the end of public broadcasting

Music: The Police: Zenyatta Mondatta (1980)

Now that the dust has settled a bit since the Obama budget thudded on congressional office floors, news of the more unsettling cuts is getting the shock and awe screenings. Among the more disturbing measures are those that cut back federal support for public broadcasting. Both Obama and Republicans have wanted to dissolve the Commerce Department, which affords some 20 million a year to public broadcasting infrastructure (think antennas, etc.). Republicans have vowed to dissolve the Corporation for Pubic Broadcasting, which supplies stations who apply with "matching funds" (contrary to popular belief, public stations do the bulk of their fundraising these days, which entitles them to some federal matching dollars managed by the CPB). The Obama plan keeps CPB, and enhances the budget by six million (so across the board federal support is still in the hole by 14 million). It's hard to imagine CPB going down, since it's among the more fiscally responsible outfits (and technically independent of the feds---by design, so we don't have, say, a media control situation).

The real scary part of the Obama proposal is the "auction." The Wall Street Journal reported last week that part of Obama's "broadband for everybody" ambitions includes auctioning off some television frequencies; proceeds would fund new wireless initiatives and so forth, while stations who offer up frequencies would also pocket some of the funds, which are estimated to be in the billions.

It's unclear---from what I could find, at least---what frequencies are proposed up for auction (except some owned by the DoD). Still, what's troublesome to me is the occurrence of the word "auction" and "public" in the same documents. The Radio Act of 1927 specifically defined the airwaves as a "public resource" and set up what would basically become the FCC to make sure commercial interests to not gobble up all the frequencies. Successive acts in the 30s and 60s still tried to safeguard frequencies—for both radio and television. The legacy of this progressive legislation is the requirement that all stations broadcasting in the United States demonstrate it is serving the public interest in one way or another. Television networks, for example, comply by offering "local" news, children's programming, and other stuff deemed to be community-centered. Cable stations developed "community access" channels.

With Clinton's disastrous sponsored telecommunications bill in 1996, however, everything changed. Basically, public interest requirements were relaxed and regulations were lifted, resulting in the massive media conglomerates we live with today. Former FCC commissioner William Kennard is somewhat infamous for admitting---while on his way out---that the FCC screwed up with telecomm 96, which winnowed down community-based programming to almost-extinction. You may recall he proposed the "low-watt" radio station idea, which flopped, and largely because both network lobbies and NPR colluded to kill it (yes, NPR fought a community-interest initiative).

I recount this history (admittedly rather briefly and simplistically) only to point out that neoliberal wankers are never going to "waste a crisis," and the recent federal budgetary crisis is proving the perfect opportunity to make symbolic gestures, like killing off the CPB. Now, all told the CPB budget is pretty miniscule, and going after them is more or less spectacle politics. Democrats describe it as "taking down Big Bird," Republicans describe it as a left-wind propaganda machine. What's getting left out if this discussion is that the airwaves (and now broadband, I guess) are still a public resource. It remains to be seen whether the frequencies this new budget proposes to auction are those set aside for public use, or current commercial slots.

While I don't have the hard data here, you can predict what frequencies I think will be put up for auction. The part of the proposed budget that folks should be frightened about is not the CPB or the demise of the Commerce Department---it’s the very idea frequencies should be auctioned off.

NPR sold out a decade ago, and PBS has been doing some pretty questionable things in recent years (I mean, really, how many times are they going to show that lip-synced "Celtic Women" schlock during pledge drives?). Even so, that there is something identified as a public resource and designed, more or less, to serve the public interest is important. Like public libraries and public parks, some socialist ideas are good, valuable, and worth protecting from commercial interests.