A further recommendation: as will be expected of broadcasters, “governments at all levels should put far more data and information online, and do it in ways that are designed to be most useful.” This will have an employment effect, and an effect on the everyday work of journalists—“entrepreneurs can create new businesses and jobs based on distributing, shaping or analyzing this data. It will enable reporters to unearth stories in a day or two that might have previously taken two months.”
Consider Targeting Current Government Advertising More Toward Local Media Businesses
Keeping with the report’s findings that it is local news that needs the most repair, the authors suggest that government advertising money—for things such as army recruitment, census compliance—be directed more strongly towards local broadcasters. In 2005, the report notes, the government spent $1 billion on such advertising and it generally went to big national entertainment media. Float this down to the local level and it will be a healthy injection.
Make It Easier for Nonprofit Media to Develop Sustainable Models
The report puts a large bulk of the responsibility for saving the news media on nonprofits, and seeks to make it easier to those nonprofits to operate effectively. Complicated sections of the tax code that seem to arbitrarily decide what news operations qualify as nonprofit need to be cleared up, argues the report. In this same section, the report authors praise the work of journalism schools that have adopted a “medical residency” model—having students actually report as they learn how to—and suggests that foundations and philanthropists funnel money into such programs.
It’s here too that the authors address the CPB, issuing one of the report’s strongest statements: “this would be precisely the wrong time to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.” One of the more specific recommendations regarding the CPB is that none of its beneficiaries should be allowed to have more than 15 percent of their revenues come from it. The idea being that the limit would prevent the state from exerting pressure on the media.
Ensure that Broadband is Widespread Enough to Fuel Digital Media Innovation
Here the authors make the argument for universal broadband—both to provide access to the community and to provide a stronger business base for the media. Universal access means larger potential audiences, after all, and more reason to innovate. The FCC report also suggests that the government “consider the central role of public libraries” here, as, rather than be made obsolete by new technologies, the library has become central to them: a place where the poor and unplugged can utilize and learn to utilize modern communications technologies that will keep them better informed.
I was chief telecom and information policy analyst for the California State Assembly -- de facto, the Legislature -- in the 1980s. It was easy to see what was coming. The Internet. E-commerce. Privacy rights. Data collection and identity theft. Recourse of subscribers online. The effects of essentially deregulated cable television on community form and life. Taxation in a cloud.
We raised most of the same policy questions then that the FCC has reiterated three decades later. How was that possible? Because there are certain unalterable struggles between those who own and control the means of communications and everyone else, that parallel other divisions in our society between those who own the means of production (add finance) and everyone else. No FCC or other political institution will touch this basic conflict of interests lest it risk maintaining the legitimacy of our entire polito-economic system.
After 80 years of mostly disappointing FCC rulings beginning with the segregation of nonprofit radio in the 1930s, how can one still be disappointed at these outcomes? The same powers that be arrange for the same pool of "talent" to receive FCC and staff appointments (also at NIST and similar institutions); naturally the empty findings and sad ruling will continue. Sadly, this is a recursive process with the outcomes getting bleaker and bleaker, so that the ultimate solution will be more explosive that it otherwise needed to be. This seems to be the price of too much communicative power in too few hands.
#1 Posted by Robert Jacobson, CJR on Fri 10 Jun 2011 at 04:08 PM