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 Communications
Policy and the Public Interest:
The Telecommunications Act of 1996
Introduction
When the 1934 Communications Act was passed, no one had a television
set, or a cordless phone, or a computer. By the time the Telecommunications
Act of 1996 was passed, comprehensively amending the 1934 Act for
the first time, many working Americans were living with faxes, cable
TV, email and voicemail in their homes. The 1996 Act reflected broad
shifts in technology use, but even more it reflected shifts in policy
approaches. Its shaping showcased the fact that the public interest,
endlessly controversial, is also at the center of communications
policy. It will continue to be. This book describes the reshaping
of the public interest standard in this massive rewrite of the 1934
Communications Act, and the issues now facing the public in its
aftermath.
It is directed at two related audiences. Scholars and students in
communication, government, and sociology have long seen the powerful
shaping role of policy in the socially critical business of communications.
As well, active citizens and activists in nonprofit organizations
addressing social concerns from poverty to public health to education,
have recognized the importance of telecommunications policy and
legislation for their concerns.
The quality of public information and discussion on communications
issues is increasingly important. In the years just before and after
passage of the Act, the issues that it raised and addressed were
rarely out of the headlines on the financial pages. They equally
rarely, however, made the front pages of newspapers, though, and
exceedingly infrequently made TV news. In fact, no media or telecommunications
story made the Tyndall Report's Top Ten Stories of 1996. This rarely
reflected a deliberate attempt to obscure the issue. It looked pretty
obscure to start with, to most editors. Communications policy does
not make for high-concept news, fitting neatly into the narratives
that implicitly frame top-ten headlines. By and large, the American
public perforce ceded the argumentation over terms of the Act to
experts.
And yet there is broad social significance in this Act. Communications
systems are an essential infrastructure of an information society,
one that is increasingly international. Information products are
a primary U.S. export, and communications is, according to the Federal
Communications Commission, an $800 billion business today. The American
Electronics Association found that in the 1990s, computing and telecommunications
sales rose 57 percent, making information technology the largest
U.S. industry by 1997 and high tech the largest single manufacturer.
These are not any-old-widget businesses, but the vehicles and instruments
of our shared culture. Communications networks map the nation's
access to information, resources, and the basic social inclusion
that is a prerequisite of citizenship. Mass media, far more visibly
and controversially, pervade and shape the culture—both consciously
and unconsciously. The way in which they operate also reflects a
society's priorities and possibilities. From its origins in the
U.S., communications policy has been marked by the recognition that
communications and culture are intimately linked. That recognition,
interpreted differently in different periods, has been carried forward
through the phrase "the public interest, convenience and necessity."
The 1996 Act took shape in a period of heightened awareness of the
relationship between communications systems and the quality of public,
community and democratic life. It is not merely a matter of finding
the right technology, or letting the market work its magic, in order
for the citizens of an ever-more-plugged-in culture to reap the
benefits of innovation. Even what constitutes a benefit is debatable.
Social philosophers who have explored the failures of a laissez-faire
liberalism in a postmodern, just-in-time global context have seen
the role of communications as central—and often disturbing.
Communications systems break down boundaries of space and time,
without necessarily facilitating discourses that matter for civility.
In fact, they may exacerbate problems of disconnection, paranoia
and social volatility. For instance, Robert Kuttner, in his Everything
for Sale (1996), persuasively linked the erosion of civic life with
the agenda-setting power of mass media-fed commercial culture. Political
theorist Benjamin Barber posed clashing ideologies as grimly linked
in Jihad vs. McWorld, with communications systems both part of the
problem and solutions. They made isolation, confusion, pathological
distraction just as possible as any kind of virtual community, he
argued: "Much of McWorld's strategy for creating global markets
depends on a systematic rejection of any genuine consumer autonomy
or any costly program variety--deftly coupled, however, with the
appearance of infinite variety" (1995, 116). As Michael Sandel
put it in Democracy's Discontent, satellites, cyberspace and global
markets "link people in distant places without necessarily
making them neighbors or fellow citizens or participants in a common
venture. Converting networks of communications and interdependence
into a public life worth affirming is a moral and political matter,
not a technological one" (1996, 340). In Data Smog (1997),
David Shenk vividly described an emerging world of "nichified
microcultures," where distracted citizens are plied with news
nuggets rather than engaging in a deliberative process.
Widespread information anxiety points to the importance of the frameworks
established by government policies on communication. The decisions
made by the various and competing actors who shaped the Telecommunications
Act of 1996 had and will have vast and unintended consequences.
These in turn shape social possibility in the transformatory, unpredictable
ways that make social philosophers take notice. They also, of course,
have immediate consequences as evident as the sudden rise in the
price of pay phones or a changed format in your favorite radio station.
These changes, large and small, are under close scrutiny. Intellectuals
and advocates played major roles in debates over equity, access,
and public accountability during the process of shaping legislation,
and they continue to intervene as the Act is implemented.
The book is organized according to the following logic: Chapter
1 offers a broad historical and analytic context for the Act, followed
by a synoptic description of the legislative process in Chapter
2. Chapter 3 provides a thematic summary of its basic clauses, as
they are organized in the Act itself, explained in terms of the
perceived problems they were intended to address. Chapter 4 summarizes
the immediate consequences of the passage of the Act, and Chapter
5 addresses its more far-reaching implications for the concept of
the public interest. Bibliographic resources include references,
an annotated bibligraphy of analyses of the Act, and a guide to
organizations concerned with interpreting the public interest in
the Act's implementation. Appendices include a abridgement of the
Act itself, by Dean Thomas Krattenmaker, the Supreme Court decision
on the Communications Decency Act, and and other relevant documents,
including advocacy and policy arguments, and regulatory speeches.
Communications Policy and the Public Interest: The Telecommunications
Act of 1996.
New York: Guilford Press, 1999. www.guilford.com
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