Atelier No.4, article 16
 

Edward S. Herman:
July 19, 2001
 

           THE GLOBAL EROSION OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE
 
                     Edward S. Herman(*)

     Public space in the media, and in communications more broadly,
is undergoing steady privatization on a global scale, with a
concurrent shrinkage in noncommercial operations and in the
provision of messages and programming other than entertainment.
This results from the fact that the powerful economic forces which
are in virtually uncontested command of economic and political life
in the New World Order are systematically replacing nonmarket
institutions and values with profit-seeking businesses and market
values. In this regime of a triumphant capitalism, more intense
competition, and a dominant neoliberal ideology,  noncommercial
media space is being taken over by those who will put it to the
"best economic use."

Advertiser hegemony versus the public sphere

     The "best economic use" of media space in a market system is
to service advertising, and the relationship between media and
advertisers has been long-standing and close. As capitalism has
consolidated its position in the West and in the Third World, and
spread into China and the former Soviet bloc, advertising has grown
rapidly and extended globally. Global advertising increased tenfold
between 1973 and 1995 (from $33 to $335 billion), growing rapidly
in the United States, but even more so elsewhere--recently, at its
fastest pace in Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe.

   Public broadcasting systems, and other noncommercial media,
without advertiser support, depend on money provided by
subscribers/listeners, donors, or the government. In a world of
government budget deficits, and financial pressures on ordinary
citizens, noncommercial media are under chronic financial stress,
and tend to be noncompetitive with sources able to tap the immense
resources of business advertisers.  And governments, under
budgetary pressure, and increasingly receptive to neoliberal
arguments, are more and more inclined to allow public media to be
transformed into market-funded entities. The commercial media are
eager to occupy that space, and conservatives want them to have it
because of the structured political bias and other effects of
commercialization on the "public sphere."
 
   By "public sphere"  I refer to the places and forums in which
issues important to citizenship in a democratic community are
discussed and debated. In the media, this would refer to in-depth
news and analyses of the news, debates and documentaries on public
issues, and biographies, histories and talks that provide insight
into matters important to citizen understanding. Advertisers, and
hence commercial media managers, tend to avoid the public sphere
because audiences there are smaller than for entertainment programs
and its serious and controversial subject matter is not compatible
with sales messages. This point was stressed half a century ago by
the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in its report
entitled The Public Service Responsibilities of Broadcast
Licensees, where the Commission acknowledged that advertising and
public service programming are incompatible. It contended, however,
that these "irreplaceable" public service programs, and overall
program balance, would be maintained by broadcasters' "sustaining
programs," funded by the broadcasters themselves. The FCC indicated
that the maintenance of such balance would be assured by the
Commission's licensing policies, which would give substantial
weight to this consideration. The FCC's claim that advertising-
based programming and public service are incompatible implies that
the market "fails" in serving the "public sphere," and that the FCC
has to correct this failure by moral suasion and regulation.

The U.S. Experience

   This incompatibility, and the disastrous effects of
commercialization on the public sphere, are well illustrated by the
70 year experience of broadcasting in the United States. When
broadcasting began in the United States in the 1920s, its
proponents placed almost exclusive stress on its public service
potential--as an educational tool and means of political,
religious, and cultural enlightenment. Advertising was seen as a
threat, or at best a necessary evil, to be kept under rigorous
control.

   But by a quiet coup, carried out between 1927 and 1933, the
commercial stations and networks, with the help of the regulatory
authorities, displaced the many early educational and religious
stations and took control of broadcasting. This control, and the
full-blown commercial regime that ensued, was ratified in the
Communications Act of 1934. In 1934 the broadcasters did pledge to
provide ample public service programming, and as noted the FCC in
1946 promised that broadcasters would meet public service
responsibilities through "sustaining programs," as a condition of
license renewal.

  But as advertising flooded in to the commercial stations and
networks, "sustaining programs" became more expensive, as they
entailed not just production expenses but foregone advertising
income. And as the FCC had suggested in 1946, advertisers preferred
light entertainment to public service programs, which shrank
steadily in importance even as broadcaster profits soared. By 1970,
public affairs programming  had fallen to 2% of programming time,
and the entire spectrum of public service offerings was far below
that provided by public broadcasting systems in Canada, Great
Britain, and elsewhere in the West. Profits of station owners,
ranged from 30-50% of revenues, and were much higher on invested
capital. But this did not reduce pressure for still higher profits,
as the workings of the market cause profits to be capitalized into
higher stock values, which become the basis for calculating rates
of return for both old and new owners.
 
   Under advertiser pressure, and the force of competition, not
only did entertainment displace public sphere programs, even
entertainment programs tended to lighten up, avoiding undue
seriousness, depth of thought, and backgrounds devoid of lavish and
upscale decor. The shrinking numbers of documentaries tended to
deal with non-political and non-controversial matters like dogs,
restaurants, travel, personalities, and the lives of the rich.
Politics was marginalized and trivialized, with news itself
transformed into a form of entertainment ("infotainment"). The
hegemony of advertising and entertainment values in the mature U.S.
system was captured at the time of Disney's 1996 acquisition of the
giant network and media conglomerate ABC-TV, when Disney head
Michael Eisner described his as a "family entertainment
communication company" in the business of providing "non-political
entertainment and sports."

  A notable trend in U.S. commercial broadcasting has been the
attrition and corruption of children's programming. As profits
soared in the 1960s, children's programs were removed from weekday
slots and shifted to weekend mornings, and were confined
increasingly to cartoons funded by advertisers of snacks and toys.
The situation was so bad that an organization, Action for
Children's Television (ACT), was organized in 1968, and sought
remedies from stations, the FCC and politicians for many years.
Despite these efforts the situation reached a new low in the 1980s
with the Reagan administration's further deregulation of TV, which
sanctioned what are called "program length commercials" prepared by
toy manufacturers and of course centering in the toys to be sold.
The toy manufacturers virtually took over children's programming
during the 1980s. The service to children improved somewhat with
the rise of cable and the 1993 change in political administration,
but not a great deal, and the downward trend of quality and central
role of advertising in shaping children's programs remains clear.

  Public broadcasting was introduced with public funding in 1967,
in large measure because the commercial broadcasters wanted to rid
themselves of any public service responsibilities and were pleased
to allow its shift to stations and networks paid for by the
taxpayer. An interesting feature of public broadcasting has been
its greater degree of political independence and courage in
allowing dissent, despite its heavy reliance on government support.
During the Vietnam War, for example, despite the growing opposition
to the war at home and throughout much of the world in 1965 through
1967, network television toed the official line and avoided as much
as it could airing the pains of the war and dissenting opinion. a
great deal of its sponsored entertainment was jingoistic." The U.S.
networks not only made none of the seriously critical documentaries
on the War, during the early War years they barred access to
outside documentaries. As the leading historian of US TV, Erik
Barnouw, has pointed out, "This policy constituted de facto
national censorship, thought privately operated."

   But while the mass protest against the Vietnam War rarely found
outlets on commercial TV, it did find occasional expression in
public broadcasting.  Apparently, the constraints built-in to the
commercial operations by ownership and advertiser interest makes
them less bold and more subservient to establishment political
desires than an institution literally on the government payroll but
granted some degree of autonomy. Because of this independence,
conservatives dislike public broadcasting (as  well as community
broadcasting), and regularly urge that it be defunded and pushed
into the commercial nexus.

Globalization of the U.S. model

  The U.S. model is being extended globally, partly because of U.S.
power, leadership, and plan,  but more basically because it
represents the advanced, if not full, product of the extension of
market principles and processes to the media and communication
industries. The plan element encompasses the attempt by the U.S.
government, and sometimes its allies, to encourage private
enterprise, open economies, and market-based media systems
throughout the world, to pry open markets, and to destabilize and
overthrow non-market-friendly governments.

  U.S. goals and strategies were implemented by means of U.S.
economic and military aid, military and police training programs,
economic and political pressure, support given to indigenous forces
serving U.S. aims, and sometimes more direct interventions, as in
Guatemala in 1954, Nicaragua in the 1980s and Cuba still in process
today. There is a clear official record of intentionality in the
pursuit of these goals, which cannot be dismissed as a product of
"conspiracy theory."

   With the long dominant position of the United States in the
motion picture business, and its great competitive strength in all
segments of the communications industries, U.S. politicians have
been  pushing for the opening up and privatization of the
communications sector for decades. The great weight of the United
States in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank has
been reflected in those institutions' policies serving the same
ends.

   The mainly U.S.-based global firms that now cross many borders,
providing films, TV shows, and "news" to media firms everywhere,
are all intensely commercial, seeking to attract audiences and
advertisers by offering attractive entertainment. They tend
increasingly to be organized around film studios, and their movies
feed into other parts of their conglomerate operations, generating
"synergistic" revenues from videos, sound tracks, books, toys and
theme park rides. For these entertainment companies, news is a very
small segment of their operations, and tends to be a necessary but
superficial adjunct to doing media business. Other features of the
public sphere have been virtually eliminated.

   But they attract large audiences with their sophistication and
special effects, and their economies of scale from dealing with
both a large U.S. and global market allow them to replace more
expensive local productions and set a cultural standard, as the
U.S.-advertiser sponsored soap opera did many years ago. And with
the accompanying global advertising and subtle value intrusions,
they help in the global advance of consumerism and neoliberal
ideology.

  But the dynamics of the market has its own internal momentum,
operative within the United States itself (and still working there
today) and extending globally at an accelerating pace by the force
of cross-border media investment and competition. Within each
country the corporate system and corporate media, underwritten by
advertisers, have gathered strength, with enhanced ideological and
political power. Aided by the increasing force of capital's greater
mobility and global financial integration, they have successfully
downgraded the idea of public goods and a public service
responsibility of government, and with the help of financial
pressure on governments have constrained the growth of (or shrunk)
public service and welfare budgets. Part of the new "economic
realism" has been privatization, which raises money and placates
powerful economic interests. And with the commercial media eager to
capture public space and put it to better economic use, public
broadcasting has been in retreat globally.

  Concluding note

  The public sphere is shrinking globally under the impact of a
triumphant market system, which is putting more and more public
space to profitable use, as defined by the advertising community.
 The main drift of the global market system and media therefore
poses the serious threat that we are allowing democracy to be
subverted and, in Neil Postman's words, "entertaining ourselves to
death."

------------
(*)Edward S. Herman, Professor Emeritus of Finance, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, is the author of a number of books, including Manufacturing Consent (1988, with Noam Chomsky), Triumph of the Market (1996), and The Global Media (1997, with Robert McChesney).