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What’s Public about Public
Media?
By Pat Aufderheide and Noelle McAfee
A Proposition:
Public media are public not because
of their excellent content (commercial media also have some excellent
content), or their tax-based funding
(some public media don’t), or
the fact that anyone can receive their signal or post to their blog
(that just makes them available), but because public media’s
central job is helping publics to find themselves.
Public media services are arteries of a healthy body politic. They
are indispensable, unless you think you don’t need democracy.
Background:
Since Plato’s day, thinkers have tried to understand what
a democratic public might be. Skeptics such as Plato were sure that
the public had little solid understanding of what is in its own
interests. Idealists were hopeful, despite some evidence to the
contrary, that the public can rule itself.
In early 20th C. America, the dominant Progressive Era view was
that the public was not in good shape to run its own affairs. As
Walter Lippmann, the eminent journalist of the twentieth century,
put it in 1925, “The accepted theory of popular government
… rests upon the belief that there is a public which directs
the course of events. I hold that this public is a mere phantom.”
Lippmann sincerely worried that leaving public matters to the public
was ill-advised. Despite the democratic credo that the public was
the proper authority on matters of public concern, Lippmann saw
ample evidence that when consulted people tended to act or vote
out of self-interest, not out of any larger sense of commonwealth.
Moreover, most people were far too busy tending to their own lives
to be fully aware of public policy issues. Their time was limited
and their attention short: “The public will arrive in the
middle of the third act and will leave before the last curtain,
having stayed just long enough perhaps to decide who is the hero
and who the villain.”
Like Plato before him, Lippmann worried that people were easily
manipulated and could not fully grasp what was in their own interest.
Besides, public issues were increasingly complex. No one individual
could possibly master all the details and intricacies of issues
facing the body politic. In the progressive-era spirit, Lippmann
argued that the best way to deal with a “phantom public”
was to set up government by good guardians. In a suggestion similar
to Plato’s call for philosopher-kings, Lippmann called for
leaders who were well-schooled and well-meaning, leaders who could
tend to the public’s problems far better than could any phantom
public.
Lippmann’s contemporary and friend, the philosopher and educator
John Dewey, agreed with Lippmann that the public often seemed apathetic
and unwilling to tackle the problems that plagued it. But Dewey
did not think that apathy was really the problem. He thought it
was something closer to bewilderment.
What seems to be apathy, Dewey argued, is best understood as “testimony
to the fact that the public is so bewildered that it cannot find
itself”. People feel and suffer consequences but don’t
know why they come about.
Dewey thought a public came into being when people came to recognize
themselves as jointly affected by problems. For instance, people
in Lake Charles who work at and live near a PVC plant come to see
that the plant’s dioxin emissions are harming their own families’
and their neighbors’ health, and that they together must address
the health problems themselves or force government to do so. At
that moment they aren’t just individual citizens (or non-citizens),
or workers, or sick people. They are members of a public, who see
other members of that public as similar to them because they share
a common problem. (Some of you may be familiar with this story from
Judith Helfand’s Blue Vinyl, a great example of public
media shown on HBO.)
Dewey did not think better guardians would fix the problem. He focused
on reconstituting the public. He defined the public simply as all
“those indirectly and seriously affected for good or evil”
by the “human collective action” of some particular
group of people. Whenever any group’s actions have consequences
for a community as a whole, this community is a political public.
But it is not always easy for a public to “find itself”
as a group of people jointly affected by the consequences of actions.
Even in his own day, Dewey recognized that modern, technological
difficulties often obscure the source and the extent of public problems.
So perceiving indirect consequences—understanding the relationships
that create the problems—is key to turning a public from incoherent
to self-aware.
Going Forward:
What was Dewey’s solution—and will it help us today?
Dewey’s solution:
• To find itself, the public needs to be
able to fully fathom the consequences of human actions and the
origins of actions. This is not about just getting better information,
because we know that people don’t even hear or see facts
they can’t understand. It means telling stories that can
make sense and finding other people to share and discuss them
with. Public radio storytellers are famous not just for good stories
but for smartly framing them, so that new understandings emerge.
Those “driveway stories” make connections.
• The public needs to able to know “what to make of”
the relationships they come to understand. They need to know what
they can do, and what the implications of their own actions will
be. Those of you who saw the Sundance screening of The Education
of Shelby Knox, the wonderful upcoming show on P.O.V. , actually
saw that happening before your eyes. Teenage Texas Christian Shelby,
in Lubbock, learns the hard way what she can—and can’t—do
to push for sex education in Lubbock schools.
• People need to have more and better opportunities to find
each other, in actual places where they can meet face to face.
If the knowledge stays locked up inside themselves, it can’t
help feed the public as a public. The post-broadcast history of
Farmingville, about community conflict in Long Island over illegal
immigration, is a wonderful example. The documentary after its
public TV airing has served as a trigger film for community meetings
all over the country, in places where the same conflicts have
been brewing, but without a way to talk about it until now.
Communication is the key to building a public. It’s
about mass media, it’s about networked media, and it’s
also about face-to-face. It’s about information and about
how you use it. In Dewey’s day, mass communication was achieved
primarily through print media, which Dewey thought lacked the force
of the “wingéd words of conversation.” But today’s
media is infinitely richer.
Most of it, though, isn’t being used to help the public find
itself through more fluid and fluent public conversation. Most of
it is noisily going about the time-honored business of making lots
of money for its owners. If distraction, titillation, misinformation,
self-aggrandizement, and catering to the great pleasure of watching
others humiliate themselves can make money, well then that’s
what these media will do.
Public media works and services, by contrast, share a common bond.
They exist to help the public find itself. That job is public in
a way that can withstand attack--such as when people say, who needs
a subsidized service in a time of media abundance, or who needs
an “elite” service in a time of populist media, who
needs protection for public media when you’ve got a whole
Internet out there. Helping the public find itself is is not about
right or left ideologies. It’s about the daily self-creation
of a democratic public. While the people may do that by themselves,
they don’t do it without any structures or services.
We either want a democratic public or we don’t. If we want
a democratic public, then we need public media. It doesn’t
always have to be noncommercial, and it doesn’t have to be
government-funded (although both have terrific advantages). It doesn’t
always have to be available to everybody (some media projects show
on pay cable, within a public service mission; some at festivals;
some on-campus), or even available at a consumer level (the services
of Public Interactive are only available to institutions, for example).
There are plenty of publics.
Everyone who who works in public media differently serves the challenge
of building publics, and the publics they serve are certainly not
the same. But they all help the public find itself.
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