’s life, his work and his relevance in this particular social and political moment. Ben agreed. He said that as he would be visiting London that summer, he might get a few interviews with Hall’s former students, colleagues and friends, to inform our discussion. I gave him a recorder, thinking he could maybe get a couple of good quotes, and sent him off. What he returned to me was a series of in-depth, personal, and riveting interviews with significant figures in
Hall’s life, and with people whose perspectives and work are influenced by Hall’s thinking.
Traditionally, with analog radio as a platform, it would have been difficult, because of restrictions based on a radio clock, to present all of the interviews. However, as a podcast we were able to make available the entire collection along with the live
Views and Brews discussion and a documentary. We developed a podcast series, Stuart
Hall: In Conversations.57 It consists of conversations about Hall’s life and work that attempt to provide listeners with an entry point into Hall’s ideas and how his work might
54 "Www.owenegerton.com." Www.owenegerton.com. Accessed October 13, 2017. 55 "In Perspective." RSS. Accessed October 13, 2017. http://kut.org/topic/perspective. 56 "Humanities Media Project." Humanities Media Project. October 10, 2017. Accessed October 13, 2017. https://humanitiesmediaproject.org/.
57 "Stuart Hall: In Conversations." NPR. Accessed May 29, 2017. http://www.npr.org/podcasts/513929538/stuart-hall-in-conversations.
26 be useful today. From Guardian journalist Suzanne Moore’s anecdotes about working with Hall on Marxism Today, to Professor Imani Perry, an interdisciplinary scholar who studies race and African American culture at Princeton University, talking about how
Hall’s work on Thatcherism can be useful to understanding Trump and Brexit, the conversations provide stories and context around complex theories. Other interviewees include Hall’s colleague and friend sociology professor Les Beck, journalist and
Guardian editor Gary Younge; professor of African American and Gender and Women's
Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago Roderrick Ferguson; Guardian journalist and academic Steven Thrasher; professor of sociology at Warwick, Adam Elliot Cooper; and various artists, writers and thinkers who Carrington interviewed during a sale of
Hall’s library at Housmans book store in London in the summer of 2016.
In the audio documentary series that is available as a podcast, we present discussions about the life, work, theory and legacy of Hall, constantly asking the question, “Are his ideas relevant today?” The show is segmented into three parts. We first focus on his colonial background in Jamaica and how Hall describes his identity through this colonial experience. We also talk here about his early days in London and his relationship with the media, music and the academy. We discuss how this formative information is, not only valuable in understanding who Stuart Hall was, but is essential in demonstrating how imagination played a role in the way he understood his identity, especially as a colonial subject, and how he theorizes identity in his work.
In the second section, we discuss his work on policing and his analysis of
Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister of the U.K. who served from 1979 to 1990.
We talk about how he coined the term “authoritarian populism” to describe how Thatcher
27 appropriated a populist sentiment of social and economic unrest and changed the direction of a conversation about inequality to one that blamed over saturation of immigrants for economic and social problems to provide a framework through which an inevitable pathway toward social cohesion and progress could be paved by policing and cuts to social programs. We finally talk about what Hall’s analysis can teach us about our present social and political moment. We discuss how Hall’s ideas provide tools to understand and respond to the present conjuncture of social and economic inequality, the rise in global populism and nativism, and how important it is to look at how identity is being created and reinforced by cultural entities like films, and television shows. Finally, in the third section we talk about Hall’s work as a public intellectual, especially in regards to The Open University in London where Hall taught from 1979 as the Head of the Sociology Department for a decade before retiring as Emeritus Professor in 1997.
“I felt I was good teacher,” Hall said on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs in 2000. “I loved my time and the Open University…I wanted to take those ideas into teaching people who had no formal educational background.”58 We echoed this sentiment in the documentary series on Hall. We wanted to provide people who might not have heard of
Hall or who might not have had any formal education at all, access to his Halls framework for understanding how notions of identity, class, race, and gender are formed and reinforced through everyday cultural practices and otherwise banal representations in the media. We wanted to demonstrate how Hall’s “way of thinking,” as Gary Younge puts in in the documentary, is essential in understanding how figures like Donald Trump
58 "Desert Island Discs, Professor Stuart Hall." BBC Radio 4. February 18, 2000. Accessed April 21, 2018. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0094b6r.
28 can take power. We also wanted to complicate and challenge people to search for deeper social and political messages instead of writing movements off—as the Left did with
Thatcherism—as “fascist.” This was one of Hall’s main critiques of the Left, as
Carrington points out in the documentary.
The key intervention that Hall made and his challenge to the Left, was not
just the need to resist Thatcherism but more importantly, the need to learn
from Thatcherism as he would put it in his book The Hard Road to
Renewal.59 For some on the orthodox hard Left, this type of approach was
considered a heresy. Simply denouncing Margaret Thatcher and her law
and order, anti-union and nationalist agenda as fascist was seen to be a
sufficient response.60
One of the many things significant about this production is the way in which we utilized all of the resources at our disposal to produce quality educational content in a way that not all commercial producers and hosts are set up to do. Harkening back to the days when educational content was produced on a shoestring budget, we produced a series with the host also acting as writer, with the executive producer as writer and editor, and two interns (in this case, both with PhDs) working on writing, fact checking, and transcriptions.
It is through innovative collaborations such as this that, I argue, public media organizations have the capacity to re-imagine their position in their communities and thus
59 Hall, Stuart. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso, 1990.
60 Carrington, Ben, Rebecca S. McInroy, and Maggie Tate. Comment on "Stuart Hall: In Conversations." Stuart Hall: In Conversation (audio blog), March 7, 2017. Accessed April 23, 2018. http://kut.org/post/stuart-hall-conversations.
29 in the information ecology. They can work to develop content that reflects a public, not of consumers but of human beings; a public that is a community. Just as The Open
University61 where Hall once taught promotes radio programs like the BBC’s Thinking
Allowed, Living Shakespeare, and Inside Science, which engage the public in stimulating, educational content, so too does public radio in the US have the opportunity to provide such resources.
If the 20th Century was defined by its relationship to progress and capital, as
Manuel Garcia Marquez so beautifully illustrated in 100 Years of Solitude,62 then the 21st
Century is one of defining value and humanity in post-capitalist systems, as Arundahati
Roy examines in her book The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.63 What do we value? How do we define and articulate value outside of the marketplace? These are questions for public radio and for our daily lives. If we cannot create a language to articulate meaning, we stand to vanish from the conversation.
61 "Latest Radio programmes - OpenLearn - Open University." OpenLearn. Accessed May 29, 2017. http://www.open.edu/openlearn/whats-on/radio. 62 Senna, Carl, and Gabriel García Márquez. 100 Years of Solitude: Notes. New York, NY: Wiley Pub., 1984. 63 ROY, ARUNDHATI. MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS. S.l.: VINTAGE, 2018.
30
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34
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35