We must first understand that the U.S. public media system has been
purposefully and severely handicapped by the professional culture of
journalism, and by corporate and government powers, and philanthropies,
from the beginning. Only with this knowledge can we discover that the
primary solution to this problem is not simply more money and
technology for public media but rather the direct, democratic,
community control of public media. Only with this knowledge can we take
action to create a public media system that enables marginalized groups
to speak to themselves and to wider audiences.
The ideal public service media system would be nonprofit,
noncommercial, accountable and independent, available on multiple
platforms, and require ubiquitous broadband and internet freedom. It
would include public, educational and government access, community and
low power radio, other community media centers, and community print and
text, and have public and community media working together in new ways.
Those who have historically subjugated U.S. public media have something
else planned for us however.
Professional control, corporate control, government control, and
philanthropic control over public media in the U.S. together have
created a system of social control and not one of social justice. I
will offer governance models as solutions that I want you to keep in
mind. I’ll focus on activism aimed at achieving community control over
public media during two eras, 1920-1960 and 1960-present, and then upon
It is important to understand that by the time commercial radio
gained dominance in the 1930s, journalists and publishers had won
widespread acceptance of professional norms over independent news
models. The journalists’ and publishers’ culture of “detached”
“science” “without ideology” determined they would control media for
It is crucial to recognize the racism in professional culture of the
1920’s and 30’s. Lagemann says the trustees of the Carnegie Corporation
worried about and financed eugenics projects intended to help preserve
the racial purity of American Society. They were convinced of the
superiority of the white Anglo-Saxon “race” and were determined to
preserve this nowhere more than in the “public profession of the law”.
This is the same foundation that helped shape U.S. media at every key
step and whose 1967 report led to the creation of U.S. public
The 1927 Radio Act created the Federal Radio Commission, which
shoved educational stations around the dial as a cop would a vagrant,
and slashed their power allotments. 128 educational stations in 1925
fell to 48 in 1930. Those left got daytime hours only.
NBC parent RCA, and CBS, in collusion with the Carnegie Corporation
and J.P. Rockefeller, created the National Advisory Council on Radio
Education in 1930, which advised educators to work with (surrender to?)
the networks. Other educators formed the National Committee on
Education by Radio, a vanguard attempting to establish a U.S.
broadcasting system with the nonprofit and noncommercial sector
dominant. The passage of the 1934 Radio Act was both a complete defeat
of public media in the U.S. and an archetype for media governance
extending to the present.
Another path was possible. In the mid-1930’s, the French government
decreed each community with a state owned station would hold an annual
meeting to elect a community council of program management. All persons
who owned radio sets and had paid the use tax would be eligible to
In 1946, pacifist Lewis Hill incorporated what became the
independent Pacifica radio network, a pioneer in listener-supported
radio. During the 1950’s however, the only new educational radio
licenses authorized by the FCC were for itty-bitty ten-watt stations.
No educators initially accepted the FCC’s 1948 invitation to request tv
channels. In 1952, the FCC reserved 242 for education. By 1960, only
1/5th were in use.
Surprisingly, there was no grassroots struggle for public tv
channels or funding for public tv or radio. The prime movers of the
Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 were educational broadcasters, the
Carnegie Corporation, Ford Foundation, the Johnson administration,
commercial networks, AT&T, media union officials, and some
academics. Virtually 100% absent from the 1967 testimony in the House
and Senate were diverse and marginalized groups advocating for civil
rights, peace, the environment, the poor, and so on. Professionals and
elites made a severely handicapped, small system that they could
control. The handful of letters from the public in the legislative
record show the people felt a government propaganda machine was being
shoved down their throats. They were right.
From the start, public broadcasting was unambiguously part of the
military-industrial complex. Carnegie Commission chairman James Killian
was Kennedy’s chief intelligence advisor and held top posts at MIT, GM,
and AT&T; Killian didn’t want public broadcasting to have
independent, permanent funding. The first chair of the CPB was General
Frank Pace, former army secretary, nuclear weapon technology pioneer,
and head of General Dynamics. Yes, even Sesame Street co-founder Joan
Ganz Cooney had worked at the US Information Agency, the government
Similar links occur at elite neo-liberal philanthropies, including
major early public broadcasting funder the Ford Foundation. Its
co-founder Henry Ford’s Nazi ties have been researched in depth
elsewhere and its history of collaboration and interlock with the CIA
is almost as well known. More obscured is the fact that the first head
of the Ford Foundation’s Fund for Adult Education was the president of
Shell Oil and that later, in 1965, Shell became public tv’s first
“enhanced underwriter.” It is also important to point out that the Ford
Foundation has been linked in the past by researchers to CIA and
CIA-like projects including the National Endowment for Democracy, the
National Student Association, and (along with the Carnegie Corporation)
the CIA-founded African-American Institute, a group active on campuses
In 1972, African Americans picketed outside a CPB board meeting
because only 7 of 887 NPR station managers were black. In 1975, women’s
groups, people of color, labor and others successfully fought Nixon’s
nomination of conservative funder and John Birch pamphleteer Joseph
Coors to the CPB. Nixon’s disdain for public broadcasting is widely
understood, but less known is the fact that activists worked very hard
in the 1970’s to correct public broadcasting’s serious shortcomings.
Filmmaker DeeDee Halleck and physicist Larry Hall organized The
National Task Force for Public Broadcasting in the late 1970’s. They
characterized public broadcasting as a system closed to creative staff,
independent producers, and interested citizens. It assembled the
powerful grass roots coalition missing from the 1967 deliberations. Its
most significant victories were requirements for open meetings and
access to records. Similar movements emerged in Boston, New York, St.
Louis, and Washington D.C. and addressed lack of diversity on boards,
neglect of local programming, censorship of controversial programming,
under-representation of minorities in employment and programming, and
insufficient citizen participation generally.
1978’s A Public Trust: The Report of the Carnegie Commission on the
Future of Public Broadcasting called for public involvement in station
governance, mixed boards with staff appointed and elected seats, and
funding from spectrum fees. Congress and the FCC ignored these, its
most important recommendations.
President Reagan and the Congress imposed major cuts to CPB. The
Cable Act of 1984, befitting its Orwellian year, gave municipalities
the right to request funding for public access channels but Aufderheide
tells us that by 1990 only 17% of cable systems actually had public
access channels. The unrelenting campaign by cable companies and
municipalities against community television would have had far worse
consequences were it not for activist organizing to save public access
That’s where my personal story begins. I became an active community
tv producer in Evanston, Illinois in the mid-eighties, co-creating a
progressive news program. But the cable provider wanted to eliminate
our access. My co-producer and I were banned — almost permanently.
Instead of walking away, I organized for an independent democratic
governance structure, akin to the models forged earlier in Canada and
elsewhere, and helped carry the nonprofit Evanston Community Media
Center through the legislative course — and we won. I know how that’s
done. In the process, I was threatened with arrest several times and
arrested for loitering.
Congress heard the complaints of independent producers in 1987 when
it directed the CPB to establish the Independent Television Service to
address the concerns of minorities and working people. Activism
increased in the 1990’s in Chicago, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Phoenix,
and elsewhere. I led Chicago efforts, which included a large coalition
to press for programming and structural reforms. We increased the
diversity of Chicago public tv station WTTW’s trustees, but the lock
local elites have on the station is formidable. An FCC warning
concerning home shopping with my name on it was cited in an FCC fine
levied against WTTW for airing commercials — the first and only such
fine ever involving a large public tv station.
More recently, Chicago Media Action activists issued a study of
WTTW’s nightly news show that swept out three elite news execs. And
while co-panelist Cass Sunstein nodded in approval at a 2005 event, I
told the entire public broadcasting system that it had failed on the
run up to the Iraq invasion. We’ve sought wider distribution of
“Democracy Now!”, and advocated for Chicago Access Network TV, low
power radio, and other needs. A critical public radio fight holds the
remaining key we need.
In 1999, the CPB insisted Pacifica radio centralize and be more
secretive. Program hosts and the station manager at Berkeley’s KPFA
were fired. A network gag rule was implemented. Listeners issued
thousands of protests. In June 1999, activists who staged a sit-in at
Pacifica’s offices were arrested and charged with trespassing. In July,
a Pacifica veteran was physically removed by guards in the middle of a
broadcast. Some 400 staged a sit-in. 53 were arrested. Next, some
10-15,000 rallied and a lawsuit was filed.
Pacifica ‘s struggle created a governance model of great importance.
Today, 2/3 of each Pacifica station board is member elected using
instant runoff voting and proportional representation. The remainder
are staff appointed. The station boards select the national board. This
structure is unique and, on this scale, unprecedented. But virtually no
other models of direct action aimed at public media in the U.S. have
been found — to date.
So the early movement to create community controlled public media in
the U.S. failed miserably. Then the Ford Foundation, Carnegie
Corporation and U.S. government funded and shaped public media to their
purposes. Since, corporations have dominated it. Now, some tell us that
new funding and technology will fix it.
The rotary press, telegraph, radio, and tv were each proclaimed to
be democratic when first introduced; it may be easy to speak in
cyberspace, but it remains difficult to be heard. That fact will not
change until we win the capacity to shape at least the public part of
that system, as it is vulnerable to sustained local organizing in ways
that commercial media is not.
To be very clear, social justice movements need a radically
re-envisioned U.S. public service media system that would be almost
unrecognizable alongside the current version. Public service media’s
governance could resemble Pacifica’s, the French model, public access
models, or the publicly elected boards of many public schools, public
libraries, community colleges, and public utilities. Gale research says
about 94% of Americans living in school districts elect their public
school trustees. But 0% of Americans watching or listening to CPB
funded outlets — except the five owned by Pacifica — have any direct
say about the selection of public station trustees.
Public media elites offer us a “partnership” in which they’re the
parents and we’re the children, anxiously waiting with our bibs on for
our media to be spoon fed to us. Unless we change this power
relationship, we will remain subject to the arbitrary dominance of
wealthy, racist, militarists shaping new technologies to sustain their
Democratic participation in civic and cultural media production only
happens when the powerless can speak to themselves and to wider
audiences. The oppressed and marginalized have a rare historic
opportunity to wholly re-envision our public service media system. We
could use it to create stories, produce culture, and change conditions.
- – - – -
Scott Sanders has co-founded a number of media activist organizations including Chicago Media Action,
and led efforts to constitute public community media centers with
member elected boards and to increase diversity on non-elected public
media boards. He also led campaigns resulting in the only FCC fine of a
major public tv station concerning commercialism. He is a video
documentarian and periodicals and technology librarian producing
research for MMTC, MAP, and the University of Chicago, and author of
articles for Truthout, Counterpunch, Z magazine, FAIR Extra!, and a number of daily newspapers.
For part I of this series see: http://www.media-alliance.org/article.php?id=1908