Ouellette, Lewis / Cultural Policy
Television
and Television
& New Media / February 2000
Moving beyond the “Vast
Wasteland”
Cultural Policy and Television in the United States
Laurie Ouellette
Rutge r s Unive r sity
Justin Lewis
Unive r sity of Massachusetts at A m he r st
In the United States, there are two basic positions on television and cultural policy. The dominant position, promoted by the television industry
and by free-market conservatives, is that television culture is best left in the
hands of commerce: if the people want certain types of programming, then
the market will provide them. This view can be traced to the free-market
ideology that permitted U.S. broadcasting, unlike most European models,
to develop as a commercially sponsored, private enterprise.
The second position, promoted mainly by liberal reformers, argues that
television must be at least partially protected from the ravages of commercialism, with its drive toward cultural malaise and the lowest common
denominator: only through some type of policy intervention can cultural
standards be maintained and the public interest be served. This view
achieved its peak of legitimacy in the 1960s, when an unsuccessful move to
upgrade the quality of commercial television, fueled by Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Newton Minow’s (1961) metaphor of
the “vast wasteland,” eventually spawned the establishment of a nationalized public broadcasting system (Baughman 1985). With the exception of
political economic critiques of media ownership that circulate on the margins of public discourse, these positions dominate public debates about
television and cultural policy.
In this article, we suggest that both views are fraught with contradictions. The first, as many critics have observed, overlooks the limitations of
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the free market (Lewis 1990) and the concentration of cultural resources
among an ever smaller number of corporations (Bagdikian 1997; Barnouw
et al. 1997; Herman and McChesney 1997). Commercial television favors its
more affluent consumers (Meehan 1990) and is wedded to content that
pleases advertisers, who typically do not wish to associate products with
gritty realities and political controversies (Barnouw 1978). The free-market
approach to television culture ultimately is geared toward the maximization of profit and the minimization of financial risk (Streeter 1987, 1997).
Thus, it is prone to imitation, blandness, and the perpetual recycling of
those genres, themes, and approaches deemed most profitable (Gitlin
1983). We agree that intervention is needed to correct these flaws.
On the other hand, the liberal reformist position, which has been less
scrutinized by scholars, is deeply rooted in cultural hierarchies and class
biases. The most influential broadcast reform initiatives in the United
States have emerged within the liberal intelligentsia and have conflated
commercial constraints with the cultural tastes and competencies of the
educated middle class. Demands for “better” broadcasting have typically
meant infusing popular mediums with superior cultural alternatives
deemed enlightening or educational for less privileged citizens (see Ang
[1991] and Murdock [1992] for a similar observation about early European
public broadcasting). Popular or mass culture, in contrast, has historically
been shunned by reformers. In the United States, in particular, the idea that
popularly favored, commercially successful media formats are also worthy
of public investment is rarely discussed (Lewis 1990).
There are multiple reasons for this legacy. The first is the intelligentsia’s
general dislike and mistrust of mass culture, a pattern well documented by
cultural studies scholars (e.g., Williams [1958] 1963; Hall and Whannel
1965). Alternatives to commercial mass culture have historically been conceived as high cultural or morally “uplifting,” not popular, relaxing, or
entertaining. The market’s failure to cultivate learning and selfimprovement—two core values of American middle-class culture (Rubin
1992)—helped legitimate the slow development of educational broadcasting, for decades the only alternative to commercial broadcasting in the
United States. That precedent, in turn, shaped dominant perceptions of
public television’s legitimate role.
Second is the infusion of cultural hierarchies with liberal pluralist promises. Multicultural rationales for policy intervention in broadcasting have
often hinged on an avoidance of what makes television popular, a conflation that codes cultural diversity as an exceptional and educated privilege.
The vast majority of the limited public funding for television goes to high
cultural, intellectual, or experimental programs that draw highly educated
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audiences, not to situation comedies, action adventures, social dramas,
soap operas, or popular news programs, with the potential to draw large
and diverse audiences. Finally, few broadcast reformers have questioned
the equation of popular appeal with commercial control. Most have been
rather willing to leave mass culture to the market, and this failure has
served the commercial television industry, with its economic interest in the
advertising sales drawn from popular programming, very well.
Thus, a combination of ideological, cultural, and economic factors have
limited the scope of broadcast reform in the United States. Significantly, the
most vocal opposition to the resulting class biases has come from conservatives, who have voiced political opposition to publicly funded programming in broader terms that reference cultural hierarchies and inequities.
The perpetually contested U.S. public television system, described by the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting (1992) as an “oasis” in the vast wasteland of U.S. television culture, is an important case in point. At a time when
conservative accusations of cultural elitism and liberal bias in public television are growing louder and more virulent, this article traces the historical
basis for class bias and argues that the system’s cultural elevation made it
vulnerable to marginalization and opportunistic political critique. The article concludes by proposing a more progressive rationale for policy intervention in the television sector, one that engages with the popular while
also recognizing the impact of commercialization.
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) versus
the “Vast Wasteland”
The U.S. public broadcasting system came of age during the presidency
of Lyndon B. Johnson and was passed by Congress in 1967 as an extension
of Great Society programs. While officially presented as a vehicle to bring
quality, diversity, and public interest goals to all Americans, the service—
with the key exception of children’s programs—became a channel for the
professional middle class (Lyle 1975; Statistical Research 1974; LeRoy
1980). Conceived against the grain of the “vast wasteland,” U.S. public television did not solicit public involvement (Rowland 1976, 1986), nor was the
service intended to provide widely viewed news and entertainment. The
public broadcasting system was created as a noncompetitive, cultural supplement that would present specialized programs to small audiences (Aufderheide 1991). While potentially geared toward the many diverse groups
that constitute American society, public television’s fragmented schedule
was especially suited to people with advanced education and the types of
socially approved tastes, habits, dispositions, and intellectual
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competencies sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1984) terms “cultural capital.”
Despite its outwardly pluralist and democratic mission, PBS addressed
itself primarily to the nation’s “opinion leaders” (Ouellette 1999).
Because the architects of U.S. public television saw no contradiction between noncommercial goals and the pursuit of private funding to fill the
gaps left by inadequate and uncertain tax support (Engelman 1996; Ledbetter 1997), the unquestioned class and cultural hierarchies that underwrote
public television’s mission were magnified by a reliance on sponsorship,
philanthropy, and viewer patronage. Sponsors preferred to underwrite
elevated programming (e.g., BBC imports, live cultural performances,
news programs geared to opinion leaders) that drew influential and upscale (if small) audiences (Barnouw 1978; Ledbetter 1997). Early audience
research conducted by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was used to
sell sponsors a viewing demographic characterized as a highly educated
and culturally “selective” group of white-collar professionals (Corporation
for Public Broadcasting 1972). Viewer donations also were courted with
promises of good taste and social distinction. Demonstrating how upperclass symbolism was played out in such endeavors, one fundraising newsletter proposed:
The success of the Forsyte Saga has inspired a money-raising idea at Channel 2
Boston. A red carpet party (champagne, black tie, expensive tickets) will be
thrown in the studio to preview the last episodes. Guests may be invited to
come in Forsyte Saga get-up. Hopefully this will appeal to Saga enthusiasts
going away on winter vacations or just to those who like to be “in the know.”
(National Friends 1970)
The prospect of nurturing popular television within a noncommercial
environment was outside the parameters of public television’s official programming goals (Kettering Conference 1969; Blakely 1971; Macy 1974).
Such a mission would have made PBS potentially competitive with commercial television and would have made it more difficult for bureaucrats to
solicit private financial support. But while economic factors are partly culpable for U.S. public television’s narrow development (Hoynes 1994; Ledbetter 1997), it was also legitimized by a specific cultural environment. To
fully understand the system’s particularities, it is helpful to briefly revisit
the reform history that predated its arrival.
According to Susan Douglas (1987), many of the class biases that oriented PBS can be traced to the earliest criticisms of commercial radio. As
she notes, the intelligentsia of the early 1920s was opposed less to the commercialization of popular culture than to the new medium’s “barbaric” cultural output (p. 313). According to Robert McChesney (1994), advertisingsponsored radio was also “appalling” to reformers and to many influential
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radio listeners of the 1930s, as was the idea of corporations directing public
discourse via mass broadcasting. However, as he notes, the reform movement
that sought noncommercial channels as a condition of the 1934 Communications Act was plagued by elitist views of how radio should be properly
used and by a failure to attract widespread popular support. Since commercial radio was thought, in the words of one reformer, to be already geared to
the “moronic mob” who lacked “good taste and intelligence and ambition
for culture,” some called for an alternative “aimed at and above a frankly
upper-middle class” (pp. 95-96). Class-based cultural ideals were rationalized by the tenuous claim that the benefits of such an alternative would
trickle down to less privileged radio listeners. As McChesney documents,
The purpose of non-commercial programming was to provide the cultural
uplift that had not been deemed profitable by the commercial broadcasters.
This stance left the broadcast reform movement in a precarious position. On
one hand, it generated a class-based populist critique of the corporate domination of the ether on free speech grounds that had the potential to appeal to
society’s dispossessed elements. On the other hand, its cultural critique was
aimed largely at an elite audience and, if anything, it repelled potential support from those who welcomed a significant place for entertainment programming on radio. (P. 97)
Quality television, for Minow (1961) and his supporters, was also conceived as the antithesis of the Westerns, quiz shows, and other popular
commercially successful television shows of the 1960s. The medium’s vulgar cultural orientation, not its commercial organization, was the issue. The
tastes of the intelligentsia, whether televised opera or portentous panel discussions, were again justified as uplifting for the uncultivated mass audience. But as James Baughman (1985) notes, Minow’s efforts to improve
commercial television were stymied by a failure to attract public support.
The size and composition of Minow’s supporters presented difficulties.
Those sharing most of his concerns tended to be among the least representative Americans: the well-educated, well-heeled upper-middle-class liberals.
Although expert at mobilizing a PTA chapter, they made for a minor constituency, an elite. Absent were members of the working class or racial and ethnic
minorities. (P. 170)
According to Baughman (1985), Minow’s failures signaled a crack in liberal “idealism about the possibilities of the American system of broadcasting,” which “once expected capitalist owners to serve a mass market and a
higher mission” (p. 173). When demands for a public alternative (beyond
the limited ETV system) emerged in the late 1950s and escalated in the early
1960s, the reform discourse drew on the historical equation of popularity
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with commercial control, public service with small audiences and cultural
privilege (Ouellette 1999). Following the quiz show scandals of 1959, for example, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (1961), implored the U.S. government to “rescue” television, defining the placement of high culture on television as the
priority (p. 149). Conceding that if “horse opera sells more autos than Ed
Murrow then the advertiser has to go for horse opera,” the editor of
Harper’s magazine called for a public service entity to produce high-quality
news, arts, classical music, and theater. As he saw it, the viewer who was
not interested could simply turn to a “western on CBS or a song-and-dance
number on ABC” (Fischer 1959, 10-14).
Another example was Walter Lippmann’s (1959) declaration that there
was “something radically wrong with the national policy under which television operates.” Writing in his New York Herald Tribune column, Lippmann cast commercial television as a “prostitute of merchandising,” but
his main complaint was the lack of “effective news reporting, good art, and
civilized entertainment.” The solution, as he saw it, was for the people at
“Harvard and Yale and Princeton and Columbia and Dartmouth” to run a
public service network that would broadcast “not what was popular but
what was good.” Presuming the service would not be widely viewed, he
rationalized that “it might well attract an audience that made up in influence what it lacked in numbers” (p. 26; Ouellette 1999).
By the late 1960s, the Carnegie Commission and the Ford Foundation
had joined influential critics and citizen reform groups in the call for a fully
fledged noncommercial public service network (Engelman 1996). Numerous critics have noted that PBS was created without adequate or politically
insulated funding, but fewer have examined the dominant cultural
assumptions that guided public television. The policy makers who debated
the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act drew from, and reproduced, a history of
broadcast reform discourse cast in a top-down framework. The promise of
bringing “excellence and diversity” to the airwaves thereby was limited by
two naturalized assumptions during the hearings. The first was that excellence in broadcasting was incompatible with large numbers. Policy makers
equated popular “mass appeal” programming with commercial television
and considered it unworthy of public subsidy. The second assumption
(although one that was rarely overtly stated) was that the minorities most
underserved by commercial television were college-educated viewers
seeking sophisticated television alternatives.
Policy makers were unsure of how public television would serve the majority of Americans who did not hold college degrees. This, coupled with
the view that commercial television catered all too well to the public’s
“mass wants,” led some to propose cultural connoisseurs as the specialized
audiences most needing of greater choices. As one supporter reasoned,
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There are many areas of interest to minority “publics,” especially in the fields
of art, drama, and music, that cannot be economically profitable. It is these areas that are in need of public support. The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 can
give the total population of these United States a real choice in television
viewing. . . . The choice will not be the present artificial choice between two or
possibly three stations programming similar kinds of entertainment, but the
choice between programs of entertainment and programs of cultural worth.
(House Committee 1967, 113)
Policy makers and their supporters envisioned quality against the grain
of commercial television’s popular formats rather than proposing more diversity and innovation within them. This occurred partly because the commercial networks were believed to be adequately serving the mass audience and partly because mass culture was deemed inherently inferior by
the policy makers who charted the course for PBS.
Many cited high cultural performances and public affairs programs
(which had been deemed poorly rated and thus unprofitable by the commercial networks) as pressing priorities for public television. Since public
funding was involved, programming geared to the educated middle class
was rationalized as having trickle-down benefits for the less privileged.
According to U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare and Carnegie commissioner John W. Gardner, public television would expose millions of people to “the best in our cultural tradition” (House Committee
1967, 26-27). Supporters of public television implied that exposure to “better television” would uplift popular taste and improve public morale, aims
that according to Tony Bennett (1991, 1992, 1995), also motivated supporters of public museum culture.
The expulsion of popular culture from these priorities constituted a narrow understanding of quality that left commercial television’s cultural hegemony intact. Policy makers were especially suspicious of the use of public funds for entertainment purposes, explaining that entertainment was
already plentiful on commercial television. Even the more radical (and
marginalized) of public television’s visionaries accepted this logic. For example, Ford Foundation president McGeorge Bundy’s unrealized call for a
public network distributed by satellite and funded by commercial broadcasters conflated commercial constraints with cultural hierarchies.
Commercial television is commerce first, and with the marginal exception it
exploits only that part of the promise of television which give the most assurance of the most profit. To the commercial networks, time is money, and they
cannot give much of it away. It follows that non-commercial television must
do the job that commercial television cannot do. Walter Lippmann stated the
justification for non-commercial educational television in 1959 when he
wrote that it should be a network which can be run as a public service, and its
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criterion not what will be most popular but what is good. (House Committee
1967, 371)
The presumption that better programs, as defined by policy makers,
would alone be sufficient to circumvent the “TV problem” surely hindered
PBS’s ability to become a significant presence in the lives of most Americans. This class bias was partly concealed, during the hearings, by the
promise of cultural pluralism. A top-down construction of the mass audience was made opaque by the promise that public television would recast
the masses as a plurality of specialized and fragmented audiences. James
Killian, head of the Carnegie Commission, envisioned public television as a
vehicle for bringing “more choices, more opportunities” to a plethora of
viewing publics. “The public television system we visualize is not for the
elite,” he claimed, but for a “broad cross section” of the American population (House Committee 1967, 148). Nonetheless, Gardner revealed the class
biases of this liberal pluralist reasoning when he explained why the proposed public television system would not compete for commercial television’s customers.
There is an element of competition in the sense that all of our publicly supported cultural efforts, whether they are public libraries or universities or
university presses, are in competition with other kinds of activities, but I
would say the record would show that this is a very modest kind of competition. This is a competition for a segment of the audience, a rather small segment of the audience. (House Committee 1967, 80)
The presumption that commercial television was for entertaining and
selling consumer products, whereas noncommercial television constituted
a “whole other world of broadcasting” (House Committee 1967, 446) freed
commercial broadcasters from their public interest duties in the minds of
some policy makers and supporters. Beyond unprofitable cultural programs, public television became the focal point of demands for in-depth
news and specialized programming in arts, humanities, sciences, and public affairs. Some even envisioned public television as a way to relieve the
commercial “burden” of the Fairness Doctrine. With public television
available to do the job, argued one advocate, the commercial broadcaster
who “reasoned that he can sell more time if he stays away” from controversial issues altogether would no longer jeopardize the health of American
democracy (House Committee 1967, 362).
People Like Who?
While PBS claims to reach a cross section of the U.S. population (Public
Broadcasting Service 1995a), audience research has consistently shown
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that its core adult viewership is small, well-educated, and above average in
socioeconomic status (LeRoy 1980; Public Broadcasting Service 1990a,
1990b, 1995b). The cultural aura that surrounds public television, coupled
with its programming priorities, has also limited the service’s multicultural
policy goals. The political turmoil that accompanied PBS’s 1969 debut coincided with a secondary focus on serving racial minorities and disenfranchised Americans. These goals were renewed in the 1980s with the creation
of the Independent Television Service chartered by the U.S. Congress to
serve publics underrepresented by mainstream PBS fare (Aufderheide
1991). What is significant here is that public television’s historical avoidance of multiple needs and tastes has been a huge barrier to expanding its
benefits beyond the white, educated, middle class (Daressa 1996).
Black news and cultural programs broadcast on PBS during its early
years comprised a small percentage of the system’s overall schedule (Public Broadcasting Service 1972). The primacy of programming geared to
white, college-educated, middle-class viewers was ideologically concealed
by the equation of specialized, unserved taste minorities (such as “music
lovers” and “news junkies”) with racial and ethnic minorities (Public
Broadcasting Service 1970). Black programs were difficult to find, and
because they did not attract corporate sponsors, they were poorly promoted and prone to funding shortages and cancellation (Ledbetter 1997).
Beyond these obstacles, their presence on PBS was a problem. As critics of
the era noted, PBS’s image as a cultural service for the white intelligentsia
was an obstacle in drawing black viewers (Gray 1972).
Shows such as Black Journal and Soul! created an Afrocentric television
aesthetic, but they were far removed from commercial television’s formats.
The idea that PBS might also nurture programs such as the “ghetto” sitcoms of the early 1970s in a noncommercial environment—and thus free
them from the quest for maximum ratings, advertising pressures, and a
tendency to trivialize urban black poverty—was out of the question. Such
possibilities subverted the rigid line between popular entertainment and
public service.
Children’s programming was the key exception to PBS’s failure to serve
the whole of American society. Programs such as Sesame Street blended
educational goals with styles and aesthetics that mimicked top-rated commercial programs (Museum of Television & Radio 1994). Because public
children’s programming was rooted in the great society goal of equality of
opportunity, it was compelled to reach a large, multiethnic, cross-class
audience. For publicly funded children’s programs to become a cultural
service for the middle class would have been extremely problematic in light
of their much-publicized mission of serving disadvantaged and middleclass children simultaneously. Children’s programming is still cited by
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liberal supporters, such as Vice President Al Gore, as the crowning jewel of
PBS (Gore 1995).
What has not been adequately addressed is public television’s failure to
attract a similarly large and diverse adult audience with enriching programming. We attribute the high “drop-out” rate among adults to several
factors. First, the subdued aesthetic that dominates PBS programming is,
for many viewers, solemn, intellectual, and dull, a distinction that stems
from the service’s mission to be wholly different from commercial television. Second, public television’s reliance on upscale BBC imports and preference for domestic programming with an aura of intellectual and highcultural cachet cast PBS as an exclusive niche on the television dial. Even
programs that work hard to use popular styles and narratives, such as the
1980s Eyes on the Prize series on the civil rights movement, have difficulty
escaping this cultural demarcation: it is as if they were being shown at a
theater in a neighborhood that was mostly white and upscale, with audiences, in such cases, defined more by the nature of the neighborhood than
by the form and content of the programming. Public television also tends to
avoid the popular zeitgeist until it carries the dust of respectability, making
it less topical and exciting than its commercial counterpart. While PBS
would never show baseball, for example, it will show Ken Burn’s historical
study of the game.
Until these cultural biases are addressed, and a progressive basis for
television policy is developed, policies that stray from the free-market
approach to television will be perpetually subject to free market and conservative attacks of elitism (Rowland and Tracey 1990). So it was that the
Nixon White House moved swiftly and strategically to blunt the growth of
public service television in the United States (Stone 1975; Powledge 1972;
U.S. National Telecommunications 1979). Nixon framed his politically
based criticisms of PBS programming in pseudo-populist terms, casting
public television as a bastion of cultural elitism ruled by the liberal Eastern
Establishment. By naming privileged liberals as the beneficiaries of a system paid for by the “silent majority” of taxpayers, Nixon hoped to win support for its marginalization and depoliticization.
Nixon’s critique drew from a history of corporate rationalizations.
According to McChesney (1994), the corporations that controlled the early
radio industry responded to the broadcast reform movement of the 1930s
by claiming that most radio listeners did not share the concerns of reformers and critics. The masses preferred popular entertainment over cultural
uplift, and they were merely being given what they wanted, said executives. According to William Boddy (1990), commercial broadcasters also
defended their profit motives in terms that exposed the class biases of
reform efforts: “plain folk” were championed by early television executives; critics who protested network programming were dismissed as
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“intellectual snobs” (p. 237). By aligning itself with the tastes of the less
privileged, the television industry legitimated its cultural power in
authoritarian populist terms, the “people” against an arrogant power bloc
(Hall 1988).
Nixon’s referencing of cultural elitism set the tone for future conservative attacks on public television. In 1995, Newt Gingrich called to “zero out”
funding altogether using similar terminology. From the Republican Right’s
perspective, it has been a convenient and effective coupling, one that has
gone hand and hand with public television’s shrinking public subsidies.
While the rhetorical strategies used by conservatives are surely disingenuous, they are not, we have shown, entirely without foundation. If we are not
to simply forfeit the notion of popular television to the unregulated free
market, we need to rethink the biases that have infused reform initiatives
and television policies.
Toward a Progressive Policy for Television
Our aim, here, is to briefly look at some of the issues involved in developing a progressive cultural policy for television in the United States. As we
have argued, liberal approaches to this question have historically begun
from a class-bound, elitist notion of culture. While Minow’s (1961) metaphor may, at times, ring true, the notion of commercial television as a “vast
wasteland” invokes an aesthetic in which it is television’s popularity—rather than its commercial structure—that is often derided as banal.
Our attempt to avoid reproducing hierarchical cultural values is, in some
ways, a modest one. It involves beginning with popular forms rather than
with preconceived notions of quality or artistic merit.
While our approach emerges from cultural studies, we are aware of the
need to tread carefully past a number of ideas that are, in policy terms,
blind alleys. There is a tendency within cultural studies to invert traditional
notions of culture and thereby to celebrate the popular without exploring
the ideological limits of popular commercial culture or to engage in questions of political economy. The approach we are advocating is quite different. In Britain, cultural studies emerged from a critique of Leavisite notions
of high culture, the thrust of which was not to turn Leavis upside down, but
to question the criteria of cultural distinction, to recognize the importance
of the popular, and to engage with it.
The failure of PBS, for all its bright moments, is precisely its tendency to
reject the popular rather than build on it. This does not mean falling into the
embrace of popular television as it is now defined. For most people, commercial television is popular in the United States not because it is a source of
a variety of joys but because it is the only game in town. If we want a cultural policy that will make television more diverse, more innovative, more
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educational, and in its profound sense more popular, we do not achieve it
by abandoning those aspects of television culture that have made it so successful in attracting an audience.
As we have suggested, PBS has engaged with popular forms in its children’s programming. It has, in so doing, significantly enriched children’s
television culture. Had it chosen this course to guide most of its adult programming, PBS would have built its schedule around sitcoms, quiz shows,
domestic drama series, soap operas, sports, and other popular forms. What
it might have done with these genres is another question, but by including
them on only an occasional basis—and often in culturally loaded formats
such as Masterpiece Theater—PBS made no attempt to cultivate the “vast
wasteland”; it simply abandoned it for a more rarefied place unsullied by
the assumed vulgarity of mass audiences.
It is hard to underestimate the effect of this abandonment on the climate
for media policy. While there are thorough critiques of commercial (rather
than public service) media systems (e.g. McChesney 1994; Streeter 1996;
Herman and McChesney 1997), constructing the political case for public
service television—as with many conspicuous forms of public spending—depends on widespread support from a range of citizens. In its current form, we would argue, PBS works against this political project because
it has made the idea of public media, in many people’s eyes, neither popular nor entertaining. When public television’s constituency consists largely
of those who already have more than their share of cultural and economic
resources, it is vulnerable to attack (whether those attacks are disingenuous), and rightly so. If a case is to be made for building support for public
television in the United States, or for a public service model of commercial
television, it needs to serve the interests of a broad range of constituencies.
Such a case should not be a matter of supplementing popular culture
with high or middlebrow cultural fare but of building on popular irritations and frustrations with the commercial system and by examining its
limits and constraints as a delivery system for entertainment and information. In this context, we shall briefly discuss strategic aspects of the two
main arenas for cultural policy: how the system is paid for and how it is
regulated.
The Case fo r Public Funding
The main goal for the public funding of television, we would argue, is to
ameliorate the influence of advertising. The critiques of a free-market system based on advertising revenue that emerge from political economy
(Kellner 1990; Gerbner, Mowlana, and Schiller 1996; Schiller 1996; Herman
and McChesney 1997) suggest that a commercial television system based
on advertising revenue is neither free nor, in many instances, responsive to
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viewer demand. Thus, for example, the gradual increase of time devoted to
advertising in the wake of deregulation is in spite of, rather than in
response to, viewer preferences. Most people want less commercial interruption, not more (Lewis and Jhally 1998).
The critiques from political economy have tended to focus on the broad
ideological constraints of leaving television culture in the hands of large,
corporate entities with specific economic interests (Herman 1995). These
are palpable, but the limits of commercial television are not merely a function of corporate ownership; the system is constrained by its very structure.
This is not simply a matter of requiring channels funded by advertising to
continually pursue those audiences sought by advertisers. In the current
system, any form of television that does not fit the need for constant interruption by commercial messages is unsuitable for broadcast. Most television genres in the United States are written around commercial breaks
every seven or eight minutes, an aesthetic requirement that makes any kind
of sustained action, drama, or mood impossible. This also means that for
every hour we spend in front of the television set, we are obliged to watch
almost 15 minutes worth of vignettes celebrating the joys of consumption.
Television programs may vary, but there is a sense in which commercial
television itself is always about the same thing. Health, happiness, freedom, beauty, and human comfort, we are told over and over again, is only
achieved through the purchase of commodities.
This point is scarcely trivial, but it is often forgotten, particularly at a
time when deregulation and the rapid concentration of ownership in the
media industries draws attention away from the system itself and toward
the shrinking group of people who control it. Certainly, it matters that Fox
is owned by a conservative ideologue such as Rupert Murdoch, or that
NBC and Viacom/CBS are both linked to the defense industry (GE and
Westinghouse); but even if regulation diversified ownership so that media
owners were as many or as altruistic and benign as Charles Dickens’s good
men of industry, the lightly regulated use of television commercials as a
source of revenue in itself closes down a range of possibilities. The simple
act of taking the commercials out of television is to radically transform it. It
frees writers from the massive constraint of writing around advertisements
and programmers from only showing the eminently interruptible. No
more desperate pleas from local news anchors (keep watching, and we’ll
tell you if it’s going to rain tomorrow), no more time-outs and “two-minute
warnings.” And television itself, for both children and adults, is free to be
about something other than the need to consume. These are significant freedoms, and they apply as much to popular entertainment as they do to PBS’s
“quality” television. Indeed, we would argue strongly against the notion
that it is only those with the “sophisticated” sensibilities of PBS viewers
who would appreciate or benefit from fewer commercial interruptions.
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Our point here is to simply emphasize the degree to which a broadcasting system is constrained or liberated not only by its organizational structure but also by its revenue source. It is therefore not enough to introduce
democratic structures into the management of the public airwaves: unless
we place significant limits on the presence of advertising, advertising will
place significant limits on television programming. This may be hard to
conceive in a country so thoroughly colonized by commercial appeals,
where even the postal service has become a marketing system, but the arguments against advertising are economic as well as cultural. As a revenue
base for the delivery of television programs, advertising is inefficient and
regressive.
There are three ways of paying for television programs: by advertising
revenue, through some form of taxation, or by direct payment (e.g., payper-view or subscription channels such as HBO). Of these three, it is advertising that costs the consumer most dearly: first, because, like private health
insurance, it introduces a middleman and, second, because it requires consumers to pay not only for the production of television programs but also
for the production of television commercials (Barwise and Ehrenberg
1984). We thereby are paying for two cultural industries rather than one,
both of which expect to make a high rate of profit. Since most television
advertising is defensive, the high cost of television advertising is rarely
recouped by dramatic increases in sales and passed back to consumers
through economies of scale. The cost must therefore be passed on to the
consumer, who pays for television at the shopping mall or the supermarket
checkout (one of the reasons, for example, why “brand names” are both
more enticing and more expensive). It is oddly appropriate, in this sense,
that so many checkout aisles are decked with copies of TV Guide, a subtle if
unintentional moment of honesty in a system that purports to be free.
This, like the sales tax, is a generally regressive way of raising revenue.
The same might be said of some systems of raising revenue for public service
networks, the notable instance here being the British Broadcasting Corporation, which collects revenue through a license fee on homes with one or
more televisions sets. While we would argue for more progressive forms of
revenue generation, the BBC license fee at least has the merit of efficiency,
being mainly devoted to the delivery of television programs.
It is, in our view, difficult to argue that television commercials serve the
useful function of providing consumers with information in a productsaturated marketplace. Nonetheless, while the information provided by
television advertising is largely symbolic, it is not entirely specious to say
that consumers derive satisfaction from buying a product because advertising allows them to associate it with being popular, attractive, healthy, or
secure (Leiss, Klein, and Jhally 1990). The real test of this argument,
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however, is to allow “rational consumers” to be able to choose to watch
television without, or with less, advertising if they wish, a choice that the
current system does not permit.
As we have argued, the freedom to have access to television programs
without frequent commercial interruptions is, on its own, a substantive
issue about television content. There are two main obstacles to the establishment of popular, publicly funded channels. The first is the political
resistance to paying taxes for something that appears to be free. The
amount of money involved, however, is not substantial, particularly if one
considers its effect on an area of cultural life to which people devote an
average of thirty hours a week. The money might be raised by reversing
what amounts to the current cultural policy of subsidizing advertising as a
tax-exempt activity—one of the many apparently inadvertent ways in
which the U.S. government promotes a corporate cultural system (DiMaggio 1993; Miller 1997) —or by revisiting former RCA head David Sarnoff’s
suggestion (from an era when a public service model was at least taken seriously) that a tax levied on commercial broadcasting might be used to pay
for public broadcasting (Kellner 1990).
The more significant obstacle to a popular public television is the power
of the commercial channels themselves, a powerful lobbying group that
has been extremely successful throughout the history of broadcasting
(McChesney 1994), particularly in the past two decades. The 1996 Telecommunications Act, which the National Association of Broadcasters lobbied
hard for, pushed commercial broadcasting further away from the idea of a
public service model than it has ever been (Aufderheide 1998). Since they
would compete for the same audience as popular public channels, commercial broadcasters would clearly see a popular public television system
as a threat—as opposed to PBS, which has little impact on its ability to
attract an audience but whose existence relieves them, in terms of political
pressure, from public service responsibilities. Here, once again, we need to
stress that overcoming the power of commercial broadcasting in this
regard will only be achieved by a popular campaign with tangible benefits
to most television viewers.
In a more general sense, the public funding of television is attractive
because it allows us to conceive of a programming rationale based on social
or cultural criteria rather than on the insistent monotone of profit maximization. Nonetheless, public systems of broadcasting are vulnerable to other
forms of pressure, notably, as the history of PBS illustrates, from governments that ultimately control the flow of revenue. Any policy for public
television must therefore involve the creation of systems of long-term
funding and separation of control to minimize these risks. This necessitates, for example, developing creative alternatives to a supervisory or
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management structure overseen by political appointees, such as the FCC. It
is also useful to consider what might be achieved by using regulatory structures to impose a public service framework on commercial broadcasters.
The Potential of Regulation
We have argued that the creation of PBS in the United States deflected a
number of the criticisms leveled at commercial broadcasting. PBS, after all,
provided a space for the liberal and/or highly educated constituencies
pushing for television reform to escape to. Whether public television was
the limited reform that stopped a revolution of the whole system, PBS certainly makes it easier for the commercial channels to go about their business unencumbered by public service requirements, while creating the
impression that it is commercial rather than public service television that
deals with popular culture. As we have suggested, this conflation between
the popular and the commercial has been the backdrop for many of the
broadcasting debates in the United States since the 1960s.
If we begin policy questions by addressing the limits of commercial
broadcasting, we can formulate a series of regulatory principles that might
make popular television more creative, innovative, and more able to serve
a variety of interests. Even if we do no more than draw on the experience of
European broadcasting systems, it is possible to identify a variety of regulatory strategies that might promote creativity, innovation, and diversity.
First, many countries continue to regulate the number and/or frequency
of commercials per viewing hour. This lessens creative constraints on
schedulers and writers in almost every genre. One reason why soccer has
never taken off in the United States, for example, is because despite being
one of the most popular games to play in schools, the necessity for showing
advertisements every seven or eight minutes means that it simply does not
fit well into a schedule in which commercials are not regulated.
Second, this principle might be extended further in relation to children’s
television. Past experience suggests that requirements on the educational
content of children’s programming are difficult to police. If networks were
required to show children’s programming commercial free—and it is hard
to see how such an idea could be opposed on any social or educational policy grounds—many of the more pernicious influences on children’s programming (i.e., the use of children’s programming as commercial vehicles)
would diminish.
Third, at present, the regulatory structure governing both network and
cable television contains no real provisions for diversity. Thus, it is possible
to have 90 percent of cable channels all attempting to appeal to the same
four or five lucrative demographic groups. The most plausible way of regulating diversity is to define the terms on which leases are granted to
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broadcast, whereby the renewal of leases is dependent on the fulfillment of
certain criteria: thus, various companies might compete with another for
slots designed for various communities of interest (this was the remit for
the creation of Britain’s Channel 4, for example). While this is not a new
idea in the U.S. context (Kellner 1990), the failure of regulators in the past to
police their requirements makes it seem so.
There are, of course, considerable obstacles in the way of introducing, or
in some cases reintroducing, these kinds of regulatory structures. First, the
broadcast industry’s power has, since the 1980s, pushed government away
from regulation rather than toward it. Second, as DiMaggio (1983) points
out, the dominant interpretation of the First Amendment tends to ignore
market-based restrictions on speech, saving scrutiny only for government
regulation. Third, the proliferation of channels made possible by cable and
satellite has complicated television and thereby has complicated any forms
of regulation that might be effective.
As we have argued, any strategy for taking on the interests of corporate
broadcasters must be based on popular discontent with the existing system. While this is no guarantee of success, change without it is unthinkable.
Such a campaign must also challenge the dominant interpretation of the
First Amendment, which has the bizarre effect, in this instance, of disabling
the power of government to promote freedom of speech while protecting
the rights of corporations to limit it. As DiMaggio (1983) argues, government is already deeply involved in the marketplace of ideas through various tax exemptions and educational institutions; it simply prefers to pretend that it is not. This is a matter of introducing cultural policy into
political discourse even while it already exists in political practice.
The development of cable systems may have put a great deal of regulatory power in the hands of cable operators such as Time/Warner or TCI,
but it has also opened up avenues for challenging this kind of corporate
power. First, it has emboldened many communities to challenge their cable
operator’s choices, thereby introducing notions of democratic accountability into the system that might be developed and extended. It has also made
the economic argument for advertising revenue as a source of funding
more fragile; not only are many people paying directly for commercial
channels, but the existence of successful channels funded mainly by subscription rather than advertising, such as HBO, suggests a willingness to
pay for television by other means.
But if we are to envision and strive for a different kind of broadcasting in
America, we must move beyond the limits of a public system created in the
image of PBS. In its current form, public television, with all its cultural baggage, is more a hindrance than help in efforts to reform television. In short,
we need to reclaim the popular from the corporate, ad-based system that
has defined it for the past fifty years.
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Ouellette, Lewis / Cultural Policy and Television
Laurie Ouellette is an assistant professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers
University where she teaches cultural studies and media criticism. She is completing
a book about the cultural history and politics of public TV (Columbia University
Press).
Justin Lewis is a professor at the Department of Communication, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has written several books about media and culture, including Art, Culture and Enterprise: The Politics of the Cultural Industries (Routledge, 1990); The Ideological Octopus: An Exploration of Television and Its
Audience (Routledge, 1991); and Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences and the Myth of the American Dream (with Sut Jhally, Westview, 1992).
His most recent book is an analysis of the media and public opinion (Columbia University Press). He is currently coediting a reader in Cultural Policy with Toby
Miller (Blackwell Press).
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