The Future of Community Broadcasting

Civil Society and Communications Policy

Elinor Rennie BA (Hons)

Creative Industries Research and Applications Centre

Queensland University of Technology

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of

Philosophy

2003 ii Keywords

access, civil society, communitarianism, community broadcasting, communications policy, cultural policy, development, digital television, free speech, new media policies, non-commercialism, quality

iii

Abstract

Will community television one day be lamented in the same way as the Glenn

Valley Bridge Club in Pennsylvania, where no one remains ‘who can tell us precisely when or why the group broke up’ (Putnam, 2000: 15)? Robert

Putnam’s bestseller Bowling Alone proposed that people ‘need to reconnect with one another’ and rebuild their communities for the good of society.

Although he may not have succeeded in instigating a revival of lawn bowls and bridge, Putnam did spark a debate about the meaning of “community” today and its role in bringing about positive social change. At a time when the communications landscape is set to transform with the introduction of digital broadcasting technology, this thesis looks at the status of community broadcasting and its role within civil society. Taking Australia’s community television sector as its starting point, it aims to define the pressures, public philosophies and policy decisions that make community broadcasting what it is.

iv This thesis is structured thematically and geographically. The introductory chapters establish the research question in relation to Australia’s community broadcasting sector. As well as tracing the intellectual path of community media studies, it sets out to locate community broadcasting within broader intellectual debates around notions of community, governance and the media.

These are brought back to the “on-the-ground” reality throughout the thesis by means of policy analysis, interviews and anecdotal evidence.

Chapters Three to Five map out the themes of access, the public interest and development by reference to community broadcasting in different regions. In

North America I explore notions of free speech and first-come-first served models of access. In Europe, notions of “quality”, public service broadcasting and the difficult relationship that community broadcasting has with public interest values. Through the Third World and the Third Way I examine how community broadcasting is implicated within development discourse and ideas of social change.

The final chapter of the thesis moves into the virtual region of the Internet, looking at changing notions of access and the relevance of new communications rationales to the community broadcasting project. At the intersection of the various themes and models discussed throughout the thesis exists a strong rationale for the future of community broadcasting. Although new technologies may be interpreted as the beginning of the end of community broadcasting, I have argued that in fact it is an idea whose time has come.

Table of Contents

LIST OF DIAGRAMS ...... vi

ABBREVIATIONS...... vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... x

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER ONE: AUSTRALIA ...... 15

CHAPTER TWO: THEORETICAL CONTEXTS ...... 51

CHAPTER THREE: NORTH AMERICA ...... 79

CHAPTER FOUR: EUROPE ...... 122

CHAPTER FIVE: THIRD WORLD AND THIRD WAY...... 154

CHAPTER SIX: NEW POLICIES, NEW TECHNOLOGIES ...... 196

CONCLUSION...... 225

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 236 List of Diagrams

DIAGRAM 1: THESIS OUTLINE ...... 20

DIAGRAM 2: STATUS OF COMMUNITY BROADCASTING ...... 36

vii Abbreviations

ABA Australian Broadcasting Authority

ABCB Australian Broadcasting Control Board

ABT Australian Broadcasting Tribunal

ACA Australian Consumers Association

ACE TV Adelaide Community and Educational Television

AFC Australian Film Commission

AMARC Association Mondiale des Radiodiffuseurs

Communautaires

ATSIC Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Commission

ATVA Asian Television Association

BENT TV Collective of queer television broadcasters

BRACS Broadcasting for Remote Aboriginal Communities

Scheme

BSA Broadcasting Services Act 1992

CAT TV Community Access Television Inc.

CBAA Community Broadcasting Association of Australia

CBF Community Broadcasting Foundation

CESPA Centre de Services de Production Audiovisuelle

viii CIRAC Creative Industries Research and Applications Centre

CLC Communications Law Centre

CMA Community Media Association

CRTC Canadian Radio–television and Telecommunications

Commission

ERTC Ethnic Radio and Television Committee

FCC Federal Communications Commission

HDTV High Definition Television

HORSCOTCI House of Representatives Standing Committee on

Transport, Communications and Infrastructure

LPFM Low Power FM

LPTV Low Power Television

MCT31 Melbourne Community Television Consortium

NCPM National Centre for Popular Music

NIBS National Indigenous Broadcasting Service

PBAA Public Broadcasting Association of Australia

RMITV Club of the Student Representative Council, RMIT

University

SBS Special Broadcasting Service

SDTV Standard Definition Television

SKA TV St Kilda Access Television

TVCBF Télévision Communautaire des Bois-Francs

The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted for a degree or diploma in any university. To the best of my knowledge and belief, this thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made in the thesis itself.

Elinor Rennie

June, 2003

x Acknowledgements

It seems that everyone who writes about community broadcasting has also worked in the sector. Whether we get much of an audience in either pursuit is beside the point – it is the process and networks that make both achievable and worthwhile (although we do still cross our fingers and hope the content is ok). Those who put-up with my rough edits and endured countless meetings from both the broadcasting and academic communities get first thanks. My supervisor, Christina Spurgeon, made this project happen and literally put the world at my feet. The wise words of Stuart Cunningham and Barry Melville

(my associate supervisors) always pointed me in the right direction. In the broadcasting community I am especially grateful to the CBAA team (Andrew

Brine, David Sice and Jan McArthur) whose collaboration on policy projects influenced my thesis without them knowing it. Also to everyone at SKA TV

(in particular Jeff, Cam, Peter, John, Rose, Ntennis) who never gave up. As

Cam once said, ‘there’s a light at the end of the tunnel and for once it’s not another train coming…’

Many people contributed their thoughts to this thesis. Thanks to everyone who went out of their way to talk to me on my travels, including: Nicky Edmonds,

xi Steve Buckley, Sylvia Harvey, Jeni Vine, John Trevitt, Chris Hewson, Dave

Rushton, Hitesh Popat, the Undercurrents gang, Nick Couldry, Peter Lewis,

Margaret Gillan, Sean O’Siorchu, Ollie McGlinchey, Nick Jankowski,

Martina Huyzenga, Erik van der Schaft, Jürgen Linke, Jonathan Levy, Zane

Blaney, Denise Brady, Ron Cooper, Kari Peterson, Ruben Abrue and MNN,

DCTV, Tara and Carlos at Paper Tiger, Kevin Howley, Curtis Henderson,

Isabelle Allende, André Desrochers, the Federation of Community Television

Stations in Quebec, Peter Foster, Catherine Edwards, Bunnie Riedell, Nantz

Rickard, Jim Blackman, Bevin Yeatman, Tracy Naughton, Christina Alvarez,

Kath Letch, everyone at OURMedia, IAMCR ComCom, the AMARC delegates and everyone else who I spoke with in corridors or over coffee.

Thanks to my family and friends in Melbourne who I did not spend nearly enough time with and all my Brisbane friends who were always there.

xii

Introduction

Simply, the sector lacks the political power of both public

service radio and commercial radio. While the sector has

been sanctioned and offered some support by the state, it has

also been under-resourced in terms of material needs such as

equipment and funding and ignored in public debate,

analysis and polemic

– Albert Moran

The Research Question

Australia’s community television trial is coming to an end. For over a decade community television groups have been analog broadcasting under an open narrowcasting trial on the sixth free-to-air television channel. The expectation has been that if the stations can prove their viability – with no government funding and short one-year apparatus licence terms – that they will become fully licensed community broadcasters. The amendments to the Broadcasting

1 Services Act 1992 (BSA) that were passed in November 2002 did just that: changing the existing community broadcast licence category to allow for the particular needs of the television services. But, although the trial is not due to end until December 2003, predicting the verdict is not so straightforward.

Community broadcasting licences are granted for a full five-year term.

However, there is no legislative guarantee that community television will be allowed to occupy its current spectrum after 2006, when the changes to the digital television plans are to occur. Despite the so-called “permanent” licensing of community television, the situation is remains far from resolved1.

Albert Moran's 1995 observation requires revisiting. Since 1996 there has been the justifiable perception in broadcasting industry and government circles that the community broadcasting sector’s political stocks have been on the ascendant. Over those 7 years the community radio sector has doubled in size and, although it is not always prominent in ‘public debate, analysis and polemic’, it has vastly increased levels of direct government support and gained considerable recognition as a lobbying force. At the same time, community television has been plagued by a policy inertia since its inception, the cause of which has not been clearly identified in academic work.

1 Across all of licensed broadcasting (community, commercial and subscription) there is, strictly speaking, no “permanent” category of licence, although this term is used colloquially to refer to the community licence within the sector. In order to operate on the Broadcasting Services Band, each fully licensed station has to have a broadcasting services licence (BSA) and an apparatus licence (RadComms Act). The community licences are allocated under the BSA Part 6 for full 5 year terms and are renewable in perpetuity. What is novel about the situation is that because the moratorium on the introduction of a 4th commercial network expires in Dec 06 and the Minister must then review the situation, the ABA is unable to issue the apparatus licences beyond the Dec 06 date. At that point, the ABA and the Government will investigate options for digital carriage if they become available.

2 Neither is community broadcasting an entirely neglected field of study. A small but useful body of work exists that has attempted to describe the community broadcasting sector and, in many cases, to justify its existence.

Within that literature parallel arguments are made in support of the sector's existence from both the academic and policy arenas. It seems that the potential for the sector to contribute to a range of areas has been established, including localism, training and skills creation. The number of volunteer hours worked in the production of community radio and television are without doubt an indication that people are involved in community broadcasting for the love of it. The diversity of the stations and the groups is undeniable. The small amount of existing research into community broadcasting is enough to paint a sufficient portrait of the sector. I do not wish to dispute the efforts of community media researchers or to find some new theory that that will make that research obsolete. If anything, these recurring themes are essential in understanding what it is that the sector has achieved and where it is going.

They name and describe community broadcasting, contributing to its identity and influencing its particular style of governance as well as its institutional design.

But deeper questions still remain. The point of inquiry for this thesis is not what community broadcasting would be capable of if there were no constraining forces (what it is good for in an ideal world), but what these forces and influences are and whether they are likely to persist. This requires an examination into the broader policy trends within which community broadcasting must function as well as the values that are attached to it. A

3 separate set of questions arise: What significance is placed on access in the changing media environment? How do “community” discourses such as those invoked in discussions of social capital impact upon the expectations and possibilities for community broadcasting? Where do we locate this media in relation to social and political structures? How is it informed or constrained by dominant public philosophies? The treatment of community policies in general and the relationship of community broadcasting to broader political agendas frame such issues. So does the nature of community itself and the role that communication plays in the maintenance of community networks and affiliations. Only through such analysis is it possible to see the policy inertia that surrounds community television for what it is, to discover where change might occur and which broader political influences determine and may reshape our notions of community broadcasting.

This thesis takes community television as its central problem. Australia's transition to digital television transmission has meant that questions of community broadcasting policy are now focused upon that issue. It is also fair to say that community television has always presented the greater problem for policy makers in terms of spectrum scarcity, costs and notions of what

“quality” television consists of. However, many of the issues discussed in this thesis are also relevant to community radio (in many instances community radio has experienced these issues first) and I have therefore included some discussion of community radio where appropriate. My primary aim is to define the forces that are influencing the development of community television policy. Research into international experience and policy rationales

4 provides a means to more robust models. Therefore, this thesis looks at the underlying motivations for community broadcasting around the world – the rhetoric, policies and movements – to determine how alternative approaches might be constructed.

Research Method

Suggesting the means towards sectoral development and engaging in policy questions within an academic thesis is an approach that requires some justification. I am fortunate to be able to rely not only on a tradition of research in Australian cultural studies that takes such an approach, but which has also defended and articulated its position. A great deal of cultural studies work in Australia has concentrated on the intersection of culture and government, including a prolific published debate over the worth of such analyses (known as the "policy moment" of the 1990s. See Cunningham &

Flew, 2002). That debate is a useful reference point in explaining my interest in the policies of community broadcasting as well as the difficulties that any such analysis faces.

Most importantly, it was argued in the policy moment discussions that policy studies allowed for an engagement with the national and cultural infrastructure that could not be reached by focusing only on grand theories

(Cunningham & Flew, 2002; O'Regan, 1992). For Stuart Cunningham, linking cultural studies to policy was a means to expand the field ‘but with methods far more modest and specific than those to which we are accustomed’, making

5 it ‘far more sensitive to what is possible as much as to what is ideal’

(Cunningham, 1992). Not only could an emphasis on policy create more socially relevant studies but theory itself could also benefit from an understanding of the processes, ideas and structures created through the technologies of government.

However, as pointed out by those opposing the policy turn, policy analysis risks becoming the ‘handmaiden of practice’, of selling-out to a particular climate (O'Regan, 1992). It was further argued that the social utility of policy analysis could not be proven over the broader influences of critical theory and inquiry. The former is a possible hazard within this thesis, which attempts to locate community broadcasting within wider policy trends. However, my primary concern is to move away from notions of community media that depict it as something resistant to government and the economy (Hawkins,

1993). Community broadcasting is dependent upon and intersects with both, as any investigation into bureaucratic attempt to accommodate the sector in policy-terms clearly shows. To ignore these dynamics risks denying important aspects of an already neglected area of the media within cultural studies.

Policy analysis is one method employed within this thesis. I have sourced policy documents from relevant government agencies in both Australia and overseas. These have worked as “roadmaps” to determine the guidelines, resources and restrictions that have shaped the broadcasters (and in some cases cablecasters) within this study and provided a valuable starting point for comparison. Where possible, I have endeavoured to also meet with policy

6 makers to hear their insights and reflections on the community broadcasting sector as well as their personal difficulties in attempting to “deal with” a sector that is not easily defined or managed. Material collected from industry associations has been another primary policy source of information.

Attention to theory rivals use of policy in this thesis. Tom O'Regan has argued that the policy polemic prioritises ‘both administrative process and the

“contents” of policy at the expense of wider political processes’, that it should not be presumed that either theory or policy analysis has ‘more social utility and effectiveness than the other’(O'Regan, 1992: 530). But there is also risk that focusing on the wider philosophical issues might ‘construe “policy” as

“politics”’. Focusing on politics, histories and overviews ‘may equip policy practitioners with useful understandings of political processes’ (523), but such an analysis might also fall short of generating policy ideas. I consider wider political processes to be essential in understanding the current position of community television, even if the policy outcomes of the research are not immediately apparent. The thesis sets out to contextualise community broadcasting within a range of intellectual traditions including media theory.

If nothing else, this can provide a clearer picture of what is involved in the development of alternative models for community television; proposals for particular models are only suggested at here. They are the next step, requiring a different type of investigation, involving a greater degree of stakeholder input than is appropriate for this more philosophical task.

7 Michael Salzer's use of the term “public philosophy” describes the wider context that I am interested in – not the theoretical, authored philosophies that are learned and debated amongst scholars, but the related philosophies upon which institutional design, values and the beliefs and biases of society are based. Thomas Streeter's term “corporate liberalism”, used intermittently throughout this thesis, is one such public philosophy (see Chapter Two).

Streeter uses the term corporate liberalism ‘to emphasise the ways in which the institution is the product of social and political choices, not of accident or impersonal economic or technological forces alone’ (Streeter, 1996: 6). This restores the agency and intentionality to the way in which broadcasting is constructed, reminding the reader that different choices and models are possible. The commitment to freedom of speech within the notion of community access is another such public philosophy – a derivative of notions of liberty that guides and informs the way in which broadcasting is managed.

Philosophy, political science and cultural studies theory are all used within this thesis as a means to discuss the “public philosophies” that inform community broadcasting.

Interviews were conducted at a number of community television stations during the course of this research. As the literature on community television

(Australian and international) is scarce, speaking to station managers, staff and volunteers provided important insights into the concerns of stations here and overseas. The stations visited were chosen, often with the assistance of industry organisations, for their representativeness in terms of the character and circumstances faced by community broadcasters in each country. The

8 level of involvement in policy issues of the individuals interviewed was also a key factor in selecting which stations to visit. This material has been written up to illustrate the themes discussed, rather than to act as case studies. The anecdotes and experiences of those involved in community television provided a means to discuss and interrogate the themes of this thesis which could not have been captured through data collation or other such methods.

Although the research question is focused upon the future of community television in Australia, I have used international experiences and histories to discuss issues relevant to the Australian situation. At commencement of the research, I soon discovered that there was little understanding within

Australian policy circles of community television in other parts of the world

(or studies to that purpose, with the exception of Naughton, 1993) and I was interested to discover whether other places had encountered similar issues to those being confronted in Australia. The experiences of community television overseas proved to be a valuable source of information on the tensions, assumptions and recurring issues common to community broadcasting.

Furthermore, international experience provided alternative approaches that have not been tested here. The international material is therefore discussed from an Australian perspective and it should not be treated as a complete reference or overview of community television around the world but rather as the international scene viewed from the position of Australia's specific information needs. There is no international model that can be directly appropriated that would solve the issue of the digital transmission of community television. One of the main contentions of this thesis is that the

9 governance of community television can only be understood through the wider social and political themes and priorities of a place and time. To impose an international model upon Australia's unique cultural and political landscape would be to ignore this fact. At the same time, overviews (beyond edited volumes) of community broadcasting in different parts of the world – television in particular – are scarce. I have therefore set out to sketch and compare some of the histories, experiences and models of community broadcasting. Therefore, although this thesis is aimed at Australia’s needs, it is also an exploration into the global landscape of community broadcasting.

During the course of the research, I visited stations, industry organisations and regulatory agencies in the United Kingdom, Ireland, The Netherlands,

Germany, the USA, Canada and New Zealand. These countries were chosen as their community television models provided valuable comparisons to that of Australia, and because they were undergoing changes in broadcasting policy due to the introduction of digital technology. Information on countries not visited was sourced through secondary material. In particular, the chapter on development (Chapter Five) incorporates a discussion on Third World community-based media that relies upon information derived from books and reports. Alfonso Gumucio Dagron presented his collection of participatory communications case studies commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation at a 2001 OURMedia workshop in Washington DC. He urged the academic community present to treat his study as a primary resource from which further analysis could be developed. I have taken Alfonso up on that challenge.

10 Thesis Outline

The thesis is structured thematically, with each area of inquiry focusing upon a different geographical region (or regions). Chapter One provides background to the research question, looking at the history of community broadcasting in Australia and the issues currently facing the sector. Chapter

Two outlines my theoretical approach in more detail, examining the existing literature and relevant theoretical frameworks. In particular, this chapter explores notions of community and the relationship of community media to the civil society debate. In Chapter Three I discuss notions of access and free speech, using the North American experience to show the tensions involved in the governance of speech rights. Chapter Four looks at the history of community television in Europe from the days of pirate transmission through to the establishment of local television in a number of countries. The

European experience captured here involves the position and role of community television in relation to public service broadcasting, in particular the values of public interest and quality. Community policies and strategies for social development are discussed in relation to community broadcasting in

Chapter Five. This looks at the intellectual path of development communications and compares it to more recent policies of neighbourhood development in the First World. How these two areas of thinking on post- scarcity deploy community towards political and social outcomes is the central concern. Chapter Six departs from the geographical focus, looking at the virtual space of the Internet. New technologies have altered the way in which community media is understood theoretically as well as in

11 communications policy. Access, in particular, is revisited in order to explore new possibilities for community broadcasting policy.

All of these themes are not restricted to the geographical regions I have located them within. They intersect and influence each other and change over time. The geographical focus is used to highlight the importance of the overriding policy objectives and traditions within which community broadcasting must function. To some extent it also works to show how and why community broadcasting debates have acquired different preoccupations in North America, for instance, than they have in the Third World or Europe.

It is possible to represent the themes of the thesis thus:

12 C.B. as a means to

social change: the

tension between the Third World “program” and the

grassroots; the

deployment of

community within development

local policies and

global agendas; third way

public the new public interest access interest North Europe America

C.B. values and assumptions: Non- C.B. as understood through access and commercialism and static notions of freedom of speech: the negotiation of community; community vs. public service community building and individual rights; broadcasting; notions of quality and the problems of the “minimalist” amateurism; the homogenous public vs. interpretations of access/rights; access as diversity. “access to” an otherwise controlled space.

Diagram 1. Thesis Outline

13 As this diagram shows, the themes of this thesis combine in the centre. The most current intellectual and policy frameworks (the New Public Interest and

Third Way) draw on all traditions and cross geographical borders to some degree. They exist at the heart of civil society debates and, it is argued here, define an emerging community broadcasting rationale.

14 Chapter One: Australia

The Emergence of Community Broadcasting: Radio

From the start, momentum for community broadcasting in Australia was checked by a broadcasting structure that sought to accommodate and appease the interests of both public service and commercial broadcasting. According to a history of community radio 2 by Phoebe Thornley (2001), at least one advocate was concerned by the unusual lack of debate on the structure of

Australian broadcasting. To Max Keogh, this was due not only to Australians'

‘infamous apathy to public affairs’ but also to the dual broadcasting arrangement that meant that other issues became disguised by the apparent stability. Where the UK system was defined by a dominant public service broadcaster and the US by its commercialism, Australia's combination of both public and private meant that there was little discussion on the impediments to growth inherent within this arrangement. The closure of experimental FM broadcasts in 1961 caused Keogh to take action. He claimed that ‘to the public

2 Community broadcasting was referred to as “public broadcasting” until the 1992 BSA renamed it. For the sake of consistency I use the term “community broadcasting”, even though most of the early literature refers to “public”. This also avoids confusing community- based media with public service broadcasting media, often referred to in Australia as “national” broadcasting.

15 FM might just as well have been a time of day between AM and PM. In the past ten years it has been kept just as much in the dark’ (Keogh in Thornley,

2001: 4). Keogh was later to become involved in the establishment of 2MBS-

FM, a Sydney classical music community station that was Australia’s first FM radio licensee. Due to the efforts of campaigners such as Keogh, community radio is now generally credited with pioneering the use of that part of the broadcasting services bands (see Thompson, 1999).

This was not the only time that community broadcasting would be judged against the commercial and public service broadcasters. In 1978 the Public

Broadcasting Association of Australia (PBAA, now CBAA) decided that community programming should be ‘complementary and supplementary and not seek to compete with existing services’ (Law in Tebbutt, 1989: 135) a definition that was then pursued to the extreme by the commercial broadcasting lobby who argued that community radio should not be allowed to broadcast classical, light or popular music, or news, sport or talkback.

Although the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal (ABT) deemed that request excessive, they did make ‘complementary and supplementary’ programming a requirement on community broadcasters. Tebbutt writes that although this was impossible to police, ‘the most significant effect it had was the way it informed [community] broadcasters’ understanding of themselves’ (Tebbutt,

1989: 135), enforcing their subordination to the established media. This chapter looks at the emergence of community television in Australia, beginning with the establishment of community radio. Following Keogh, I

16 focus upon the status of community broadcasting within Australia’s wider media landscape towards an understanding of the position of the sector today.

The Australian community radio sector has always been comprised of a diversity of interests and groups, although some were more dominant than others in the policy circles through which legislative change eventuated.

Tebbutt writes of the Alternative Radio Association’s (ARA) frustrated attempts to be included in the policy process. Formed after Melbourne’s pirate stations 3DR (Draft Resistors) and 3PR (People’s Radio) were shut down by the authorities, the ARA were not invited to the 1974 Department of Media’s conference on community broadcasting until the oversight was made known.

Instead, it was the educational and fine music advocates of community media that liaised with government on the possibilities for community radio.

However, even that somewhat less radical community broadcasting campaign met with significant resistance. The then regulator, the Australian

Broadcasting and Control Board (ABCB, now the Australian Broadcasting

Authority (ABA)) argued against the establishment of community broadcasting, claiming that there were no available frequencies for new broadcasters and that, in any case, community broadcasting would be a waste of spectrum. As a result, the first community radio stations were not issued under broadcasting legislation by the ABCB but as “experimental” and

“education” stations by the Postmaster General under the Wireless and

Telegraphy Act (Tebbutt, 1989). The University of Adelaide and two fine music stations in Melbourne and Sydney received these first licences. More radical stations appeared in the mid to late 1970s after “limited commercial”

17 licences were awarded through the ABCB, including 3CR in Melbourne who vigorously pursued an access philosophy. As Thornley points out, community radio stations demonstrated a diverse range of models in the early days:

2RDJ-FM in Sydney ‘insisted on broadcasting to the local community as a whole, opposing programs in languages other than English for local ethnic communities’. She adds, ‘still their primary motivation remained a love of radio’ (Thornley, 2001: 13).

That love currently attracts more than 20,000 volunteers on a regular basis to radio alone, contributing approximately $2.79 million in unpaid work hours each week (Forde, Meadows, & Foxwell, 2002). The continued growth of the community radio sector is indicative of how many communities retain that motivation. In 2002 there were 234 community broadcasters and 104 aspirant stations (compared with 255 commercial radio stations). Sixty percent of full licensees are located in metropolitan areas, and 37 community broadcasting stations are the only available radio service (Forde et al., 2002). The community radio sector is now comprised of not only fine music groups, educational groups and political groups, but also ethnic groups, Indigenous broadcasters, geographical communities, religious communities and, most recently, youth radio.

Others have attempted to research and record the specific attributes of the community radio sector, the most thorough and recent report being that conducted by Forde, Meadows and Foxwell (2002). Their work has provided a valuable snapshot of the community radio sector and the issues that concern

18 those working in the stations today (gathered through focus group research and questionaries). Culture, Commitment, Community also shows that the themes of localism, funding (including identification with a non-commercial ethic) and the role of community broadcasting within the wider media environment continue to preoccupy as well as define the sector. It is these concerns that I will focus on in the remainder of this introductory chapter. But first it is necessary to take a more detailed look at the emergence of community television.

Community Television

A report written by the Communications Law Centre (CLC) details the early history of the campaign for community television (Communications Law

Centre, 1989/90). This account tells of the slow and much interrupted progression towards community television test transmissions out of the video access movement of the early 70s. With the support of the Australia Council, ten independent video access centres and two resource centres were established in 1974, which provided the community with access to video production equipment and training. As pointed out by the CLC, the resources concentrated into production were, at that time, out of proportion to the available broadcast opportunities. The access centres hence became the sites out of which community television campaign groups were formed. The first proposal for community television, a mobile low power service to link the access centres in Melbourne and Sydney, came in 1976, however, the government opted to defer their decision to fund the initiative. It would be

19 almost two decades until a full community television service would finally get off the ground. Throughout this period, successive governments retained a generally supportive attitude towards the development of community television but remained reluctant to commit resources to its development.

Although the Coalition parties made promises to introduce community television by 1981 (Prime Minister Malcome Fraser even wrote a letter to the

PBAA to inform the organisation that he intended to call for licence applications) no such efforts were made (Communications Law Centre,

1989/90).

The metropolitan producers had watched with interest as pirate (unlicensed) television stations were established by Indigenous communities in remote areas; the Pitjanjarra in Ernabella , South Australia, and the Walpiri of

Yuendumu, a township on the edge of central Australia’s Tanami desert

(Batty, 1993; Michaels, 1987). In 1987 the Department of Aboriginal Affairs developed a framework for rural and remote Indigenous television services through the Broadcasting for Remote Aboriginal Communities Scheme

(BRACS). When the BSA 1992 was introduced, these services (which had progressed from “pirate” status to “limited licences”) became fully licensed community broadcasters (Productivity Commission, 2000). Although

Indigenous broadcasting was to take a different legislative path to the metropolitan stations, these first stations were a significant development in the campaign for community television. Other efforts were also made to secure community channels on cable television. Although that idea was thwarted by the reluctance of government to impose carriage arrangements on the cable

20 sector, the persistence of various community television campaigns throughout the country since the 1970s is evident. In 1982, community television broadcasts were screened on SBS television on two weekends, coordinated by the Open Channel video access centre in Melbourne3. In the years 1986–1988 community television groups sought incorporated association status with the intention of transmitting low-power signals to their local neighbourhood.

RMITV, a founding member of MCT31, which continues to run out of RMIT

University, conducted the first test transmission which was permitted under the Radiocommunications Act in 1987. This was followed by subsequent tests established with the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal’s approval (predecessor of the ABA) from SKA TV, CAT TV, ACE TV and others (see

Communications Law Centre, 1989).

Spectrum scarcity and the expense of television broadcasting were given as reasons by successive governments to reject petitions for community television beyond the test transmissions. As it had consistently been stated by government agencies that community television would not receive direct government funding, the community television test transmission groups instead focused their attention on securing spectrum and permanent licences with the intention of financing the stations by other means (Flew & Spurgeon,

2000). It was not until 1992 that the Government decided, following a recommendation by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on

Transport, Communications and Infrastructure (HORSCOTCI), that the sixth

3 This experiment, which offered a possible alternative to stand-alone services, remains the most significant cross-sector broadcasting arrangement to date between community television and the public service broadcasters.

21 high power television channel4 should be used for community purposes until a final decision was made on who would occupy it. As there was no commitment from Government at this time to ensure permanent spectrum allocation for community television, the stations began broadcasting on temporary open narrowcasting class licences for the purposes of the BSA, under what was to be known as the “community television trial”. Community television services began broadcasting in Melbourne in 1994, followed by

Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Lismore and Perth. Attempts were also made to launch stations in Hobart and Bendigo but the licences were withdrawn by the

ABA as the groups failed to fully launch their services within the allocated time-frame. In May 1999 the Minister revoked the use of the sixth channel in areas other than those holding existing broadcast licences due to digital television planning. As a result, analog community television stations have only been permitted in areas where there is an incumbent service or where spectrum is available to be allocated on an ad hoc basis. For now, hopes of a regional roll-out of community television will not be realised unless legislative changes are made to accommodate community television services in all television markets.

Programming on community television reflects a wide range of communities, including language groups, social justice groups, gay and lesbian programming, as well as local information and magazine-style entertainment.

A market research study commissioned by Access 31 (Perth) in 2001 found

4 So called because of Australia's existing three commercial and two government funded broadcasters.

22 that approximately 1.8 million people in the five capital city stations5 were tuned in and watching community television – the equivalent of 23% of the adult population living in areas that could receive a community television service (Market Equity, 2001). Each station instituted a different organisational model at its commencement and, as a result, the programming, community access arrangements and revenue-raising activities of the stations vary considerably. Funding sources include broadcast fees from program providers, facilities hire and production fees for some programming, membership fees, donations and grants. The stations were required to be not- for-profit when they applied for their class licences and were expected to be guided by community broadcasting licence restrictions in order to progress beyond the trial phase.

It is fair to say that the community television trial lasted longer than anyone expected. Despite the fact that the stations did manage to broadcast, no decision on the licensing arrangement was forthcoming. As the stations became increasingly frustrated by the lack of momentum, the bureaucrats also complained throughout successive review processes that they were unable to provide any real guidance or directives that would see the stations meet the expectations of community licences. After all, the stations were not community licensees but open narrowcasters – a much more sparsely defined licence category. Community broadcasters were to represent the interests of the community for which they were intended to serve, and allow for community participation in programming as well as the running of the

5 The study did not survey Lismore.

23 organisation. But as the stations were not licensed as community broadcasters, the regulator was unable to enforce these obligations during the trial phase.

Sponsorship was permitted under the community broadcasting licence but was limited throughout the trial period to five minutes in the hour (as applied to radio). That too could not be enforced.

In 1996 the ABA was instructed to report on the best use of the sixth free-to- air channel. That report recommended that ‘the sixth channel, if put to any use at all, should be used for community access television, as most socio- economic benefits presently appear likely to follow from this use’ (Australian

Broadcasting Authority, 1997, xi). Community access television was preferred as it was seen to be inclusive of multiple programming needs, freely available and likely to reflect local interests and concerns. The sixth channel report also found that long-term security for community television was required ‘instead of continuing the open narrowcasting class licensing arrangements and the uncertainty that they generate’ (Australian Broadcasting Authority, 1997: ix).

As the ABA’s 1996 report was not tabled in parliament the sector saw no direct outcomes from these recommendations. Ralph McLean, Chairperson of

MCT31, has commented that many of community television's limitations were

‘imposed by virtue of it being “on trial”, both literally and figuratively, for seven long years. Very few criminal trials last this long, but community TV has been “on notice” all that time’ (McLean in Davey, 2002: 129). As

McLean's sentiments from 2001 clearly articulate, those involved in the running of community television stations throughout the trial felt poorly treated in government decision-making processes.

24 Issues

Indigenous Television: Finding a New Direction

Although remote Indigenous broadcasting services are the only television services currently licensed under the community broadcasting licence category, a number of Indigenous groups have in recent years begun campaigning for the development of a separate licence category for

Indigenous broadcasters. Under the community broadcasting licence, the groups argue, Indigenous radio (and potentially television) broadcasters must compete for spectrum and licences with other aspiring community broadcasters despite the fact that Indigenous radio and television are a “first level of service” – the primary information and entertainment source – for many Indigenous communities. Sponsorship restrictions also sit uneasily against demands from Indigenous groups for new approaches to policy- making that cease to see Indigenous people in terms of “welfare” and dependency, and instead encourage social and economic reciprocity

(Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Commission, 2000; Pearson, 2000).

Issues surrounding the future of Indigenous broadcasting highlight the tensions in the definition, use and role of community broadcasting: Who is this media intended to serve? Who is excluded, or what interests are not met by current services? Underpinning the Indigenous broadcasters’ demands is the issue of whether the Australian government is willing to make a commitment to identifying “air rights” (or spectrum rights) as a natural right

25 possessed by first peoples alongside land rights. That is an issue which is related to the themes in this thesis but that requires its own separate study.

Marginal Culture

Mark Lyons, in his book The Third Sector: The Contribution of Nonprofit and

Cooperative Enterprises in Australia, points out that the greatest threat to nonprofit organisations today is the lack of appreciation within government of the particular nature and importance of the third sector. Whereas once governments damaged the third sector through nationalising sections of it, out of a belief that government could do better, today they no longer see themselves as service providers. ‘The threat they offer to the third sector is quite different’, writes Lyons. ‘It is the threat of non-recognition’ (2001: 221).

The treatment of community television in Australia reflects the apathy that

Lyons describes.

Community broadcasting was introduced along with a sweep of policies in the

1970s that were based on the principle of diversity. Multiculturalism, in particular, signified a new approach to the way in which diversity was managed. These programs sought to recognise difference and to cater for minority languages and cultures, replacing previous notions of national identity based on the idea of a unified and homogenous citizenry. The establishment of the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) in 1977 was seen as a means to meet the needs of multicultural Australia in the broadcasting environment. Although the Ethnic Television Review Panel considered the

26 provision of ethnic broadcasting through community television, they concluded that:

[Community] television's overriding commitment to

alternative special purpose programs is too limited to serve

the needs of multicultural television. To locate multicultural

television under the aegis of… community television would

be to put it in the realm of broadcasting designed principally

to meet minority group needs. This would run counter to the

overriding objective of promoting multiculturalism among

the community (ERTC Second Report quoted in

Communications Law Centre, 1989/90).

As this demonstrates, community television has been depicted as marginal and

“alternative” from the start when seen in relation to larger policy concerns such as multiculturalism. Diversity was still essentially distributed to viewers rather than met through the participation of civil society groups. Whilst SBS has successfully managed to bring a sense of cultural diversity to public service broadcasting, it has nonetheless been criticised for presenting cultural product that is cosmopolitan and does not sufficiently cater for Australia's various diasporic groups (Hawkins, 1999).

The issues of quality, diversity and public service broadcasting are discussed at greater length in relation to European broadcasting in Chapter Four.

Although attitudes prevail that cast community broadcasting as inferior to public service broadcasting, this is not the only front on which notions of

27 marginality have been propagated. Stuart Cunningham has observed that many government initiatives in which cultural diversity was given as a policy objective have dismissed community broadcasting. Creative Nation (1994), in particular, ‘simply reiterated the status quo for community broadcasting, while all around it special initiative funding was being delivered for a wide variety of related initiatives’ (Cunningham, 1997: 22). In an early instance of community broadcasting being considered outside of “worthy” cultural funding, a 1976 decision to shift responsibility for the video access centres from the Australia Council to the Australian Film Commission (AFC) caused serious set-backs for the community television campaign. Writes the

Communications Law Centre:

Following the transfer, there was a change of emphasis

towards more “professional” production and the AFC's

commitment to the video access project was revised. The

Commission's rationalisation of funding priorities resulted in

substantial disruption to the work of the video access centres

and the eventual closure of most programs and for a time

there was a decline in the activities of the community

television lobby (Communications Law Centre, 1989/90:

15).

It is plain to see that when community is described, it carries with it a set of values and characteristics. Culturally, community is associated with

“amateurism”, as well as notions such as “political”, “authentic”, “social concern”, “welfare”, “therapy”, and “worthy” – terms identified by Gay

28 Hawkins in her study of the mobilisation of community in Australia's cultural policy context. As Hawkins points out, although these terms may challenge the hegemony of the professional and the national, ‘they are also invoked as terms of derision and dismissal, as signs of aesthetic fiascos and cultural lack’

(Hawkins, 1993: xix). Community is something that is often strived for, that becomes part of the political discourse at times but is never fully realised. In the Australian cultural policy context, community is represented as being an alternative, a sincere yet problematic ideal that is not important in the greater scheme of things.

The cultural status of community broadcasting within Australia's broadcasting environment could be represented as being below the market, whereas public service broadcasting and cultural policy have pursued notions of difference that are seen to stand above the market:

Cultural Policy

Market

Community Broadcasting

Diagram 2. Status of Community Broadcasting

29 The marginalisation of community media is often attributed to its failure to live up to its (largely self-proclaimed) desire to change broader media patterns of ownership and control. Writes Albert Moran:

Over the past twenty years, this progressivism – the sense of

the alternative society that community radio might help

bring about, has been gradually marginalised by the growth

of the sector as a whole as well as by the soft

commercialism… Community radio is seen to have shifted

away from the original radical vision; indeed the sector is

drifting and may wither and die. Above all, there is a view

that it has failed to realise its potential’ (Moran, 1995: 159).

Although recent alternative media theory has begun to revise this “radical vision” as something necessarily in opposition to the mainstream media (see

Chapter Two), in terms of policy justifications, it is diversity rather than radicalism that has been the stronger motivation behind community broadcasting in Australia. If anything, the particular diversity of community broadcasting does not fit comfortably with government ideas of a dense and varied cultural citizenry. Although Tebbutt (1989) tells of early attempts by government to shut down radical community media, today, community broadcasting suffers from not being “cutting edge” enough. Indeed, a greater degree of “radicalism” in terms of provocative political content or avant garde/experimental content might have helped community broadcasting’s status – content such as that screened on SBS (whose government funding continues to grow). On Melbourne's Channel 31, local football associations,

30 religious groups and taped performances from comedy clubs to weddings accompany ethnic broadcasters such as the Australian Television Association

(ATVA) and alternative media (SKA TV, BENT TV). Although the more

“ordinary” associations, groups and cultural products make up a large part of community broadcasting, they are generally only mentioned in discussions of the sector's failures. For instance, Moran calls this aspect of community broadcasting “weak multiculturalism”:

The mechanism of community radio that equates the needs

of Aboriginal Australians with those of country and western

fans, the needs of gay people with those of gamblers on the

turf, the needs of prisoners with those of community

sporting groups, smacks of a “weak” multiculturalism that

welcomes difference in the name of pluralism and

cosmopolitanism rather than see that some differences are

more important than others as evidence of continued social

inequalities and subjugation (Moran, 1995: 159–160).

Such assumptions about what community media should be are in direct tension with notions of public access and participation. The marginality of community broadcasting is reinforced by the policy approach to broadcasting based upon carefully controlled and predetermined cultural objectives. These themes are explored at much greater length in the context of notions of free speech in North America, as well as changing notions of access that have entered policy debates due to the rise of the Internet, in Chapters Two and Six.

A greater awareness of how such values saturate Australian broadcasting

31 policy is required in order to see the uses of community broadcasting and its relevance for the emerging digital broadcasting environment.

Non-Commercialism/Funding

Funding is a difficult issue for the community broadcasting sector. The need to raise revenue exists in constant tension with the non-commercial ethic of the sector, reinforced by the licence restrictions and the Code of Practice. But with decreasing government funding for radio, and none for television, finding ways to raise money has become a major concern. According to

Forde, Meadows and Foxwell, core funding (funding which is guaranteed on an annual basis) stood at around $1.27m in 1985 and was provided to 56 stations (aproximately $22,000 per station). This increased until 1995 (with stations receiving on average $25,000 each) but dropped significantly from that point onwards. In 2002/2003 core funding stands at around $15,300 per station, or 3.58 million shared between 234 licensees. The new “targeted” funding regime introduced in 1996 supplements the core funding, but is not guaranteed and must be justified by the sector every three years. Taking into account the distribution of targeted funding together with core funding, the average amount per station for 2002/2003 works out to be $22,550. In real terms this represents a significant drop in funding since the original 1985 amount. Competition for government money has increased between stations, many now operating without any government funding at all (Forde et al.,

2002). The CBAA summed up the situation in their report to the Local Voices

Senate inquiry into regional radio: ‘Our biggest dilemma is that what you

32 might casually assume to be an abundance of riches (in spectrum terms) becomes a major issue for sustaining viable services if government support remains frozen or declines while new commercial and narrowcasting services continue to devour the corporate sponsorship pie’ (Community Broadcasting

Association of Australia, 1999: 1). Community television has not been included in the Community Broadcasting Foundation’s (CBF) distribution of core government funding (nor is there an “abundance of riches” in spectrum terms). With no government commitment to provide extra funds for television on the horizon, the stations are likely to have to continue to rely on sponsorship and sale of airtime as well as the lesser revenue sources of membership/subscriber fees and donations.

Accessing market-based revenue sources is more difficult for some broadcasters than others. Sandy Dann from Puranyangu Rangka-Kerrem

Media in Halls Creek described the situation at their radio station:

We’re just working on [sponsorship] at the moment, we do

that in kind… the bakery might donate a pizza, so we’ll

make mention that we’ve got a pizza to give away from the

local bakery, and we like to put that into local youth

programs, for the young ones… so that at least we know that

a group of kids out there has had something to eat… Halls

Creek is a lovely, vibrant community, but it’s also very

oppressed in certain respects… (Aboriginal and Torres

Straight Islander Commission, 2000: 7)

33 In contrast, a Sydney-based youth oriented temporary licensee, WILD-FM estimated in 2000 that their sponsorship potential was around $3.5 to 4m

(O'Donnell, 2000). It is almost impossible to generalise about the financial potential of either radio or television community broadcasting when the stations exist in vastly different communities, some with substantial limits on the amount of revenue available. However, this hasn't prevented some from attempting to do so. In possibly the most confusing take on the funding of community radio, a Senate report into regional radio in September 2001 concluded:

There were some calls in submissions for the limits on

sponsorship content to be lifted from 5 minutes per hour.

The Committee is not persuaded that such a move would

assist many stations. In its discussions with individual

stations in the course of this inquiry, many were unable to

fill the current 5 minutes. Increasing the level of sponsorship

allowed would also have implications for the commercial

radio broadcasters. It is ironic that radio stations which have

grown from the community are unable to gain sponsorship

support for their activities. Lifting the sponsorship time per

hour would advantage few stations unless they advance their

activities in obtaining sponsorship. Without proof of support

for community stations as demonstrated by sponsorship

support, there is little pressure for Government to subsidise

further the community broadcasting sector (House of

34 Representatives Standing Committee on Communications,

2001, paragraph 2.127, p. 40–41).

This position ignores the fact that some stations may never be able to achieve financial independence from government sources. At the same time, it is protective of the interests of the commercial sector by denying those community broadcasters with the ability to raise more sponsorship revenue from doing so. What is apparent from the Senate Committee's report is that the real issue in terms of financing the community sector is not so much the ability of stations to participate in the market or not, but confusion over the appropriateness of that activity. The Senate Committee's viewpoint is one where market participation acts as proof of the sector's worth, yet where that activity may have ‘implications for the commercial radio broadcasters’. The sector is depicted as inadequate when it cannot compete, and overstepping its role when it does.

The influence of the commercial lobby in restricting the financial growth of the community is a very real issue. This was particularly apparent in the case of the youth-oriented dance music stations.

When HITZ-FM went on air in Melbourne for a ninety-day

test broadcast, it didn't take long for the commercial rock

music stations to notice the slump in their ratings. HITZ-FM

sounded terrific and programmed for a community that was

not well served, so it went on-air as it planned to continue. It

gave FOX-FM and other competitors a real shock, so much

35 so, they took their complaints to Canberra (O'Donnell, 2000:

96).

HITZ-FM's success came from the fact that they catered for a community of dance music listeners, a highly lucrative demographic that placed the station in competition with commercial radio stations for audiences. During its time on air, a ratings survey found that the “Other FM” category had jumped from

1.8 to 16.1% of audience share in the 13–17 age group and from 3.3 to 12.8% in the 18–24 age group (Counihan, 1996: 14). HITZ-FM later found that it had its own competitor, another temporary community licensee called KISS-FM, who also took their format to Sydney and started up a commercial narrowcasting station Rhythm-FM. These stations clearly represent a departure from the generally held image of the impoverished community broadcaster. In the case of the HITZ-FM story it was the commercial broadcasters, rather than the audience, who most vehemently opposed community broadcasters participating in the market.

Anxiety over commercialism in the community broadcasting sector also comes from within. Despite the fact that licensees are required to be not-for- profit and are limited in the amount of sponsorship that they can broadcast, activities that are seen to be in direct conflict with the community broadcasting ethic are common. Albert Moran gives some examples of this

“creeping commercialism”:

In Cairns, 4CCR has charged an Aboriginal group a fee for

access to its airwaves. Before its present involvement with

36 the Australian Fine Music Network, 2NSB Chatswood

limited community programming in favour of a commercial-

music type format purchased from an American consultant.

2SSS Canberra is operated as a service for the racing and

gambling industry in the ACT. Three stations (4CRB Gold

Coast, 2CHY Coffs Harbour and 2GCR Goulburn) have

been questioned about their high levels of

sponsorship/advertising: 2CHY was opposed in its licence

renewal not only by FARB but also by some “S” class

stations (Moran, 1995: 158).

A more recent example is the retransmission of John Laws's notorious commercial radio program on community radio6. For community television, the screening of “billboard” advertising (non-moving graphic images) during non-programming time has been known to exceed the sponsorship limits in some cities. Possibly the most controversial activity in the community television sector has been the sale of large blocks of airtime to commercial companies. These particular issues are beginning to be resolved through regulation: under the new licence conditions, the number of hours that can be sold to a commercial programmers and non-profit organisations has been restricted. In recognition of the need for diverse revenue sources, the amendments did not prohibit the sale of airtime altogether and sponsorship has been increased from five to seven minutes.

6 The program was the focus of an ABA inquiry known as “Cash for Comments” involving the broadcasting of paid product endorsements disguised as editorial.

37 Melbourne's 3RRR-FM had an estimated turnover of $1.1 million in the financial year 2000–2001 divided equally from sponsorship and subscriber income. Kath Letch, station manager of 3RRR FM and former President of the CBAA, has expressed the need to uphold a community identity in order to maintain audiences. She identifies two influential factors determining appropriate sponsorship: available business partnership opportunities and community acceptance.

Fundamentally, the sector puts itself forward as an

independent, non-commercial broadcast service – whether

that’s TV or radio – and sponsorship poses an inherent

tension in that dynamic. Because although its called

“sponsorship” in reality it is on-air promotion with a tag and

that’s advertising. There aren’t boundaries in the Act on

what you can and can’t take provided its tagged. So that

means that the decisions about what you will take operates

at a station level rather than at a regulatory level and I think

the decisions that stations can make in that regard are

affected by their location. So for example, many community

radio stations in large regional centres would run promotions

for McDonalds or Hungry Jacks. There are only a small

number of local businesses and only a smaller number that

have any advertising budget. If you have a large take-away

food chain that does have an advertising budget you are

probably going to take them, and they will quite possibly be

accepted by your community. So the test is: is it accepted by

38 your community and is it accepted by your listeners. And

there are many stations that could run a whole range of

things that couldn’t be run on 3RRR, not because of the type

of service that 3RRR delivers but because of its type of

identity in its community and its audience (Letch, 2002).

Behind this thinking is a clearly audience-driven approach to sponsorship, whereby the listerners’ desire for a community “feel” or standard is prioritised in order to retain audiences. The community ethic is as much an image – signifying the station’s uniqueness – as it is a style of governance. In 3RRR’s case that image has proved to be particularly lucrative.

For television, the funding issues faced by radio have been amplified as a result of the increased transmission and production costs and complete absence of government funding. The Communications Law Centre remarked in their report on the test trials that, ‘without question, the failure to identify an appropriate funding base for public television has been the most significant impediment to its development’ (Communications Law Centre, 1989: 14).

Although, arguably, spectrum issues related to broader broadcasting economics are surpassing cost as an impediment to growth, it remains a prominent issue.

The CTV stations have existed on the brink of poverty with almost all having had at least the threat of voluntary administration. Equipment maintenance, including transmission, has been difficult. On a positive note, it has now been accepted at government level that only a diversity of funding sources can

39 provide the sector with sufficient revenue to meet running costs. It is no longer a question of whether market participation is acceptable, but how much. If Letch’s view is correct then the viability of the stations is tied to their ability to maintain a community identity without alienating themselves from business. This is an area that requires further research in the community media studies field if it is to receive the necessary attention, however, ideas of non- commercialism first need revisiting (see Chapter Four).

Localism

Localism is an attribute of community broadcasting that attracts less attention than it deserves. On the surface, the statistics are impressive: Access 31,

Perth’s community television station reported in 2001 that they were screening 185 hours a month of local first-run programming (Brine 2001);

Briz 31 stated in a submission to the ABA that local content accounted for over 40% of their total broadcast hours (Catchpoole, 2001). For radio the figures are similarly high with two thirds of stations claiming that they produce over 100 hours a week of local programming. These figures are striking compared to the commercial broadcasting sector where local content is on the decrease. In 2001 Southern Cross Broadcasting closed its regional production centres in Cairns, Townsville, Canberra, Alice Springs and

Darwin. This was but one more blow in a steady loss of localism in Australian commercial broadcasting since the 1980s (Davies, 1995). The Local Voices

Senate Inquiry into regional radio reported from the ABA’s evidence that the number of networked stations increased by more than 80% between 1993 and

40 2000 due to liberalisation of ownership rules. Increased competition (due to a greater number of licences) within local markets is also given as a reason for the loss of localism, with stations resorting to greater levels of program sharing in an effort to cut costs.

The benefits of localism should not be assumed. The provision of local news services are generally deemed to be the most needed function of local broadcasting (House of Representatives Standing Committee on

Communications, 2001). However, in the community sector it is local entertainment, cultures and activities that make up the greater proportion of broadcasting content. Where this is seen by some to be a deficiency of the sector, the perpetuation and promotion of local culture deserves closer attention than it has received. The role of local events promotion, discussion of local issues through talkback or panel programs, as well as local music

(Australian music quotas are given in the Community Radio Codes of

Practice) are considered outside of the news genre yet are potentially significant sources of local information.

It is evident, in any case, that the provision of localism in the community broadcasting comes relatively easily – it is a by-product of access and community group participation. The involvement of groups within the production of broadcasting (91.3% of community radio stations cite the provision of access to the media for local groups as their most important role

(Forde et al., 2002)) indicates that localism is integral to the structure and function of community broadcasting stations in the majority of cases. Where

41 the issue of localism becomes problematic is how the worth of local content can be measured and evaluated. In the context of this thesis, I have chosen to focus upon the networks of civil society, as well as the deployment of localism within development agendas. In this respect, localism is treated here from a production angle rather than as a provision-based service. Although community broadcasting may in fact serve the needs of local communities, it is the desire for access that drives local content rather than need.

There are further questions that surround justifications for community media based on localism. Community broadcasting stations are established where the motivation to produce exists within the local community. For this reason it can never be a blanket solution to the diminution of local content in regional areas, at least not without efforts to stimulate interest in media production, including training. At the same time, the opportunities presented by community broadcasting for developing skills and creativity in localities are poorly researched and overlooked in policy circles in Australia (see Creative

Industries Research and Applications Centre, 2002). This is discussed at greater length in relation to UK community media initiatives in Chapter Four.

The Future: The Introduction of Digital Television

Digital terrestrial television broadcasting began in Australia in 20017, implemented through a conservative and cautious transition regime. The mandating of High Definition Television (HDTV) is the defining feature of

7 2003 for regional broadcasters.

42 the policy. It protects the interests of the existing free-to-air commercial stations for the duration of the transition phase and necessitates that large portions of spectrum be reserved for these broadcasters, using up space that might otherwise be sold to new commercial services or used for other sectors.

The only means contained in the original Bill for new entrants to participate in digital television is through a new licence category known as “datacasting”. It was intended that these new commercial services would cater for niche markets, providing informational content such as stock market reports and the weather. However, severe limitations were contained in the datacasting licence, including a prohibition on entertaining content or self-contained video material of more than ten minutes in duration. The datacasting plans failed to excite the market, leaving the commercial incumbents in a comfortable position (despite the fact that they have been restricted from delivering extra channels). The public service broadcasters are permitted to multichannel, but no extra funds have been provided to produce content for these channels.

There was no provision in the Digital Television and Datacasting amendments (2000) for community television services to migrate to digital television along with the other free-to-air stations, nor was there any guarantee that it would do so at any future point during or after the simulcast period. The rationale behind HDTV is that consumers will be enticed to replace their analog sets for digital sets by the superior quality of them rather than because of new content. Although digital content can be received with a much cheaper set-top box, HDTV can only be received with an expensive wide-screen high definition set. The groups that occupy community television

43 have not yet been given the means to participate in digital television.

However, it appears that there is one minority that will be very well catered for. Twenty hours a week, in fact, of television content broadcast on the digital spectrum will be seen only by the HDTV audience that can afford it.

The absence of community television from the digital television transition regime came as a surprise to the community television sector. The groups had welcomed the 1998 legislation, despite some misgivings concerning an imposed carriage relationship between datacasters and community broadcasters. The amendments contained the first legislative recognition of the developing sector and provided a framework under which the sector could potentially progress. Section 59 (e) of schedule 4 of the Broadcasting

Services Act 1992 (BSA) required the Minister to conduct a review into the regulatory arrangements that would apply to ‘the digital transmission of a community television services, free of charge, using spectrum in the broadcasting services bands allocated for use for the provision of datacasting services’ (House of Representatives, 1998). Spurgeon and Flew wrote of implied carriage arrangement:

The main advantage of this approach is that community

groups are freed from the burden of financing and

maintaining complex and costly TV broadcasting and

distribution systems and can concentrate resources on

program making, by “piggybacking” their services onto

infrastructure developed by commercial providers (Flew &

Spurgeon, 200: 70).

44 However, they also warned that the interests of the not-for-profit groups would most likely be made vulnerable through their relationship with the commercial carrier. The CBAA further pointed out that under such an arrangement, community television services would only exist in those areas where there was a viable datacasting market (Community Broadcasting

Association of Australia, 1998: 3). In general, these hesitations did not overshadow the sector’s belief throughout 1999 and the first half of 2000 that a licence condition for the carriage of community television to be imposed upon a datacaster was at least one way for the sector to enter the digital broadcasting environment.

Although the 1998 legislation put in place a statutory requirement for a review into the possible regulatory arrangements for community television, the situation remained uncertain – despite a Ministerial promise in 1998 that community television services would be granted digital access:

The digital environment opens up new localised

programming opportunities for all broadcasters, including

the community television sector which will be guaranteed

free access to the spectrum needed to broadcast one standard

definition digital channel (Alston, 1998).

The report that came out of the section 59 review was expected to deliver the arrangements for community television but was still not tabled at the time of the Senate hearings into the 2000 Bill. Although the ACA submitted the report to the Minister, the Government did not feel it would be in a position to

45 finalise matters ‘until the ABA’s digital channel plans are finalised and the quantum of spectrum available for datacasting is known, towards the end of

2000’ (Department of Communications Information Technology and the Arts,

2000). Community television was left in the same tenuous position whilst the commercial and government broadcasters and the new datacasting industry were assured a place in digital broadcasting. The CBAA expressed their concern that if provision was not made for community television in the legislation then any subsequent efforts to provide digital spectrum would be difficult and unlikely. Once spectrum was assigned for datacasting and licences auctioned it would be too late to impose a carriage requirement as

‘the market would have already determined an access price predicated on the uptake of a full 7 MHz bandwidth’ (Community Broadcasting Association of

Australia, 2000: 1). As it turned out, the government cancelled the datacasting spectrum auctions in May 2001 due to lack of interest. What will happen to the two channels set aside for datacasting is not yet known.

Australia’s policy for digital broadcasting transition will make television slower to adapt to the changes brought about by convergence than other media and service industries, with the exception of radio. The rationale behind the digital television legislation favours industry stability over increased competition and potential disruption of existing services, the result being that the economic interests of the incumbent free-to-air broadcasters will not be threatened before the end of 2006, when new entrants to the free-to-air market will be considered. There has been much criticism of the digital television transition policy for favouring the interests of incumbents to the detriment of

46 potential new services. The triplecast obligation of the digital television legislation, which required free-to-air broadcasters to transmit their signal in high definition digital, standard definition digital and analog formats, was described by the Australian Consumer’s Association (ACA) as a ‘bandwidth intensive white elephant’ designed to take up spectrum that could otherwise be given or sold to new entrants (Australian Consumer's Association, 2000:

4).

This does not mean that the cultural objectives currently pursued through broadcasting policy have not been put under pressure as a result of the introduction of digital television. With the increased spectrum capacity, a range of new players stepped forward to express their interest in participating in digital television broadcasting, mostly from the press and telecommunications sectors. Somewhat more accustomed to competition policy approaches, these players pushed arguments of consumer choice and the development of innovative new services via market forces. In the words of

Ben Goldsmith and Tom O’Regan, ‘the presence of these players ensured intense debate, signalled the break up of any consensus about the agenda within which debates would be constructed and conducted in both film and broadcasting policy alike, and ensured that any decisions taken were likely to be at most provisional’ (O'Regan & Goldsmith, 2001: 14). Even though ultimately the Australian government opted to maintain its status quo in the short term, debate continues as to whether this approach will stand up, particularly in light of the slow consumer uptake of digital television in countries with less conservative digital television regimes (such as the United

47 Kingdom). A convergent media environment has meant new emphasis on issues such as privacy protection, copyright, standards, access to infrastructure, and commercial robustness. Previous regulatory concerns that focused on cultural maintenance and support can no longer claim such distinct, or primary, importance.

The cultural role of community broadcasting is also being revised in light of new market pressures. Although spectrum scarcity excuses for denying permanent allocation to community television are less convincing with the introduction of digital technology, commercial interest in spectrum has also increased. The Productivity Commission, a government agency required to advise on microeconomic policy and regulation, wrote in their Broadcasting

Inquiry Report that, ‘the major cost to the general community of community broadcasting is the opportunity cost of the spectrum they use’ (2000: 275–

276) and recommended that the ABA conduct regular research on the demand for community radio and television programming. Digital technology may have delivered more channels through increased spectrum capacity, but it has also brought with it new pressures to see spectrum in purely economic terms.

In such an environment community broadcasting is in danger of being seen as a “waste” of a profitable resource.

It is possible that the motives for community broadcasting do not have to comply with the “state versus the market” formula, an equation of revenue lost and social capital gained; instead, it may be the case that the two philosophies are not opposed, that social and cultural capital, as well as civil

48 society development, can actually lead to economic growth. Such an approach would lead away from conceptions of community media based on welfare and towards what Anthony Giddens calls “generative politics”. Community media fits well with ‘a politics which seeks to allow individuals and groups to make things happen, rather than have things happen to them, in the context of overall social concerns and goals’(1994: 15). This approach is discussed at greater length in Chapter Five. How we prove that this is the outcome of community media and that more social and economic (eg micro business) benefits are likely to ensue from community television than from a greater number of commercial television broadcasters is another area for further research.

As the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Digital Television and

Datacasting) Bill 2000 made its passage through the Senate it was amended to include a new object. That object reads:

To ensure the maintenance and, where possible the

development of diversity, including public, community and

indigenous broadcasting in the Australian Broadcasting

system in the transition to digital broadcasting (3 (1) (n) of

Schedule 1 of the BSA)

This object sits alongside other aims and intents of the Act, such as the development of an efficient and competitive broadcasting industry, the need for broadcasting to reflect a sense of Australian identity and culture, fair and accurate coverage of matters of public interest, and the protection of children

49 from harmful content. It is the only paragraph in the Act's objectives to mention digital broadcasting, and refers to the short-term imperative of the transition to digital, thus giving it an uncharacteristically specific time-frame.

It is also the first legislative recognition of Indigenous broadcasting as being distinct from community and public broadcasting. Goldsmith, O'Regan and

Cunningham (Goldsmith, Thomas, O'Regan, & Cunningham, 2001: 9) have observed that ‘although the BSA's objects may in many ways appear remote from the real history and current practice of Australian media regulation, they embody many of the key terms and ideas which frame debate over future policy directions’. Object 3 (1) (n) stands as a reminder that our immediate cultural concerns are as important as our long-term ones, that there are areas being left-out, marginalised or avoided that digital television policy has yet to address. The next chapter takes a more in-depth look at what it means to implement community broadcasting – the solutions that “community” purports to advance and the theoretical frameworks it arises out of.

50 Chapter Two: Theoretical Contexts

Within the claim that spectrum should be handed over for community use is the endorsement of community as a sphere of activity outside of the state and economy that requires attention, status and resources. Community is named and validated – named as having a substantial interest, if not a right, to broadcast. But what is community, and on what grounds can it make such a demand? In order to answer this question it is necessary to focus on the deployment of community as a sector, as a type of governance – as an identifiable means to achieve certain political outcomes. Tracing some of the theoretical constructions of community is useful in this process as it can inform the qualities that a politics of community carries with it. This chapter will therefore move through some of these debates – not to find a correct definition of community, but with the aim of arriving at some idea of the different tensions that the term carries with it into political life, in particular to broadcasting. My analysis is concerned with the various political languages, policies and theoretical ideas that employ notions of community. In the second half of this chapter I turn to the small but important body of media studies work that has attempted to define the meaning and use of community media. First, however, I will survey the political approaches to community

51 that have prevailed in recent years, in particular the debates around civil society.

The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is not to find what is “right” about community or to endorse it as an ideology, but to view it as a ‘remaking of political subjectivity’ (Rose, 1999: 176) that brings new options into the political field. This is an understanding of community that is not singular or uniform but located in the diverse networks and allegiances of everyday life, at the point where such configurations meet with the strategies of government.

I begin where Jean Luc Nancy has left off, that is, at the recognition that the

Western philosophical tradition of community (beginning with Rousseau and

Marx) ‘ended up giving us only various programs for the realisation of an essence of community’ (Nancy, 1991: 12). That single solution approach, which sought a totalising account of community in order to justify a larger operational goal, is unconvincing in a post-communist world dealing with the contradictions of global capital and culture. Furthermore, it denies the inherent “incompleteness” of community: community is a process, a relationship; it is interaction and communication (Nancy, 1991).

The current political movements that rely upon notions of community are not without their difficulties and inconsistencies (discussed throughout this thesis). Their use, as Paul Hirst contends in his discussion of associationalism, lies in the recognition that politics is no longer a matter of two competing options (Left and Right) (Hirst, 1994). Contemporary shifts towards community do not seek to find the truth of community, but see it as a means to

52 new opportunities for political change. These debates and political movements are applicable and relevant to this thesis precisely because they attempt to explain the use of community as a field of government in contemporary liberal democracies. Community broadcasting has not been discussed in these terms before, despite the fact that broadcasting is ‘the product of social and political choices, not of accident or impersonal economic or technological forces alone’ (Streeter, 1996: 6). Community broadcasting has mostly been seen as a means to counter or overcome existing systems rather than to complement them. My focus in this thesis is on the possibilities and options that community brings to current broadcasting contexts.

Community and Governance

The work of Nikolas Rose is the most useful starting point in understanding the deployment of community. Rose sees community as a space that claims to be outside of politics – even regarded by some as pre-political – that nonetheless requires political action to bring it about. ‘It is the objectification of a plane formed at the unstable and uncomfortable intersections between politics and that which should and must remain beyond its reach’ (Rose, 1999:

182). Community is uncalculated, formed through a sense of affinity and identification, a recognised essence or a sense of belonging. It also involves processes of group formation, mobilisation and public participation. When community is instituted as a third sector, and in this case as a participant in a regulated broadcasting environment, it becomes an object of governance (an approach which originates from Foucault). Uncalculated communities are

53 made operational via this transaction and become an instrument through which values and culture are directed. In this way, community broadcasting embodies the paradox of the third sector. It appears, on the one hand, as a space beyond politics, ‘a kind of natural, extra-political zone of human relations’ (Rose, 1999: 167). However, it is also very much a concerted political style, one that supports and allows a type of government and its programs to work. Viewing community as a political technology opens analysis up to how community has been deployed and mobilised, moving away from viewing it as given (which leads to conceptions of community that are static and caught up in notions of truth). Seen as a transaction of governance, it is possible to understand how interventions have shaped cultural forms, what interests have been supported or weakened, how community has functioned in the project of democracy. And in this case, how community has fared as a sector of broadcasting.

As community broadcasting is at the intersection of the administratively controlled broadcasting environment (having to comply to licence conditions and regulation) and the more random, messy and “natural” configurations of the community sphere, it is not an easy subject of study. In many respects, the institution of community broadcasting is a means to manage something that has previously managed itself, and this creates a set of dilemmas that are unique to community broadcasting. There is constant tension between who should gain access, what level of editorial control stations should maintain, how to determine whether stations are representative of the community their licence was intended for. Studying community broadcasting is not just an

54 investigation into the management of broadcasting, but of community as well.

It is these qualities that make community broadcasting a unique object of study and why it is that community broadcasting not only requires but brings with it alternative policy approaches.

Communitarianism vs. Liberalism

For those who attempt to defend community on normative grounds, community is inescapable. It is essential to understanding the social as being a social context, that our identity, culture and ideas are shared with others, not developed in isolation. Community is a social web, or bonds that are shared.

These bonds ‘carry a set of shared moral and social values’ (Etzioni,

1995:19), duties and responsibilities that are essential to social cohesion. The communitarian argument, which sees this as the primary organising principle upon which social structures should be designed, has been criticised for relying on romantic notions of natural unity and for claiming to be progressive when it is, in fact, often based on conservative and nostalgic ideals. Iris

Marion Young has written that the desire for unity through community can lead to the denial of difference by creating an opposition between what is considered to be “authentic” and “inauthentic” social life. She feels that many who appeal to the ideal of community ‘tend to evoke an effective value’ through their desire for social wholeness, unity and meaning (Young, 1990:

302). Insular communities border on fanaticism, devaluing that which is not within the community as “other”. Community shelters and closes off communication in these discussions. It negates the existing reality,

55 detemporalising social change, ‘providing no understanding of the move from here to there that would be rooted in an understanding of the contradictions and possibilities of existing society’ (Young, 1990: 302). Proponents of community often invoke nostalgic desires, promoting a return to the ‘warm, encompassing (and closed) communities of the premodern era’ (Dionne,

1998: 6). Andrew Jacubowicz has written of SBS radio that programs can become ‘avenues for the propagation of the “imagined communities” of the immigrants – strange, limited, partial expressions of their experience’

(Jakubowicz, 1989: 111). Such tendencies also apply to community group broadcasting. Community can be progressive and radical, conservative and moralistic, nostalgic or revolutionary. In modern capitalist societies, diversity appears to be its only defining feature.

The debate about what community is, and what importance it should be given politically is played out most forcefully in the rights debate between communitarians and liberals. The liberal argument asserts that individual rights must be the primary concern of political society as only through the protection of the individual's rights is the good life most likely to occur. Much of the liberal argument is reliant upon the “state of nature” or variations of it: a hypothetical position in which individuals are stripped of their memory of history, class, knowledge or the place that they occupied within society. In these circumstances any rational individual would choose a system of equality in which a set of basic rights were protected. No matter how she (or he – she does not know her gender) was to “end up” when her life attributes were returned, she would be guaranteed a level of safety and wellbeing. On this

56 basis it is possible to arrive at a set of minimum rights that will ensure the best possible outcome for all. Chandran Kukathas, for instance, believes that although groups matter, ‘there is no need to depart from the liberal language of individual rights to do justice to them’. He argues that it is not acceptable to elevate or create political institutions or legal rights that are structured or based around cultural interest as ‘those very institutions or rights will profoundly affect the kinds of cultural communities individuals decide to perpetuate or to form’ (1995: 230). Furthermore, individual liberty may be jeopardised if the interests of the individual become secondary to the rights of the group. A liberal framework is paramount as groups are not fixed entities but are constantly forming and dissolving in response to political and institutional circumstances. In this portrait of liberal rights, community exists outside of the political realm, it is a matter of personal affiliation that political action would only distort to the favour of some over others (see also Dworkin,

1977/1991).

Communitarians are dissatisfied with this argument and assert the primacy of the social over the individual. Our culture, ideas, material circumstances and values do matter and it is through our interaction with others that society exists. Furthermore, a focus on individual rights overlooks the duties and values (civic virtue) that are fostered by community and that are necessary for a well-functioning society. MacIntyre finds the abstract self to be unacceptable as ‘particularities can never be simply left behind or obliterated’

(MacIntyre, 1984: 219). In its most adamant form, communitarianism asserts that the emphasis on individualism in liberal theory fosters an amoral,

57 fragmented society. Liberalism promotes discontents such as isolation, the rat race, apathy and divorce. As Michael Sandel sums it up in reference to

American liberalism, ‘the procedural republic cannot secure the liberty it promises, because it cannot sustain the kind of political community and civic engagement that liberty requires’ (Sandel, 1996: 24). The more moderate communitarian, Michael Walzer, finds a contradiction within such arguments.

Communitarians on the one hand argue that liberalism misrepresents our situation as we are inevitably part of a society, with ties to family, cultural groups, friends, work colleagues, etc. But at the same time communitarians assert that society has lost the togetherness that it once possessed. These two communitarian arguments are ‘mutually inconsistent; they cannot both be true. Liberal separatism either represents or misrepresents the conditions of everyday life’ (Walzer, 1995a: 57). On the strand of thinking that sees society as having become fragmented ‘into the problematic coexistance of individuals’, he contends that we may as well ‘assume that liberal politics is the best way to deal with the problems of decomposition’ (Walzer, 1995a:

55). In other words, if we are ‘a community of strangers’ then the liberal justice approach is the most suitable system. However, Walzer asserts that communitarianism does make an important contribution that is not incompatible with liberalism. It is possible that liberalism can prevent us from seeing the value of the historical path and from recognising that we could know and treat each other better. Liberalism is the only means to ensure freedom but, within that, the notion of community can be a correction that enhances liberal values. It can never be a totalising theory, but is a useful and

58 necessary recurrent theme that reminds us of what type of society we would like to live in.

For many democratic theorists the hard opposition between liberalism and communitarianism is unnecessary. Young writes that ‘unlike reactionary appeals to community which consistently assert the subordination of individual aims and values to the collective, most radical theorists assert that community itself consists in the respect for and fulfilment of individual aims and capacities. The neat distinction between individualism and community thus generates a dialectic in which each is a condition for the other’ (Young,

1990: 307). Cohen and Arato agree that it is useful to move beyond the stalemate of two normative and irreconcilable theories. They believe that today, the two principles belong to the ‘same political culture’ (Cohen &

Arato, 1992: 20) and that the usefulness of the debate lies in the reconciliation of the two schools of thought rather than the continued assertion of their fundamental polarities. The actual dialogue made possible by the two theories

– our use of their universal norms for the sake of argument – is what allows us to dispute and to engage with the institutional realisation of both individual rights and the social whole. Although their take on the matter is still essentially intersubjective – possibly closer to the communitarian critique as it starts from the social context – they do not dismiss the importance of the rights thesis. In fact, they argue that rights are essential to ensure that free dialogue and engagement on political issues occurs:

In short, rights do not only secure negative liberty, the

autonomy of private, disconnected individuals. They also

59 secure the autonomous (freed from state control)

communicative interaction of individuals with one another

in the public and private spheres of civil society, as well as a

new relation of individuals to the public and the political

spheres of society and state (including, of course, citizenship

rights)... The rights to communication, to assembly, and

association, among others, constitute the public and

associational spheres of civil society as spheres of positive

freedom within which agents can collectively debate issues

of common concern, act in concert, assert new rights, and

exercise influence on political (and potentially economic)

society (Cohen & Arato, 1992: 22–23).

It is this approach that carries the most weight in the context of this thesis.

Rather than attempting to base an understanding of community broadcasting within a philosophically irrefutable notion of community, my aim is to focus upon the use of community as it is deployed to reach certain cultural and political ends. Cohen and Arato locate this activity within the sphere of civil society.

The Civil Society Debate

Civil society is a domain created by people through their associations, bonds and allegiances, separate from the state and the market but tied to both. For

Walzer, civil society is ‘the space of uncoerced human association and also

60 the set of relational networks – formed for the sake of family, faith, interest and ideology – that fill this space’ (Walzer, 1998: 129). Some theorists place emphasis on the ‘clubs’ and non-profit groups that we voluntarily take part in

– from bowling clubs and bridge to scouts and political parties (Putnam,

2000). Others include the more disparate networks of new social movements and Internet discussion groups (Cohen, 1999; Huesca, 2001). Civil society is most easily explained as ‘relations of conscious association, of self- organisation and organised communication’ (Cohen & Arato, 1992: x) which are either institutions or near-institutions. In some respects civil society is a means of speaking about community beyond the “natural” intercommunication between people – it is community as a sphere of social activity within liberal democracies, firmly positioned within the structures that make up modern politics. It is not far removed from the concept of community – in fact, it has become popular to speak of the renewal of civil society as a political strategy to advance the cause of community and to argue against individual-centred politics (Dionne, 1998). Here civil society is used to mean a sphere of social life. This allows for a reading of community media that focuses upon its management and institution, upon its position within a wider broadcasting context and as a product of a larger sphere of closely related activities and networks. But it is also important to see what community broadcasting is seen to achieve, what compromises between government and citizens, what corrections to existing structures and how it attempts to reshape communication. The tensions, contradictions and possibilities of civil society can help explain how and why community broadcasting performs, and is treated, in a particular way.

Cohen and Arato see the concept of civil society as capable of reconciling some of the contemporary debates around issues of democracy, participation, rights and welfare. But for civil society to be capable of engaging with such issues, they assert that civil society cannot only exist in the private realm.

Cohen and Arato's Civil Society and Political Theory therefore departs from theories of civil society that see involvement in the voluntary sector, family, etc, as occurring outside of the political sphere. The pluralist model, for instance (see Chapter Three), depicts society as collection of groups and the state as an organisation of individual citizens, where ‘society and state, though they constantly interact, are formally distinct’ (Walzer, 1995b: 148). For

Cohen and Arato, this approach denies the possibilities presented by associational life, the public sphere and new social movements as ‘spheres of positive freedom’ (Cohen & Arato, 1992: 23) in which people learn difference and debate issues – activities that are political, transformative, engaging and participative. It could also be said that if civil society continues to be seen as non-political then it will become even more marginal (Hirst, 1996). John

Keane also agrees that civil society should not be relegated to the realm of the

“private” but understood as part of the political process. He writes that democracy is ‘a special type of political system in which civil society and state institutions tend to function as two necessary moments, separate but contiguous, distinct but interdependent, internal articulations of a system in which the exercise of power, whether in the household or the boardroom and government office, is subject to public disputation, compromise and agreement’ (1998). From a media studies position (which implicitly takes it as

62 a given that non-state activity as an important area of social life) this definition of civil society is the most useful and appropriate. In both the work of Cohen and Arato, and Keane, communication is identified as being essential to the processes of civil society. For this reason, I shall focus on these works in my discussion of community broadcasting.

Keane's discussion of the role of communication in civil society is framed as an argument against Nicholas Garnham's theory that a healthy public sphere is best realised through public service broadcasting. He insists instead on a more pluralistic account of public life that is inclusive of all media forms, with multiple public spheres. For Keane, ‘a healthy democratic regime is one in which various types of public spheres are thriving, with no single one of them actually enjoying a monopoly in public disputes about the distribution of power’ (Keane, 1998: 186). Keane's view of the role of the media in civil society is one where a plurality of groups express their solidarities and oppositions to each other, rather than seeking out an ideal, uncontaminated model of communication. He asks in the closing paragraphs of Civil Society whether ‘the future is likely to see a variety of contradictory trends, including not only new modes of domination but also unprecedented public battles to define and to control the spaces in which citizens appear’ (Keane, 1998: 189).

He recognises that in current civil society discussions, questions around the media and communication, and their role within civil society, are so far only

‘poorly formulated’.

63 This thesis attempts to address such concerns, at least where community- produced communication is involved. I take as a given Garnham's axiom that communicative action in some form ‘lies at the heart of both the theory and the practice of democracy’ (Garnham, 1986: 364). The public sphere, defined as ‘the social space generated in communicative action’ (Habermas, 1996:

360), is implicit within the notion of civil society, as only an understanding of communication within public space can link civil society to democratic theory

(Cohen, 1999). It is, therefore, a significant gap that so little work on civil society takes into account the role of the media, except to see it as a destructive of face-to-face forums (for instance Putnam, 2000). Community broadcasting, being a media that is produced by civil society groups, has a unique relationship to the types of citizen participation that occur through civil society engagement.

The inclusion of all media within the realm of civil society by Keane (here he departs from Cohen and Arato) is compatible with his definition of civil society that includes the market. Keane's basic state – civil society distinction is justified on the grounds that the separation of civil society from the economy falsely renders civil society economically passive. Furthermore, he holds that accounts which see civil society as distinct from the market tend to depict non-profit alliances as ‘good’ while the market is ‘bad’ – a binary that is not necessarily a true representation of either. His recognition of the mutual dependency of civil society and the market is also important: ‘where there are no markets, civil societies find it impossible to survive. But the converse rule also applies: where there is no civil society there can be no markets’ (1998:

64 19). Keane's observation of the falsity of an economy – civil society divide is pertinent. The relationship of the two spheres is discussed in this thesis in terms of the tensions between community media and market participation.

In particular I refer to the anti-commercialism associated with community media and how this may work to marginalise the sector and reinforce the interests and power of the commercial sector. However, I do see it as necessary to conceptually separate the market from civil society. In contemporary liberal democracies the economy is often seen as the only alternative to the welfare state. I am interested in a third approach, whereby the associations formed out of non-profit motives are seen as legitimate participants in governance. In a structure where the power holders are just as likely (if not more) to be privately owned economic actors than bureaucratically organised governments, the non-profit sector should be recognised as an identifiable alternative model. In the broadcasting realm, the non-profit construction of community broadcasting is a deliberate measure to ensure that community interests are not overlooked or overcome as a result of economic incentives. This does not mean that community broadcasting should be banned from participating in the economy (which only serves to keep it impoverished and ineffectual) but that its organisational model should reflect community aims. At a purely empirical level, broadcasting is an administratively achieved space of defined interests, in which civil society has sought representation as something other than public and private media and this self-definition suffices. I do not dispute the view that all media play a role in civil society, however, I am concerned with the media that civil society

65 chooses to create as something distinct from market and state. My definition of civil society is, therefore, one that is associational and non-profit, generated for civil society and by civil society rather than the state or the market.

The concept of civil society and the debates around it is dealt with in this thesis in a range of contexts. Firstly, it as necessary to recognise that people's engagement in civil society is the reason why some of us set out to establish community media in the first place. Community broadcasting is created out of the belief that civil society requires communication platforms – the two are, in this respect, mutually dependent. This is seen in the campaigning efforts of aspiring community broadcasters around the world – the non-commercial pirates and the test transmissions that have lead to the establishment of community media. As has been observed in the European context, community broadcasting, in the majority of cases, was established as a result of continued pressure from community groups rather than by government-inspired directives (see Chapter Four). Community broadcasting should therefore be seen as a means to the maintenance and extension of civil society by civil society itself.

Secondly, the concept of civil society is useful when discussing community broadcasting as it avoids making generalisations about the nature of community media. Much writing on community broadcasting (literature discussed at greater length below) focuses only on the radically progressive aspects of programming and the production process. As a result, community media as a whole has attracted much less attention than has one of its

66 components – alternative, or radical, media. Although these studies are important in that they examine what is unique about community expression, they do not account for the large amount of community media that is not radical or social change focused. Using the notion of civil society expands the field to encompass all community media.

Thirdly, the concept of civil society as a contributor to the field of political action presents a range of policy options that deserve consideration in the broadcasting context. For instance, Paul Hirst writes of the failure of left and right to institute effective social democracy. For Hirst, the politicisation of property relations and the struggle for exclusive control of the one political space has resulted in the left-right opposition, both of which ‘strove to make their control of the state permanent and that policy irreversible’ (Hirst, 1994:

8). Politics now consists also of campaigns of resistance – feminism, environmentalism, anti-racism – as well cultural groups, pressure groups, support groups and others. These movements arise from anywhere, often from intolerable situations, and sometimes from everyday routine. They are not fixed although they may be organised and long lasting. Hirst concedes that politics was never entirely dominated by left and right, but maintains that more and more non-state, regional and supra-national players have the ability to influence policy. For Hirst, this denotes, or requires, a return to associationalism – governance of social affairs through civil society and voluntary organisation. This does not involve the wholesale supplanting of existing institutions, rather it provides a vital supplement to them that enables their defects to be meliorated (Hirst, 1994: 12). This rethinking of institutional

67 arrangements is one that is supportive of voluntary, non-profit organisations.

Within such a vision, community does not have to be marginal or defined by opposition, but is capable of offering new avenues for participation that work with an acceptance of the difference, diversity and power structures of the contemporary world. Other relatively new political theories and movements are also contributing to what can only be seen as a revival in the idea of civil society. Included in this ‘search for new compromises between states and societies’ in which ‘grand fictions about the primacy of state institutions are thus laid to rest’ (Keane, 1991: 35) are the Third Way attempts to “connect” government with community (Giddens, 1994, 2000). I also add “alternative development” to this group of “new” politics as it aims to construct a post- scarcity society through community participation (this is discussed in the media context in Chapter Five).

None of these movements are without their problems – in fact I think their deployment in the communications field has already proved fraught with difficulties. The purpose of including them within the context of this thesis is only to demonstrate how community has been mobilised to achieve certain ends. In many respects community media is already contributing alternative models of organisation and information distribution (see Chapter Six) which have gone largely unrecognised. The question remains how these “natural” formations may inform new policy possibilities in a rapidly changing communications arena. The debates currently occurring around civil society in popular and political theory provide a “way in” to these issues.

68 This brings me to my final reason for considering community broadcasting in the civil society context. Civil society is separate from the state, but in many respects requires a relationship with the state in order for it to exist. For community broadcasting, the relationship with the state is made clear by the legislative frameworks and policy decisions that define how this somewhat dispersed and varied activity will be implemented. Theories that do not take into account the dependency of community broadcasting upon state structures and administrators risk overlooking the positive role that the state can play towards the development of community media.

The organisations of the third sector provide a means for citizens to learn responsibility and to collectively influence the workings of the state and the market through civil society. But, although ideas and issues are shared and deliberated within civil society, civil society is also partial, inconclusive, and not easily understood (Walzer, 1989). As a result, theories that uphold the democratic potential of community are in constant danger of generalisation, of idealising that which is arbitrary and of proclaiming benefits which cannot be easily proven (Kymlicka & Norman, 1994: 363). As Walzer writes:

... more like working in an ethnic alliance or a feminist

support group than canvassing in an election, more like

shaping a co-op budget than deciding on national fiscal

policy. But can any of these local and small-scale activities

ever carry with them the honour of citizenship? Sometimes,

certainly, they are narrowly conceived, partial and

69 particularistic; they need political correction. The greater

problem, however, is that they seem so ordinary. Living in

civil society, one might think, is like speaking in prose

(Walzer, 1992: 106).

Previous Approaches to Community Broadcasting

The assumptions of marginality that surround community media are only reinforced by the scant attention that has been devoted to it in the field of media studies. This deficiency has recently begun to be acknowledged by a group of media scholars attempting to redress the issue, most notably

Clemencia Rodriguez, Nick Couldry, and Chris Atton. With them, in the effort to reinvigorate the field of community media studies, are a number of authors who have been there from the start. My reference to these earlier texts

(and later versions of them) throughout this thesis is testament to their usefulness. This includes the work of John Downing, Nick Jankowski, Peter

Lewis, Ole Pren and Per Jauert, to name a few8. Academic work on community media does not always refer to “community media” –

“alternative” media, “radical” media and “citizens' media” are terms/objects of study more often used (a point I will return to). As it currently stands, there is no substantial body of work that focuses on the construction of community media in a policy context, or that attempts to contextualise community media in terms of the “public philosophies” that it draws on. However, recent

8 Although a substantial body of work originating from South America has been cited within texts that I refer to, lack of translation (confirming the low status of community media studies) has prevented me from accessing that work. I am grateful for the lucid accounts of this material in the work of Rodriguez in particular.

70 community media studies works do contribute substantially to the project of discovering community media’s importance. Despite the fact that the governmental aspects remain largely unexplored, this work can assist in discovering why community media has made it into policy agendas in a particular way and why it remains problematic. One of the central tenets of this thesis is that the rethinking of community media might help overcome stagnation in the policy context, and the work that is currently being done in the area is likely to prove valuable towards that end. The revival of community media studies is still a new project, but one with the promise and potential to yield new policy directions.

Community media studies emerged out of efforts to “democratise” the media.

In 1976 UNESCO established a commission to examine international communications problems, in particular the inequality of information flows between the First and Third World. The resulting MacBride Report recommended more democratic national policies, the fostering of South-to-

South communication and a code of ethics for the mass media (Rodriguez,

2001). The ultimate purpose was to bring about a New World Information and

Communication Order (NWICO). The failure of NWICO is today generally acknowledged in that ‘not only do information and communication flows remain unbalanced, but the mass media are controlled by fewer and fewer owners’ (Rodriguez, 2001: 7). The failure of NWICO caused communications scholars to look towards existing grassroots media as a counter-trend with the potential to overcome the imperialist threat of the mass media. Alternative media initiatives were said to destabilise the one-to-many communication

71 structures of the mass media through their participatory, two-way structure.

The passive audience could be transformed into active producers. Alternative media, in this way, was positioned in relation to a conception of popular media as monolithic and singular. Even critics of alternative media began to apply the same paradigm, asserting that the promise of community media must be checked by the reality that small-scale media could not, and never would, compete with the mass media for audiences. For instance, Atton recounts a study by Comedia in 1984 which argued that the alternative press will remain marginal as long as it continues to adopt non-hierarchical, collective structures ‘adopted for political, never for economic ends’ (Atton,

2002: 34). (Atton instead seeks to understand what is offered by alternative organisational models in their own right.)

Although such intellectual constructions of community media still remain, the argument is essentially flawed. It might even seem irrelevant for many living in Western democracies that do not see the popular media as crudely repressive. How can we argue for the need for “revolutionary” media when we, as the audience, have the ability to make our own cultural choices and possess the capacity to take or leave the values, products and cultures available in the media? As Hartley (1999) has most convincingly argued, popular television can teach its voluntary, entertainment-seeking audience about identity and difference, maintaining and advancing citizenship – what he calls “democratainment”. The shift in media studies towards a conception of the active audience has put into question the aspects of the NWICO debate that stirred ideas of an audience being controlled by American content. But

72 whilst media theory has moved beyond imperialist notions of domination over the thoughts and tastes of the audience, the critical left remains ‘firmly couched within transmission models of communication’ that imposes the dominant culture upon the receiver (Ang, 1996: 165). This has only served to leave community media studies out of touch with important developments in the media studies field that have incorporated more complex ideas of power, identity and cultural change. That said, community media studies is now beginning to acknowledge the inadequacies of its own tradition. Chris Atton points out that the classification of fanzines as “subcultural” runs the risk ‘of collapsing a range of class positions, social relations, political and cultural ends, and claims to solidarity and opposition into a social setting that is essentially structural’ (Atton, 2002). Downing has written that justifications for alternative media (or “radical media” as he prefers) need to be disentangled ‘from the often axiomatic assumptions we have about audiences’

(2001: 9). For Downing, alternative media is in fact, ‘the most active form of the active audience’ ( 3), an interaction with media and culture in general rather than an argument against the possibilities for media engagement.

Nick Couldry writes that the lack of media studies work concerned with alternative/community media is only justifiable if it is unconnected with the wider research agenda. However, ‘if we are concerned with the broader social process of mediation – characterised by an extremely uneven distribution of symbolic resources – then ignoring alternative media is not only arbitrary, but it misses the key point about them: that they are the weapons of the weak

(Couldry, 2002: 27). For Couldry, ignoring community media does not make

73 sense when the starting point of media studies is the construction of one's own reality and others and how that is distributed (symbolic power). The fact is that people's efforts to put themselves within the media frame may be only a small contribution to the mediascape compared with the large amount of material generated from the media industry. However, this alone should not make it marginal as an object of study. For Couldry, the attempt to alter the dynamics of symbolic power is intensely interesting precisely because it is posed as a challenge, a disruption, or (in de Certeau's (1984) terms) as a tactic.

Couldry's assertion of the relevance of alternative media to the media studies academy recognises the oppositional quality of alternative media without resorting to a binary position on its role in relation to the mainstream media.

He privileges ‘alternative media practices’ wider concern with the politics of speech, rather than its positions on formal politics’ in order to open ‘a debate on the conditions for effective democracy in mediated societies’ (Couldry,

2002: 26). The move to see alternative media within a more complex understanding of power has been important within the reinvigoration of community media as an area of study.

Clemencia Rodriguez writes that she was compelled to find ‘a new route to conceptualising community media’ upon realising that her experiences of working within groups in Colombia, Texas and Catalonia did not fit easily within the available theoretical frameworks.

Our theorising uses categories too narrow to encompass the

lived experiences of those involved with alternative media.

Communication academics and media activists began

74 looking at alternative media as a hopeful option to

counterbalance the unequal distribution of communication

resources that came with the growth of big media

corporations. This origin has located the debate within rigid

categories of power and binary conceptions of domination

and subordination that elude the fluidity and complexity of

alternative media as a social, political, and cultural

phenomenon (Rodriguez, 2001: 3–4).

By reframing alternative and community-based media as “citizens’ media”,

Rodriguez seeks to move beyond previous academic discourses that position community media projects as linear and ‘conscious processes towards a common goal’ (Rodriguez, 2001: 22). The fragmented, messy and often contradictory existences and ambitions of alternative media are not indications of its failure but evidence that our previous assumptions about alternative media have been misplaced. Using Mouffe’s (1992a) radical democracy theory, Rodriguez seeks to show how the efforts of these groups can be seen as an articulation of citizenship, when citizenship is seen as the day-to-day endeavour to renegotiate and construct new levels of democracy and equality.

Central to this conception of alternative media is Mouffe’s demand that citizenship be thought of through a liberal democratic regime that is inclusive of pluralism and yet able to account for different subject positions and social relations. Rather than citizenship being simply the minimum framework of liberalism or the all-encompassing preoccupation of civic republicanism,

Mouffe sees citizenship as an ‘articulating principle’ that allows for a plurality of specific allegiances whilst maintaining equality and liberty. Citizenship

75 must ‘always be recreated and renegotiated’ within this context (1992b: 14).

Rodriguez' shift to “citizens' media” does not remove the themes that have always been the focus of alternative media: protest and dissent, collective organisation and participation, culture and the media, watching and producing. However, these themes are not strung together in order to produce a singular project or a cohesive, rational goal for the project of democratic media, but are instead seen as multiple fronts upon which citizenship is being constantly negotiated through expressions of identity and cultural strategies.

The possibilities of these new conceptions of citizenship enactment or expression through community media are important in the context of this thesis. By opening up new, non-essentialist notions of participation, community media becomes relevant and empowering. Early understandings of community media imposed a false (and most likely impossible) ideal – neglecting the subtleties and complex dynamics of mainstream media uses as much as those of alternative media itself. This discourse closed off community media to other uses and led to depictions of its small-scale nature as an indication of failure, and its ordinariness as its lack of power. Neither scale nor aesthetics are the central dilemma in Rodriguez's, Couldry's or

Atton's view.

Much of the debate on alternative media is taken up with what alternative media is. For Atton, production, distribution and organisation define alternative media as much as content. In this way, he manages to include a discussion of highly personal/individual zines within an area usually defined

76 by group activity. Clemencia Rodriguez has gone to lengths to elaborate on why some small-scale media can be considered “citizens’ media” – empowering, progressive and alternative – whereas others cannot (Rodriguez,

2002). Reading a video produced as part of a citizens’ media project by three young Chicana girls, Rodriguez writes that the video, opens ‘a path toward a rendition of the barrio grounded in the love of three girls for the place of their childhood’ (Rodriguez, 2002: 85). The typical renditions of the barrio characterised by sepia tones and violent scenes are not found in the video Wild

Fields. Instead it conveys inconclusiveness – shown through diffused light – and flux, which is conveyed by the constantly moving camera. For Rodriguez, citizens’ media leaves behind ‘all legacies of preexisting codes’, plunging into

‘the in-betweens; before entities were coded as subject or object, dream or reality; before each were assigned a value, which inevitably confines us all to a system of exchangeable units’ (Rodriguez, 2002: 85). It is these qualities that distinguish citizens’ (or alternative) media from the ‘endeavours of skinheads and white supremacists, Christian fundamentalists and neo-Nazi groups which intend to tighten still further the order of Being's straightjacket’.

Although I do not dispute the potential to differentiate different types of community media on aesthetic or ethical grounds, in practice the decision to accept some types of community media over others is problematic. In Chapter

Two these tensions are discussed in terms of freedom of speech models that employ first-come-first-served strategies and access regimes that seek to institute programming in terms of community needs. My concern is not that some content is more desirable than other content. The issue in the context of

77 this thesis is whether or not structures exist that can “steer” community media in positive directions and whether that is necessary at all.

If there is a gap in the work of alternative media theorists, it is that they choose to focus only on one aspect of community media activity. My use of civil society theory is intended to rectify this and to account for the range of community media content that is found in Australia, if not across the globe.

Uniting the theoretical contribution to the issues and “on-the-ground” reality of community broadcasting is the intention of the next three chapters. Themes of access, quality, public interest and civil society advancement have already been raised. In order to get closer to these issues and to develop an idea of the international landscape of community broadcasting, these themes will be mapped across North America, Europe and the Third World.

Chapter Three: North America

Origins of Public Access in America

In 1968, in the slums of Montreal, a local organisation known as the Saint

Jacques Citizens’ Committee, took to the streets with portable cameras, interviewing residents and later discussing their footage at public meetings.

The project, organised by Dorothy Todd Hénaut and Bonnie Klein, was part of Challenge for Change, a National Film Board of Canada initiative designed to address poverty by provoking social change through the use of film. Hénaut and Klein in their report on the Montreal project expressed hopes that one day citizens’ groups would be able to make programs for local television outlets

(Engelman, 1990). In a parallel development in Virginia, USA, the first community access channel had just begun cablecasting. This chapter begins with the United States, and the history of access in that country, to more recent developments in Canada in the final section.

Ralph Engleman’s (Engelman, 1990) history of public access television details the progression from the Canadian experiments to the establishment of

79 public access television as it now exists in the United States. The Challenge for Change approach was summed up in a report of the time as ‘the concept of the filmmaker as an organiser, activist, stimulator, catalyst, or whatever he might choose to call himself, as distinct from his usual role’ (Boyce

Richardson in Engelman, 1990). The idea that the filmmaker could, through her use of technology, shape social relations in ways different to predominant mass media formats became the first justification for community broadcasting and cablecasting. At its heart was the concept of access – access to the means to produce programs and to distribute them via broadcast or cable technology.

It was this that led a group called Town Talk to establish community access to cable television at the crucial time of licence renewal in Thunder Bay,

Ontario, in 1970. Challenge for Change provided equipment and training to

Thunder Bay, and programming consisting of locally produced programs, live studio segments and phone-ins was developed. However, Engleman writes that despite the substantial following that the programs attracted, the community television group was not able to withstand its opponents:

Local authorities were opposed to the presence of video

crews at certain meetings. Some government officials in

Ottawa charged that the project was controlled by radicals.

The local cable company, backed by the national association

of the Canadian cable industry, opposed giving up control of

programming and finances to a citizens’ group. The

company asserted greater control by requiring submission of

programs three weeks in advance and an end to phone-ins

(Engelman, 1990: 15).

80 Power dynamics such as those described by Engleman – editorial control by the cable company, as well as government support for industry over the establishment of a public space – are recurrent themes in the history of community television and radio. These forces caused the end of the Thunder

Bay experiment before the year was out. However, community broadcasting did develop in Canada and it is now seen by many as the birthplace of the community broadcasting movement in the First World.

The Canadian experience provided a fundamental argument for the establishment of community broadcasting. This chapter looks at that defining principle known as “access” and the obstacles it has experienced in North

America. In the U.S.A, access television became equated with the nation’s commitment to free speech – a principle that is confronted every day through the use of access television by local communities and individuals. Some authors choose to distinguish between “access” and “community” media with the latter being locally produced and more coordinated (for instance

Jankowski, 2002). In Australia the two concepts are closely related and it is the negotiation of access, localism and community building that often defines a station’s success in terms of its ability to fulfil community needs. North

America’s re-evaluation of access, therefore, provides a useful means of discussing the dominant values behind both approaches.

Both access and free speech need to be seen within the wider North American broadcasting context. Thomas Streeter describes this as a system of ‘corporate liberalism’ – not in a purely theoretical sense, but in terms of the guiding

81 belief and vision that informs policy and government decisions. This is a

‘messier, cruder’ form of liberalism than that conceived of by the

Enlightenment thinkers and somewhat paradoxical in its implementation.

Corporate liberalism involves bureaucratic structures (“corporations” as in agencies and institutions) working to create the market, to make it work, and is therefore, ‘a dynamic response to complex social contradictions and conditions, conditions that include various forms of resistance to corporate control’ (Streeter, 1996: 40). Even seemingly non-market notions such as the public interest are a means to create harmony between competing forces in society, resulting in a compromise that ultimately falls in favour of private interests. Streeter sees access as part of this agenda. Although access policies and campaigns draw attention to the unequal distribution of power and resources in broadcasting, they are also a demand for access to a resource that someone else owns or controls, therefore presupposing the legitimacy of that ownership. Furthermore, it should be seen as an administratively achieved means to appease interests with an objective of neutrality. ‘The granting of access is thus easily interpreted as one of technocratic corporate liberal adjustments useful for maintaining smooth relations between corporations and the consuming public’ (Streeter, 1996: 195). Streeter explains that his analysis is not intended to prove or contest the dominant liberal philosophy but to uncover the contradictions and tensions within it. My aim is to highlight the difficulties that this dominant paradigm presents for the development of community television.

82 Streeter’s point that access is a marginal concession within a system that serves private interests is seen within the administrative and legal treatment of access television in America (discussed below). However, access television also deals with social forces that exist outside of the market – with communities and issues that do not fit easily inside the framework within which they operate. This chapter looks at these tensions, moving beyond the claims to access and free speech and towards the attempt to construct civil society through access television. This involves a change in the notion of access, based on a more complex idea of empowerment rather than the earlier

(minimalistic) individual rights-based conceptions. In the USA this is being contested at the station level. In Canada, policy is being created that attempts to guarantee a model of access closer to the empowerment model. Therefore both the “on the ground” station management policies and the legal contracts and licences that permit access are entry points to understanding how civil society is hindered or helped in its participation in television and radio in

North America.

United States of America

George Stoney, a New York academic, worked as a guest executive producer for Challenge for Change from 1968 to 1970. Upon his return to the United

States he set up the Alternative Media Centre at New York University with

Canadian documentary producer Red Burns. The centre’s objectives included media education, the encouragement of communication for diverse groups and

83 greater public control of the media. One significant achievement of the

Alternative Media Centre was an intern program, through which groups of people were trained to work at cable companies around the country. The interns then went on to establish the first access facilities and channels and soon became involved in lobbying the FCC for the provision of access channels. Out of this came the sector’s umbrella membership organisation, the

National Federation of Local Cable Programmers (NFLCP) which has since been renamed the Alliance for Community Media. In 1970 two cable franchises were awarded for the city of Manhattan with two public access channels and two government channels written into the contract at the last minute. One company provided a studio with a camera, a playback deck and a director free of charge. The Alternative Media Centre made videos that documented neighbourhood characters and opinions from their location in

Bleeker Street, Greenwich Village. As so few people had cable television in the 1970s, the videos were screened in shop-fronts, apartment lobbies and from the back of Stoney’s station wagon (Linder, 1999). At the same time, other radical video groups began to appear. In 1971 two Manhattan access channels were screening five or six hours of content a day.

Community media made its way on to cable television systems beyond

Manhattan through these early efforts. Thousands of local channels are now devoted to public access (which exists on 16.5% of all cable television systems), educational access (12.9%) and government access (10.7%) – a triad known as PEG. Low power television provides some communities with programming and, since 2000, non-profit and educational institutions can also

84 apply for low power radio licences, both of which are discussed below. But cable access television is the quintessential American platform of community media. It is a medium that is seen by some as controversial and profane, by others as ordinary and superfluous, and by the cable companies as an imposition. Those working in cable access defend it vigorously on the grounds of pluralist democracy, free expression as well as community and individual development. It makes for difficult television terrain, and yet is a uniquely American cultural phenomenon. Although other countries have since instituted similar models to public access television (Berlin’s Offener Kanal is strikingly similar to the US access prototype), public access is in many respects a showcase of a non-profit pluralist domain that is saturated with

American political principles.

To be clear from the start: no one believes that the original ideal of public access has been fully realised, including its most devoted supporters

(Aufderheide, 2000). The program schedules of public access television are enough evidence that radical democratic talk is not all that congregates within the access space. Religious and spiritual groups dominate many channels

(although not all). Tapes are not previewed prior to screening, as this is considered adverse to the free speech intent, resulting in a hotchpotch of programs with varying production values. Programs with quirky titles such as

“The Purple Hamster Show” can be seen scheduled alongside “The Jesus

Show” and “Atheist Alliance Presents” on San Francisco’s public access

85 channel, CityVisions9. Zane Blaney, the station manager, admits that much of it is “niche” viewing, but that “hotspots” of television attracting a significant number of viewers are also to be found. George Stoney recently commented on the problematic content of access television and called for a reconsideration of its first come, first served structure:

As early as 1972, when Red Burns and I worked with

Nicholas Johnson, the lone “green” member of the FCC, to

craft the language for the provision of access in cable

franchises, the concept of ‘first come, first served’ was

fundamental to ensuring that all users would be treated

equally… Now, almost three decades later, we have a

wealth of experience to help us reconsider the challenges

and shortcomings in implementing this concept (Stoney,

2001: 29).

Public access television remains fundamentally centred around the idea of access and it is unlikely to give up its founding philosophy. But the difficulties that the stations have faced over the years, not least the question of whether anyone is watching, have caused some of its initial structures to be questioned as Stoney now believes they must be. Access television is now rethinking its values and purpose.

The radical beginnings of access television in North America have not disappeared, however. Paper Tiger, for instance, started with a series on New

9 CityVisions, April 2001 program schedule.

86 York’s Manhattan Neighbourhood Network (MNN) in 1981 on which media theorists and critics (the first being Herb Schiller) discussed excerpts from media publications. Its programs – many deliberately rough-edged with hand- drawn graphic cards and visible booms – now number around 400. They include programs on the anti-globalisation protest movement, the Zapatistas and union issues, and get distributed from their offices in Soho to the activist community world-wide through alternative media networks (Halleck, 2001).

The Deep Dish network, conceived by Paper Tiger, collates and distributes social change television to access stations wishing to screen their series (who have a satellite dish) throughout the United States. With other cooperatives and groups such as Free Speech TV, the Committee for Labour Access (CLA) and Not Channel Zero, and Downtown Community Television, alternative media is alive and definitely kicking on public access television. Paper Tiger continues to screen on MNN and even receives grants from the station in order to continue producing (Tara, 2001). Radical media did not disappear from public access; it was simply joined by the less radical, the religious, the local, the extreme right and interested individuals.

The democratic nature of radical media can be studied in its own right

(Chapter Two). That is a different task to understanding the forum of public access television as a created space, for all its diversity, problems and battles.

As the authors discussed in this chapter point out, access television’s progressive potential has been marred by a lack of resources, ‘by the bias of localism and by a lack of ties to larger spheres of discussion and debate’

(Stein, 2001a). Alternative/radical media has since carved out its own identity

87 separate from access television and has moved beyond the local to become a masterful promoter of itself and its global community. All of this activity largely exists outside of the structure of access that is being considered here, although the fact of an available distribution platform has been important for its endurance. However, efforts are growing to improve the image of access television and to reconstruct it as a site for community building, for the renewal of civil society. It is these aspects, rather than the claims to radical democracy, that I am concerned with. In order to get to the heart of these issues, the policy and legal aspects of access television first need to be outlined, in particular the institutional dilemmas and their relationship to the philosophical underpinnings of access.

Cable Franchise Agreements and the Problem of Property

Rights

In terms of policy, the history and current position of community television in the United States is inextricable from, and subservient to, that of the cable television industry. It is a contractual relationship that has created significant tensions, resulting in over three decades of legal sagas. Cable television had a humble start. It was first used as a subscriber service to relay broadcast signals into homes with inadequate over-the-air transmission as early as 1948.

Antennas were assembled by local technicians (one in an old bus on a hill) in order to receive and amplify broadcast signals which were then piped via cables into homes (Streeter, 1986). As Streeter points out, cable television emerged not because of a straightforward technical need (radio frequency

88 repeaters could have been set-up by networks), but because there was no economic incentive or obligation for the networks to serve small communities.

These limited remote area systems, originally known in America as community antenna television (CATV), grew from 70 in number to over 800 in the decade of 1952–1962 (Engelman, 1990). With such expansion, as well as improvements in cable technology (which gave it the potential for more channels than free-to-air television), the cable industry began to look towards providing programming beyond basic retransmission. The National

Association of Broadcasters became concerned that this new technology, with its local and somewhat hobbyist character, had the capacity to infringe upon their mass market. They were right to be concerned.

The relationship between community television advocates and the cable industry was one of cooperation and mutual benefit during the 1960s, when the cable industry was seeking to gain the favour of the government and regulator. In 1968 the first US public access channel began operation in Dale

City, Virginia. It was run by the Junior Chamber of Commerce along with a council of community representatives, cablecasting for two years without advertising. The FCC saw a public interest attraction in such enterprises and in 1969 (leading up to the 1972 cable rules) required large cable systems to originate their own programming and to experiment with community access

(Stein, 2001b). As a result, the cable industry made no attempt to curb the efforts of the Alternative Media Centre when it was formed in 1971. But the discourse of localism, as well as technocratic claims that depicted cable technology as a social cure-all, had set in motion a national cable policy that

89 was to ultimately work against both visions. One result was policy that

‘focused a great deal of attention on local broadcast outlets, while simultaneously blocking consideration of the national character of the broadcast system’ (Streeter, 1986). The model of cable television that developed, whereby cable franchises are administered through local authorities, meant that access television was to develop as a diverse, uneven and tenuous phenomenon lacking a national policy commitment.

The FCC’s first major intervention into the cable industry came in 1966 when it banned signal importation into the nation’s 100 largest markets. This freeze, which favoured the networks, remained until 1972, during which time the

Commission conducted a review of cable television towards the consideration of its first comprehensive plan for the industry. Over that time policy rhetoric and lobbying efforts transformed “community access television” into the more impressive-sounding “cable” technology. This important discursive shift was pushed by a progressive libertarian agenda from the Rand Corporation, the

American Civil Liberties Union, the electronic industry, city governments and eventually the FCC itself. For Brenda Maddox, writing in 1974, this faith was religious: ‘it begins with something that was once despised – a crude makeshift way of bringing television to remote areas – and sees it transformed over the opposition of powerful enemies into the cure for the ills of modern urban American society’ (Maddox in Streeter, 1986: 97). The 1972 FCC cable

Report and Order exposed the Commission’s change of heart towards cable, allowing and encouraging the industry to expand for the benefit of the public.

One of the consequences of the report, apart from asserting their own capacity

90 to regulate the cable industry, was that it gave local governments the ability to negotiate franchise agreements with the companies. In addition, for the only time in U.S. history, access television became a federal policy goal, with cable systems in the top 100 markets required to reserve three separate channels for public, educational and government (PEG) access. In 1976 this was revised to services with 3500 subscribers or more, with cable providers being allowed to combine PEG onto one channel where there was inadequate demand or channel capacity. But the Supreme Court invalidated the public access requirement once and for all in 1979 when Midwest Video Corporation successfully argued that the requirements infringed on their editorial prerogatives and overstepped the FCC’s authority. The ruling, however, left the First Amendment issue unresolved and did not prevent congressionally or municipally mandated access (Stein, 2001b).

In 1977 a federal appeals court ruling permitted Home Box Office (HBO) to bid for programming (Calabrese & Wasko, 1992). That decision, along with the possibility of cheap networking via satellite technology, led to the transformation of cable into the multi-billion dollar industry that it is today.

The supposed public forum of access television continued to be written into municipal franchise agreements, with the number of stations numbering over

2000 by the 1990s. As cable companies competed for franchises, communities lobbied their city governments for channel capacity, facilities and, in many cases, a percentage of the subscriber revenue. In one example of the power of municipal government control, twenty four access channels were negotiated in the city of Dallas-Fort Worth (Linder, 1999: 9). Bunnie Riedell of the

91 Alliance for Community Media believes that franchise arrangements have proven to be beneficial for access television as it has produced a diverse model that cannot be easily eradicated (Riedell, 2001). Riedell’s view reflects the liberal idea that political interference – the arbitrary whims of politicians – can be transcended by recourse to the law. The flip side to this arrangement is that, policy-wise, access television is now less of a defined public forum than a potential legal battleground.

The FCC’s requirements relating to public access channels and its operating rules could not be enforced after the Midwest case. However, the rules are indicative of the model of public access that has been constructed through local authorities ever since. The operating rules specified that access was to be first-come, first-served and non-discriminatory; without advertising, lottery information or indecent matter; and that records must be kept of individuals and groups who have requested access time (Fuller, 1994: 20). As indicated by these rules, access television was to be implemented first and foremost on the basis of speech rights. Linda K. Fuller writes that, ‘philosophically, the concept of public access has its roots in John Stuart Mill’s social libertarian theory; politically, in First Amendment guarantees of free speech; legally in

FCC and Supreme Court mandates for localism and viewer rights’ (1994: 4).

The outcomes of free speech rulings are closely followed by the sector as they define how far “first-come-first-served” policies can be altered. As the primary justification for access television, it would seem logical that the liberal rights framework would provide its security, but this has been far from the case. Laura Stein has detailed in her work on the legal history of public

92 access how the relationship of access to First Amendment rights remains unspecified (2001b). Moreover, public access channels have not been recognised legally as public forums and remain vulnerable to constitutional challenges by the cable companies themselves. These challenges to the legitimacy of public access have themselves relied upon First Amendment rights, asserting that public access television is an infringement on the cable companies ability to control its own resource.

In 1984 Congress developed a national policy for cable television, which codified the ability of the franchising authority to require PEG channels, facilitates and equipment. The Act forbade cable operators from exercising editorial control over the channels but stipulated that they could not be found liable as a result of access content. It also placed limits on the amount of intervention available to franchise authorities and capped the franchise fee at

5% of subscriber revenue. The Act did not prevent the establishment of monopolies at the local level, thereby effectively protecting industry despite being couched in the language of deregulation (Streeter, 1996). Some lower court decisions upheld the implied (but not explicit) status of PEG channels as public forums. For instance, a case involving the Ku Klux Klan and Kansas

City found that neither the government nor the cable operator had a right to censor content. In other cases, however, it was found that the government had no compelling interest in mandating public access (Stein, 2001b). In 1992 a new move by Congress undermined the public forum status of public access channels to an even greater degree. The Cable Television Consumer

Protection Act made cable operators liable for obscene programming on

93 access channels, effectively restoring the cable operator’s editorial control – and hence their property rights – over the channels. The Alliance for

Community Media challenged the indecency rules on the basis that the channels were public forums in which programmers had First Amendment rights. They were unsuccessful. The FCC asserted that the cable operators rights were being restored rather than those of access programmers being taken away.

That public access violates First Amendment rights of the cable operator demonstrates how the liberal rights framework has had highly contested, contradictory outcomes for access television. Calabrese and Wasco have written that the cable television structure, in which government-sanctioned cable monopolies have a greater claim to First Amendment rights than other parties, has dealt ‘an argument for the public protection of private censorship’

(1992: 140). That public power has been used ‘to establish a private monopoly by way of an exclusive cable franchise’ is an example of why First

Amendment rights can only be understood through property rights – whether a space can be considered a public forum or private property. As Stein outlines, there is no consensus amongst judges as to how access challenges should be dealt with in terms of its claim to public forum status and the competing property claims of cable companies. Public access has been seen by some as analogous to the granting of public easements on private property – a bargain with local government ‘to provide a right of access to the cable system in exchange for the use of public rights-of-way’ (Stein, 2001b: 20). But for others, access channels are deemed to be unconstitutional infringements of the

94 private property of the cable operator. As Streeter writes, ‘in the popular imagination free speech still stands for dissent, for alternatives, for debate.

But practically speaking, free speech functions to structure industry relations and insulate them from political accountability’ (1996: 193).

Stein concludes that only an empowering, rather than a defensive, approach to speech rights will protect public access television. She bases this within participatory democratic theory that sees the state as playing a positive role in providing forums for democratic speech and asserts that there is ample precedent in both ‘law and policy to support the legitimacy of government action that safeguards democratic speech’ (Stein, 2001b: 34). However, as

Patricia Aufderheide has argued, without nationally legislated public cable channel capacity, judicial battles fought at the whim of the cable industry are likely to persist (2000). As one legal brief recently summarised ‘the good news is that the First Amendment is alive and well, and the bad news is that it is usually difficult (or impossible) to predict how the First Amendment will be applied to specific situations’ (Horwood & Driver, 2002: 4). Expecting courts to unanimously embrace an empowering speech regime seems a distant hope under a dominant American public philosophy that equates liberalism foremost with property rights but disguises the implicit power relations of property behind a natural rights framework. These issues will be returned to in

Chapter Six, in relation to the communications commons debates. For now, it is enough to see that access has been an easily undermined phenomenon in the

US and that no universal conception or dedication to access as a public space exists.

95 Access and First Come, First Served: Reassessing Rights

Recently in Davis (a University town in California), a Republican student group had invited a controversial speaker who ‘promotes the idea that we don’t need to do any more apologising for what he calls the “damn slave thing”’ (Peterson, 2001). Black student campaign groups demanded that the speaker’s advertisement be pulled from the student newspaper, then attended the event in order to stage a walkout. Later at Davis Community Television, the Station Manager, Kari Peterson, discussed with the Programming Manager who within the community would make an appropriate moderator for their program with the deliberately ambiguous name of Get the Word Out. Davis

Community Television had decided to produce an episode of Get the Word

Out to debate the topic. The station’s dilemma on that day was how to choose a host for the program without appearing to take sides; but that was only a particular instance in what Peterson saw as a bigger issue. This seemingly routine discussion between two staff was recounted to me in order to highlight the everyday problems that access television stations confront in terms of the negotiation and management of free speech. That Davis Community

Television had created a program to allow for such discussion was pushing the boundaries of access in a profound way. It was a deliberate intervention into the “first come first served” policy of access in that it chose to showcase certain issues and encourage access by groups who might not otherwise participate.

Davis Community Television once followed a strict access mandate, seeing themselves as ‘completely hands-off, that we provided a soap-box and that

96 our job was to facilitate others’ use of the equipment and that my job was to open the door in the morning’ (Peterson, 2001). Peterson explains, however, that the people who came through that door were mostly people ‘with a lot of time on their hands, some fringe element, individuals, people for whom video is a passion’. In order to encourage others within the community to use the station, Davis Community Television devised a number of generic programs that would be run by volunteers and interns at the station with supervision and training conducted by staff. The idea behind the programs was that people within the community would be able to speak on issues relevant to them or their organisation without having to go through the long and difficult process of training, production and post-production. It was a move away from the producer-driven ethos that has traditionally characterised community broadcasting. Peterson explains it as ‘making community speech easier’, but also as the facilitation of dialogue within the community:

Our mission has evolved to become about serving our

community, much more of a community development

mission. It has to do with strengthening the community by

empowering people of diverse viewpoints to speak, but the

other part of the equation is to ensure that people are hearing

what they have to stay.

Access is an avenue through which Americans engage with and contest ideas of free speech and pluralism. It is not simply a theoretical principle that is called on to justify requests for electronic public forums, but the questioning, creation and trial of American political values on a daily basis. Simply

97 “opening the door in the morning” reflects a first-come-first served philosophy, whereby individuals are not discriminated against but granted equal rights of access. It negates the idea that some groups should be privileged over others, even if that might balance out the representation of different groups within that locality. The fervency with which this policy has been discussed and implemented in the past through public access television in the United States, and which continues today in many stations, demonstrates the working, or active, presence of philosophical ideals within community broadcasting. As Downing writes:

[T]he First Amendment, the right to free public speech, is

not a settled American achievement, nor is it an arid desert

for professional lawyers. It is a contested area, which has

everything to do with our always fragile, threatened rights to

communicate about toxic waste dumps, policy violence,

City Hall corruption, the scandals of our schools, teen

pregnancy and a whole long list besides. If access TV is not

seen as the best guarantor of what our First Amendment

rights are in contested situations in our localities, then its

purpose is cloudy and its future very obscure (Downing,

1991: 8)

The US tradition of public access was built upon a straightforward interpretation of the First Amendment as its defining principle. If everyone has an equal right to produce and distribute their viewpoints through public access, then the resulting marketplace of ideas will enhance America’s

98 pluralist democracy. The normative liberal doctrines were embedded within this model – it provided a framework based upon rights with only minimal restrictions imposed in the allocation of resources (time-slots, equipment use).

However, observations and accusations that democracy was difficult to find within the plethora of “vanity video” style programs that were submitted began to be voiced in the 1980s. Theorists held that behind these calls was a reassessment of the notion of free speech itself – that more speech did not necessarily equate with better speech. It was a challenge to the predominant contemporary liberal doctrine that the mere provision of access rights would yield a better system for all (Aufderheide, 2000; Downing, 1991; Stein, 1997).

It is pluralist in that personal alliances are considered a matter of individual choice, and difference is considered a matter of toleration. Public access, in this way, has been a defined but thinly managed space of individual expression with community (as in group) media occurring as a derivative activity, or by-product.

At a day-to-day level, the free speech principle has been important in overcoming potential conflicts that could arise in the attempt to prioritise community interests. Interviews conducted by Higgins with volunteer producers in the mid-1990s led him to the conclusion that the free speech dogma was a strategy that ‘allowed individual producers to endure ideological differences that otherwise might be personally intolerable’ (Higgins, 2002:

13). The value of free speech was that it could work as an accepted rule that everyone had to follow. Toleration was realised not so much through idealistic notions of constructive dialogue, but through compliance to a legalistic rights

99 policy. In one quote from Higgins’s research, a volunteer insists that he will not work on any program ‘that’s contrary to Christ’, although he admits that he did help one such producer to get his car started: ‘…his choke broke down and I helped him with his starter [laughing]. Crawled right up under it and helped him with it, but I’m not gonna help him with his program’ ( see also

Higgins, 1999; Higgins, 2002: 13). As this short story indicates, cooperation and toleration have resulted from the pluralist approach even if only to a limited degree.

The Alliance for Community Media published a special issue of its quarterly

Community Media Review entitled ‘Rethinking Access Philosophy’ in 2002, in which notions of “first-come-first served”, free speech and the relationship of theory to practice are confronted by both scholars and practitioners. This collection is one of the few texts that unites community media theory with the concerns and observations of practitioners. It demonstrates plainly that community broadcasting in the United States not only needs to be seen within the context of American pluralism, but that it is intimately caught up in the complex project of advancing community concerns within a liberal, individualist framework. John Higgins writes in his contribution that ‘the critiques from within public access, developed in a laboratory of daily practice, represent positive steps to move beyond simple assumptions of democracy and power, toward a more integrated view of access within a complex society framework’ (2002: 12). In this way, access television is attempting to balance liberal principles with non-market life. Measures such as those taken by Davis Community Television are efforts to bring civil

100 society into view, negotiating the needs of groups without abandoning a commitment to individual freedom.

American community media theorists have discussed this shift in terms of competing claims over speech rights. They have not departed from the rights discourse, so much as redefined its boundaries in relation to the access story.

John Higgins (2002) sees it as a move away from current “one-dimensional” interpretations of free speech that pursue strictly individual and equal rights regardless of social context. He sees it as a return to early American interpretations of free speech, where the emphasis was on individual rights as a means to wider social freedom and benefit for all. It is also as a move towards more recent critical interpretations of free speech that highlight issues around ideas of “truth” and power – factors which are purposefully erased in liberal theories (such as Rawls’s) in order to assume that the best outcome for all is met. As with the communitarian critique of liberalism, Higgins’s critical approach holds that the liberal premise is misleading as individuals cannot be separated from the society and circumstances in which they live. To do so risks the entrenchment of inequality, as those with less power and resources are unlikely to compete fairly with those who have more. As Calabrese and

Wasco have written, the premises of freedom of expression in American liberal theory go beyond the individual’s freedom of expression, suggesting the ‘need to balance individual freedom against larger social goals such as rights of access to the media and a right to hear’ (Calabrese & Wasko, 1992).

Laura Stein’s discussion on the legal grounds of public access is similar, taking participatory democratic theory as a means to understand the full role

101 of public access and that ‘speech rights must be interpreted in light of the real conditions affecting democratic speech’ (Stein, 2001b: 33).

These critiques are not a departure from liberalism, or the access commitment to speech rights, but more of a departure from a particular market-oriented individualism that has emerged out of liberalism in recent decades. As other writers have also asserted, the stylised contrast between liberalism and communitarianism was less defined in classical liberal theory than it is in the dominant liberal position of current American politics. Although the

Enlightenment thinkers, in particular John Locke and John Stuart Mill were captured by ideas of reason and empiricism – a rationalism that was important in overcoming previously justified hierarchies and oppression – they did not abandon moral traditionalism. Natural laws were central to their position and liberal rights were advocated as a means to cultivation of unquestionable human virtues. Despite their secularism they were not moral relativists and remained dedicated to ideas of truth (Spragens, 1995). The point is that the corrective notions of access do not depart from liberal philosophy, but only dispute the modern-day American manifestation of it. Individual rights remain central to understanding access television, however, the end result – the ultimate social goal – requires intervention in terms of channel capacity and direction in the creation of more watchable channels. ‘Contemporary liberalism’, writes Spragens, is

…vastly more secular and arguably more materialistic than

earlier liberalism. It is much more agonistic regarding what

constitutes the good life and human virtue. And, to make a

102 point which is particularly pertinent to the concerns of

communitarianism, it has transformed and radicalised the

whole conception of political individualism (Spragens,

1995: 43).

For the defenders of access television, it is important to be mindful of the

“good life”. If anything, the problematic aspects of public access television tell of the fragmentation that results from a “hands off” approach to community. Where critics of access were sceptical of its relevance to democratic process, it supporters responded that, yes, ‘civic life is a cultural process that must be nurtured’ (Aufderheide, 2000). If public access is left to its own devices – or to the whims of the cable companies – then new thought needs to be given to American values and public philosophy. And with it new practices of civil society support and communication. As Walzer has written on the topic of American pluralism: ‘Most often, when individual men and women insist on “being themselves”, they are in fact defending a self they share with others’ (Walzer, 1995b: 146).

Access and the Civil Society Debate

In this way the critique of access policy displays another angle of the liberal- communitarian divide. At Boston Neighbourhood Network (BNN) the concern was that community groups, and not just individuals, required assistance to participate in public access television. With stretched resources many groups would not be able to find volunteers or staff with the time to learn television production, to the exclusion of many associations in the community who

103 could potentially make use of the resource (interview with Curtis Henderson).

It was a matter of encouraging and facilitating media use by community groups out of a belief that the work of such groups was vital to the community. The solution for BNN was a channel called BNNLive, which is run as an “automatic studio”, requiring only two station volunteers and a fixed set that could be made available to groups within the community. Panel-style discussions can be broadcast without the groups needing to produce programs themselves. The move towards programs such as Get the Word Out and those on BNNLive suggests that some access stations see themselves as playing a part in the support and revival of civil society, placing a strong emphasis on the importance of associations. A look at the program schedule for BNNLive over a one week period shows programs called the Citywide Parent’s Council,

MA Association of Women Lawyers, The Greek Program, Arthritis Answers,

Small Business Today and a program Lets Talk About It (by Citizens for

Participation in Political Action). The program format may be basic, but it works for groups needing to get information out to their communities.

Furthermore, the station is aware that with such associations on side, it is unlikely that the city will renege on BNN in future contracts. And it is not just

Boston that is taking such steps. Manhattan Neighbourhood Network has also turned one of their channels into what they call a “curated” channel with programs (not necessarily live) relevant to the Manhattan community.

The encouragement of associations is premised on the idea that speech rights and what Sandel calls America’s general “public philosophy” is ill equipped to deal with ‘the erosion of community’ (Sandel, 1996: 3). The idea that ‘if

104 the locality is to take access television as a serious matter, as a communication lifeline, then it cannot be simply left to its groups to find their way to the door’ (Downing, 1991: 8) is a call for renewed civic engagement. The restructuring of access to provide for the participation of associations and the deliberation of community concerns is therefore underpinned by the idea that civil society can contribute to the good life in a way that will not be realised through strict adherence to a neutral rights policy. Although the connection is not made between access television and the civil society debate in the literature10, the parallel exists. What is the point of considering civil society arguments in the light of community radio and television? It is certainly the case that to ignore the role of community media within civil society – its potential and realised status as a means to information distribution for a myriad of civil society organisations – is to underestimate its importance (as argued in Chapter Two). It is also the case that there is a movement within some access stations to reaffirm its centrality to civil society groups and to expand these networks. There is, therefore, an undeniably deliberate engagement with notions of civil society extension and renewal. Seeing access television only in terms of an uncomplicated, minimalist notion of speech rights denies this role.

The civil society debate – one of the central themes of this thesis – has had a particular treatment in America. It has been expressed as an insecurity towards America’s future – in particular the country’s moral and social

10 I do, however, acknowledge an engaging discussion of the civil society debate with Rob McCausland of BNN in May 2001.

105 outlook. Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone has come to epitomise this approach, although Putnam is far from alone in his views. Alan Wolfe observed that the unprecedented media and popular attention that Putnam’s work attracted makes it ‘impossible to argue that interest in the idea of civil society was somehow manufactured or ungenuine. Clearly the idea and the national mood worked in tandem’ (1998: 18). Putnam’s own account of the

“national mood” is salient:

In 1992 three quarters of the U.S. workforce said that “the

breakdown of community” and “selfishness” were “serious”

or “extremely serious” problems in America. In 1996 only 8

percent of all Americans said that ‘the honesty and integrity

of the average American’ were improving, as compared with

50 percent of us who thought we were becoming less

trustworthy. Those of us who said that people had become

less civil over the preceding ten years outnumbered those

who thought people had become more civil, 80 percent to 12

percent. In several surveys in 1999 two-thirds of Americans

said that America’s civic life had weakened in recent years,

that social and moral values were higher when they were

growing up, and that our society was focused more on the

individual than the community. More than 80 percent said

that there should be more emphasis on community, even if

that put more demands on individuals (Putnam, 2000: 25).

106 The methodology behind such figures, as well as Putnam’s broader observations on the drop in voluntarism and group membership have been challenged on many counts (See Sullivan, 1999; Galston & Levine, 1998).

But although trust may be difficult to measure, and other forms of civic engagement may exist that are not identified in Bowling Alone, Putnam does pick up on a mood worthy of consideration. The civil society debate is centred around an idea of a perceived decline in moral values to assert that Americans have been ‘pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the century’ (Putnam, 2000). That participation in politics (voter turnout and party membership), in the institutions of civil society (its associations and clubs), as well as informal ties (social gatherings such as picnics and bowling), has sunk is said to have consequences for both democracy and the general happiness of citizens. Exactly how this conclusion is reached is difficult to discern in much of the civil society debate, except that failed social policy is seen to be part of it, with poverty, crime, family breakdown and drug addiction symptomatic of political and social collapse.

Others assert that voluntary activity is a necessary politicising experience that raises participation in formal political processes. But it is not simply that community organisations are viewed as one answer to social policy concerns

(a theme discussed in greater detail in Chapter Five), but that values such as trust, loyalty and altruism are being threatened.

It is possibly the reluctance within American thought to depart from an individualist framework that has led to such reliance upon morality as a means to social advancement. If individual selfishness weakens pluralism to the point

107 where people become ‘religious and cultural freeloaders, their lives enhanced by a community they do not actively support and by an identity they need not themselves cultivate’ (Walzer, 1995b), then what can be done? European-style associationalism does not necessarily provide an easy answer, as rights are subordinated to association membership made compulsory by the state. It is, therefore, no surprise that much of the civil society debate has become a lament for the decline in the moral responsibility of individuals. Those that have sought to answer the problem have looked to the realm of civil society as a possible means to strengthen social bonds with only minimal state involvement. Their basis for making this claim is that interaction with others creates trust and responsibility which will manifest itself in the wider political community to the benefit of all. The ultimate responsibility for social improvement is placed on individuals’ personal qualities, with an acknowledgment that the formation of these values is built through social relations.

One of the problems with this type of moralism is that it can paint an unrealistic portrait of what exists in the cultural sphere. Not only is Putnam suspicious of the media, seeing it as destructive of community (Chapter Two), but also much of the civil society debate ignores the types of affiliation and activity that are not “desirable” in the cultural realm of middle-class America.

As access stations demonstrate, so long as the free speech imperative remains, then the speech that is likely to result is unpredictable. Television channels on which teenagers freely swear whilst play-acting WWF wrestling can hardly be said to be promoting middle-class notions of good community. The sector’s

108 virulent fight against indecency restrictions has demonstrated that this is not likely to go away – and nor should it. Access television is in one respect a rude awakening to the fact that to understand and support civil society requires looking at the world, good and bad, face on.

Jean L. Cohen’s criticism of Putnam’s work addresses the issue of moralism.

Cohen argues that Putnam’s conception of civil society and the notion of moral decline ‘undermines democracy instead of making it work, threatens personal liberty instead of enhancing it, and blocks social justice and solidarity instead of furthering them’ (1999). The singular focus on voluntary associations as moral incubators is misguided on two counts: firstly, for ignoring the importance of political institutions and legal rights guarantees, and secondly, it overlooks the genesis of ideas and policy that occur through deliberation in civil society. The first point is important as it highlights the fact that rights protect and encourage freedom of association, diversity, expression and so on – an important aspect of pluralism that supports

America’s culture of voluntarism as much as its individualism (this point is also made by Verba, Schlozman, & Brady, 1995). The second point is that

Putnam must rely upon moral notions of trust and reciprocity in lieu of an adequate conception of deliberation and information exchange in civil society.

Cohen is dissatisfied with the conclusion drawn by Putnam and others that horizontally structured rather than vertically structured associations create

“good” social capital, thereby increasing political responsibility. She points out that this method is flawed as ‘we are never really told why only horizontal

109 as distinct from vertical associative networks produce social capital’ (1999:

62). Cohen continues:

I suspect that the issue is handled this way because the most

obvious argument cannot be made without considerably

complicating the theoretical framework: namely, that

perhaps what develops interactive abilities and democratic

competence within an association is participation as an equal

in the exchange of opinions and in collective deliberations

over associational affairs – that is, voice in the association's

internal public sphere. Hierarchical, authoritarian

associations such as the Mafia can easily generate skill in

strategic action; the Catholic Church can generate loyalty.

But I suspect that only associations with internal publics

structured by the relevant norms of discourse can develop

the communicative competence and interactive abilities

important to democracy (Cohen, 1999: 63).

So although she does not dispute that civil association can have moral effects such as the fostering of toleration and trust, she asserts that the focus needs to be on deliberation and the democratic qualities of groups. For, ‘if all the myriad associations of civil society were structured like the Mafia, I doubt that either democratic competence or even liberal tolerance among citizens would be widespread’ (63). Moreover, she questions the assumption in civil society discourse that trust between individuals within groups must necessarily lead to trust in wider society. For instance, there is no reason to

110 assume that participation in a choral society will translate into political engagement or the desire to create a good society. There is nothing to lead us to the conclusion that intragroup trust will ever be anything other than particularistic without the influence of other factors. Cohen therefore maintains that it is what she calls voice rather than values such as loyalty, trust and virtue that are important in civil society. Such a focus on voice and deliberation requires an understanding of the public within civil society discussions. Without this, the civil society debate descends into talk of moral decline that has little to do with democratisation. Cohen’s argument has much in common with that of Stein and Higgins in that it is public space for deliberation that is seen as essential to the vitality and strength of civil society and thus access television.

Access television is therefore devoted to the sometimes contradictory principles of individual rights and community building, promoting local issues, concerns, groups and personalities but refusing to sit in judgement of what should be considered right and wrong within that pluralist, sometimes fragmented, realm. When the moral role is necessarily abandoned (but the community engagement role acknowledged), all that can be said about access stations is that they are distributors of information and network builders. Their claim to community building comes not through the promotion of values or the selection of communities that are deemed “good” for society, but through their provision of a channel through which communities can potentially reach out to their members or others beyond their immediate group.

111 New Developments: LPFM, LPTV and Digital Broadcasting

Beyond cable television, there have been some interesting developments for community broadcasting in the United States in recent years. Most significant has been the emergence of low power radio stations. According to the

Prometheus Radio Project, in the early 1960s thousands of local non-profit radio stations were broadcasting in the US. Changes to broadcasting policy in

1978, which eliminated 10 watt radio licences and cleared the way for commercial licences, reversed this situation making community licences virtually impossible to get. Even the community radio umbrella organisation, the National Federation of Community Broadcasters (NFCB) was, until recently, largely composed of public broadcasting (PBS) radio stations run by community boards. In many instances these stations have proved vulnerable to corporate interests at the board level. A more radical community radio movement surfaced with Free Radio stations – micropower radio stations that broadcasted without licences who were bound by a strong ethic of media ownership democratisation.

It was partly the threat posed by the pirate radio broadcasters that caused the

FCC’s Chairman Kennard to begin a rulemaking inquiry into non-profit low power radio (LPFM) licences in 1998 (although apparently he was also inspired by Zane Ibrahim of Bush Radio in South Africa during a visit to the station (Pierson, 2003)). Although the LPFM licence did eventuate, it attracted substantial resistance from both the commercial and public broadcasters who claimed that the LPFM signals would interfere with their existing signals ( for more technical information on interference see Prometheus Radio Project,

112 2000a). This resistance was taken to Congress where a Bill was passed that effectively limited the number and power of LPFM stations, and precluded the possibility for higher powered transmitters in urban areas. The Radio

Broadcasting Act 2000 prevented former pirate broadcasters from applying for licences (this was later found to contravene First Amendment rights).

However, the Act did not entirely restrict this new, and encouraging, community broadcasting development. The current President of the NFCB – whose membership now also includes LPFM stations – reported at the World

Association of Community Broadcasters (AMARC) conference in 2003, that commercial radio licensees have reached the limits of audience tolerance for profit-raising strategies such as advertising and play-lists. As a result, audiences for non-profit stations are on the rise.

Low power television stations (LPTV) were created in 1982 as a means to enhance diversity and to encourage local programming. These licences were created with “secondary spectrum priority” to ensure that they would not interfere with existing or new full-service stations. There are some 2200 licensed LPTV stations in approximately 1000 communities. They are recognised by the FCC as providing ‘a wide variety of programs to ethnic, racial and interest communities with the larger area’, as well as local news, weather and public affairs programming (Federal Communications

Commission, 1999). The stations are not necessarily community stations, many supplying retransmitted signals from the networks or used within schools for educational purposes. However, according to the FCC, LPTV services have significantly increased the diversity of broadcasting ownership.

113 They therefore represent access to broadcast spectrum rather than community broadcasting per se.

As LPTV stations could easily be displaced (due to their secondary status), their ability to raise necessary capital has always been difficult. Now, with the introduction of digital television, the prospect of LPTV stations being pushed out of the picture has become a reality. In order for full-power stations to complete the transition from analog to digital, the FCC has provided them with a second channel for the conversion period. In assigning digital television channels, the FCC maintained the secondary status of LPTV and were ‘compelled to establish [digital television] allotments that will displace a number of LPTV stations’. The Community Broadcasters Protection Act sought to rectify this situation by providing LPTV with Class A, or primary, status. However, according to the criteria, LPTV stations can’t win Class A status if their signals overlap with the digital-coverage areas planned by existing full-power broadcasters. The number of aspiring low power television licensees far exceeds the number of licences available. In 2000, 1318 full- power licensees announced that they were planning on transmitting digital signals to the maximum permitted coverage areas, despite the fact that many of them were well below the maximum levels in their analog coverage. It is suggested that ‘by signalling intentions now, the full-power stations hope to ward off encroachment by LPTV outlets’ (McConnell, Feb 14, 2000).

The ramifications of digital broadcasting in the USA for community broadcasters parallel the situation in Australia. For radio in the United States,

114 digital broadcasting planning blocks new entrants to an even greater degree.

The In-Band-On-Channel (IBOC) plan provides full-power stations with spectrum around their current channel rather than a new channel allocation for digital broadcasting. When the simulcast period is over, the stations will be permitted to occupy the entire bandwidth they have used during the simulcast period rather than relinquishing their old channel to new broadcasters.

Exposing the real issues behind spectrum planning, Prometheus Radio have written that this system means that more digital signals will occupy a given bandwidth (creating more potential for interference) than Kennard’s plans for

LPFM would have. ‘In the digital age, this is akin to elephants blaming mice for crowding them off the savanna’ (Prometheus Radio Project, 2000b: 2).

Canada

The Canadian experience demonstrates the difficulties that arise when community broadcasting is not adequately legislated for and the attempt to rectify lack of policy. Télévision Communautaire des Bois-Francs (TVCBF) is located in Victoriaville, Quebec. The station began in 1974 as a video access centre, established independently from the local cable company. Its board is elected by its membership, which is open to both groups and individuals within the community. In 1985 the private company Videotron bought the local cable franchise from the existing operator and contracted

TVCBF to manage all local programming for Victoriaville’s local community channel. TVCBF now functions as a community access channel, training and mobilising volunteers and producing local programming. 16,000 people in

115 Victoriaville receive television via cable, and ratings have indicated that 20% of these viewers watch TVCBF on a regular basis, mostly for its local information programming. The Victoriaville community is committed to the channel. This has been demonstrated in recent years through the community’s fight to keep the station community-run.

When I visited in 2001, there was an atmosphere of anxiety at the station.

Prior to 1997, cable companies were required to provide a community channel and to give 5% of their subscriber revenue to fund community programming.

In 1994 TVCBF discovered that the cable company was not meeting this obligation. Between 1985 and 1991 Videotron were paying TVCBF $10,000 per annum. In 1991 this figure increased to $15,000, however, it was discovered that the figure owed should have been closer to $90,000. When

TVCBF took their complaint to the CRTC, Videotron were made to pay the group not 5% of their revenue, but 9%. As a result, TVCBF’s funding leapt from $15,000 a year to $150,000 a year between 1992 and 1998. When the obligation to host community television was removed in 1997, Videotron decreased their funding of TVCBF to $50,000 ($AUD 64,290) a year, leaving the group to make up the rest through community fundraising, their Bingo program (which brings in $30,000 a year) and grants. Videotron’s attempt to prevent TVCBF from running the channel failed in Victoriaville only due to community mobilisation and protest. However, Videotron had succeeded in closing down 10 other community-run channels in the Montreal area, replacing them with their own content (Voyer, 2001).

116 Although cable companies were permitted to discontinue the community channels, doing so would mean that the companies would have to pay a full

5% of their subscriber revenue to the Canadian production fund. If they maintained their community channels, then this would be reduced to beween

2% and 3.5%. The community access channels were retained by many as a result, but became increasingly professionalised and began to disregard the

CRTC’s guidelines. Many reduced, or ceased completely, their access and training components. A station just outside of Montreal, TVC de

Châteauguay, reported that their access had decreased from 6 hours a day to 3 minutes every 3 weeks. Access consisted only of a segment on a program that showcases highlights of community programming throughout the region

(Desrochers, 2001). Increased ownership concentration of cable franchises and cable operators moving towards networked systems and programming is one possible reason for this, another being the cable companies’ preference for professional programming.

Canada was considered to be the leader in community television prior to the

1997 changes. Cathy Edwards, documentary maker and former community television volunteer described it as ‘second to none in the world prior to 1997 in providing a public space on television for individuals and community groups to express their concerns and to exchange information’ (2001). In response to the lack of access, a community television advocate, Jan Pachul, submitted an application for a low power terrestrial television (LPTV) licence in the area of Toronto. Although LPTV community licences existed at that time for remote areas of Canada, there was no policy for such licences in

117 metropolitan areas. The CRTC rejected the application as it was outside existing licence conditions. StarRay TV became a pirate television station – and Jan an embittered adversary of the CRTC (see www.srtv.on.ca). However, the CRTC did issue a review of community radio and television policy, encompassing cable television, digital services and low power television and radio.

The resulting policy, released in October 2002, makes a strong commitment to both access and localism (CRTC Public Notice 2002-61). Under the new policy, cable companies still have the ability to run community channels and receive a reduction in their contributions to the Canadian production fund.

However, they must abide by a number of rules including a minimum of 60% community programming produced either by the licensee or by members of the community from the licensed area, which must be given scheduling priority. Furthermore, the licensees must devote a minimum of 30% of their programming aired to access programming or 50% where demand exists (free of charge). Where one or more local non-profit community television corporations exist in an area – groups such as TVCPF and TVC de

Châteauguay – then 20% of programming aired must be made available for access programs from such groups. Where there is more than one group then a minimum of four hours of access must be granted to each group per week.

Consultation with the community via advisory boards and/or feedback from volunteers is required, and the channels must reflect ‘the mulitcultural and

Aboriginal reality of their communities’. In terms of the financing of the community channels, cable systems with less than 20,000 subscribers may

118 elect to allocate the full 5% of their contribution to the Canadian production fund to local expression. Only limited sponsorship is permitted, although advertising is allowed where no other local services (radio or television) exist, presumably because there is no danger of them infringing on the markets of existing services. An important addition to the legislation is that where the cable operator does not provide a community channel, non-profit community groups may apply for a community programming service licence. This is to be arranged as a mandatory carriage arrangement where the operator does not operate a community channel.

In regards to low power television, new rules replace the former remote licences. Low power television can be established either on a for-profit or non-profit basis where spectrum exists, but have second class status to full- power stations, meaning that they can be required to cease operation or change their assigned channel if they interfere with a regular channel’s signal.

Low power television may broadcast up to 12 minutes of advertising in the hour, however, it must be local advertising. Low power radio can also be run on a non-profit or for-profit basis, but the Commission states that ‘the ownership of multiple low-power radio licences and cross-ownership between low-power radio and low-power television will generally be discouraged’.

The new policy does take into account the problems experienced by community television groups in Quebec. Groups around the Montreal area will be able to resume broadcasting their programs, as will other groups throughout the country. TVC de Châteauguay will get four hours per week, as

119 they will share the access time with other groups in their area (Desrochers, private correspondence). The legislation still gives priority to the private cable operator, in that where they chose to run the community channel themselves they may do so, as long as they provide the access quota and associated requirements. Only where the cable operator chooses not to run the station can groups such as TVCBF apply for an independent licence. Some opportunities exist for sponsorship, and the cable operator is required to spend money derived from sponsorship on the channel. However, the CRTC, not wishing to deprive the Canadian production fund of the 5% of cable subscriber revenue have stipulated that only smaller licensees can elect to put that money towards the community channel. The independent community groups cannot apply to the Canadian production fund. Furthermore, there is no requirement that the cable operator provide a portion of their revenue to the maintenance of these groups. The financial position of groups therefore remains tenuous. Finally, as there is no requirement that the community channel be carried on satellite, the community content is lost to a potentially large audience. In Montreal, the

Videotron technicians have recently been on strike, causing as many as 15% of their customers to move to satellite (André Desrochers: private correspondence). Although the Canadian legislation is forward thinking for its multi-platform approach (cable, digital cable and low power radio and television), as with most other places, satellite remains the sticking point.

120 The Next Step?

The policy history of community media in North America is a more complex dance than simply “one step forward, two steps back”. The battles for access have been fought on different fronts without a federally mandated community broadcasting set-aside. It is not only a history of conflicting political agendas, but also of the unresolved position of community broadcasting principles within the wider broadcasting framework. At the time of writing, in the USA the FCC was undergoing a review of the last remaining ownership rules designed to limit the size of media corporations’ control of the airwaves. As a result, access is becoming an increasingly relevant concept. In this chapter it has been shown how community broadcasting requires a more complex investigation into access than speech-rights theory provides. Once community broadcasting’s role within civil society is understood, more productive models arise. Chapter Six looks at new articulations of access that seek to move beyond the idea of access to an otherwise controlled space and towards an

“information commons”. The concept of community building, introduced in this chapter, will be further discussed in Chapter Five. First, however, some other policy values that have shaped community broadcasting require attention, namely those of quality and non-commercialism.

121 Chapter Four: Europe

Disruptions to the Public Service

The era in which radical and not-so-radical independent

stations [in France] challenged the state’s monopoly on

radio broadcasting ran from March 1977 through summer

1985… An exquisite touch was when one rebel station

(known in the movement as “the pirate’s pirate”), actually

succeeded in broadcasting for 4 months from right inside the

very headquarters where the jamming signals were emitted,

operated by a technician totally disillusioned with his work

as a jammer.

– John Downing

Community television in Europe emerged out of, and in response to, a broadcasting environment characterised by public service broadcasting monopolies. Although the policy and institutional structures of individual nations differed significantly during the monopoly era, broadcasting on the whole was essentially closed to competition after the initial experiments of the

122 1920s. Nations allocated broadcasting spectrum to semi-public institutions, giving them exclusive permission to broadcast. These broadcasters were not necessarily single institutions or “national” in their reach: Belgium and

Switzerland both had separate broadcasters for different language groups.

Britain allocated spectrum to commercial consortia in addition to its national service, whilst the Netherlands licensed broadcasters according to the “pillars” of ideological associations that structured civil society. German broadcasting was (and remains) organised at the state, rather than federal, level. Despite these differences, it is generally the case that as European viewers and listeners tuned in to a limited number of channels, TV’s mass media found a mass audience for four decades.

Eli Noam writes that the success of these institutions, with their politically and culturally influential programming, made the public service broadcasting structure seem ‘the natural order of things, as if exclusivity over a major form of information provision in open societies were not highly unusual’ (1991: 4).

When change eventually arrived in the 1970s and 80s, the strength of this belief surfaced, with defenders of the status quo in government and intellectual arenas appearing in force. Public service broadcasting was therefore the measure by which other forms of broadcasting would be compared. Community broadcasting, as a result of this climate, would be judged on the basis of quality, under the threat of privatisation. European community broadcasting therefore needs to be seen within a different context to community media in North America. Non-commercial television and radio in countries without a dominating public broadcaster (USA, Canada and, to

123 some extent, Australia) have a different set of issues from countries where it has arisen ‘from criticism of a monopolistic public service system that was considered out of touch’ (Kleinsteuber & Sonnenberg, 1990: 97).

At the heart of the tensions surrounding the decentralisation of broadcasting discussed here – piracy, the cable experiments, and the establishment of community broadcasting – is the ongoing theme of the relationship between civil society and the state. The complex question of whether community broadcasters are made stronger through state assistance or best left to their own devices is the fundamental difference between the European and North

American models. Where the US tradition sees civil society as necessarily separate from the state, and potentially distorted by state involvement, the

European tradition sees civil society as dependent upon, and made stronger, through the state’s assistance. In the final section of this chapter, I shall discuss some of these issues in relation to the changing structures of civil society in Europe.

Others who have attempted to draw conclusions on the state of European broadcasting have written of the problem of generalisation. This is certainly an issue in respect to community broadcasting where vast differences are found within countries as well as between them. The examples in this chapter are therefore simply illustrations of themes and are not meant to represent the continent as a whole. However, international developments since the emergence of community broadcasting have meant that stations throughout

Europe have faced a common set of issues, even where models have varied

124 greatly. The decentralisation of broadcasting in Europe was the result of a number of concurrent forces of which pressures by citizen groups for participation was just one ( see Blumler, 1992b; Harrison & Woods, 2001;

Hoffman-Reim, 1992)). The opposition political parties in countries where state control was most stringent (such as France and Italy) sought representation in the media. Economic interests advocated decentralisation in order to enter the broadcast market. Within the public broadcasting corporations themselves, staff had been seeking greater freedom from centralised control. And, at the same time, the electronic sector was being promoted as an area of national economic development in many countries, leading to high-tech policy and the rollout of cable infrastructure.

Therefore, common issues facing the early community media sector throughout Europe can be identified. In their introduction to the only comprehensive volume on European community media, Jankowski, Prehn and

Stappers wrote in 1992:

Many general trends in media developments seem

impervious to national borders: satellite television and the

impact of foreign programming on national and local

culture, commercialisation of radio and television

programming at all levels of the media system, and the

tension between desire for community involvement in

programming and a trend toward more professional

production standards. These and other similarities are

125 strikingly evident among local radio and television stations

across Europe (Jankowski, Prehn, & Sappers, 1992: 1).

Beyond changes in media, Europe itself was transforming. New levels of secularisation, the arrival of new immigrant communities, the formation of the

European Community (formerly the EEC), and an emerging post-communist era for the East set a dramatic backdrop for the arrival of small-scale media.

The various European models of community broadcasting that emerged have been surveyed in Jankowski et al (1992) and elsewhere ( for instance

Jankowski, 2002; Kleinsteuber & Sonnenberg, 1990; Vittet-Philippe &

Crookes, 1986). This chapter builds upon this research to consider the broader tensions that shaped community broadcasting in Europe and to consider the new force now confronting the sector.

Sailing the Airwaves: Community Broadcasting’s

Pirate Beginnings

The initial disruptions to public broadcasting’s privileged status came from the sea – signals beamed into countries from unlicensed stations located on ships off the coast of Scandanavia. In 1958 the first commercially-run “pirate” radio station, Radio Mercur, transmitted into Switzerland and Denmark, setting a trend which later spread to the Netherlands, Belgium and Britain

(Noam, 1991). The ship from which Radio Mercur (1958–62) beamed its signal to the mainland, and that had earned them an alleged turnover of 6 million kroner, was shut down by the authorities only to be sold to a new

126 pirate, Radio Syd (1962–6), which broadcast into Sweden. Although sometimes a lucrative means to a “fast buck”, pirate stations were also leaky boats for investors. Laws were passed in Sweden, Belgium and Denmark from

1962 onwards to outlaw the stations, some with strict penalties including the seizure of assets (Eijk, 1992). Although the Netherlands did not create anti- piracy laws until 1974, the stations were still clandestine enterprises wherever they existed, defying national borders and operating with ambiguous ownership structures and an overall disregard for copyright and wavelength agreements (Chapman, 1992).

The stations gave audiences what was absent from public service broadcasting at that time, namely, American-style popular entertainment. But the pirates were seen as a legal problem rather than an indication of audience dissatisfaction with existing media. Political parties and licensed broadcasters raised concerns about the potential for the pirates to interfere with emergency signals. They also warned that the stations were likely to encourage listeners to get involved in fascism, communism or recreational drug use.

Although the commercial pirates seem far removed from community media, as Prehn writes, ‘their anti-establishment attitude and programming formats were, to an extent, a pre-echo of many community stations of the 1970s and

80s’ (Prehn, 1992: 250). Both were a movement “from below”, and a challenge to the established order. But where the commercial pirates did not possess the moral legitimacy required to gain legal status, the same could not be said for the second wave of pirates – this time established out of non-

127 commercial motives (Noam, 1991). In Italy, where the monopoly broadcaster was under tight political control, clandestine left-wing local stations run by trade unions and social movement groups began to appear, known as “radio libres”. In the town of Biella near Turin, cable pirate Telle-Biella distributed programs to 100 subscribers, informing them of alternatives to the political status quo (Noam, 1991). In France, the French Ecology Party began broadcasting via radio transmitters, starting a similar wave to that of Italy

(Downing, 2001). In both countries, local stations were recognised by law within a relatively short period of time (although in Italy commercial interests quickly overtook many of the community stations due to an absence of regulatory guidelines). Whether commercial or community, the pirate stations were a challenge to the control of the airwaves by top-down public institutions/corporations. Dissatisfaction from the viewing public, the initiatives of hobbyists and political frustration from under-represented groups, meant that aspiring broadcasters would go to great lengths to break into a controlled technical space. That some secured audiences large enough to attract advertising revenue is an indication of the public’s desire for an alternative.

This pre-history of European community broadcasting makes an easily romanticised story – pirate broadcasters sailing – and selling – the airwaves from the ocean. But piracy is an activity that does not just belong to an idealised past. Where constraints on broadcasting exist, people will find a means to transmission. And where piracy is found today, its rivals are no longer associated exclusively with public broadcasting, but strike also from

128 the commercial sector out of a need to protect their markets. Piracy is a tactic of the weak (Couldry, 2000; de Certeau, 1984), an intervention by those who seek to find gaps in the strategic spaces of regulated broadcast spectrum. It exists outside of the defined spaces of community broadcasting, and yet it often works through the same networks and movements. In some countries, the pirates made it clear that it was no longer acceptable for arguments of spectrum scarcity to be maintained – at least where signals did not interfere with those bands set aside for legal broadcast use (for instance Sweden. See

Hedman, 1992). Community broadcasters continue to use that same tactic but through more legal routes. In the early 1990s, a community television campaigner in the UK found a loophole in the UK’s broadcasting legislation and requested that the regulator find available spectrum for text-based services, which were available without a licence. In this way, Dave Rushton discovered how much spectrum, and where, was not in use – information he used in his campaign for local television (Rushton, 2001). In terms of use of electronic space, piracy and community broadcasting both work on a similar principle. Where community broadcasting seeks a delineated commons – a campsite for anyone to make use of – piracy pitches itself where it can, with little regard for who controls that space or who happened to be there first.

This history also demonstrates how community and commercial media came to be “in the same boat”, as it were, during the transitional period of the

1970s. As both were seen as a threat to the status quo, interesting alliances formed between the two not yet recognised sectors. Coming up against the powerful public service advocates, this did not always work to the advantage

129 of the community sector in terms of the way community broadcasting was perceived. A look at the initial experiments in community television (which preceded community radio in most countries) demonstrates the changing relationship of community broadcasting to both the public and private sector.

A Blurred Vision: The European Community

Television Experiments

The literature on the early community broadcasting trials yields two recurrent themes: decentralisation, in terms of the breakdown of the monopoly systems, and amateurism, as a threat to existing standards. Neither of these issues can be dealt with without reference to the changing position of public service broadcasting in terms of its assumed “rightful” control of broadcasting and notions of aesthetic quality. With the European community television trials taking place within systems which were, at that time, dominated by public service broadcasting, the predominant values were those which were perpetuated by the incumbents. When the first European community broadcasting trials took place in the 1970s, North American cable community television had already been established. It was looked to as a model but was recognised as operating in very different circumstances. In 1978 Peter Lewis warned that it was important to take into account what alternative media ‘was an alternative to’. Localism was a feature of North American broadcasting and viewers were ‘accustomed to seeing low-budget local programs’. He further

130 pointed out that ‘there is no long tradition, at least in the USA, of public service programming, or of public service local radio in either country’

(Lewis, 1978: 10). Community broadcasting, from the start, sat uneasily between the private and public sectors – it was non-commercial but still far from the established public institution model; it was supported by industry but only to the extent that it would open the way for mass commercial media.

Furthermore, the community producers were reliant upon the commercial cable providers in order to fulfil their ideals of participatory media, while the cable companies saw local television as a means to win government favour.

The community television experiments were described at the time as the

‘alliance of the mercenaries and the missionaries’ (Lewis, 1978: 16).

The first round of non-commercial community television experiments began in England (1972), followed by the Netherlands (1974), Denmark (1974),

French-speaking Belgium (1976), and Sweden (1979), with Germany (1984) to follow. The degree of private involvement in the experiments differed across nations but the tension between community television and the potential privatisation of broadcasting was common throughout. In the UK, the privately owned company, Greenwich Cablevision, successfully lobbied the

Minister of Posts and Telecommunications to allow local origination on its cable system, which until then had been restricted to relaying existing broadcast services. Along with five other licensees, the experiments were awarded on the condition that they would exist without public money, that they would provide local, community-oriented programming and maintain a high degree of quality. Advertising, sponsorship and the screening of films

131 were all prohibited (Lewis, 1978). In the 1970s the cable companies were expecting the Conservative government to develop legislation that would permit Pay TV services. Providing community television channels was described by one Cable Television Association member as a means to ‘set a precedent – the first time that someone other than the broadcasters was entrusted with communicating with people in their homes’ (R. M. Denny in

Lewis, 1978: 17). Richard Dunn of the Swindon Viewpoint station also believed that ‘part of the agenda was pay television, that whilst the community television experiments were experiments in community television, perhaps the government might sympathetically look on pay television in the future if companies like EMI were successful in providing community television services’ (Richard Dunn interviewed by Tony Dowmunt,

1990/1994).

Another commercial interest was the electronic hardware industry, which was looking to expand its market by promoting the idea of video production to ordinary people. The Sony Portapak – a heavy, non-broadcast quality video camera that was developed out of the US military budget – was put to use in the cable community television trials (Garnham, 1990/1980). It is now an infamous relic of those first cable programs, outdone by countless generations of video cameras. At the time it was an important tool for community broadcasters, as it was relatively affordable and easy to use. Swindon

Viewpoint saw it as their goal to enable local people ‘to borrow equipment, light weight port-a-packs (sic), the old Sony port-a-packs, which people could borrow free to learn how to use television cameras and recording equipment

132 to make their own programs, to edit themselves’ (Richard Dunn interviewed by Tony Dowmunt, 1990/1994).

Such alliances found their harshest critics to be working within media studies.

In particular, the British school of critical cultural studies read community media with suspicion due to the involvement of private interests. This is an academic tradition firmly grounded in Marxism but with a concern for culture as well as economics, in particular the nexus of the two. The legacy of

Marxism within this strand of cultural studies manifested as a concern and belief in “progressive” tendencies (and their opposite), the primacy of production over consumption and an emphasis on ownership and control (see

Hartley, 2003; Turner, 1996). Although, on the surface, these features would seem supportive of the community broadcasting project, commentary remained strongly divided between the leftist advocates and the leftist critics.

For the latter, community broadcasting was too weak to be revolutionary; it did not presume the primacy of the state (or public service media) as the vehicle through which change must occur, and it was opportunistic in its financial structures.

In his article The Myths of Video, Nicholas Garnham sees the Portapak as being unsuitable for Europe, which, in his opinion, should be above the US- style “technical fix” (1990/1980: 64). Garnham criticised the amateurish quality of community video and video art, seeing film as the superior format for broadcasting. For him, community participation is a myth that has been

133 promoted by industry to sell Portapaks to ‘video freaks’ (68) and to open up the cable market. He wrote:

The claim for community video still, however, retains a

lingering and dangerous propaganda force in the field of

cable television. The major economic interests behind the

manufacturer of electronic hardware are also involved in a

concerted, long-term push to develop cable as a means of

breaking the public control of broadcasting. The aim is to

gain access to certain specialised and profitable segments of

the audience to the detriment of that European tradition

whereby broadcasting has a duty to serve the whole

community (Garnham, 1990/1980: 68).

Graham Murdock also wrote of the hidden commercial agenda in the community television experiments:

From the point of view of the companies involved, then, the

present cable experiments fulfil two principal functions.

Firstly, they act as public relations exercises aimed at

establishing the present operators as capable of running a

domestic television station responsibly, and persuading the

government to allow cable to proceed on a commercial

basis. Secondly, they provide convenient opportunities for

electronics manufacturers to develop and test “hardware”

134 facilities. They are, in fact, one component in these

companies’ overall “Research and Development” programs

(Murdock in Bibby, Denford, & Cross, 1979).

Elsewhere, the community broadcasting experiments received substantial government investment but were still viewed as a step towards the entry of private interests into broadcasting. In Denmark, pressure for community broadcasting came from citizens’ groups (Petersen, Prehn, & Svendsen, 1992) with the first local cable television experiments beginning in 1973 with a four- year duration. In 1981, due to a lack of evidence concerning the first trial, a new experiment was initiated. Despite the fact that the experiments were subsidised and advertising was prohibited, a significant amount of money was invested from the private sector into local television beyond state funding.

Even in Denmark, with its history of state-assisted associationalism, private interests pursued community broadcasting in anticipation of liberalisation.

Where the government contributed 1.6 million Euros for the duration of the second-round experiments, it was estimated that a total of 23 million Euros were spent on local TV in 1985 alone (Jauert & Prehn, 2002). By 1986, 108 radio and 42 television licences had been granted with some local programs out-rating those of the national broadcaster Danmarks Radio (at the time the only other broadcaster). Again there were indications that community broadcasting was not what had been expected. Although it was concluded that the first round of Danish experiments had not been broad enough for a decision on local cable broadcasting to be made, the report on the experiments did find that programming had not met political expectations. The content that resulted was “soft” rather than focused on local political agendas. From the

135 start, ‘the political centre had one idea while the program-producing periphery predominantly had a different one’ (Jauert & Prehn, 2002: 4).

The sale of portapaks, the rolling out of cable, R&D exercises to test commercial enterprises, and a means to win favour with government through community assistance were motives that academic commentators felt a need to expose. Commercial investment was seen as an underhanded business that negated any moral grounds that the community stations made claim to. What is striking about this critique is that an arrangement that allowed for unprecedented community involvement in broadcasting was seen as outright privatisation when it could just as easily have been viewed as a

“publicisation” (in Hirst’s term) of private interests.

It is unlikely that these judgements would hold today, where the political climate favours “partnerships” between business and community (largely in spite of the persistence of critical Marxism and neo-Marxism within cultural studies). That commercial interests can help assist community participation and access to equipment, or that community broadcasting provides R& D for the commercial sector is no longer seen to be covert and improper. The UK experiments floundered after 1979 when the returned Labour government made it clear that Pay TV was not likely to eventuate in the near future. Two stations survived for a time beyond this date: Swindon Viewpoint, which was granted money from the lottery fund and Channel 40 in Milton Keynes, which was funded by the Post Office. These stations eventually closed down and it is only recently that the UK government have begun developing legislation for

136 permanent community broadcasting services (see Chapter 5). This time, local commercial television has preceded community television, with over 60 local television licences awarded by 2001 – a definite sign that times have changed.

In the other countries that undertook community television experiments, permanent frameworks for both television and radio have since been developed, although not without significant hurdles and delays. Ed Hollander contends that community broadcasting policy did not result from the experiments but from continued campaigning by groups after the experimental period was over (with the exception of Neighbourhood Radio in Sweden). He writes that the cautiousness of European governments can be attributed to their ‘concern for possible commercialisation of cable communication facilities. Allowing use of the cable by any non-public broadcasting organisation might create a precedent, it was thought, for other, less idealistic uses of the cable’ (Hollander, 1992: 13). In the follow-up edition to The

People’s Voice (Jankowski et al., 1992), titled Community Media in the

Information Age (Jankowski, 2002), Jankowski is much more optimistic. He writes that in Western Europe, ‘local and regional stations have achieved legitimation in national media policies; restrictions on modes of transmission have been lifted; stable financing has – in a number of select countries – been attained; training has expanded’ (4). With the threat of decentralisation now a reality, the caution and fear over the introduction of community media seems to have finally passed.

137 Values

During the community television experiments, Peter Lewis posed a challenge to the dominant values in European broadcasting. He observed that despite expectations, a large amount of the community content produced in the UK was not news or investigatory documentary. However, ‘underlying even the nostalgia of a local history program, or the angling demonstration or the coverage of a church fete, is a challenge to the notion of impartiality’.

Community radio and television challenge the dominant value of impartiality in reporting, a phenomenon ‘with which the professionals in broadcasting will have to come to terms. It is not that the monasteries of broadcasting face dissolution; only that the monks within them must realise that people outside can learn to read and write and that not all manuscripts have to be illuminated’ (Lewis, 1978: 74).

The value judgements made on the basis of quality that dominated the literature written for the European community broadcasting experiments have remained a feature of academic and policy discussions ever since. These have already been mentioned in relation to Australia in Chapter One. So familiar is this critique that it is rarely questioned or debated. Participation in broadcasting by ordinary citizens is equated with amateurism, and amateurism is treated apprehensively within the broadcasting arena – television in particular. Community broadcasters and their programs are judged in terms of transmission quality, journalistic standards, and artistic/technical merit, all of which have the capacity to impede or enhance the viewing or listening experience. However, these standards are also related to assumptions and

138 expectations about the control of broadcasting, including who will make best use of the airwaves, aesthetically and morally. In the European context, quality was the advantage of the public service broadcasters whilst amateurism and commercialism were in many respects the antithesis of it.

This notion of quality in public service broadcasting has been thoroughly contested and with it the justifications upon which public service broadcasting rests ( for instance Hartley, 1999; Hawkins, 1999; Keane, 1991). With the position of the public broadcasters shifting – their once unquestioned command of cultural space having now been challenged – the status of community television in respect to notions of quality also deserves revisiting.

Gay Hawkins writes of the discourse of value that has supported public service television in the past (‘the institutional and discursive processes that work to rank, distinguish, and attribute status to certain cultural forms and practices and the audiences that recognise and enjoy these’ (1999: 176)).

Quality is not deployed in respect to one cultural or taste-group’s appreciation, but as a totalising value that implies an intrinsic good, or aesthetic superiority. The public service broadcasters are held to produce the best television, a value that works to disguise the cultural interests that are in fact being served. By universalising concepts of what good television is, the interests that are being met are also universalised. As a result, difference is excluded. Televisual forms and practices outside of this (community television for instance) are also seen ‘as fundamentally “other” and inferior’

(178).

139 The literature on the European community television experiments centred on the discussion of whether community-made programs were good enough for distribution to the general public. In belittling community content, television production was elevated to a talent beyond the learning ability of most people:

With very few exceptions, the majority of program makers

show very little understanding of the video medium. This

may not seem surprising: after all, most have never used

video equipment before, and have little knowledge of the

standard conventions of television production. But even

those volunteers who continue to make programs are not

encouraged to give much thought to the medium they are

using. Most have the same attitude as the typical home

movie-maker’ (Bibby et al., 1979: 28).

It is fair to say that a lack of production quality will discourage audiences from viewing. But this was not the case across the continent. For instance, the stations in Denmark that survived the experimental period displayed a high level of professionalism and developed a distinct station profile (Petersen et al., 1992). Since the experimental period, it has been a common issue within stations to improve the technical standards of programming, although this is constantly in tension with the principle of access and freedom of expression.

This is the case even in the “purest” of community television stations, Berlin’s

Offener Kanal. The cable television station survives entirely on money derived from the TV licence fee (1 million Deutschmarks in 2001) and runs with a strict ethic of access (videos are not previewed prior to broadcast so as

140 not to imply judgement of content). However, in recent time, the station has begun to address its scheduling, sought to upgrade its equipment and revised its training programs in order to create more “watchable” television (see also

Salto below) (Linke: 2001). But beyond the obvious issues of technical standards, community broadcasting is recognised as the territory of niche interests, of localism and amateurism. All of these characteristics sit in stark contrast to the traditional notion of quality in public service broadcasting and its unifying notion of the public.

The rethinking of public service broadcasting came through an acceptance of the popular media as an important site of cultural learning. The cultural advantage that public service broadcasting maintained for so long had rested upon their independence from private interests, in that commercial interests would not be able to jeopardise their ability to convey objectivity and ‘truth’.

Commercial media, despite its ability to attract audiences, was seen as less suitable, less informative, and to some extent tasteless. The pleasure gained through viewing commercial media was therefore cast as a lesser value than the information one gained through watching or listening to the public service broadcasters. The notion that the ‘sublimation of pleasure’ was necessary in order to gain moral superiority began to be challenged (Hawkins, 1999: 177).

Public service broadcasting came to be seen as the “disciplining” of the tastes of the popular class in order to claim a privileged status in the public sphere – what Hartley has called ‘democracy as defeat’ (Hartley, 1999: 119).

141 Apart from the theoretical considerations, Blumler identifies some of the

‘chinks in the armour of public service television’ in terms of its place in national political orders. The relationships of state–society–citizenry were changing, including the weakening of allegiances to party politics, secularisation and/or depillarisation as well as ‘an overall ethos of consumerist hedonism’ that was suffusing throughout Europe (1992a: 15).

This meant that the services offered began to appear ‘old fashioned and their traditional clients appear a declining constituency’. Furthermore, the public service broadcasters met with criticism from those with “alternative” views about the role of the broadcasters, demanding more public accountability and diversity and attacking the complicity of the broadcasters with dominant political forces. As a result, the appeal of the liberal – utopian vision of infinite communication channels grew.

This did not so much signify the death of the public service broadcasters, so much as a loss of the principles upon which it once rested. In many respects, these values precluded the variety of roles that public service broadcasting performs, including multicultural services (such as Australia’s SBS) and the nurturing of new talent (Triple J radio). Liz Jacka has written of the need for public service broadcasting ‘to be looked at each site where it exists and in the context of the particular media ecology within which it exists. Positions which give it an automatically privileged position with respect to quality, democracy and citizenship can no longer be sustained’ (2001: p12).

142 The commercial media have their supporters who have justified their status as rightful occupants of the cultural sphere against the dominant European values. The concern that community broadcasting paves the way for commercial interests is no longer plausible due to the now decentralised

European broadcasting environment. Regulatory distinctions have been developed in many First World countries that distinguish for-profit from non- profit local media, making the association even less relevant. But where the value assumptions of both the public and commercial sectors have been rethought, the position of community broadcasting within this decentralised broadcasting framework remains unexplored.

Quality and Community Broadcasting

Little work has been done into audience reception of community media, in terms of how viewers engage with its content. Some textual analysis of community programming has shown that community content does not necessarily conform to the formats of more professional programming (in terms of Indigenous media this was first explored by Michaels, 1986).

Rodriguez’s textual reading of the video Wild Fields is an example of one author’s response to the pace and imagery of community media (Rodriguez,

2002). Due to this lack of existing research, it is difficult to make qualified conclusions about alternative values perceived in relation to community broadcasting. The anthropological methods of evaluation outlined by Peter

143 Lewis and developed by Lewis, Tacchi and Slater, provide a valuable starting point for more research in this area (see Lewis, 2002).

One recent study commissioned by Denmark’s Ministry of Culture, does, however, provide some valuable insights into notions of quality in community broadcasting. The study, conducted by Per Jauert and Ole Prehn, focused upon changes in the funding arrangement for local television in Denmark.

Following the experimental period, local radio and television became a permanent feature of Danish broadcasting in 1985 and 1987 respectively.

Advertising was permitted by 1988, and a support fund was set up whereby funds levied off profit-making stations would provide support to local radio where it was needed. It became apparent that the stations were developing into for-profit and non-profit sectors, but that ‘legislation was basically organised according to non-commercial principles’ (Jauert & Prehn, 2002: 6), for instance a ban on networking and limited transmission areas. In 1994 a decision was made to create new licence categories, resulting in 82 commercial and 174 non-commercial local radio licensees and 23 commercial and 30 non-commercial television licensees11. A new system of state subsidy for the non-commercial stations was developed, in part derived from the public’s contribution to the TV licence fee (previously reserved for the national broadcaster Danmarks Radio) and a tax on the now networked commercial local television stations. The non-profit television sector received a total of 6.7 million Euros in subsidy in 2001, distributed according to the

11 As licensees share frequencies, this does not represent community channels so much as “program actors” that often share channels with commercial providers (Jauert & Prehn, 2002: 7)

144 amount of broadcasting time each station was producing. As ‘quantity became the chief concern rather than quality’ (6), this system was changed to an application process based on a merit system for priority programs. In late

2001 the subsidy was reduced to 5.3 million Euros per annum for the 2002–

2006 period (despite a large increase in the number of licensees), partly due to the tax on the networked local stations being lifted. For Jauert and Prehn the reduction was a ‘political signal that the non-commercial stations have the lowest priority in media policy’ (11). With the shift to a “beauty contest” funding model, one of the main focuses of the study was to assess the quality of community programs. Recognising the disputed nature of quality in the broadcasting context, Jauert and Prehn used interview and focus group research to assess the extent to which quality was considered a dominant value for both viewers and producers. They found that:

The participants emphasise the nearness and thoroughness

of the broadcasts and in particular the special, lingering

tempo as some of the most prominent qualities of many of

the local broadcasts. The slow tempo also gives people the

opportunity to finish speaking, which for several participants

is almost a relief compared to the fifteen-second democracy

of ‘the big media’ news programs. The ‘amateurish charm’

exists and is appreciated, that is, the broadcasts are not

judged primarily based on their technical or journalistic

correctness, but rather on their ability to evoke or express

participation and nearness (Jauert & Prehn, 2002: 25).

145 The focus groups condemned community television programming when it attempted to imitate a genre that they were ‘unable to fulfil’ (25). Community television that sought to replicate the content of commercial and public service broadcasting was simply second-rate rather than an appeal to the viewer’s own sense of community identification. It was therefore shown that community television viewers do not tolerate poor quality, or that they should.

Rather, the Denmark study demonstrates how different sets of values are at work alongside the dominant and assumed values around quality.

What Jauert and Prehn identify as ‘proximity, relevance and a sense of participation and sincerity’ (2002: 26) that are associated with community broadcasting are values that have remained secondary compared to the values of quality that have traditionally defined public service broadcasting.

However, these values are significant as they demonstrate that audiences engage with community media in a different way to either the commercial or public service broadcasters. This identification is tied to the viewers’ own sense of familiarity with their local community or a community of interest as well as to an awareness of how the material is produced. It is an insight into someone’s viewpoint, the story of an ordinary participant. In other words, it is not judged in the same way that qualified and professional renditions would be, but on its own terms.

One of the consequences of the changing role of public service broadcasting has been a new conception of the public interest. New values of diversity, multiple viewpoints and participation through new technologies are being

146 coopted into the function of public service broadcasting. For the community sector, such values have always been present. Steve Buckley, of the

Community Media Association in the UK, has written in response to the

BBC’s new localisation and interactive efforts that, ‘in the fast moving, free- thinking world of the Internet, community media is an idea coming of age and the BBC wants to be part of it’ (Buckley, 2000). How the public interest is managed in the absence of a unified notion of the public is discussed in

Chapter Six. One possible consequence is that new forms of partnership could be formed between the public and community sectors, beyond the calls

(typical of Europe) for a portion of the TV licence fee where it exists. For

Australia, changing notions of public service broadcasting could yield new solutions to local media production based on cross sector partnerships – new links in the areas of training, spectrum sharing or even content provision. The proposals for a National Indigenous Broadcasting Service (NIBS) are also interesting in this context. What is at the moment essentially a local and dispersed production and power base in the Indigenous media sector has the potential to create an entirely new form of public service broadcasting – decentralised in its structure, but signifying the Indigenous “nation” within

Australia’s mediascape (see Hartley & McKee, 2000). I will return to the

Australian issues in the concluding chapter. For now it is necessary to look at the broader issues related to civil society and the state.

147 Civil Society

The broadcasting system of the Netherlands has throughout its history had more involvement by civil society associations than any other. It stands as a unique example of associationalism in broadcasting, where civil society has been privileged over market and government agencies in radio and television.

This model was the result of the once “pillarised” society of the Netherlands and it can only be viewed as having occurred within that history. But despite the particular social structure from which it arose, broadcasting in the

Netherlands displays problems for associationalism as a guiding institutional arrangement. This public system, based upon community, ideology and voluntary association, was ultimately to be challenged in the same way that other European public broadcasters were in the 1970s. Amsterdam’s cable community broadcaster, Salto, is the product of public dissatisfaction and alienation from organised civil society. It therefore demonstrates the transformation and fragmentation of civil society, and of broadcasting’s contribution to this shift.

The four “pillars” of Catholicism, Protestantism, socialism and liberalism that dominated the social landscape in the Netherlands during the Twentieth

Century meant that the country was largely organised through non-profit associations (or corporations). Each pillar ran its own schools, unions, clubs and media, producing approximately 15% of Dutch GNP in the 1980s, a greater output than that of the central and local governments combined

(James, 1982: 34). In 1967, a new Broadcasting Act opened the way for groups other than the four pillars to broadcast. With sufficient members,

148 groups were allocated time-slots based on a sliding scale, so that the larger the group, the greater the number of hours per week that group would be granted.

Furthermore, groups were required by the Act to prove that they contributed to the diversity of broadcasting, thereby ensuring that existing broadcasters were not duplicated, or their interests threatened (Noam, 1991).

McQuail writes about how the model of diversity that was employed in the

Netherlands broadcasting system reflected historical differences based on religious and political affiliation. It differed from other public broadcasting systems in that it made no claim to represent a unified national community.

As he writes, ‘the idea does mainly relate to an “external” and exclusive diversity in which different “voices” and outlooks have their own separate channels, rather than to the more commonly encountered “internal” diversity, according to which all tastes are catered for by channels serving large, heterogenous audiences’ (1992: 101). In this way, broadcasting in the

Netherlands was seen either as exceptionally pluralistic or as enshrined segregation (Noam, 1991).

However, piracy – both commercial and non-commercial – was an indication that the broadcasting system based upon the four pillars had begun to lose relevance. Amsterdam’s community broadcaster, Salto, originated out of pirate radio and television. When cable television was first introduced to

Amsterdam in 1978, anarchist groups such as the squatter movement began

“hacking” into the cable system and broadcasting their experimental programming and pornography at night. Despite a broadcasting structure

149 designed according to the pillars of civil society and based upon affiliation and membership, groups such as the squatter movement sought out their own means to production and representation. When a legal framework was developed for community broadcasting, Salto was awarded the licence and the anarchist groups became regular programmers (for instance Staats tv-

Rabotnik). The community broadcasting law in the Netherlands stipulates only one licence within a designated area, with the licensee able to broadcast on any platform and across a number of channels (the exact number is negotiated politically). Beginning with one radio and one television station in

1984, Salto now has three television channels and six radio channels, four of which have both cable and terrestrial transmission frequencies. One of the television channels is devoted to AT5, a local news channel originally owned by a private publisher. When the owner found the station to be unprofitable, the City bought the channel and “gave” it to Salto, so as ‘not to be seen as having municipal/state broadcasting’ (van der Shaft, 2001), reflecting the nation’s long-standing scepticism towards state control.

Within discussions around associative democracy some theoretical considerations have been raised regarding the European “corporatist” style of governance. The primary concern is that civil society involvement in the provision of public services can exclude groups outside of the nominated associations from any significant participation. The applicability of these concerns to broadcasting is that it raises the important issue of how organised forms of civil society should be regulated to participate in the broadcasting landscape as well as the potential exclusions that result from such forms of

150 participation. As Mansbridge points out, how power is distributed within civil society is a major concern: ‘in today’s polity, the most powerful organised interests look no more like the textbook’s citizen-initiated concerns than

General Motors looks like a ma and pa store’ (1995: 134). The “ma and pa” scale civil society groups excluded from corporatist models include the

“weaker” or more transient groups such as single-issue alliances, the networks of new social movements that defy formal organisation, groups concerned with local issues, or issues of culture and identity.

Salto itself is now attempting to develop a more open structure, whereby individuals can broadcast programs and not just legal entities such as incorporated associations/foundations as was formerly the case. According to

Station Manager Erik van der Schaft, Salto’s original board of 60 people caused ‘paralysis in terms of governance’, with ‘everybody having their say about god knows what’. This unworkable model – a mixture of access and corporatism – has recently been dismantled, with the board now reduced to less than 15 and policy development delegated to the Station Manager.

Individuals not aligned with an association can now submit programming proposals, which are only broadcast when they are deemed technically suitable for broadcast by the station. According to van der Schaft, the changes have been implemented in order to attract more creative programming:

Before, the truly creative people were scared away by all the

bureaucracy and the ones who were left behind were the

ones who knew their way around our social and welfare

system: people who know how to get subsidies and know

151 how to work the system to their advantage. I feel we’ve lost

a lot of talent that way and now we’re trying to bring them

in. Especially younger people – why try to get them to set up

a foundation when they can just make programs? It’s a bit

more difficult for us in terms of trying to get the money they

owe us and what have you, but I feel that is a risk we have to

take (van der Schaft, 2001).

The Salto example indicates the breakdown of the corporatist model, particularly its relevance for younger people living in Amsterdam. A community station reliant upon such a structure risks irrelevance for the proportion of the population who do not wish – or know how – to ‘work the system to their advantage’, as van der Schaft puts it. Rather than seeing such a change as the demise of civil society, Salto has sought to adapt to this change and to find new means to include programmers who exist outside of the formal group structures. The desire to attract better programming is also a concern, taking into consideration that in the context of Salto this means increased innovation and difference rather than high quality. But even behind this motivation is the sense that, without change, new spaces, ideas and alliances within civil society will be alienated. Being “community”, for van der Schaft, does not have to mean being old-fashioned, corporatist or bureaucratic.

Europe, in this chapter, has been used to signify the changing values that surround community broadcasting yet which have not been translated, updated and applied to the workings of community broadcasting. Where

152 public service and commercial broadcasting have received such attention, the valorisation of quality and the pre-eminence of the singular cultural voice have been called into question. The cultural ladder presented in Chapter One

(cultural policy and PSB on top, community on the bottom and the market somewhere in between) is being restacked. The final chapters concentrate on where community is finding itself within the new structure.

153 Chapter Five: Third World and Third Way

Rebuilding Community Media

Until recently, the Ballymun Media Centre (County Dublin, Ireland) was located in a flat on the second floor of a grey tower block practically indistinguishable from others around it. All had graffitied walls, dark stairwells and lifts containing the sorts of waste that the word “litter” just doesn’t describe. Now the community media group is housed within a new and impressive community building, a curving glass-fronted space containing offices, sound studios, theatre, dance hall, a dark room and bar.

Looking out across Ballymun, the community centre stands as a new approach to development, surrounded still by the tower blocks of an older “project” awaiting demolition.

Many miles away is the city of Bamako in Mali. In 1993 Alfonso Gumucio

Dagron visited Bamako to research a media group funded by Food and

Agricultural Organisation (FAO) and the United Nations Development

Program (UNDP). He writes that, ‘In a country often so dry and austere, the garden in the middle of the CESPA building in Bamako looks like an oasis.

154 Somehow it symbolises the very perspective of the project, which aims to create many oases of participatory communication in the remote, rural communities of Mali’ (2001: 115).

Ballymun and Bamako are both examples of community media within programs intended to improve the lives of local residents. These two “oases” signify the attempt to rebuild and improve localities through community media. Where Bamako sits within a long and controversial history of communications development, Ballymun represents a new interest in, or deployment of, community within local government strategies of neighbourhood development. However, the Ballymun media centre predates the City’s current neighbourhood regeneration attempts. This chapter seeks to understand the use of community media for development purposes, in particular the assumption that the establishment of community media will lead to positive social change and how existing community media fits within such claims. It looks at the promotion of community as a legitimate partner for government and development agencies, and of media and technology as empowering tools for localities. These themes have already been touched upon via Davis Community Television in Chapter Two and the motives behind Europe’s community television trials. The implications and increasing relevance of community media for social change now requires a closer look.

This is part of a new approach to development, what Anthony Giddens in

Beyond Left and Right, calls ‘an alternative development’ (1994: 152). A revision of development, for Giddens, must involve a move beyond welfare

155 approaches that act as modernity’s insurance against external risk, to strategies that see risk and uncertainty as manufactured and that can be confronted through an organised, yet reflexive, strategy. It is an attempt to move away from dependency and stagnation, and towards self-development for the prevention of poverty and social exclusion. In Australia these themes have been articulated most compellingly in relation to Indigenous issues, in particular by Noel Pearson who has set out to build reciprocal rather than dependent relationships for the Cape York community (Pearson, 2000).

Giddens suggests that an alternative development is not simply a transfer of resources from North to South (convincing rich countries to give to the poor and then restructuring political systems to align with those of the North). An alternative development must be ‘a challenge to modernity rather than an attempt to generalise it successfully everywhere’ (1994: 158). This might involve, for both the North and the South, attention to the initiatives of most economically deprived groups: indigenous social movements, or local “self- help” organisations for example. Development should not be seen as imposition upon the South, a “solution” imposed from above, but a worldwide concern:

An alternative development: isn't that just what we see

emerging – or struggling to emerge – within the more

developed societies also? And isn't such an alternative

development at the same time the only way in which it

would be remotely possible for the reconstruction of welfare

156 in the North to be compatible with increasing prosperity in

the South? What is at issue here is the coming into being of

a post-scarcity society – a process still perhaps led by those

in the wealthier countries, but worldwide in its implications

(Giddens, 1994: 163).

Giddens sees a correlation between welfare and development within his rethinking of both. Although the two approaches are applied to vastly different social situations, the emphasis that Giddens places upon locally led change means that welfare and development share a common principle. As policy strategies, these newly conceived programs are both directed at the alleviation of scarcity through an improvement in the life values of self- reliance and responsibility.

The communications policies that are designed for social improvement in the

North and the South (or First and Third World as I prefer to call it12) are also related, although generally not discussed within the same study. Participatory communication (Third World) projects are generally defined by their high- level of community involvement and organisation and are considered successful when they have been “appropriated” by the community (Dagron,

2001). Although the term “participatory communication” refers to a field wider than community media (health communication, education projects etc),

12 Although the terms First and Third World are problematic (as discussed in this chapter), the use of North and South reinforces geographic notions of exclusion, and seems absurd to an Australian with a reasonable standard of living and freedom. Instead, I prefer to use First and Third World, only to suggest the struggle for empowerment. I further agree with Melkote and Steeves, that ‘a Third World exists within the so-called First World and vice versa’ (Melkote & Steeves, 2001: 28). In fact, this definition supports my attempt to find correlations between both development and neighbourhood development policies.

157 there is a body of community media theory that situates itself within this discipline. The World Association of Community Radio Stations (AMARC) also deploys participatory development notions within its descriptions of community broadcasting. Participatory communication projects are often small-scale, seeing specific bottom-up solutions as being more effective than general macro policies. Furthermore, they are seen to provide a means for networking within the community and between communities, rather than simply from communicator to receiver. Their uniqueness in this respect means that participatory media projects often rely upon and generate innovative relationships between the community and relevant NGOs, development organisations and other institutions. Servaes emphasises a level of responsiveness within participatory communications:

With this shift in focus, one is no longer attempting to create

a need for the information disseminated, but instead,

information is disseminated from which there is a need.

Experts and development workers respond rather than

dictate, they choose what is relevant to the context in which

they are working. The emphasis is on information exchange

rather than persuasion, as was the case in the diffusion

model (Servaes, 1996: 16).

Spending more time in the field, maintaining continued contact and keeping promises (Servaes, 1996: 16), are also characteristics of Third Way neighbourhood development approaches in the UK that seek to “connect” with communities. Both are examples of interventions by government or other

158 institutions to alleviate issues of scarcity and/or social unrest. In a number of instances neighbourhood development media (Ballymun) and community- based development media programs in the Third World (Bamako) work to put into practice the reflexive, or generative, policies that Giddens’ is endorsing.

For community media this shift has proved important. It is not that the justifications for community media based upon social change are new, but that a favourable policy climate has emerged through which to implement projects based upon these principles. This climate has emerged out of efforts to deal with the disparities produced by the globalisation of capital and the

Information Age. Theoretically, the justifications for community media that look to postmodernity, networks and new social movements are also closely associated with this policy shift. Out of it comes a new set of questions for community media. Firstly, are the approaches and achievements of Third

World participatory communications applicable to industrialised countries?

The rhetoric of both Third World and Third Way promotes “connecting” or

“partnering” with community, raising questions of how the local is implicated within global agendas. Are such policy approaches constructive for the communities they claim to reach? Or, on the other hand, do deliberate attempts to dissociate the local from national and global development agendas ultimately risk irrelevance? As one of the intentions of this thesis is to locate community media within intellectual and policy traditions, I will first look at development issues in general before moving on to their implementation in respect to community broadcasting.

159 Participatory Communications Development in the Third

World

In Making Waves, Alfonso Gumucio Dagron has gathered anecdotal stories and facts in order to portray some of the contributions that grassroots participatory communications projects have made. They are therefore

“snapshots” of groups from South America, Asia and Africa, taken at a specific moment in time but containing brief histories of the project’s rise, and sometimes their fall. Of Moutse Community Radio Station (MCRS) in South

Africa, he tells of how the station, originally established and run by local women, became a generalist station, hence losing its original community’s focus. ‘As with many stations in South Africa, the dynamic hits its lowest ebb and then rebuilds’, he writes (2001: 252). The impermanency of the projects – their tendency to be based upon temporal and cultural moments and their changing motives and outcomes due to financial and organisational constraints – stand out in the report. Dagron sees the diversity of the experiences and their flux as part of the nature of participatory media. ‘We are learning from the virtues and mistakes of these experiences by placing them in a puzzle’, he writes. ‘Not because at the end of this process there is the complete model for all circumstances, but because from the multiple experiences we may draw some pieces for a new puzzle’ (2001: 33, emphasis in the original).

CESPA in Mali was inspired by similar FAO projects that had been successfully run in Peru and Mexico. The goal of the CESPA was to train, mobilise and organise the local population in the use of video in order to

160 ‘facilitate the development of new techniques for agriculture, and for improving community management capability and increased participation’

(Dagron, 2001: 116). Eighty percent of Mali’s population live in rural areas, which extends over the Sahara and the Sahel. The country’s reliance on seasonal rains, and constant battles with natural disasters, makes it one of the most difficult places to live. CESPA attempted to alleviate problems of food production through the creation of “pedagogic packages” that worked with local knowledge and perception as well as information from specialists to create videos about agricultural concerns. In its first decade, CESPA had completed 22 such packages (designed for different ethnic groups within

Mali), as well as 116 motivational videos, 23 cultural programs, 20 institutional videos as well as theatre sketches and “newsmagazines” for television. In 1993, CESPA became an independent company, generating its own income. Dagron points out that CESPA has been viewed as the most successful participatory communication project in West Africa and the financial independence of the project is generally considered one indication of its success. However, since this point, the video training aspects of the project have been removed – the ‘process became less important than the product’

(119). For Dagron, community participation in development communications projects outweighs economic gain. The measures of success are local, culturally specific, yet based upon an idea of social change.

These themes run throughout new approaches to participatory communication in the Third World that seek to break away from top-down governance, once the model for development. It signifies that development theory is now deep

161 in the process of coming to terms with its own past. Having undergone the scrutiny (the almost therapy-like experience) of the postmodernist gaze it is now painfully aware of its past failures and influences. Escobar writes of ‘the inability of development to bring lasting improvement in the social condition of much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, on the one hand, and on the other, the epistemological crisis that seems to affect the field’ (2000: 165).

The development project has failed in its objective of overcoming scarcity at large (generally it has advanced the debt crisis, poverty and ecological destruction) and lost the intellectual and political arguments it once relied upon to justify its existence. However, the development industry continues to operate, and even its harshest critics do not wish to stop the resources that it manages to lever. Finding new methods and approaches to social change, in the hope of redirecting resources towards more fruitful projects, has become the goal of much writing in the field today.

A story by development worker Bella Mody demonstrates the problematic area of communications development. In the early seventies, Mody worked for an organisation with the unnerving name of the NASA-India Satellite

Instructional TV Experiment (SITE). Recounting the story of her experience with SITE’s Kheda Communication Project, Mody tells of how the group assumed that ‘knowledge served as power under all conditions’ (Mody, 2000:

190), an assumption with devastating consequences. The agency had decided to confront the legal and human rights violations being committed by landowners with the complicity of local government. With a considerable tone of irony, Mody writes, ‘All that was needed to dismantle caste, class and

162 gender abuse was the harsh glare of investigative documentaries and drama on local TV’ (190). The documentary crew first created and broadcast programs exposing the lack of infrastructure in the area in order to motivate local government towards greater efficiency. They then moved on to ‘more serious problems of exploitation, such as family agribusinesses not paying their labour the legal minimum wage’ (190), incorporating interview material gathered in local villages.

As the daily coverage continued, daily labourers could not

believe the government agency was standing up for them

against the local economic power structure, but neither

could the economic powers. The federal government

agency, full of physicists, TV producers, social scientists,

was dabbling in rural development (Mody, 2000: 190).

The consequence of this “dabbling” was that huts owned by interviewees were burnt down by paramilitary gangs commissioned by the farmers. The police, having also been paid off by the farmers, never arrived. Not only did the

Kheda Communication Project discover that ‘communication through technology alone was impossible’ (191), but they also learnt the disastrous implications of ‘context-free research’ and ‘ungrounded theory’ (194).

Since Mody’s personal collision with the failings of communication development, academics and institutions have begun to look towards

163 participation as a means to fulfil a new (agenda-less) development agenda.

The demise and rethinking of communications development is recounted in detail by writers such as Servaes, Escobar, Melkote, Steeves, White and

Wilkins (including Escobar, 1995; Melkote & Steeves, 2001; Servaes, 1996,

1999; Wilkins, 2000b). I will focus only on the shift to grassroots media projects as one solution to the development problem. But first it is necessary to briefly review the tradition out of which participatory communications development has emerged.

The Epistemological Crisis of Development Communications

Early development communications was founded upon the sender–receiver communication model that suggested the media could “effect” or guide people’s thinking directly. In the late 1950s when communications development began to be practised, this theoretical paradigm was already being discredited. Research such as that of Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955) asserted that “intervening variables” (a person’s predisposition for example) could modify the effectiveness or meaning of a message. Despite this, research commissioned by agencies such as UNESCO continued to employ the media effects model, possibly out of a belief that people living within traditional societies were more easily influenced than those in industrial societies. David Lerner’s 1958 book famously suggested that the media could act as a hypodermic needle, injecting sensibilities into traditional peoples that would encourage modernisation. In later studies (for instance Rogers, 1962) the effects model was replaced by a more technology-centred model that

164 endorsed the setting-up of communications infrastructure in non-industrialised countries as a means towards the diffusion of innovations.

The notion of modernisation was central to both the effects and innovation approaches. Modernisation promoted an idea of “progress” that was firmly grounded in the Enlightenment concepts of science, reason and individualism.

In Harvey’s words, the Enlightenment project ‘took it as axiomatic that there was only one possible answer to any question’ (1990: 27) – a universalism that guided the drive towards a particular type of political order. In development, this manifested in the promotion of technology and infrastructure as well as political pressure upon Third World governments to implement macro-policies that would lead them either towards capitalist economic systems, or, in some instances, the modernism of Soviet-style statism. Industrialisation and urbanisation were seen as the goals of development, best implemented through Western methods of production and labour and centrally controlled by bankers and economists. The so-called

“problems” of the Third World were viewed as internal rather than the product of international economic arrangements and power (Melkote &

Steeves, 2001).

Escobar (1995) quotes a paragraph from the United Nations Department of

Social Affairs, written in 1951:

There is a sense in which rapid economic progress is

impossible without painful adjustments. Ancient

165 philosophies have to be scrapped; old social institutions

have to disintegrate; bonds of cast, creed and race have to

burst; and large numbers of persons who cannot keep up

with progress have to have their expectations of a

comfortable life frustrated. Very few communities are

willing to pay the full price of economic progress (Escobar,

1995: 4).

Discourses such as these became dominant in international institutions but also within the social imaginary – the daily discourse that continued to classify and characterise places now named “Third World”. Notions of poverty, deprivation, illiteracy and helplessness were problematised within this category, perpetuating the powerlessness of these geographic and cultural spaces. As a result, subordination was provoked through discourse that proclaimed to alleviate it. Some scholars, in particular the South American dependency theorists (or “dependistas”) of the late 1960s and 70s, began to confront development by pointing out that the problems at stake were in fact caused by global capital flows and power. Dependency theory addressed the problematic nature of Western power structures that were being deployed through development programs. However, in terms of communication, it reinforced the linear model of communication: ‘source-transmitter-channel- receiver-destination’ (Servaes, 1999: 46). Although an important shift in understanding development, dependency theory still, essentially, saw communications as something that was imposed upon the receiver, framing it as an issue of imperialism.

166

The participatory communication approach arose out the dialogical pedagogy of Paulo Friere, as well as the UNESCO debates of the 1970s, which culminated in the McBride report (see Chapter Two). These approaches supply the principles upon which participation has been implemented. The more detailed and specific concerns with grass-roots media and local specificity is mostly discussed in terms of the postmodernist revision of development, or “postdevelopment” as it has been called (Wilkins, 2000a).

The works of Escobar and Huesca, in particular, look to conceptions of power and discourse as being the necessary theoretical framework from which new approaches to development must emerge. Wilkins writes that

‘reconceptualising the field in terms of power demands that we consider development communication as an intervention created and justified through institutional discourse operating in a global system’ (2000a: 207). For

Escobar, development is a colonising discourse in the same stroke as Said’s

Orientalism. Drawing also on Foucault, Escobar writes that the problematisation of poverty ‘brought into existence new discourses and practises that shaped the reality to which they referred. That the essential trait of the Third World was its poverty and that the solution was economic growth and development became self-evident, necessary and universal truths’ (1995:

24). Escobar looks at the deployment of discourse around women, peasants and the environment in development contexts, arriving at the conclusion that development as a whole is a highly problematic construct. Intimately tied to our political structures and idea of the “social”, development has been a

167 highly successful apparatus for ‘producing knowledge about, and the exercise of power over, the Third World’ (Escobar, 1995: 9).

Postdevelopment arises out of this attempt to make visible the colonising discourses and actions of development. It maintains the idea that intervention is possible, and that something must be changed. However, it chooses to replace the concept of development with the less problematic “social change”.

Some discourses of participatory communication maintain that it is the process rather than the product that is important. However, it is difficult see any difference between participatory communications development that establishes community media stations and the broader field of community media without the idea of some kind of “project”, or social goal, within its definition. Escobar contends that

We may understand postdevelopment as opening the

possibility of reducing the role of development as a central

organising principle of social life in Asia, Africa, and Latin

America, as a heuristic device for seeing local realities in

Asia, Africa, and Latin America differently, and finally as a

way to strive for other potential principles for thinking about

and reconstituting the world. If we imagine postdevelopment

in these ways, then we have to admit that postdevelopment

already exists in what we have called here (place-based)

practices of difference (Escobar, 2000: 168).

168

Perhaps it is the case that the true goal of postdevelopment (media) theory is community media itself (a “place-based practice of difference”), entirely run by the community according to their own system and imperatives. Where participatory communication departs from community media (and perhaps also from postdevelopment) is when the claim to bringing about social change is not generated from within the group but by outside planners. I will return to the implications of “planning” in the second part of this chapter.

Considering participatory media as a means for communities and individuals to alter power relationships through grassroots activity is one way to deal with the fact that the project of development is ‘riddled with cultural and historical biases’ (Melkote, 2000: 39). Relinquishing the idea of “development” (but not necessarily the resources that development institutions lever) avoids endorsing imperialistic, paternalistic, modernising projects whilst retaining the idea that something can be done. By framing it as one of empowerment instead of development, the emphasis on participation directs the debate towards the “on the ground” usefulness of community-based media as a means to social change. It is an approach that focuses upon local specificity and self- management and, as a result, is less concerned with the broader notion of civil society or whether it should be constructed in places where it is currently absent.

The possible contradiction within the postdevelopment approach lies here. A reading of grass-roots media as the only means to embrace and elevate local

169 culture without implicating it within modernist development agendas reaches a dead-end when it attempts to see such media as drivers of large-scale social change. David Harvey’s neo-Marxist critique on postmodernity makes the point that by ‘acknowledging the authenticity of other voices’, postmodernism ghettoises those voices, seeing them only in terms of their own logic and specificity. It therefore cannot successfully engage in the realities of the political economy (Harvey, 1990: 118). Postdevelopment does attempt to seek social change nonetheless, and in this way it steps back from its own postmodern stance. At a theoretical level, postdevelopment is confusing due to its reliance upon local specificity – an apparent resistance to accepting any kind of macro view – whilst still maintaining an idea of social change. In a more practical sense, it is questionable whether projects that are so intensely local and immediate can stimulate social change in terms of global inequality.

This is an issue that confronts community media everywhere and one that I will return to. But first it is necessary to take the macro view and to look at the problem of civil society in the Third World.

Civil Society in the Third World

Before examining First World development media, it is worth asking where the similarities between First and Third World development end. The community media projects mentioned so far have relied upon development institutions for their survival. However, postdevelopment communications

170 advocates the establishment of community media projects as a means to lasting change. The question remains as to whether community media could last in Third World settings without development assistance and frameworks.

If not, will community result in social change, or will it simply mean the continuation of development assistance? This possibly undermines, even makes redundant, the effort to achieve social change through community media. By focusing only on local development, postdevelopment writers risk ignoring the larger structures that community organisations rely upon for survival.

If civil society and its associations are not pre-political (in the way that community is), but rather the product of a particular stage in capitalist democracy, it follows that a state’s political structure will determine the presence or absence of civil society. Blaney and Pasha question the notion that civil society is an appropriate prescription for Third World development.

Their argument is that discussions of civil society and its new-found popularity suggest a false ‘universality of human experience’ (1993: 3). In reality it is a structure that is ‘captured in the stabilisation of a system of rights, constituting human beings as individuals, both as citizens in relation to the state and as legal persons in the economy and the sphere of free association’ (4-5). Ignoring this, overlooks the difficulties faced by the Third

World in attempting the long-term stabilisation of civil society.

For community media, this raises two issues. Firstly, whether community media requires an existing and mature civil society, and secondly, whether the

171 prescription of community media as a solution ignores fundamental political issues. Do the difficulties encountered by community media in the industrialised world (such as funding and management issues) become insurmountable in places where there is no support-bed or framework for civil society? Or is it the case that community media in the Third World can only be understood outside of theoretical conceptions of civil society and the liberal democratic state? Since the end of apartheid, South Africa has been attempting to repair the enormous inequities brought about by the country’s history of enforced discrimination. Civil society played a crucial role within that transition, both in popular resistance to apartheid and in the transition to democracy (Horwitz, 2001; Klug, 1995). Community media has come into existence as a part of the democratisation process. However, economic and cultural legacies of the apartheid era remain, displaying the difficulties that community media projects face in their attempt to expand civil society within a transitional democracy.

South Africa developed a framework for community radio within its 1993

Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) Act. Under the Act, community radio stations are required to be non-profit entities, must serve a particular community, encourage community participation and may be funded by sponsorship or advertising. It was intended from the start that four-year licences would be made available to community radio stations. However, delays caused by problems in the IBA’s own internal structure meant that the stations had to exist on 12 month interim licences until hearings could be held.

Apart from the predictable problems that licensing delays have caused (time-

172 consuming annual renewal processes and an inability to develop long-term plans (see also Dagron, 2001: 251)), many stations suffer from a serious lack of resources and volunteers.

Jo Tacchi’s (2002) research into the relatively new community radio sector in

South Africa highlights the social difficulties faced by the stations. Mabalane

Mfundisi of South Africa’s National Community Radio Forum (NCRF) states that community radio is sometimes seen as ‘exploitation of the poor, by the poor’(Mfundisi in Tacchi, 2002: 72), highlighting the lack of a voluntarist culture in communities with high unemployment and a history of political and economic subjugation. For Pheladi Gwangwa, community apathy towards the running of the stations has to do with the fact that ‘people still need to be schooled into the working of democracy’ (Gwangwa in Tacchi, 2002: 72).

Tacchi comments that ‘simply understanding what community radio is and can be for communities, and how they can be managed transparently, is recognised as an issue by people on all sides of the community radio debate in

South Africa’ (72). What is apparent in the South African example is that the absence of a strong civil society complicates the establishment of community radio. On the one hand the lack of volunteerism – a cultural phenomenon taken for granted in other countries – inhibits the internal running of the stations. Furthermore, as the external environment – the local economy and infrastructure – remain characterised by scarcity, the structures that could provide ongoing funding and assistance cannot be relied upon.

173 Others write of the seemingly insurmountable rift between the need for state- building in Third World politics and the transition to democracy that requires a level of individual liberty (see Monshipouri, 1997). State legitimacy is required to foster stability and manage economic inequalities, ethnicity, religious conflict and external influences. However, a strong, interventionist state can run counter to the expansion of civil society and participation. These factors put into question the ability of community media organisations to become part of the permanent political setting.

Generalisations such as these can only be taken so far. The Mali CESPA project demonstrates that significant improvement can be achieved through development projects and that they are capable of achieving a degree of economic independence. Stations will still be capable of playing a part in the empowerment of the individuals and communities involved. In this way, the citizens’ media approach that emphasises the impact upon people’s lives and ability to express themselves is still appropriate to these examples. And, arguably, community media plays a more significant role for viewers in places where state-controlled media is the only alternative. But the point to be made is that the claim to stimulating broader social change and overcoming scarcity through community mobilisation requires complex examination, taking into account the micro and the macro. Although the development project ultimately aims to make itself unnecessary, community media as a driver for social change may not have the ability to foster social change in the absence of the “project”. Development communications will replace community media in the absence of broader political change.

174 Development in the First World: Ireland and the

United Kingdom

Taking these ideas into the First World highlights some of the difficulties in neighbourhood development and Third Way programs. Many of the same themes are present: modernisation is also being revised within the planning agencies of much of the industrialised world. For instance, the high-rise council housing of the old Ballymun have become a symbol of a failed top- down approach to social problems. Although governments constructed the tower blocks in order to resolve real problems faced by economically disenfranchised communities (such as sanitation, the provision of hot water and heating) it is now apparent that these public housing projects created as many difficulties as they attempted to resolve. They became isolated areas of poverty, attracting crime and drug use.

In 1987 the residents of Ballymun first campaigned to have their housing issues addressed. In response, the Dublin Council spent 57 million Irish pounds in the mid-1990s, refurbishing 150 of the flats. The project did not address the needs of the 5000 homes situated over Ballymun’s two square miles, nor did it resolve the structural deterioration of the buildings themselves (McGlinchey, 2002). The current redevelopment has emerged out of Dublin City’s Strategic Plan, a 12-year framework for change that targets

Ballymun for development due to its low employment and education rates. In

July 2002, the first of the tower blocks were demolished, and residents began relocating into the new low-rise dwellings. But this second approach to urban

175 renewal is more than simply an ‘ediface complex’ (Shearer cited in Graham,

1999: 17). Ballymun signifies a new approach to urban development, where social and technological spaces are seen to be as important as the physical structure in which they stand. The regenerated Ballymun will be an e-town, with computing and Internet connection available to all residents.

Furthermore, consultation with communities is also said to be vital to the fulfilment of the Strategic Plan (http://www.dublin.ie/background.asp).

A Community Forum has been established in Dublin in order to discuss community concerns and filter ideas from civil society through to government. A subsection of this Forum is the Community Media Forum.

Although the campaign to establish a community television channel in the

Dublin area has worked through this forum, the national campaign for community television is much older and involved many more individuals and groups around the country. In March 2001, Ireland established its first legislative commitment to community television by allowing for community channels for cable or MMDS distribution. These services are expected to be self-funded and to represent local interests. Community channels are created through “community content contracts” awarded by the Irish Radio and

Television Commission (IRTC) (to become the Broadcasting Commission of

Ireland (BCI)). Applicants must be representative of the community and programs must address the interests of the community. Although there is no non-profit stipulation, the channel must ensure that no monetary reward beyond covering costs is involved.

176 The country’s community media umbrella organisation, the Community

Media Network (CMN) has expressed dissatisfaction with a number of aspects of the new legislation (Community Media Network, 2000).

Communities are only defined by geographic localism, excluding communities of interest. There is no ongoing funding arrangement for these services. Most crucially, there are no requirements for access or participation, meaning that the community’s involvement could potentially be restricted to viewing, depending on the contractor. The Community Media Forum is attempting to resolve these issues within their own group’s proposal for the contract. They envisage that neighbourhood media groups such as Ballymun’s will produce material from their locality and send it to the station for broadcast. The establishment and survival of a number of community media facilities and training centres is therefore central to the station’s objectives.

According to the CMN’s manager, Margaret Gillan, the community television channel has gained momentum in policy circles over recent years as it is seen to fulfil the Government’s mandate of “partnership”:

Setting up a website can be used as an excuse to avoid real

participation, and the National Development Plan is

supposed to be big on participation. You set up an

“interactive” website but who can access it? The whole

process is an offshoot of partnership and partnership is the

government’s format for progress ever since the 90s (Gillan,

2002).

177 This rebirth of community media is not exclusive to Ireland. The United

Kingdom is also in the process of establishing permanent community broadcasting licences for the first time in its history. The policy rationale behind the new licence category (known as “access radio” with non-profit local television still under review) is not unlike Dublin’s. It seems that participation in the form of community broadcasting is now experiencing a much more favourable policy climate in the UK and Ireland than ever before.

The neighbourhood development approach to community broadcasting can also be seen in Huddersfield, a small town in West Yorkshire. Beaumont

Street Studios, established in 1985, was initially a response to social problems within the local black community. In its early days the centre offered only sound recording studios and training, but has now diversified into multimedia, as well as radio and video training and production. Although not a community broadcaster (the access radio licence was still only a proposal when I visited the UK in 2001), Beaumont Street Studios has run a number of short-term radio broadcasts under the Restricted Service Licence (RSL) scheme. The

Studio is also involved in providing the New Deal for Musicians, a New

Labour strategy to bring unemployed people back into the labour market. For this they provide a training and mentoring program, designed towards supportive, work-focused learning. In March 2001, the New Deal for

Musicians had been running for only a year but had managed to train numbers in the hundreds.

A lot of our work at the moment is grant-funded work at an

access level. So it’s working with people who are long term

178 unemployed or kids that didn’t go to school. The sort of

projects where people’s basic levels of literacy and

numeracy tend to be very low and their motivation tends to

be very low. And it’s using the media that we have to

interest people in understanding their situation better and

developing self-confidence and developing skills that will

take them forward. So it’s not so much about training people

up for jobs in the industry so much as training people up for

a job (Jeni Vine, 2001).

Beaumont Street Studios have no core funding and their annual income varies from year to year depending on what funding is available. According to the groups Training Manager, Jeni Vine, in the year 1999/2000 the annual income was around half a million pounds. ‘That’s running a whole range of programs, some of those are commissions, some of them are working on European funded projects, some of them are training, some of them are commercial’

(Vine, 2001). The commercial operations include sound studio hire and short- courses for businesses. But the majority of funding comes from grant-based projects, including the New Deal for Musicians.

Jeni Vine has taken her experience with community media into research. Her study, which compared three different community media training projects in

England, deliberately implicates itself within current UK policy objectives.

For Vine, community media fits within social policy that looks beyond short- term solutions to social and economic exclusion. In her opinion ‘that is what community media has always sought to do and can now find a platform for’

179 (Vine, 2001). Vine sees the need for ‘a rationale for community media that includes not only the potential individual gains for trainees but also the gains for the local community’ (Vine, 2001: 3). Central to her thesis is the argument that learning through creative production is a more profound, empowering and ultimately productive way to learn than experience gained through traditional education. This point is similar to the UK government’s Creative Industry

Task Force Report:

Engaging learners in doing creative work, such as design, music

and media production, and writing rather than transcribing,

provides not only a more fulfilling, accessible and intuitive

experience of the basic ICT technical skills, it also encourages and

requires the development of creative thinking, one of the most

important drivers of the knowledge-based economy (Department

of Culture, 2000).

The Community Media Association in the UK has also been making the most of the Blair government’s community rhetoric. The organisation’s General

Manager, Steve Buckley, commented that:

The government has majored on social inclusion, reform of

life-long learning, community access to communication

information technologies, local democracy, e-government

etc. All these things tie in with new agendas within the

community media sector. And we’ve been able to argue

fairly successfully that community media reaches lots of

180 themes and topics that the government wants to reach and

that have been reflected in statements of ministerial support

for community media at a high level (Buckley: 2001).

In March 1999 Gordon Brown (Chancellor of the Exchequer) allocated 252 million pounds to support community-based Learning Centres. This was matched with 250 million pounds from the New Opportunities Fund (money levied from lottery profits). Combined, the funds were intended to support the development of 700 Learning Centres, only some of which would be

Community Media Centres (CMCs) – providing facilities equipped with radio, television and web content production technology. The CMA, at the time, described this development as ‘possibly the most important opportunity ever for getting financial resources into Community Media development’(Community Media Association, 2000). Steve Buckley estimates that since then 10-20 million pounds in capital funds has come into the community media sector as a result of the 40-50 funding proposals which have been made to the ICT Learning Centre by community media groups. The

CMA has also made two successful bids into the scheme for flagship projects in Sheffield and East London, totalling 850,000 pounds. The Sheffield project will consist of a major Community Media Centre located in the National

Centre for Popular Music (NCPM) as part of the NCPM’s redevelopment. It will have 4 radio studios, 2 training areas, a production suite and a mobile unit. In London the funds will go towards a new centre in Tower Hamlets as well as a mobile unit (Steve Buckley, private correspondence, 2002).

181 The justifications for community media in the UK, based upon neighbourhood development and social regeneration, could stem from a history in which broadcast spectrum for community use has never been granted. Knowledge and motivation were also identified as key benefits of community broadcasting in Peter Lewis’s 1978 study of Britain’s early community cable television experiments. The cable experiment did not succeed, marred by

‘changes of governments and lack of policy’ (Lewis, 1978: 71) leaving community media groups without a platform for broadcast. As a result, they have persisted as audio and video training centres with production outcomes but no ongoing means to distribution (see Chapter Four). Their funding has been predominantly grant-based, either from government or philanthropic funds. Reliance upon grant funding places pressure upon community organisations to justify their projects in terms of measurable social outcomes and to focus their efforts upon target groups in the majority of cases.

Although community media has always been justified on the grounds of its ability to provide training, these new discourses display aspirations of knowledge-economy growth and a concern for globalisation. Whereas previous approaches to community media focused upon their capacity to affirm local identity, new approaches seek to build localities, seeing the local in the context of global flows of capital. This approach accepts the contention that globalisation has made economic and cultural forces less inhibited by nation state borders. One ramification of this is that cities and regions become more significant, as they are capable of attracting industry and tourism through lifestyle appeal as well as economic incentives. In recognition of this,

182 city councils and local and regional governments are increasingly looking to enhance their sense of place. With a dual agenda of social/neighbourhood regeneration and competitiveness within the global economy these policy approaches have a specific focus on local culture rather than the nation as a whole. The mobilisation and coordination of funding bodies, arts, heritage and tourism agencies as well as private and third sector groups is central to this trend. In disenfrachised areas, the goal is to encourage a more ‘active and reflexive citizenry’ capable of taking advantage of the opportunities of the new economy (Latham, 2001).

The United Kingdom’s New Labour government, in its attempt at Third Way politics, sees social capital as a means to prosperity. Communications technology, with its capacity to extend knowledge economy growth, is also of central importance and is succinctly summarised by Giddens: ‘In the new information economy, human (and social) capital becomes central to economic success. The cultivation of these forms of capital demands extensive social investment – in education, communications and infrastructure’ (Giddens, 2000). The inclusion of communications into local development policies becomes an issue of local agency. Stephen Graham summarises the three different aims driving the push towards information technology within local policy:

• The “global positioning” approach, where telematics are

used to attract inward investment into cities

183 • The “endogenous” development approach where

telematics are used to try and “reconnect” the economic,

social and cultural fragments that increasingly

characterise contemporary civic cities; and

• The delivery of public services via telematics and the

etablishment of new channels of city–citizen

communication (Graham, 1999: 17).

With its focus upon social capital, as well as content production and training, community media is a logical fit within the second of these objectives. It ‘may help underpin the development of a “virtuous circle” where improved social cohesion is linked with a renaissance of urbanism, local economic development and civic culture’ (Graham, 1999: 19).

Some correlations between Third World and Third Way can thus be seen. In both participatory development in the Third World and neighbourhood development, the assumption is that “connecting” with communities will bring forth new approaches to improving local conditions. Both see this as crucial in order to get beyond the failed modernisation solutions of the past.

Globalisation is accepted as a phenomenon that requires correction - it will lead to greater disempowerment of those outside of the economic networks unless strategies are put in place to counteract such forces. These strategies are implemented at a local level – social change is seen as having to come from within communities rather than from outside. Finally, both rely upon a

184 relationship, between an agency and the community and are therefore working at the intersection of civil society and the state and/or economy.

Implicit within this, is the idea that it is necessary to foster civil society

(although in coordination with the state). John Keane writes that:

The language of civil society can also be used for the

purposes of calculating political strategies of achieving a

predefined or assumed political good. In contrast to

empirical-analytic-interpretive approaches, which are

concerned with such intellectual tasks as naming,

categorising, observing, theorising, comparing and

understanding a complex reality of institutionally structured

action, strategic usages of the distinction between civil

society and the state have an eye for defining what must or

must not be done so as to reach a given political goal. The

term “civil society” is bound up with efforts to calculate the

tactical means of achieving or preserving certain ends

(Keane, 1991: 41).

As has been outlined in this chapter, both neighbourhood development and

Third World development rely upon the idea that civil society is a means to achieve a positive political end. The final section of this chapter looks at the difficulties involved in that proposition in relation to community media.

185 Localisation

Communications development and neighbourhood development both base policy within a sense of place. Within these programs the local is valorised as the site from which legitimate change must occur. In order to separate itself from the modernist past, these projects maintain that direct connection with the community concerned is necessary. Power is redistributed to the local level.

Giddens writes that ‘contrary to what is sometimes assumed, globalisation creates favourable conditions for the renewal of communities. This is because globalisation has a “push-down” effect, promoting the local devolution of power and bottom-up community activism’ (2000: 62). As with the participatory development approach to community media, neighbourhood development acknowledges the inequalities that globalisation produces.

However, it seeks relevance within this system rather than recognition of cultural relevance for its own sake. It seeks inclusion within the knowledge economy through education and skills transfer. In participatory development, the emphasis upon local place and culture is intended to avoid generalising perceived community needs. Programs based upon uniformity, in some critiques, are seen as imperialising (although this is problematic too as it casts the local community as powerless against any influence). Blaney and Pasha even warn that endorsing civil society and proclaiming its significance within a global system could be another mask for supporting a global culture. In other treatments uniform approaches ultimately fail due to a kind of self-

186 blinkered misdirection (as in Mody’s example). Participatory communications is wary of globalisation due to the history of development.

Where some criticise Third Way approaches to globalisation as being economically deterministic and (perhaps contradictorily) supportive of liberal capitalism (Callinicos, 2001), others turn to community media as a means to resist the capitalist forces of globalisation. Huesca (2001) and Escobar (2000) look to new social movement theory as a means to resolve issues of place and globalisation in development theory. New social movements have arisen out of the context of globalisation and signify a challenge to the power structures enforced by the rise of global capital. This “globalisation from below” utilises technology and networks to coordinate resistance and to stimulate social change.

New social movements are generally understood to be small,

decentralised, and democratic in their structure; cyclical and

diffuse in their temporal arrangement; and action driven

toward identity construction in their orientation. In the most

general sense, new social movements have been defined as

heterogenous groups forming outside formal institutions and

operating in discontinuous cycles to forge collective

meanings and identities that direct action (Huesca, 2001:

421).

Escobar asks whether it is possible to launch a defence of place as the starting point for social action within a world increasingly characterised by

187 globalisation. The two contradictory phenomena of global communication networks and the assertion of place within the global context can, combined, allow the concerns of the powerless to be expressed. By asserting the importance of place in terms of development – a continuing focus on local projects – development will work to build coalitions between places through communities’ use of communications technology. Seeing community media and development projects in terms of globalisation is important in order to see beyond the immediate groups and to account for networks and transnational communities. It takes community media out of its immediate broadcast reach and, in this way, acknowledges the role it plays in influencing and maintaining social movements across the globe – elevating ‘local knowledges into different constellations of knowledge and power through enabling networks’ (Escobar, 2000: 171).

It is what some have called “grounding” the conflation of unanchored knowledge and power in globalisation theory (Graham & Marvin, 2001; Slack

& Williams, 2000). Whereas popular conceptions of the ramifications of information communication technologies emphasise “flows” over “places”

(such as Castells, 1996), they found that only through understanding of the lived reality of local experience can the nature and potential for participation in the information economy be seen (see also Coates, 2000).

But to see globalisation as the primary justification for community media or development media projects risks ignoring the local for its own sake, outside of the global context. It should be remembered that community media

188 predates current concerns of globalisation. Local uses that do not intend to elevate people into the knowledge economy (as the Third Way rhetoric suggests) or that do not connect affiliated resistance groups (as postdevelopment suggests) should not be disregarded. If skills and networks are the criteria for funding community media projects then other uses – identity, entertainment – may miss out. Furthermore, if training programs focused upon specific groups take priority then other financial needs, such as infrastructure and station management, may not be met.

Beyond Development Communications and Towards

Community Broadcasting

Jan Servaes warns that participation is not appropriate to all situations, nor is it mapped-out according to a stringent policy design: ‘It is not an innovative formula that “experts” diffuse to the masses. It is a process that unfolds in each unique situation. To prescribe how that unfolding should occur is not only counterproductive, it is often the antithesis of genuine participation’

(Servaes, 1996: 23). Participatory communications has come to terms with the limitations of community-based change. There are no fast results and no outcomes that can be predefined. These observations go back to the problem of attempting to define communities as knowable and measurable entities.

David Harvey writes that concepts such as “community” can

… disguise radical differences in meaning because the

processes of community production themselves diverge

189 remarkably according to group capacities and interest. Yet

the treatment of communities as if they are comparable (by,

say, a planning agency) has material implications to which

the social practises of people who live in them have to

respond (Harvey, 1990: 204).

In the policy context, a rhetoric that sees community as a project to be constructed may work to entrench false notions of community, rather than support existing civil society. The theoretical progression that participative development communications has undergone is instructive in this instance.

What is at stake is the way in which communities are packaged and treated within policy approaches that seek to overcome scarcity.

Margarat Gillan, of the CMN in Ireland expressed dissatisfaction with Dublin

City’s Community Forum. Referring to their website, she pointed out the claim that without the Forum ‘the community does not have a platform from which to air their views’:

‘There are lots of platforms! …The community workers co-

op is one of them, for example. People created platforms but

little notice is taken of them, that is the problem. This is the

one the Government likes, and this is the one they’ve

decided we’re going to have’ (Gillan, 2002).

The Community Forum, for Gillan, is fraught with problems, mostly to do with the way the Forum has been structured by the City. By comparison, the

190 Community Media Forum, whilst a member body of the City Community

Forum, has an independent existence. Since it is driven by the groups involved, it can continue separately if so needed. Gillan sees its achievements, particularly its part in the campaign for community television, as being indicative of this. Where government strategies seek to shape civil society, or require them through “partnerships” to comply with government settings, they risk ostracising the community. In a true partnership, Gillan points out, one partner does not have the upper hand. Furthermore, she sees the campaign for community television as a complex struggle, involving many groups over a long period of time – a history which is easily overlooked when the City’s efforts are seen as the only interface.

Apart from the danger of missing actual community needs as a result of bureaucratic organisation or preconceived objectives, the danger of relying upon community or civil society for legitimacy in policy making is that it can lead to a kind of “moralism”. Alex Callinicos (2001) in his bluntly titled book

Against the Third Way, points out that the Blair government’s reliance on the notion of community has often manifested as a conservative championing of family values. The ‘internally complex character’ (55) of community is overlooked in practice, replaced by a ‘moral authoritarianism’. The zero tolerance policing of the Blair government is given as an example. By defending tough policing in order to protect communities, Callinicos points out that the liberal conception of individual rights and liberty is betrayed for a

‘sum of all liberties’. It is a strange critique coming from a Marxist, but

Callinicos has a point. Community, or group rights, can be dangerous when

191 coupled with a sense of moralism and righteousness. In terms of civil society, there is the real danger that only the parts of civil society that comply with the views of government will find assistance or validation. Although this has always been the case, where the rhetoric does not match the reality then the more radical and reactionary groups become entrenched outsiders. Once again referring to participatory communications, Servaes writes that it cannot be ‘a strategy to make target audiences “feel” more involved and, therefore, more acquiescent to manipulative agendas. It is not a means to an end but legitimate in its own right’ (1996: 23). This insight applies to all practices that seek to create social change through the mobilisation of community. However, despite the fact that the complexity of civil society groups problematises attempts at “partnership”, this is often what civil society groups seek and desire. Civil society relies upon both government and other agencies and networks for its survival and it is only in relation to such structures that it finds its role. Therefore, there are no answers to be found by abandoning attempts to connect groups and institutions.

The South Down Under

How does this relate to Australia’s community broadcasting sector? That is a question that has been asked but not fully answered. With organisations such as AMARC relying upon development justifications and funding – neither of which are directly accessible for Australia – there is some reason for Australia to feel left out of the global community broadcasting movement. This chapter

192 has attempted to move beyond that stale-mate by exploring the neighbourhood development approaches that are occurring in community media but also by highlighting the problems of development more generally. When seen in this light, it becomes apparent that:

• community media as it exists in Australia avoids many of the

difficulties inherent in development programs. When the problematic

and imperialising aspects of development thinking are removed, local

media initiatives remain a key opportunity for change. I have argued

that the distinction between this goal and the “postdevelopment”

approach are in fact closely related.

• the Australian community broadcasting sector is implicated within the

“social change” mission to some extent – even where that is simply the

existing and continuing effort to strengthen civil society and

communications opportunities at the grassroots level.

In other words, community broadcasting in Australia needs to be seen not so much as a response to globalisation (on the whole it is not), but as one existing infrastructure that offers some solutions to policy dilemmas, some of which involve globalisation issues.

There is a trend within Australia at the moment to promote community building with a view to social and economic advancement (Latham, 2001;

Pearson, 2001; Tanner, 1999). Although this chapter has been critical of Third

Way politics to some extent, my intention has only been to add to the debate

193 rather than to discount this approach. In earlier chapters I have discussed community broadcasting stations as nodes in civil society networks. This recognition is relevant to the types of policy solutions offered by Third Way thinking. The way in which these networks intersect with the ambitions of local and national government requires some further research. It also needs to be recognised that the types of “brokering” between communities and local government discussed in Botsman and Latham’s The Enabling State (2001) have existed in the community broadcasting sector for some time. The proposal by Access 31 to utilise their State Government’s satellite resources is one example of this. Such solutions – in this case to the issue of local television – reflect the dispersal of power and control that the Third Way emulates.

But as I have outlined in this chapter, care needs to be taken in promoting the use of civil society for economic gain. Mark Lyons, writing on Australian civil society, makes a similar argument in relation to the social capital (as the means to economic capital) argument. Although charitable non-profit organisations may represent a for-profit organisation in terms of efficiency and the level of service, civil society organisations (as defined in Chapter

Two) are established to serve members. He writes:

…a well-run civil society organisation involves its members

in its decision making processes; it is participatory and

discursive. In so far as it provides a service, it is far from

efficient and is committed to encouraging its “customers”,

who are its members, to develop their own capacities for

194 self-help and to have a voice… For managers and governers,

and perhaps for government policy makers, these two

perspectives require some rather delicate balancing (Lyons,

2001: 211–212).

And, as was demonstrated by Paul Keating’s preference for a “family” channel (with moralistic overtones) during the sixth channel inquiry,

“community building” can sometimes be understood as something very different to access.

In summary, although the postmodern within postdevelopment makes it acquiescent to the specificity of community and can frustrate its attempt to justify itself within the terms of social change, the problems of not complying with the local are twofold. Postdevelopment doesn’t deny the existence of civil society so much as imply an inherent acceptance of its diversity. In this respect, postdevelopment affirms civil society, but does not see it as being capable of universality. The very nature of civil society means that it cannot be promoted or rolled-out. It is inherently characterised by place and culture.

The next chapter takes a look at new policy approaches to communication that similarly promote an “unfinished” model of democracy and social change.

Dagron’s puzzle that cannot find completion but only supply a few pieces for a new puzzle seems to be an appropriate metaphor to lead off from.

195 Chapter Six: New Policies, New

Technologies

Trespassing and Access

I was once told that outside of his home in the town of Liffey, Tasmania, a prominent Australian Senator has placed a sign that reads ‘Trespassers are

Welcome’. Senator Brown (who I have seen being removed from property during a peaceful protest) acknowledges through the presence of his sign the way in which property can restrict freedom whilst at the same time undermining that principle. By allowing access the sign makes lack of movement in other spaces visible.

The act of seeking access cannot help but sound like a challenge or a demand

– it is the opposite of exclusion and alienation, and yet it is also a recognition that these dynamics exist. Access has been requested in many places at numerous times (in the women's movement, in overcoming racially designated borders) but it is not a unifying political goal in itself. Seeking access is not so much the attempt to institute a fundamentally different regime, but a process of reform that occurs on multiple fronts within a

196 complex system. Access is the process of identifying the spaces where power is used to block freedom and seeking to shift it.

As discussed in Chapter Two, Streeter has shown that access television is subservient to a system organised around the principles of contemporary liberalism in that it appeals for access to something owned by someone else

(Streeter, 1996). But community broadcasting also suggests an alternative regime through the act of demanding a space and using it differently to the general governance of the airwaves. The difficulty of community broadcasting comes not from its ambitions to change wider patterns of ownership and control, but that it is made to exist within overall policy arrangements that are antithetical to its design. The policy question about how to accommodate community broadcasting – how to provide access – has generally presupposed its subservience, or accommodation, within that system. An alternative policy regime is difficult to imagine.

And yet, in broader policy trends, a new conception of access is being imagined, if not pursued. What in the past has been a politically ambiguous word (more of a political process and a tool than a system of governance),

“access” has come to describe a new type of politics. Writes Jeremy Rifkin,

‘access has become the ticket to advancement and personal fulfilment and as powerful as the democratic vision was to earlier generations. It is a highly charged word, full of political significance’ (2000: 15). Lessig writes that in the digital age, ‘the central question becomes not whether governments or the market should control a resource, but whether a resource should be controlled

197 at all’ (2001: 14), suggesting that we need to relearn the benefits of protecting resources from private and public control. What has emerged policy-wise is “a new public interest”, based on an alternative regime where access is no longer about gaining access to a controlled territory, but where that territory is freely accessible to begin with. Inspired by the rise of the Internet, the new public interest argues that open and accessible communications platforms are the most guaranteed pathway to the development of new ideas – and for the reinvigoration of political life. Although that moment may not last, it has brought a new significance to notions of access. It needs to be asked how the new public interest and its vision of democracy relates to the old idea of community broadcasting and the public interest. Whether new notions of access, raised in part by new technologies, are necessary in the context of community broadcasting is the concern of this chapter.

The Internet

Although each chapter so far has centred on a geographical region, the territory that this chapter will begin with is the virtual one of the Internet. The networks of the Internet, it is often asserted, are the pathways to a more lively and powerful civil society. Pippa Norris writes that ‘the characteristics of the

Internet to shrink costs, maximise speed, broaden reach, and eradicate distance provide transnational advocacy networks with an effective tool for mobilisation, organisation and expression that can potentially maximise their leverage in the global arena’ (2001: 172). The Internet is central to discussions of new media not only because of its pervasiveness but also because of the

198 significant hopes and anxieties it has attracted. Furthermore, current debates concerning communication policy innovation rely heavily upon the Internet for their evidence.

Many were quick to promote the possibilities of new technologies, in particular the Internet. Not only had advances in communications technology made the world smaller, readers were told, they had also brought a sci-fi utopian future to the present. But now some of those who think about the

Internet have changed their minds. Where Barr wrote that ‘the Internet represents a radical departure in terms of the ownership and control of electronic media’ (2000: 123), Lessig asserts a year later that existing interests will ‘protect themselves from the competitive threat the Internet represents.

The old, in other words, is bending the Net to protect itself against the new’

(Lessig, 2001: 16). The concern now is that if “the future” is here, then it is beginning to look a lot like the recent past. At stake in the new public interest is the survival of the Internet “commons” – its accessible and open architecture. This conceptual framework will be extended to explore the issues involved with community media’s transition to a convergent media environment in the final part of this chapter.

Community media and the Internet

What exactly is community within the vast, decentred and global terrain of

Internet content? Does the Internet’s potential for participation at the edges

(with no apparent centre of control) mean that it is the perfect domain for

199 community expression? Its facilitation of communication in real time, the formal and informal congregation of users according to their interests, the end-to-end technical design – all of this makes it the technological platform with a seemingly natural affinity for the spaces, groups and networks of civil society. Early impressions of the Internet expressed this sentiment. For instance, Rheingold’s discovery of the virtual community:

Millions of people on every continent also participate in the

computer-mediated social groups known as virtual

communities, and this population is growing fast. Finding

WELL [Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link] was like discovering

a cozy little world that had been flourishing without me,

hidden within the walls of my house; an entire cast of

characters welcomed me to the troupe with great merriment

as soon as I found the secret door (Rheingold, 1994: 1–2).

However, discussions of community formations on the Net complicate, rather than clarify, attempts to locate community media activity. These early discussions of the Internet expressed its potential as a realm immune from control, as if the Internet were the perfect public sphere where people could organise into communities without the restrictions of time and space that have encumbered traditional communities (Poster, 1997). This depiction of the

Internet, as well as its swift growth and apparent ability to defy regulation or control, inspired a wave of cyberdemocracy – a belief that the technology would increase society’s democratic potential. The accessible and participatory nature of the Internet was seen to make it an ideal democratic

200 space wherein people could communicate freely and participate in forums built for collective decision-making. Nicholas Negroponte wrote in 1995 that

‘the access, the mobility, and the ability to effect change are what will make the future so different to the present’, and that digital information would be an

“empowering” force beyond people’s expectations (1995: 231).

The excitement expressed by the early Internet participants at the possibilities for a new democratic space is understandable. If their elation is to be criticised, it is how easily they made grand sweeping statements out of their experiences in what was essentially a closed community of techno-literate libertarians. The particular voluntarist and utopianist history that has been instilled into discourses of the Internet is just one history. In fact, the Internet as it is known today is the result of collaborations between public and private research institutions, corporations, publicly-minded individuals as well as organised and informal groups. To look only at the radical elements of the

Internet is to deny the complicated and contradictory relationship between commercial and non-commercial relationships involved (see Goggin, 2000).

The Internet was not the product of uncorrupted ‘hippy artisanship’ (Barbrook

& Cameron, 1995) but of a combined effort from private industry, government and civil society groups and individual pioneers. Those that warn of ‘certain economic, political, and legislative trends that threaten to convert the Internet into yet another commercial medium, stripped of its unique potential for facilitating progressive political debate and transformation’ (Ford

& Gil, 2001: 201) often ignore this history. Much cyberdemocratic discourse also ignores the vast body of literature that warned against technological

201 determinism. Writes Nicholas Garnham: ‘In spite of the assaults of critical theorists, romantics, and postmodernists and growing popular suspicion, science and technology, and the technologically determined view of progress linked to it, retains high prestige and currency, perhaps particularly in relation to information and communication technology, at both popular and elite level’

(2000: 66). The task of positioning how we understand the Internet within existing political theory is still far from completion.

It is no longer possible to rely upon these cyberdemocratic discourses in attempting to define the role that the Internet will play in the advancement of civil society. Cyberdemocracy has finally become outdated with the recognition that participatory appearance of the Internet was just one possible path of development. The ability for the Internet to be shaped through market forces or the state’s design was, and is, entirely feasible. Discussions of commercialisation on the one hand and surveillance and privacy – such as the

FBI’s Carnivore software – reflected a new sweep of concerns. Lessig’s

(Lessig, 1999) mantra that “Code is Law”, which discussed how the Net’s architecture could be altered to accommodate regulation, became the new, less optimistic, depiction of the Internet. Conveniently summarising his entire book in one paragraph, Lessig writes:

Nature doesn’t determine cyberspace. Code does. Code is

not constant. It changes. It is changing now in a way that

will make cyberspace more regulable. It could change in a

way that makes cyberspace less regulable. How it changes

202 depends on the code writers. How code writers change it

could depend on us (Lessig, 1999: 109).

Code sent a warning through academic and policy circles that a different, commercialised Internet might be just around the corner. But even though the early beliefs about the Internet were to be dampened by the likes of Lessig, it can be said that the ethos of free information exchange within early cyberdemocracy claims must have attracted media activists and communities in need of an accessible platform. Although it was falsely deterministic, this promise was in some ways a self-fulfilling prophesy, fuelling interest in the

Net and expanding its user base. Such interest in the democratic uses of the

Net led to some astoundingly effective innovations by groups that were otherwise considered to be without media power. Most famous of these was the experience of the Zapatista movement in Mexico, an Indigenous army that utilised global information networks in 1994 to express their demands directly without having to use state controlled media channels. As Ford and Gil describe it, ‘the Zapatistas inspired a flourishing, widespread, and varied network of radical media communication that afforded them the opportunity to communicate with civil society. As a result, civil society was motivated and able to respond directly to the requests of the EZLN [Zapatista National

Liberation Army] for citizen participation in their project’ (Castells, 1996;

Ford & Gil, 2001: 219). What the Zapatistas described as a five hundred-year struggle received global attention for the first time, due to Internet.

Pippa Norris writes reservedly that, although it is unlikely that we can expect total political transformation, the ‘restructured opportunities for information

203 and communication available via digital politics will potentially have positive consequences for civic society, altering the balance of relevant resources and slightly levelling the playing field’ (2001: 23). Using a sample from the

Yearbook of International Organisations, Norris concludes that about a quarter of all civil society associations have an online presence

(approximately 12,400 groups world-wide). And this is excluding social movement networks or other unregistered types of community groups. The number and diversity of groups on the Net, from the International Potato

Centre to the Nordic Youth Committee, is testament to its use as a civil society forum. Invoking another commons, Norris sees the Internet as ‘a virtual Hyde Park Corner where a plurality of multiple actors can and do find opportunities to network, organise and express their viewpoints’ (2001: 190).

Norris’s work is a useful survey of the current status of civil society’s use of the Internet and at the content level. But she does not attempt to identify the possibilities for an extension of this activity or draw conclusions from her findings as to the use of media throughout civil society.

So what is community media on the Internet? Without the mechanisms of governance – licensing, regulation, incorporation – that clearly define community broadcasting as belonging within third sector, it is difficult to identify exactly what can be considered community media. Communities who utilise the Internet negotiate their own terms and boundaries more often than not. Resources and enthusiasm determine their presence on the Net but their activity is not enshrined by application to a bureaucratic authority. It is possible, however, to gauge some qualities: that which is not directly

204 associated with either government or private sector interests, that involves voluntarism and group interest. Furthermore, community media groups see the media as central to their objectives or charter.

The Internet and the New Public Interest

The rise of the Internet has had broad political consequences for all sectors of the media (for a policy-based discussion see Flew, 2002). What this means for community media is nicely summed up by community web developer,

Gabrielle Kuiper. If there is a future for community media, Kuiper believes, then it will need to be constructed out of DIY materials. In true communitarian style, the technologies used will be the equivalent of mud bricks: ‘anyone can learn how to make mud bricks, build their own houses and teach other people how to build them’ (Kuiper, 2002). Kuiper works with the group Catalyst, located in an old ice-cream factory in a suburb of Sydney.

Catalyst assists community groups in achieving an online presence as a low- cost ISP, through training and the development of free software based on open source code. By pioneering free software, Catalyst constructs technology that can be built upon, adapted and repurposed by other groups. This technology is the hand-made bricks of Kuiper's metaphor for community access. Access here is something that is free to all, where information can be copied without permission and where the community creates its own spaces and technologies rather than being designated by them.

205 The technical initiatives of open source and end-to-end design can be credited with having made the Internet the unusually accessible and participatory communications platform that it is. End-to-end design is the result of a system of protocols that allow computers to share data by “packet-switching” – shifting recognisable packets of data by labelling and routing them to their destination (see Froomkin, 1997). As a result, there is no reason why a computer should send a packet through the same route twice, avoiding the need for a central machine. Writes Lessig, ‘end-to-end says to keep intelligence in a network at the ends, or in the applications, leaving the network itself to be relatively simple’ (2001: 34). This system means that permission is not required in order to participate in the Internet (Leiner et al.,

2000). And as the source code that implements the protocols is visible, anyone can participate in the construction of new layers of protocols, and so develop new applications or produce new versions of existing ones. In the case of free software (meaning software distributed under the GNU Public Licence that prevents it from being copyrighted) a philosophical idea, or ethic, about access to technology and how it can be engineered to promote participation is promoted. That the software cannot become proprietary means that it is kept in the public domain as a free, common resource. Furthermore, the technology is collaborative, with a capacity-building potential, and educative in that the code is visible to be analysed and learnt (Kuiper, 2002).

These characteristics of the Internet's architecture have been written about extensively. For Lawrence Lessig, the Internet is a commons in which no one has ‘the exclusive right to choose whether the resource is made available to

206 others’ (2001: 20). It is akin to a public park or beach that anyone can access or a language that anyone can learn without having to seek permission. The commons is a resource that is held “in common”, and the Internet, due to its technical architecture is seen as the ultimate example of this. In another version of the commons philosophy, Graham Meikle (2002: 31) makes a clear distinction between types of interactivity that allow for a degree of choice in content (such as video game interactivity) and that which enables people to

‘influence and contribute to the content of the exchange’. In making tiered distinctions between types of interactivity, Meikle demonstrates how the issue is more complex than simply that of the conventional binary of participation and broadcasting. For Meikle conversational forms of interactivity are

“unfinished”. The unfinished nature of this interactivity means that it allows others to add to existing works and so continue the creative process. As a result, it is a type of interactivity that leads to the new, bringing about

‘possibilities of a future that, in this case, we don’t back into; one that may not look like what’s gone before’ ( 33). Such “intercreative” designs are therefore a catalyst for innovation. As with Lessig, Meikle sees the possibility of a future rich with new ideas and democratic potential as residing in the existence of open, rather than closed systems, in the particular end-to-end technology and in open source software.

Although the commons debate has become popular through discussions of the

Internet, the revival of the commons as a political concept is much broader.

David Bollier writes: ‘The American commons include tangible assets such as public forests and minerals, intangible wealth such as copyrights and patents,

207 critical infrastructure such as the Internet and government research, and cultural resources such as the broadcast airwaves and public spaces’ (2001: 2).

Within all of these spaces there is a fear that too much private control leading to the restriction of access will be against the public interest. The narrowband

Internet, with its open and accessible architecture represents a moment in which the access was taken to a new level, even if that structure does not last.

The debate over media access has flipped from one where an existing regime of ownership and control is presupposed, to one where openness and freedom are the “natural”, or primary, foundation. The argument, therefore, becomes one of protecting the spaces where freedom exists and creating new spaces for that to occur. Access is not subservient to wider structures, but the starting point from which other concerns (economic and political) can then be addressed. The impact of this upon the ideas-world of policy has been substantial. The threat of losing that narrowband moment has sparked a new policy push, away from a concern about how to regulate the Internet, to concerns for how to make sure that it remains free and accessible.

This shift is beginning to be discussed as part of a “new public interest”

(Aufderheide, 2002). As Anthony Smith writes, when we invoke the public interest, ‘we are, half-consciously, groping for a way of referring to something highly valued, a telos or collective good normally standing in opposition to, or above, other legitimate demands and interests’ (1989: 11). The prevailing understanding of the public interest – the “old”, familiar, public interest – has negated selfishness and personal gain in favour of a common good that may require compromise from individuals. McQuail sees it as a ‘matter which

208 might affect the public life of society’ – the general welfare – stemming from first principles, or ‘basic social and political values’ (1996: 69). Because it is the thinking behind public service broadcasting (and content requirements) in broadcasting policy, the public interest has, through its insistence on what is

“best for all” come to represent the collective.

The new public interest is something altogether different. It involves embracing a range of possible publics that may conflict or contradict each other. There is no claim to what the “good” is, only a striving for it; more players and more ideas means a greater chance that some kind of progress will emerge, either in the form of economic advancement or the advancement of democracy. When partnered with access, the communitarian ideal is transformed into a more dispersed, random and inconclusive idea of the good life. This is demonstrated by Meikle in his discussion of the One Nation

Party's somewhat surprisingly participative website:

An open, Version 1.0 media space is one in which everyone

can participate, and that means having to deal with

everyone's ideas, even when they turn out to be ugly,

divisive and cruel. So one thing that the One Nation media

experience shows is that an open media environment might

turn out to be a confronting one for many of us. But that is

still, I think, preferable to a closed, Version 2.0 system built

around choices which all support the same entrenched

positions and interests (Meikle, 2002: 57).

209 The difference between this idea of media democracy and the more cautious, regulated idea of the (old) public interest in broadcasting policy is clear.

Policy approaches that seek to uphold the new public interest are important for community broadcasting as they admit the existence of multiple publics – something that has always been a feature of the community broadcasting rationale.

The new public interest is an insurance against control, a wager on democracy. But without the participation of civil society within that commons

(the community ideal expressed by Kuiper and Meikle) the new public interest would be in danger of becoming just another argument for free markets – a revival of liberal economics and competition policy. The new public interest has been promoted by US communications advocacy organisations such as

Media Access Project and the Centre for Media Education, as well as by the computer science and legal academic communities. At times, commercial players such as ISPs have joined the campaign when it has advanced their interests. Although it has found most force in the US due to the controversy over the AOL/Time Warner merger and the consequences for broadband, similar philosophical arguments have made their way into Australian and

European communications policy discussions. Damien Tambini has spoken of the new public interest behind the UK's new communications bill, which brings more players to the market. Furthermore, he sees it as influencing the role of the public service broadcaster – citing the BBC’s intention to add the objective to “connect” to the existing trinity “inform, educate and entertain”

(2002). In Australia, the Productivity Commission argued in their Report on

210 Broadcasting that innovation in the digital television environment could only be achieved through competition, transparency and a leaner and smarter approach to spectrum management (see Chapter One) (Productivity

Commission, 2000).

Aufderheide, picking up on the strange alliances formed within the commons debate, asserts how ‘it confirmed… the insight of public interest advocates that commons strategies have benefits that are not organised neatly along commercial/noncommercial, public/private, consumer/citizen lines’ (2002:

13). The competition aspects of the argument are clear from the AOLTW story – that smaller ISPs who do not have stakes in the network infrastructure should still be able to provide services without additional cost to consumers.

The issue involves the implementation of old, anticompetitive business structures within a domain characterised by access. But those who advocate the new public interest are concerned not only with competition but also with the maintenance of the pre-commercial structure and character of the Internet.

The differences between the commons and open access need to be more clearly defined within the media policy debate. The inclusion of civil society – in terms of free access for all – as opposed to market-based systems (such as competitive price-based spectrum auctions), is an integral factor in the implementation of a true commons. But although the new public interest can be cynically viewed as a straightforward endorsement of competition policy, community-based media fits better within this design than with notions of the public interest being only met through monopoly or oligopoly public service broadcasters.

211 Relationship of Old and New Media

In the late 1990s Gabrielle Kuiper and community television pioneer Matthew

Arnison began working on an automated calender site whereby groups could post their events onto the Internet without people in a central location having to key in each entry. The code – adapted by Arnison and known as Active

(www.active.org.au) – was extended to include a space for community news and opinion that could also be easily posted. As a result, Active became a forum for community news and debate, with not only events but descriptions, explanations and journalistic information focused upon Sydney’s activist community.

Active’s global impact came about through its role in the development of the

Indymedia phenomenon. Prior to the anti-corporate/globalisation rally during the WTO 1999, Indymedia’s main function was as a physical space for community-based media in the US. Active had been launched in Sydney in

January of that year, and upon hearing about the upcoming protests decided to attempt a web broadcast of the event. A site was developed at Catalyst that involved only the news aspects of the Active template with the additional capacity of enabling the uploading of images and video onto the site. Matthew

Arnison, in the United States at the time, met with the Seattle Indymedia

Centre and suggested that the Active source code be used by Indymedia for their coverage of the event. Arnison, at a safe distance back in his lounge- room in Sydney, worked throughout the night during the protests to keep the site going ‘while tear gas was floating in to the Indymedia office in Seattle’

(Kuiper, 2002). The infamous Seattle protests attracted the world’s attention,

212 and on the weekend of June 18 the site reached 1 million hits. Indymedia became possibly the most notorious activist site on the web, retaining its structure as an open forum for news, opinion and events through the automated posting system. Within six months of the Seattle protests over 30

Indymedia sites were established in cities throughout the United States and around the world. There are now over 70 in existence, spawned from the original code, and adapted to fit local languages and aesthetics, including sites in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane.

Sydney Indymedia have, in the past, had a presence on 2SER community radio where they have imitated their own web format by encouraging listeners to send in their own short audio documentaries. The entire program was then digitised and uploaded back onto Indymedia Sydney. According to Kuiper, the radio program ‘was a recognition that you get your message across more effectively if you put it out across different media’, attracting wider audiences according to their media usage. Such convergence also extends to television.

Activities of video groups such as Actively Radical prompted Catalyst to invest in video capturing equipment in order to incorporate video documentaries onto the site.

There is a common assumption that broadcast media is, and has always been, a “closed” network. Meikle writes that:

Early Net technologies – email, bulletin boards, newsgroups

– produced so much optimism and excitement at least partly

because they were seen to enable participation on a scale,

213 and to a degree, not possible with established media. Any of

us could, in theory, take part. An interactive technology was

one in which we could get to them as easily as they could

get to us (Meikle, 2002: 29).

But hasn’t community broadcasting always been a media platform in which anyone can take part? In the commons of community broadcasting, participation and broadcasting are not in opposition to each other but made compatible. It is an open system within which anyone can enter the conversation, not in a “talk-back” radio style, but as equal producers.

Therefore, using Meikle’s own terminology, community broadcasting is

Version 1.0 media utilising Version 2.0 technology. Although not end-to-end

– apparently the penultimate platform for the stimulation of innovation – community broadcasting’s access mandate brings it close to this principle, despite being a broadcast media. The claim that community broadcasting overcomes the broadcast one-to-many communication structure is not new.

Participation, framed in contrast to the mass media, has always been used as a justification for community media. But in the restating of the commons argument this is mostly overlooked. The implication of bringing community media into the commons debate is that innovation arising out of open networks is not restricted to the Internet, but possible on any platform where a commons can be established. Although the commons are not necessarily restricted to non-profit activity, community broadcasting is one means to organise a commons within broadcasting to ensure greater access and equity.

A further implication of considering community as relevant to the commons

214 debate is that the innovation that takes place across media platforms can be accounted for and understood.

Community media has a tendency to occupy available space where it can be found. In Italy, low-power stations have sprung up utilising free spectrum to broadcast television content as an alternative to stations owned by Berlusconi.

In the UK, a test was conducted at the June 2002 Community Media Summer

Festival that saw community television distributed to the local neighbourhood by wireless broadband, using spectrum that is freely available for use within a

100 metre radius. These are only the most recent examples of a history of community media initiatives that have “routed around” legislative hurdles in order to be seen or heard. More famously, when independent radio station,

B92 in Belgrade, was suspended in 1999 under the Milosevic regime, the station persisted by video streaming its programming on the Net. In the process it gained the attention and support of the international community and was eventually distributed for rebroadcast in Serbia via sattelite (Meikle,

2002). As has already been mentioned, the group Catalyst was formed by community television campaigners who were dissatisfied by the activities of the community television station in Sydney at the time. Indymedia was developed as a means to coordinate large groups of activists during the Seattle demonstrations and to allow independent reporting of events by the activist community. In all examples, new media territory was crossed as a tactic to survive or make do – in order to persist.

215 Innovation within community media is not restricted to the Internet or unique to its design. In many cases, the groups that utilise the Internet emerge from or seek partnerships with broadcasters. Kuiper, comparing the content of Sydney

Indymedia with the Indymedia sites of other cities, said that it would have been a ‘much more effective and useful site if it had made contact with existing community media when it started off’ (Kuiper, 2002). By restricting discussions of innovation to the Internet, the processes of information sharing, collaboration, and flexibility to move between media platforms are not taken into account.

Beyond Community Media

There is a moment in Meikle's Future Active where boundaries of community media on the Internet are thrown into doubt. Mathew Arnison is quoted by

Meikle:

I like to think the free software movement is a very strong

activist movement, but somewhat hidden. This is because

the people involved don't really think they are activists, and

other activists don't realise what is going on… For once they

can write software to do what they want, rather than what

they can get paid to write, and they get to join a huge family

of other people sharing the process of writing software

(Arnison in Meikle, 2002: 107).

216 Arnison defines participation as activism, even though the people involved are not aware of it as such. This raises an interesting question about the future of community media. In the free software movement, media production is not identified as media activism by many that create it, as the idea of resistance is less obvious when the technology is open to begin with. The words

“community media” could be substituted for that of “activism” and the point would still be the same – that participation has become so commonplace on the Internet that people are not aware that they are changing the traditional structures of the media. The concerns over property only become an obvious feature of the free software movement when enclosure becomes an issue

(which is why Meikle and Lessig seek to make people aware that free software is an important democratic movement). So far I have discussed access as having changed from “access to” towards access as openness. The logical extension of this (on a purely intellectual level) is that access is no longer “access” at all as it has lost its notion of change, resistance and opposition. We might just as easily say that rather than all participation being community media (as Arnison hints at) that, in fact, community media itself would no longer be defined as community media as its “other” would cease to exist.

In some respects defining community media on the Internet has been a matter of self-definition – an identity group in itself rather than an institutionally designated sector – as the boundaries between types of participation are not enshrined or delineated by the governmental categorising that occurs in the field of broadcast regulation. As the Internet is increasingly threatened by the

217 enclosure strategies of private companies seeking to control the technology, the nature of community involvement and activism may become more clearly defined, particularly if commons-style spaces are created in order to ensure that access remains. In the realm of television and radio, community media requires adequate definitions in order to make it distinct from commercial and government broadcasters and to uphold its status as a legitimate sphere of media activity. I declared in the introduction to this thesis that the primary exercise here was not to imagine what community broadcasting might look like in an ideal world (although I have taken some liberties in this chapter to do just that) but what forces exist that make it what it is. As long as the media is not an open resource, community media is an important category by which to ensure that participation exists. However, there is also the possibility that if access remains a subservient concept within that framework, community participation will remain a marginal concern of broadcasting policy.

Community and the Network Society

There is also a larger question at stake here and that has to do with the position and relevance of notions of community access and participation in the politics of the network society in general. Writes Rifkin:

Inclusion and access, rather than autonomy and ownership,

become the more important tests of one's personal freedom.

Freedom is a measure of one's opportunities to enter into

relationships, forge alliances, and engage in networks of

218 shared interest. Being connected makes one free. Autonomy,

once regarded as tautological with personal freedom,

becomes its opposite. To be autonomous in a network world

is to be isolated and disconnected. The right not to be

excluded, the right of access, on the other hand becomes the

baseline for measuring personal freedom. Government's role

in the new scheme of things is to secure every individual's

right of access to the many networks – both in geographic

space and cyberspace – through which human beings

communicate, interact, conduct business, and constitute

change (Rifkin, 2000: 240).

Although the way in which we view community media may change as technologies become more participative, the notion of community itself becomes more relevant. In fact, the new economy has coopted community within its project of network relations. Community is both a means to the development of fruitful relationships that may extend and enhance networks and information flows, and that which contributes value to this new social configuration. As Castells has written, this is a politics where ‘a structural logic dominated by largely uncontrollable flows within and between networks creates the conditions for the unpredictability of the consequences of human action through the reflection of such action in an unseen, unchartered space of flows’ (1999: 59). Community furnishes this otherwise bleak social vision with some kind of meaning, albeit a meaning that is made up of a myriad of different concerns, efforts and tastes. Reaction against the destructuration of society takes the form of ‘affirming basic cultural, historical, or biological

219 identities (real or reconstructed) as fundamental principles of existence. The society of flows is a society of primary ascription communities, in which affirmation of the being (ethinic identity, territorial identity, national identity) becomes the organising principle for a system that in itself becomes a system for itself’ (Castells, 1999: 59).

Where Castell's work is descriptive (to some deterministic, for instance

Callinicos, 2001), the role of community within the “society of flows” is, for others, something that must be prescribed and promoted. Rifkin speaks of two types of access – community and commercial. He wants us to ask what type of access it is that we seek to institute, asserting that it is the networks of community that are more valuable, and more lasting, they are ‘the wellspring of social trust’ and a means to self-fulfillment (2000: 243). Community plays a vital role in the maintenance of networks and social relations within the network society, but, more importantly, it makes it worthwhile. As the case of community television in Australia demonstrates, the issue of access, as well as the role of community within the new media environment, remains far from determined.

Access and the Australian Context

As discussed in Chapter One, community broadcasting has struggled to overcome its position of marginality in an environment where the interests of the incumbent broadcasters are prioritised on the pretext of market stability.

Television in particular has been considered an arena of controlled quality in

220 which the status quo is maintained (favouring the commercial incumbents) in return for public interest requirements. This quid pro quo rationale, the presence of two national broadcasters and a fixed approach to spectrum planning, have made for a broadcasting environment in which access can only ever be a minor concern. The ‘political, technical, industrial, economic and social compromises’, as the Productivity Commission stated, ‘have created a policy framework that is inward looking, anti-competitive and restrictive’

(2000: 5). In such a framework, tradeoffs between economic and cultural imperatives are favoured over transparency or flexibility. Access, as a principle, is marginal within such a system, an anomaly that does not fit with notions of prescriptive regulation over content and production.

The history of community television policy reflects this uncomfortable relationship. It has coincided with the rise of notions of cultural diversity, in which national identity has been redefined to account for and support the existing identities of the various cultural groups. This included policies directed at particular cultures, for example, the development of multicultural and Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander policy frameworks and the establishment of a national broadcaster with an ethnic broadcasting mandate –

SBS television. But where multiculturalism has a defined and easily identifiable purpose (ethnic/migrant cultures and multilingualism), community policies are more often defined by what they are not (Hawkins, 1993).

Community has been named in the cultural process as something other than high culture, as an effort to account for the various groups that were seeking recognition, funding and cultural rights. In this cultural reorganisation,

221 community has been constructed as something that belongs at the fringes of culture. The inherent untidiness of community when viewed as an object of policy (where does it end and who is in charge?), its transient nature and its status as something different to established forms of cultural enterprise

(experimentation, voluntarism) fits uncomfortably with a regulatory environment of managed difference. In the television context, it is clear that the preferred means of maintaining Australian cultural standards is through content requirements rather than through access. Access becomes a concession to what is left over rather than a positively defined means to diversity. Where Streeter, writing of the American context, speaks of access as being complicit in a rationale of bureaucratically supported private interests, in Australia the more pertinent point is that any claims to access creating neutrality are outdone by a cultural policy framework of pre-emptive, bureaucratically achieved, regulated balance.

Australian communications policy requires a clearer conception of what community access means if an adequate arrangement for the digital transmission of community television is to be found. This means thinking beyond the activities of the existing community television stations and towards community access in general. There are obvious limits to the comparisons that can be drawn between community broadcasting and the

Internet. The restrictions upon television broadcasting in terms of the limited number of channels, content and classification requirements, as well as technical factors, mean that systems whereby anyone can “upload” content into a commons style arrangement are not (at this point in time)

222 comprehensible. Opportunities do exist, however, to provide community broadcasters with a space in the digital television environment that would allow for a greater degree of experimentation and technical flexibility than has been possible with analog technology. The set-aside of a significant amount of digital spectrum for use by community broadcasters would be one step towards a more open communications platform.

The point of this chapter is not to speculate on what such an arrangement might look like, but the principle upon which access is granted. The current television environment does not provide sufficient justification for the development of community broadcasting. Proposals for the digital transmission of community television have so far presumed that content will remain similar to that of the current trial stations. These suggestions, which have mostly centred around the carriage of a single standard-definition community television channel by another broadcaster (either a public service broadcaster or a commercial broadcaster), do not allow for community innovation beyond the current achievements of the sector. If anything, suggestions for the digital transmission of community television presume the static nature of community broadcasting, restricting and containing it rather than seeking a means for its advancement in the new digital environment.

The central argument of public interest advocates in the commons debate, including the AOL merger, was that the government should be regulating to restrict anti-competitive practices likely to stifle innovation through the provision of access; not simply the carriage of other commercial enterprises

223 who can compete at auction for access, but free access for anyone – a true commons. The new public interest is not far removed from that which has been called upon in the past to support the establishment of community media.

Community media has relied upon diversity, difference, access and participation as the primary justifications for its existence. Such values have never fully conformed to a public interest that has sought top-down solutions in defence of the majority good. As John Keane writes, a ‘theory of civil society and public life that clings dogmatically to the vision of a unified public sphere in which “public opinion” and “the public interest” are defined is a chimera’. For the sake of democracy, ‘it ought to be jettisoned’ (Keane,

1998: 189). Philosophically, the new public interest is not incompatible with community broadcasting. In some respects it is hardly new at all.

224 Conclusion

Is there a future for community television? The answer to that question, of course, is “it depends”. This thesis has attempted to clarify what that future is dependent upon, and to locate community broadcasting within the wider questions facing communications policy today.

It depends, firstly, upon an adequate conception of the role and use of community broadcasting. I have argued in this thesis that we need to look to civil society to understand community broadcasting. This means accepting ideas of diversity and difference that are grounded in the real networks, alliances and affiliations that communities choose to form. In Chapter One,

Mark Lyons pointed out that the greatest threat to the civil society in Australia today is non-recognition. It follows that the first place to begin to find a future for community television is to recognise it.

Streeter (1996) has asserted that policy alternatives become available when the deliberate political choices that have shaped broadcasting into its current political form are uncovered. In Australia's case that system is one of a stabilised mixture of public and private broadcasters with a regulated and pre-

225 emptive approach to the public interest. Whether this system as a whole is due to change drastically or not, a clearer conception of the role of community broadcasting is required if its full potential is to be realised in the digital television environment. This means asking what it is that community broadcasting does differently to commercial and public service broadcasters.

In these final pages I will gather together some of those questions and consolidate the research findings within the Australian context.

Changing Cultures

Broadcasting is not alone in having to deal with cultural, political and industrial shifts. Nikolas Rose writes that we are now experiencing a proliferation of ‘forms of politics and types of contestation which cannot be calibrated in terms of the dichotomies of traditional political thought’ (1999:

2). The activities of civil society have perhaps also expanded, or at least repositioned, to become the foreground upon which many of our issues, conflicts, and cultural activities are played out. Communities, and their relation to the social and political, seem to have exceeded the boundaries, terms and structures of Australia's cultural policy.

There is a relationship between our social, political and cultural landscapes and our ability to engage with media at different levels and through multiple means. Whether there has been a recent proliferation of cultural and political groups, tastes, identities and issues is debatable. It does appear to be the case, however, that we are witnessing or recognising this activity more acutely and

226 with greater interest than in the past. It is now a recurrent theme of political thought that issues of national sovereignty and identity are being challenged by ‘the globalisation of flows of money, communications, products, persons, ideas and cultures, and the localisation of local economic regions, world cities, regional identities, lifestyle sectors and so forth’ (Rose, 1999: 2). This recognition, if not the activity itself, is tied directly to our information systems, our access to media and our increasing ability to participate in and distribute cultural expression.

The history of community television in Australia demonstrates that civic participation in the broadcasting arena has not been a priority – at least where economically powerful interests are at stake. Is this justified in a society dealing with competing and conflicting demands stemming not only from our differences, but also from the boundaries of our freedom and rights, from environmental crises, globalised industrial issues and a variety of claims to identity recognition and support? As O'Regan has stated, cultural diversity in the community arts context was about ‘recognising, sanctioning and organising inter-ethnic political identities’ (2001: 5). This approach falls short of encompassing the broader ideas of community and difference discussed in this thesis. Community broadcasting is not a solution to society’s problems, but a participant within the cultural field that derives its significance from the fact that it emerges from civil society. As a result it is structured to extend the networks of civil society – and thus the sites for citizen engagement.

Technological change – in particular the introduction of digital media – is altering civil society through new methods of information exchange, new

227 industry structures and regulatory capabilities. Granting civil society institutions – including community television – the right to develop and to begin to interact dynamically with cultural and political spheres in one step towards accommodating these changes.

Theoretical Directions

Nick Couldry has observed that alternative media has been underrepresented in media studies, asserting that theory is one arena within which the marginalisation of community-based media must be addressed. This thesis has attempted to locate the debates that are relevant to community broadcasting, including discussions of community, civil society and development (Chapter

Two). Other contributors to the field have discussed community broadcasting in terms of personal and community empowerment (Rodriguez, 2002) and as symbolic power (Couldry, 2000; Huesca 2001). These works are important for constructing notions of community media that move beyond seeing audience size or ability to affect ownership structures as measurements for success.

However, the area of community broadcasting still requires a great deal of further research.

I have outlined some of the themes upon which such research could extend from: its use as a tool for civil society expression; possibilities for social change at the local level; and financial models beyond anti-commercial assumptions. The next step might involve empirical evidence on the extent to which community broadcasting promotes civil society networks; economic

228 models for small scale media working under different conditions (in regional areas, or conflict situations, for instance); or studies into skills expansion through community broadcasting involvement. One of the more pressing areas for further research to emerge out of this study is the development of alternative technical models, including the possibilities for dynamic spectrum use and the place of community participation within commons-style set- asides. The cooperation of the technical and legal communities is vital if this project’s findings are to generate further outcomes.

Reassessing Quality and Non-Commercialism

Community broadcasting is often seen as an inadequate method of meeting public interest requirements, particularly when public service broadcasting attracts greater audiences through the provision of “quality” content. Those working within the community broadcasting field do not generally hold this view, reaching for concepts of access and participation to justify their position. For them, public service broadcasting does not, and cannot by nature, provide the freedom, skills dissemination and level of participation that community broadcasting provides. The non-profit motive, shared with public service broadcasting, is upheld in community broadcasting not for the sake of maintaining the appearance of unbiased authority but as a symbol that people are involved in broadcasting for the love of it (Letch, 2001). These differences, how they have come about and their associated claims to “the public interest”, are important in distinguishing the need for community broadcasting.

229

Judging community broadcasting on the basis of the success of the national/public service broadcaster is not unique to Australia. As discussed in

Chapter Four, when Europe's broadcasting landscape began to change in the

1980s, community campaigners were fighting for access alongside potential commercial players. The defenders of public broadcasting – who dominated the intellectual and elite opinion – were not the natural allies of community broadcasting (for instance Garnham, 1990/1980). Although community broadcasting advocates promoted their cause on the basis of public rights and local content, the endorsement of a decentralised and open communication system was nevertheless a challenge to the cultural status and funding of public service broadcasting. When cable companies began to support community content trials (ingratiating themselves to government) it could only have exacerbated the sentiment that community broadcasting was simply one more step towards privatisation (Hollander, 1992).

But that was then. Commercial interests have made their way into European broadcasting through cable and satellite technology as well as over-the-air transmission. The notion that public service broadcasting should be the sole

(or dominant) provider of content has been dismantled, and with it the idea of a unified national audience. Mass representation and elitist views of quality have been replaced with access to niche services and ‘negotiated quality’

(Tambini, 2002).

230 Australian broadcasting has always accepted commercial broadcasting

(although not outright competition). Still, the possibility of a more competitive and multi-channel television environment means that the motives behind anti-commercialism should also be up for review. The old assumption that the community and economic spheres must be kept separate has had more to do with the threat of community licences providing a backdoor for new commercial services than the integrity of community broadcasting. Times have now changed and, in some countries (for instance the UK), local commercial television licences have been awarded ahead of the drafting of community licences. Somewhat ironically, anti-commercialism, including prohibitions on advertising, sponsorship and, in some cases, the screening of non-local content, have restricted the development of the community sector, yet not in any way that prevented the arrival of commercial broadcasting and cablecasting. Allowing community broadcasters to participate equally in the market does not mean lifting the non-profit requirements or compromising the community ethic or image – indeed, these are essential to community stations’ success as pointed out by Letch in Chapter One. It simply means revising the possible pathways towards more financially secure stations.

Developing Community Broadcasting

In the First World, community is deployed in social policy as a means to stimulate self-management. It is a politics of responsibility, ethics and trust, which has gained significant support through the revival of the concept of civil society as well as in Third Way politics. In both movements, community

231 is seen as a solution where top-down policies have failed – a means to build social capital and to restore altruistic values. As discussed in Chapter Five, these policies are not without their contradictions and difficulties. However, micro attention to the possibilities that community broadcasting presents at the local level has not been undertaken in Australia.

For community broadcasting to play a significant role in the provision of local media, issues of viability and licensing must be addressed. The main obstacle to the establishment of regional local television has been the loss of the sixth channel reservation in regional areas – the significance of which largely escaped the sector at the time. Although two Victorian townships have been developing plans for cable community television services (Mildura and

Ballarat), the general lack of cable roll-out in Australia beyond the capital cities, and no legislative requirement on cable providers to provide community television, means that cable is not currently a solution. However, models do exist, such as Access 31’s plan to send their signal via satellite to local transmitters in regional towns. These possibilities are currently thwarted by legislation and planning.

Australian community broadcasting stations do not have access to donor agency funding and, as a result, have been somewhat excluded from the global community broadcasting movement that often justifies itself through development arguments. It is these arguments that need to be reassessed. The

First and Third World division is propagated, at least in conceptual terms, by the community sector if it considers itself a benefactor of these arrangements.

232 In terms of the global community broadcasting movement, demands need to be framed as empowerment, and the nurturing of local civil society networks achieved via models that seek to move beyond aid dependency and towards economic independence. With this shift in understanding, Australian community broadcasting stations are part of a significant global movement.

Strangely, although community broadcasting and civil society at large have been instrumental in stimulating movements around environmental awareness, women’s issues, the media itself – its cultural role, the distribution of resources and rights governance – has not been seen as something to debate, promote or advance (outside of the studies field). This thesis has aimed to include community broadcasting issues within wider information debates.

Renewed Access

Digital television is just one of the fronts upon which such change must occur.

Policy ideas to date have worked on the basis that existing levels of participation and resources will persist in the digital environment. By creating models around that assumption they have made it a fact. Australian policy makers (as well as Canadian) have spent much time and effort developing complicated models based on carriage arrangements and – through successive review processes – have moved further away from the simple option of access delivered by a spectrum set-aside. The Productivity Commission has written of the need to determine the “opportunity lost” of community broadcasting spectrum (Foxwell, 2001). In an astounding example of the regulator’s

233 complicity in current economic priorities, the ABA have even suggested that the government purchase space from cable providers to screen limited community “windows” (Australian Broadcasting Authority, 2001). The move towards seeing spectrum in economic terms sits uneasily with the notion of community which rests upon fundamentally different notions of property and value. This concern is not just applicable to television, but to broadband cable technology, digital radio and satellite.

Chapter Two set the groundwork for an idea of access that goes beyond speech rights. It was shown that where community broadcasting has been constructed upon that principle it has been left vulnerable to corporate challenges. The efforts of stations in the United States to define themselves as civil society facilitators beckons a new conception of access involving the creation and nurturing of community networks. These newer notions of community media were extended into Chapter Six, in relation to the commons debate and the principles upon which communications resources are managed.

I have argued that this rationale opens up possibilities for more constructive models of community broadcasting. Although the issue of first-come first- served is not resolved through the commons model, the development discourse discussed in Chapter Five (but threaded throughout the thesis) builds a more concise picture of how communities themselves can – and do – work to maintain relevance within the access structure. The way in which this might be encouraged through government or industry partnership is the primary use of new (post)development and Third Way theory. The separate themes of this thesis – access, the public interest and development – on their

234 own do not provide a way forward for community broadcasting. Together, they generate possibilities. The diagram introduced at the start of this thesis illustrates that starting point. Somewhere in the middle – at the intersection of the different attempts to construct community broadcasting as well as the various traditions out of which is has emerged – exists a strong rationale for the future of community broadcasting. Although new technologies may be interpreted as the beginning of the end of community broadcasting, I have argued that in fact it is an idea whose time has come.

Further models are required. Community television has developed out of, not in spite of, cultural assumptions and values. If notions of marginality and aesthetic lack can be left behind, then new possibilities for community broadcasting can emerge. When combined with communication, community can be seen to be a politics without an essence, a politics of difference. As

Wurzer has written on the notion of community, the challenge is to begin to conceive of community broadcasting as an open-ended possibility, as

‘precisely the conversation where nobody knows what he or she will say before he or she has said it’ (Wurzer, 1997: 97).

235

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