Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University PUBLIC BROADCASTING & PUBLIC AFFAIRS: Opportunities and challenges for public broadcasting’s role in provisioning the public with news and public affairs By Pat Aufderheide & Jessica Clark, with editorial participation by Jake Shapiro Papers 2008 MEDIA : RE PUBLIC at Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University PUBLIC BROADCASTING & PUBLIC AFFAIRS: Opportunities and challenges for public broadcasting’s role in provisioning the public with news and public affairs EXECUTIVE SUMMARY shared solutions in sharply different local contexts. Public broadcasters have conducted isolated experiments in U.S. public broadcasting faces profound challenges as a interactive and participatory media, with mixed results. Tools mass media service entering a disintermediated digital era. It and funds for reliably measuring the impact of such projects approaches those challenges with both chronic strengths and have not materialized, and commercial yardsticks do not track weaknesses. Its strengths include a clutch of highly visible the public benefits of such media. Public broadcasters have and trusted brand names (PBS, NPR, Sesame Street), a also proposed a variety of common digital platforms, without creative and far-flung talent network, and a highly balkanized consensus or resolution. Although several organizations are structure, which invests funders and audiences in the survival helping stations to coordinate around solutions, no single of individual entities, especially local stations. Its weaknesses organization is positioned to lead the full range of public include an audience that skews old and is getting older, broadcasting entities through digital and online transitions. particularly for television; a reputation for elitist programming; Public broadcasting’s resources and assets are and that same highly balkanized structure, which inhibits valuable today and hold great potential value for tomorrow’s decision making to respond to the changing environment. nonprofit online media sector. The sector will have to transform In an increasingly segmented media marketplace, to fulfill that potential—the question is how. Scenarios include public broadcasters still aim to educate and inform the going local, going national, partnering up, or fighting it out, broadest possible swath of Americans. Radio in particular has each of which offers opportunities to those who care about succeeded in attracting new listeners in the past decade. But preserving the public service media. programmers and stations struggle to both maintain current audiences and engage new ones across a quick-shifting array of new platforms and devices. INTRODUCTION Public radio and television operate in very different ways, and their record of providing public affairs and news U.S. public broadcasting is a rare animal internationally; is also very different. Public radio has consistently since compared to the majority of state or public broadcasters 1969 provided high-quality, innovative, daily news programs, around the world, the government funding it gets is tiny and which are the backbone of the service and attract the largest its role in defining the national news agenda intermittent. Yet proportion of listeners. Competition among public radio it is actively scrutinized as a potential source of liberal bias by program services has helped to increase the diversity of voices conservative legislators and watchdogs, who loudly criticize and formats. Meanwhile, public television—in part because it as a waste of taxpayer money. U.S. public broadcasting it has been under much tighter scrutiny politically—has developed in a profoundly bifurcated way, with radio and struggled with news provision. Its one daily news program, an television evolving separately into highly distinct services. hour long, is in a traditionalist format and is produced by an Both, however, were created and exist within the U.S. mass independent production house. Public affairs documentaries media regulatory regime. Both operate on spectrum reserved and series struggle for placement in a service better recognized by the FCC specifically for noncommercial (not “public”) and appreciated for its children’s and cultural programming. broadcasting. Both play significant, though different, roles in News and public affairs provision is a core function shaping the American news and public affairs diet, and both of public broadcasting, and garners enormous trust ratings—a provide news and public affairs programming that are rarely feature that is in short supply in participatory news media. matched in the commercial environment. However, future news and public affairs programming will require genuine interactivity and listener/viewer choice and participation to remain relevant. This has been a major obstacle HISTORY for a service that has been rewarded for its feudalistic stability. Efforts to develop nationwide public affairs programming Public broadcasting has always been a small, niche service in for the emerging digital TV channels have been stymied the United States. In fact, it was created as an afterthought. by a lack of funds and the complications of implementing Legislators, helped along by corporate lobbyists, between MEDIA RE:PUBLIC | Side Papers | Public Broadcasting and Public Affairs | 2008 / 2 Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University 1927 and 1934 decided the shape of U.S. electronic media. new legislation at all, and even then radio was only allocated Commercial enterprises were given permission, through a quarter of the federal monies. licenses, to use designated parts of the spectrum for profit, The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 was very by selling advertising time. Other interests—labor unions, different from the Carnegie Commission’s recommendations. religious organizations, educators, private foundations—had Driven by fears of a politically liberal broadcasting service warned that such commercial use would eliminate community (here the Ford Foundation’s reputation loomed large) and and educational use of the spectrum. Such warnings proved the concerns of commercial rivals, Congress deliberately correct and in 1938, a small part of the FM spectrum—then created a decentralized national service that was anything pioneer territory, and generally regarded as worthless—was but a “system.” Congress provided only a small minority reserved for educational broadcasters, as a sop to the most of what public broadcasters would need through federal well-organized of the losers. Later, in 1952, educational TV funds, and that through a regular appropriations process. got a similar deal—reserved spectrum, mostly in the UHF The choice of appropriations, rather than an endowment, band, not through any public petitioning or protest but largely guaranteed that public broadcasting’s content would be as a result of the concern of one FCC commissioner. The UHF perpetually under political scrutiny. Congress also banned the band was then regarded as vastly inferior spectrum, because agency that handled those funds—the Corporation for Public it was much harder to tune into than VHF. Broadcasting—from providing “interconnection” (allowing the Spectrum without resources was not much of an stations to share programming, in order to provide high-quality opportunity. Many of the available channels stayed dark, and national programs). This guaranteed that stations would those that attempted to broadcast—usually through a school individually have to struggle to raise the bulk of their own or university—often carried dull, cheap programs, perhaps funds to support themselves, and furthermore would have to talking heads in a classroom. organize themselves to develop cooperative arrangements to After World War II and the advent of television, the acquire programs and/or co-produce them. Ford Foundation became newly aware of the power of media. Current policies and assumptions about public After failed investments in commercial television, Ford funded broadcasting were shaped by the broadcast realities of the time, a campaign to push for more federal funding for the non- and have been slow to change as new transmission technologies commercial television space that had opened up in 1952. have evolved. Legislators, programmers, and advocates have These efforts triggered the interest of other funders and were regularly framed free, over-the-air public radio and television as instrumental in establishing the Carnegie Commission on a public good, but there are no guarantees of universal access. Public Broadcasting, which in 1966 unveiled an ambitious pro- Satellite transmission in the 1980s transformed the importance posal for a service that could enrich the nation informationally of cable, which was turned from a welter of local services to and culturally. a national phenomenon. It made possible low-cost transmis- The Commission’s report became the platform on sion of programming, and therefore enabled the rise of national which legislation for a public television service—this was program services. (It also transformed the economics of public the first use of the phrase “public television”—was then broadcasting by dramatically lowering costs of transmission for negotiated. The White House took an active role, recruiting them as well.) “Must-carry” provisions enacted by Congress leading members of the defense establishment as well as in 1992 guaranteed that cable companies would continue cultural leaders to present the