Communication Justice

Communication Justice b y B art P reecs

A system that limits the ability to communicate to a privileged few is no more ethical than one that limits suffrage to white male property owners.

Yet that is exactly what we have in the US today.

It’s time for people of faith to speak out.

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The dominant American culture can be compared to an immense oceangoing oil tanker. Like a ship as long as a football field, the culture has enormous momentum, and it can be very hard for outsiders to change its direction.

To steer a ship that size, the crew of an oil tanker uses a rudder that may be three or four stories tall. In America today, the large, powerful culture industries—movies, television, cable, publishing, music—can be compared to that rudder.

To control the rudder that steers the giant tanker, engineers have designed something called a trim tab—a relatively small rudder that moves the bigger rudder. Like the oceangoing tanker, American culture has a trim tab, too. That trim tab is communication policy. “Communication policy” may not be a familiar term to many people, but it’s shorthand for the laws and regulations that control the operations of the culture and communications industries.

Today we are fully engaged in a communication revolution.

Every communication industry—telephone, cable TV, broadcast TV, radio, movie, music, and all branches of the publishing industry—is being shaken to its foundations.

As Danny Duncan Collum wrote in the June 2008 issue of Sojourners magazine, one part of this revolution, the transition to digital broadcasting in February 2009, will be the most significant change in the US communication marketplace in a generation. Most American homes subscribe to satellite or cable TV systems and may hardly notice the change. But behind the scenes, the digital revolution creates turmoil for all the communication policies—the business and political deals—that have shaped the communications industries for decades.

It’s important to note that support for communication is one of the pillars of our democratic way of life.Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution gave Congress the authority—and the responsibility—to provide funding for post offices and post roads. It shouldn’t take much imagination to make the leap from 18th-century post offices to 21st-century broadband networks and digital communications technologies.

The nation’s first communication policy debate was over whether the new post offices should distribute newspapers at subsidized rates or deliver them for free. The Postal Act of 1792 did set a price for newspaper postage, but at rates far less than other mail.

For more than 100 years, the federal government provided support for the information essential to democratic selfgovernment. As late as 1885, the new medium of national magazines got a significant reduction in postage, a policy that contributed indirectly to the rise of pioneer muckrakers like Ida Mae Tarbell and her 15-part exposé of Standard Oil in McClure’s magazine.

The delivery methods have changed, but the fundamental principle still applies: It is the responsibility of government

to promote and support the flow of information that democratic self-government depends upon.

In the 20th century, however, support for democratic communication faltered. In the early days of broadcasting, powerful business interests persuaded government leaders that only a strong program of licensing could bring order to the chaotic world of early radio experiments and development.

The 1927 Radio Act did indeed bring order and investment to the airwaves, but at the price of crushing hundreds of pioneer stations supported by churches, schools, farm bureaus, and labor unions. The newly formed Federal Radio Commission created a system of exclusive licenses given out for free in return for vague promises of operating in the public interest. These policies reduced competition on the radio dial and created enormously profitable business operations, but the promises of public service proved difficult to enforce.

Later, advocates for cable television franchises in the 1970s and early 1980s promised to set aside dedicated channels for “public, education, and government.” But again, reality doesn’t always match the promises.

I recently learned that a 16-city consortium negotiating with Verizon for video franchises in the northern part of the Puget Sound region near Seattle has already made a fateful decision. “We won’t be asking for a P-E-G fee, because none of the cities want any public access channels. We’ll be asking for an E-G fee,” was the quip I heard. I can’t fault the cities that decided to have nothing to do with public access.There are flourishing community media centers and public access channels throughout the country, but the effort to support these efforts is not trivial, and there are always other demands for time, attention, and resources.

But this does not mean that cities should simply fold some selected cultural and civic programming into what used to be the “government channels” and re-brand this as “community programming.” It is no safer to let City Hall be the gatekeeper for information about local communities than it is to let questions of war and peace be debated primarily on cable channels owned by defense contractors or private empire builders who need government approval for their expansion plans.

The trillion-dollar failure to hold a full, complete debate over the decision to invade and occupy Iraq was a massive systemic failure of our existing communication system and the communication policies that created that system.

Why should CHRISTIANS care?

The reason Christians should care about radical transformation of the communication industries in the US is that this transformation could be—repeat, could be—a huge opportunity to level the playing field between people of all faiths and powerful institutions whose agenda is directly opposed to

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mall—right now.

In his new book, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters (Orbis, 2008), long-time Catholic peace activist and author James Douglass describes how President John Kennedy’s American University address on June 12, 1963, was one of the most significant events of the entire Cold War, because it represented a significant shift in policy towards ending the Cold War through negotiation. Douglass says the speech received very little coverage in the US media at the time. In fact, he says, because the Soviet Union halted its normal jamming of the Voice of America, there may have been more Russians than Americans who heard the speech in its entirety.

The same reluctance to give credence or airtime to voices

faith-informed visions for a good life and a healthy society.

The world and all its attractions will always be a serious distraction for anyone trying to live a gospel life or persuade our neighbors to build a society that reflects gospel values.

But our current communication policies put the most powerful communication tools in the history of the human race almost entirely in the hands of people and companies whose primary mission is directly the opposite of the good news.

Jesus says love thy neighbor.The multibillion-dollar media industry says the key to happiness is beating your neighbor in the status game with the right car, the right house, and the right vacation. Jesus says store up treasure in heaven. Media messengers scream at us to save money by shopping at the DIGGING DEEPER

Prologue to a Farce: Communication and Democracy in America

by Mark Lloyd (University of Illinois Press, 2006)

World Association for Christian Communication (WACC.org.uk) promotes communication for social change. It believes that communication is a basic human right that defines people’s common humanity, strengthens cultures, enables participation, creates community, and challenges tyranny and oppression.

WACC’s key concerns are media diversity, equal and affordable access to communication and knowledge, media and gender justice, and the relationship between communication and power. It tackles these through advocacy, education, training, and the creation and sharing of knowledge. WACC’s worldwide membership works with faith-based and secular partners at grassroots, regional and global levels, giving preference to the needs of the poor, marginalized, and dispossessed. Being WACC means “taking sides.”

Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media

by Eric Klinenberg (Holt Paperbacks, 2008) Digital Destiny: New Media and the Future of Democracy

by Jeff Chester (New Press, 2007) Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications by Paul Starr (Basic Books, 2004) Free Press (FreePress.net) is a national, nonpartisan organization working through education, organizing, and advocacy to promote diverse and independent media ownership, strong public media, and universal access to communications.

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arguing against war is evident in our time as well. Author and online columnist Eric Boehlert recently wrote about media treatment given to a powerful message from Sen.Ted Kennedy in late 2002 during the preparation for the war in Iraq.

Boehlert notes that major news networks mostly ignored Kennedy’s speech. Former Vice President Gore also gave a strong antiwar speech, only to be ignored or ridiculed. the knee-jerk belief that free markets every time and everywhere automatically produce the best possible arrangement is still the dominant belief of the current culture.

This faith is so deep that one of the best things Christians can do is call this belief by its correct name: idolatry. The belief that the government which governs best is the government that governs least has a nice ring to it, but it’s not an adequate excuse to ignore biblical teachings about the need to bring justice to the oppressed and turn away from violence.

But even more importantly, Christians can help frame this discussion in the ethical terms that it deserves. William Wilberforce portrayed slavery not merely as an economic issue, but also as a moral evil. In the same way, today’s evangelicals can link the seemingly obscure, wonky issues of communication policy to deeper moral truths.

We can point out that our current policies concentrate the power to communicate in a handful of people and institutions whose agendas are mainly focused on preserving and maximizing their own power. A communication system that limits the ability to communicate to a privileged few is no more ethical or just than an electoral system that limits the right to vote to white men who own property.

The potential abuse of military and economic power was one of the major concerns of the authors of the Constitution, according to The Political Economy of Media (Monthly Review Press, 2008), a new book by communication scholar Robert McChesney. Evangelicals and other people of faith do not need to be reminded that concern for violence and economic injustice did not originate with Jefferson and Madison. The same issues were the primary concern of the prophets Jeremiah and Micah.

The digital communication revolution is a rare and fleeting opportunity to heed the warnings and visions of both Old Testament prophets and the Founding Fathers and to demand communication policies that support both justice and democratic self-government. n

The opportunity for transformation Since these multibillion-dollar industries are being transformed anyway, wouldn’t this be a good time to ask ourselves whether this allocation of communication power and resources really produces the results we want?

Could we perhaps use this transformation to find a stable source of funding for public or community broadcasting? Could local churches, community groups, or educational institutions produce programming that better reflects our deeper values if they were given a fraction of the resources currently assigned to distant corporations whose only loyalty is to the next quarter’s earnings per share?

Now would be an ideal time to raise these questions— unless people of faith want to continue making our case for both personal transformation and for social justice in a communication environment that’s a bit like a tug-of-war match with a sumo wrestler—with the sumo wrestler taking the lower position on a hill.

Some political and moral questions, like abortion or gay marriage, are susceptible to manipulation as wedge issues, dividing Christians from nonreligious people and even amongst ourselves. Communication policy can be a bridge issue, where Christians of all persuasions can find precious common ground with people of other faiths or even the most secular of nonbelievers. No one is served when these powerful communication tools are used only to promote materialism, greed, and instant gratification—especially when the business models of the communication industries require ever-increasing amounts of sensationalism, sexuality, and violence to attract attention.

What should people of faith do?

It is clearly time to step back and ask, “Is this the best we can do? Is there no alternative that might serve us better?”

Christians can bring two powerful gifts to such a discussion.

First, one of the major obstacles to even discussing communication policy is the deeply ingrained belief that the communication industries should be regulated only by the mechanisms of a so-called free market. This belief is widespread despite the fact that the communication marketplace in the US has never been free of subsidies or regulations. But

Bart Preecs worked as a daily newspaper reporter in the ’70s and ’80s, created and analyzed web content in the ’90s, and now works for a technology marketing firm. He is the author of If Every Voice Is Sacred: A Truth & Reconciliation Path to Communication Justice, available in autumn 2008. He blogs about technology and the media at WashburnCommunication.com and SeattlePI.NWSource.com.

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