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News from the Future of Public Media
Ellen Goodman’s report on the FCC’s Broadband Plan
email discuss Posted by Patricia Aufderheide on Mar 19, 2010 at 10:17 AM
We’re proud to bring you the first report from Center for Social Media Fellow Ellen Goodman, who is Professor at Rutgers School of Law and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the FCC working part time on the FCC’s Future of Media Project:
This week, the FCC released its epic National Broadband Plan. The Plan largely deals with telecommunications infrastructure issues – how can we get more ubiquitous and faster broadband. Although the Plan is very focused on the bottom line of how ubiquitous broadband can support social and democratic flourishing, it actually only addresses the content of broadband communications in a couple of places. What the Plan calls “public media” is at the center of its content discussion. Before going on, it’s important to pause and consider what this term “public media” means. This is the first time, to my knowledge, that a government document has used the term in place of the better-understood (and narrower) term “public broadcasting.” It is thanks in large part to CSM’s Public Media 2.0 report by Pat Aufderheide and Jessica Clark, , that this term has entered the policy lexicon. My book chapter “Public Service Media 2.0” and comments to the FCC, are also cited extensively in the Broadband Plan. Pat’s, Jessica’s, and my work has all been aimed at understanding best practices and partnerships among an expanded group of public media creators, curators, and connectors. I have focused in particular on the policy and legal changes that are necessary to promote the kind of diverse and distributed noncommercial media environment that fulfills the aspirations of the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act. Our work has been funded by the Ford Foundation which has been working to conceive of and support innovations in the public media space that it was so instrumental in creating in the ‘60’s. The Broadband Plan picks up this notion of public media at a moment that Ernie Wilson, Chairman of CPB, calls “a 1967 moment.” It is a moment when all stakeholders – from public broadcasters to foundations to government to communities to schools and other non-profits – are looking at what public media can do to improve life, knowledge, and discourse.
What the Plan says about public media (in Chapter 15) is pretty much what we had hoped it would say: that public broadcasting must become part of a more extensive network of public media makers and that federal law and funding mechanisms must be changed to support this. The Plan didn’t provide any details about what kinds of policy or structural changes would be necessary. It threw out some ideas on copyright law changes to allow public media entities to more easily archive materials and allow noncommercial access. While this is an important and highly contentious issue (the Copyright Office is looking at it), it is somewhat to the side. It doesn’t go to the core of how public media entities can be encouraged to network with each other more effectively, what counts as public media, and how to resource the new networks. The Plan also threw out the idea of using noncommercial TV spectrum auction revenues (to be generated by voluntary consolidation of stations) to fund public media. I supported this kind of approach in my comments and think there may really be something to it. But it’s an issue that will take a long time to work though, that will involve the whole TV band, including commercial TV stations, and that will require Congressional action. So no one should start counting the money yet. In the mean time, it would be good for public television and other stakeholders to begin to map out scenarios for the spectrum that would lead to greater collaboration and support for content services and outreach.
All in all, the Broadband Plan didn’t say all that much about the future of public media, but the fact that it considered it at all in a proceeding that ostensibly had little to do with it, and the fact that it adopted the central vision of the CSM’s work on public media is pretty huge. The next FCC undertaking (the Future of Media Project) will pick up where the Broadband Plan left off and will provide another opportunity for those with good ideas about the future of public media to comment. Initial comments are due May 8.