What’s Public about Public Media?

print email discuss By Pat Aufderheide and Noëlle 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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May 2006 Articles

What’s Public about Public Media?

print email discuss By Pat Aufderheide and Noëlle McAfee

A Proposition

Background

Going Forward

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