international Spanish speaking national networks â for example Univision â than the local English press. Though they make some important distinctions ...
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Closings and Openings: The Shifting Dynamics of the Counter Public Sphere in the Wake of Media Restructuring Bernadette Barker-Plummer Dorothy Kidd Media Studies Department University of San Francisco 2130 Fulton Street San Francisco, CA 94117
Key Words: media, public sphere, counter public sphere, democracy, social change, conglomeration, Internet, web Published in Howley, Kevin (Ed.) 2009. The Community Media Reader. Newbury Park: Sage Publications
2 ABSTRACT Closings and Openings: The Shifting Dynamics of the Counter Public Sphere in the Wake of Media Restructuring Bernadette Barker-Plummer Dorothy Kidd The general threat to the public sphere associated with increasing privatization, commercialization, and conglomeration of media systems has been well articulated. Less attention has been paid, though, to the ramifications of dominant media restructuring for counter public spheres. How, for example, have media conglomeration and restructuring efforts affected local democratic communication? Are groups able to counteract local closures by taking advantage of new web technologies of communication? Is independent, alternative, or community media filling the void of local commercial news for these groups? In this essay we discuss some of the changes in the Bay Area mediascape and investigate how these changes are affecting local democratic communications. Drawing on an analysis of changes in Bay Area media ownership and format structures, and on interviews with 26 local social change groups, we ask how local groups are negotiating the shrinking public sphere.
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Closings and Openings: The Shifting Dynamics of the Counter Public Sphere in the Wake of Media Restructuring
What I would really love is to cut out the middle-man. I would love for us to have access to a platform to communicate with the public and not be moderated by a television station that is doing their story so they can make a profit… to have even ten minutes just to say this is what we think is important… Andrea Buffa, Code Pink, San Francisco, 2004 The general threat to the public sphere associated with increasing privatization, commercialization, and conglomeration of media systems has been well articulated (e.g. Bagdikian, 2002; McChesney, 1999; McChesney, Waterman and Nichols, 2002; Underwood, 2001; Cooper, 2003; Kidd, 2005).1 Less attention has been paid, though, to the ramifications of dominant media restructuring for counter public spheres -- those spaces in society where emergent groups or “critical communities” form and articulate their concerns and identities before (or instead of) engaging with dominant institutions and discourses (Fraser, 1992; Rochon, 1998). How, for example, have media conglomeration and restructuring efforts affected local democratic communication? How are social change groups responding to this restructuring of the local public sphere? Commercial media have always been critical, but problematic, resources for social change groups (Barker-Plummer, 1995, 2002; Ryan, 1991, Ryan Anastario and Jeffries, 2005). Are these structural changes making that relationship even more difficult? Are groups still able to negotiate any access to local news spheres? Or are they counteracting local closures by taking advantage of new web technologies of communication? Is independent, alternative, or community media filling the void of local commercial news for these groups? How exactly is the deregulated local mediascape
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Some of the issues from this growing literature include: the political and economic consequences when small numbers of corporations own most media outlets in the same market; the loss of genuinely local coverage as a result of conglomeration logics that share non local content across outlets; problems with diversity in ownership, staffing and content; political consequences of integration between media and non media companies; and so on.
4 affecting grassroots communication efforts, and with what consequences for democratic communication more generally? Though the dynamics of dominant and counter public spheres are just beginning to be usefully theorized, clearly media systems play a central role in the process of democracy in modern, mediated societies (McLaughlin, 2004; Couldry, 2003; Rochon, 1998; Fraser, 1992). As Garnham (1992, cited in McLaughlin, 2004) has noted, the concept of the public sphere itself is so useful because it makes clear this “indissoluble link between the institutions and practices of mass public communication and the institutions and practices of democratic politics.” Changes in media structure, then, are likely to have consequences for democratic processes. In this essay we discuss some of the changes in the Bay Area mediascape and investigate how these changes are affecting local democratic communications. Drawing on an analysis of changes in Bay Area media ownership and format structures, and on interviews with a sample of 26 local groups, we ask how local groups are negotiating the shrinking public sphere.2 Our groups include women’s, immigrant rights and environmental groups, housing advocates and bicycle coalitions, media activists and digital rights groups, peace groups, prison reform advocates, youth organizations and children’s advocacy groups. We asked them about their communication goals, strategies and technologies, and about their experiences of recent changes in the local media environment. 3 Overall, we found an environment in which old communication flows are breaking down, and new ones, though they offer unprecedented freedom in some ways, may also come with new limitations. For example, access to local newspapers, radio and TV by social change groups, is decreasing or becoming more expensive or difficult for all of these social change groups. But that closure is accompanied by increasing use of web
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We thank the University of San Francisco McCarthy Center for the Public Interest and the Common Good for their support of this project and the USF students who were our research partners in this endeavor, including: Francisco McGee, Kathleen Emma, Sam Sharkey, Stephanie Bolton, Kendra Kennedy, Maria Savage, Aliza Parpia, Michelle Sanchez, and Kat Amano, 3 The groups interviewed were: Asian Pacific Islanders Wellness Center, Berkeley Liberation Radio, Coalition on Homelessness, Children Now, Code Pink, Day Laborers, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Ella Baker Center, Film Arts Foundation, Forest Ethics, Global Exchange, Death Penalty Focus, Justice Now, Latino Issues Forum, League of Women Voters, Media Alliance, Mujeres Unidas y Activas, NAMAC, POOR, Prison Radio, Prostitutes Education Network, Rainforest Action Network, SF Bike Coalition, SF Tenants Union, Third World Majority, and Youth Speaks. They range from organizations with no paid staff to several groups with budgets over $1 million and up to 40 full and part time staff. Most of the groups’ funding is a mixture of foundation support, private donors and membership fees.
5 communication, which promises the possibility of reaching around local news nets, and of global reach in some cases. However, these net resources are not equally accessible or equally useful to all groups. Nor do they necessarily deliver the audiences, or audience relationships, that social change groups seek. In particular, groups representing the poor, immigrants or communities of color were closed out of English speaking commercial media and unconnected to web communications. For these low resourced groups, for whom urban news has often served as an entry point into the democratic communication system, local closures may be especially critical. For some very successful advocacy groups -- like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a locally based, but globally accessed web “hub” for digital policy and rights information – the web is a critical resource, providing a site of influence that flows back into the dominant spheres. For other groups (e.g. Global Exchange, Ella Baker Center) the web is a more mixed resource, connected to conventional media in more complex ways. Alongside the increase in web communication, some social change groups are increasing their own independent production (for example, Poor News and Street Sheets). Self-published newsletters, papers and videos are part of the communicative efforts of many groups, as is an increasing use of other independent media outlets (from the Bay Guardian to IndyMedia sites). But, as with web-based knowledge-building, the connections between these outlets and more dominant spheres of debate and resource allocation (e.g. city government) are unclear to our respondents, Generally, then, we see a shifting landscape of social change communication in the Bay Area in which commercial closures are taking place alongside openings created by alternative media and web technologies, but in which the flows from these alternative sources back to dominant spheres of debate and allocation are less clear than in the case of traditional media. The Shifting Bay Area Mediascape The Bay Area is an important location for this kind of study because it offers what may be a best case analysis. Though the area has been subject to many of the same forces of conglomeration and restructuring of the communications industries as other locations, it is also notable for its strong traditions of independent media and vibrant grassroots politics.
6 Independent media have a long history in the Bay Area. The Pacifica Radio flagship, KPFA-FM, for example, began in Berkeley, and several community and public radio stations, and four Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television stations, continue to serve the region, as does the San Francisco Bay Guardian, one of the oldest alternative weeklies. The Spanish-language, African American, and Asian American communities have also developed media organizations, including newspapers, broadcast services and film festivals, for their communities. More recently, the global Indy Media Center (IMC) has started open-publishing news services, supplemented by the irregular alternative newspaper, Faultlines. In addition, the region also hosts several independent film organizations, and over forty independent film festivals. The Bay area is also at the forefront in the development of progressive public relations. However, as in much of the US, there has been a marked increase in corporate concentration of commercial media ownership in the San Francisco Bay area. The majority of newspapers, broadcast radio, TV and cable stations are operated by national chains, or transnational conglomerates. Local production of all kinds has been cut, especially extended news coverage and investigative reporting, and coverage reflecting the interests of Spanish language, African American, Asian and Native American communities. This concentration of ownership has had dire consequences for the newspaper and radio industries especially. Within the last decade, San Francisco has become a one-paper town, with the San Francisco Chronicle owned by the New York based Hearst Company. The Denver-based chain, the Media News Group, controls most of the other dailies and weeklies in the region, including the Oakland Tribune, the first major metropolitan paper owned by an African American. The only independently owned alternative weekly is the San Francisco Bay Guardian, as the Phoenix-based New Times operates both the so-called alternative SF Weekly and East Bay Express. As a result of these mergers, hundreds of journalists have been laid off, 4 and there is a marked reduction in editorial diversity and the coverage of local issues. The majority of stories now come from national and international news syndicates (AP) rather than local correspondents. These patterns continue in the radio industry. Two US-based transnational conglomerates, Clear Channel, and Viacom’s Infinity, dominate in the Bay area, with eighteen radio stations between them, the lion’s share of the advertising market, as well 4
According to the Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism, newspapers had 2,200 fewer full time . employees in 2004 than in 1990.
7 as the related billboard industry. Clear Channel also controls the parallel music industry with its ownership of music promotion and concert venues. The layoffs of staff, as well as the automation of content production and broadcasting has led to the elimination of most locally produced news and public affairs. Programs in which there would be opportunities for a wide range of publics to engage in discussion about local issues, have been all but removed. A study by the local media advocacy group, the Youth Media Council, demonstrates how little programming is devoted to local social issues of youth, urban poverty, and race, and particularly to the representation of youth in the discussion (Youth Media Council, 2002). The consequence for local public service programming is particularly marked if we consider factors of race and language. Clear Channel purchased many of the urban radio stations, which served African American communities as well as many Spanish language stations (2005). In 2001, NBC purchased Telemundo, the second-largest Spanish language TV service. Rather than producing better news programming as they had promised, in 2006 they cut news production entirely at the Spanish-language KSTSTV in San Jose, replacing it with a regional newscast from Fort Worth, Texas. These changes in Bay Area media ownership and formats have clearly already changed the media sphere, expanding the number of commercially targeted media and undermining local, community oriented stations. But how have these changes affected local democracy more generally? How are macro structural shifts affecting democratic communications? We addressed these questions to Bay Area social change groups.
Negotiating Access in the Wake of Media Restructuring Just take a look at the sections of the paper … I think that there needs to be an Environmental section. I think there needs to be a Social Justice section of the papers. I think that we really need to look at what we’ve come to accept as news. I just don’t think that sports is an important enough thing to merit having a section and, you know, environmental destruction is not … Rainforest Action Network, 2004. When Gavin Newsom gets on a bike, they’ll cover that -- SF Bike Coalition, 2004
8 Community groups in the Bay Area are experiencing media restructuring in the Bay Area as a closure of local media space. For low resourced or non-English speaking groups especially – groups whose visibility has always been tokenistic – the situation has gotten much worse and reporters “never come around” anymore (Mujeres Unidas). More professionalized groups are still able to get their voices into the public sphere through local and national news media, but they are having to dedicate more resources and staff to compete for that shrinking space and they encounter constraints regarding some issues (such as media deregulation) that news media routinely ignore. Children Now are an example of a relatively well-resourced group and they are one of the most successful groups at accessing news media. They do so through continuous production of information subsidies (studies, surveys, policy analyses, quote pages) and by targeting that information quite narrowly to specific reporters. Being advocates for children’s issues also helps, of course. Even the most cynical journalist hesitates to present children as “special interests.” Children Now’s media strategies are so developed because media is a key target for their work. Their mission involves “reaching decision makers” with information about children's issues, and their organizational activities are knowledge production and communication based. They also have as staff ex journalists and writers. It is not surprising then, that they do well in interaction with news media. There are critical limits, however, even to Children Now’s access. Although the group’s studies and publications on children’s education and health issues are usually well received, their critiques of deregulation in media and its consequences for children’s TV are ignored. Media reform is a key children’s issue for them, but it seldom makes it through the news filter. Besides these issue limits, the cost of media access in organizational resources and time is very high. Global Exchange’s spokesperson highlighted this when he noted that 90% of the media coverage of the group and its issues is the direct result of the group’s pro-active strategies. Other groups— Ella Baker Center, Latino Issues Forum and Justice Now, for example -- reinforced this sense of media visibility as a resource that needed to be continually recreated. In fact, Code Pink’s media strategist described building visibility as an exhausting and sometimes dispiriting process in which even well organized groups working on critical issues have to “twist themselves into pretzels” to make it happen. As she notes in our opening quote, many social movement groups
9 dream of the possibility of simply talking to the public without having to jump through the hoops – material and symbolic -- created by commercial media. Sometimes social change groups can become recognized as the “expert” in a particular area and journalists will come to them, at least on that issue. Global Exchange, for example, for whom fair trade and international labor equity are core goals, have become known to media as experts on Nike and sweatshop issues and they receive calls and questions from journalists about Nike without having to proactively seek them out. Ella Baker Center is similarly recognized as a local expert on youth incarceration and prison issues. For some exceptionally successful advocacy groups like the EFF, this expertise covers a whole policy area such as the Internet and digital policy. According to an EFF spokesperson, for example, EFF get 1.6 million hits to their website a week and they seldom pitch reporters anymore, but simply respond to questions. For lower resourced groups, and groups representing communities of color, immigrants, or poor people, commercial media closures are being experienced more dramatically. These groups were much less likely to be able to produce mainstream news media access. Partly this is a result of their lack of resources to produce the knowledge packages that journalists respond to, and partly it is the outcome of a passive media strategy in which they wait for media to come to them. But without the authority of dominant sources, nor the expertise of the well-resourced groups, these groups – despite newsworthy concerns -- could not attract media to them except in crisis situations or in tokenistic ways. Mujeres Unidas and Day Laborers, for example, are groups who represent immigrant Latino/a communities. They told us that they have little or no contact with English language media. Several other respondents also talked about the long history of commercial media exclusion and racism in treating minority communities. The Ella Baker Center, for example, explained that one of their current challenges was to work in the context of “an audience which has a bias because of 20 or 30 years of racist coverage and racist storytelling.” Groups advocating for housing (Coalition on Homelessness and the SF Tenants Union, for example) faced an additional, political hurdle. By advocating for affordable housing and policy solutions to homelessness, they often found themselves on the other side of local business interests – including that of the local newspaper. The Coalition on Homelessness, for example, talked about the difficulty of sustaining debate on affordable housing issues when the media are underwritten each week by real estate advertising.
10 This sense of media as part of the establishment was reinforced by the SF Bike Coalition, who noted how the local press simplified its issues and presented bicyclists as naïve, while carrying large amounts of auto advertising. Rainforest Action Network, experienced the mainstream media as lacking any serious interest or space for social justice issues. As their spokesperson notes in our section header quote, there is always a sports section in news, but no environmental section. For all of our respondent groups, accessing local news was problematic. Even the most successful groups find that sustaining that access is increasing in cost as commercial media shrinks its news hole due to staff layoffs and reformats from news to entertainment. For poorer groups, the commercial news sphere seems to have already closed.
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The Web – Another Door Opens? We know that we are not going to able to get our message out perfectly through any kind of radio, TV or press interview… and so the idea is really to get the organization’s name out in earned media and that will drive people to the website where can say exactly what we want to say, however we want to say it, with a virtually unlimited amount of space… Global Exchange, 2004 There has been a marked increase in the sophistication in, and use of, Internet and web communication technologies. From the most web savvy groups like EFF, Code Pink and Global Exchange who routinely use the net for international communication and discussion, to local immigrant groups, the web has changed the ways in which social movement groups work. Global Exchange, for example, attribute a rapid increase in the visibility of their group and issues to their net presence. Their own site has increased its hits by ten fold (90,000 to a million) in a few years as sweatshop issues have also risen to public attention. Other groups, who came to web communications later – such as the Ella Baker Center, or Latino Issues Forum – have now also revolutionized their organizing and fund raising through email. Web communication offers social change groups the ability to reach more people more efficiently and economically, and to control their communications content. As Global Exchange’s spokesperson explained, web sites designed by movement members present issues in the way that movements would like to communicate them – rather than filtered through news media routines and logics. The general lack of restrictions on web space allows groups to go into much more depth on their issues than they could in media reports, encouraging some groups to see their web presence as the real public message about them, and their appearances in mainstream (or earned) media as simply the “driver" of audiences to the web site. Web technology has also been used by groups to organize events quickly (by fax blasts and email alerts), to raise money, and to generate large volumes of mail to pivotal policy makers at appropriate moments. The SF Bike Coalition, for example, is a fan of Fax Blast that allows the easy generation of mass mailings – but each letter comes from an individual – to key decision makers.
12 Forest Ethics, an environmental group focused on changing corporate practices, uses just the threat of Net organizing power in their work with corporations. Their success in generating buzz and discussion about particular companies, in traditional and net spaces, often persuades companies to make a deal in advance of the publicity. After threatening Staples with concurrent protests at 100 of its stores around the country, for example, Forest Ethics found itself in negotiations with top administrators there about recycled paper. The net also allows groups to set up independent knowledge bases. Educational and service based groups like Asian Pacific Islander Wellness Center, for example, use their website as a knowledge portal to specialized research and information for HIV positive Asian/Pacific Islanders. Other groups use net communications to organize petitions, phone banks, and to raise money directly. Code Pink, for example used an email alert in 2004 to raise $100,000 for supplies for refugees from Fallujah. In immigrant communities, groups are also increasing their use of Internet communication, though not necessarily to communicate with their constituents, who do not always have the technology, but to stay connected to allies, and to learn about policy issues. 5 Overall, groups reported an increasing use of Internet resources – and the accompanying death of transition technologies like paper fax machines – in all aspects of their work. They used it for recruiting, communicating with members, publics, policy makers, politicians and corporations, fundraising, event organizing and tactical interventions. Perhaps the biggest benefit of web technologies for movement groups, though, has been the ability to build their own web sites and communicate freely through them about their issues. Though the audiences for these sites are uncertain, for anyone seeking it, a new interconnected knowledge base on a wide range of social issues, built by social change organizations, is emerging on the web.
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The Pew Internet and American Life Project reported in March 2007,that Latinos comprise 14% of the U.S. adult population and about half of this growing group (56%) goes online. By comparison, 71% of non-Hispanic whites and 60% of non-Hispanic blacks use the Internet.
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Alternative Routes: Ethnic, Public and Independent Media Roles It's two totally different worlds. Whereas the Spanish speaking press covers all the same things that the English speaking press covers and then sometimes does community based stuff, the English speaking press doesn’t try and come into the Latino community – Mujeres Unidas y Activas, San Francisco, 2004 There is also a growing space in media spheres for independent, autonomous and ethnic media. Ethnic media are increasingly important to non-English speaking groups. Faced with exclusion from the dominant media, and supported by cheaper and more accessible technologies of desktop publishing and Internet distribution, groups are also creating their own communications, and sub-contracting with independent producers. The Coalition on Homelessness, for example, produced the Street Sheet in direct response to a lack of serious coverage in the local commercial media. Poor News Network and Third World Majority not only produce their own stories, they include media production and media literacy training for members. The Ella Baker Center also produces documentaries. Most recently they produced and distributed a 30-minute documentary about the California Youth Authority that was picked up by local media. APIWC also produces informational videos and films and distributes them to clients and community groups. Several groups – e.g. Media Alliance and Film Arts Foundation – have as one of their core activities the support and promotion of alternative media production. More established alternative media are also playing a central role in the Bay Area counter public spheres. For example The Bay Guardian, San Francisco’s independentlyowned alternative weekly, was mentioned many times by respondents as a sympathetic and accurate outlet for social movement communication, much more so than the city’s mainstream daily, the San Francisco Chronicle. The San Francisco Tenants Union, for example, found the Guardian more sympathetic, while the Coalition on Homelessness, who are shut out of the mainstream media debate, note that The Guardian respects them as the local experts on issues of homelessness and housing. Global Exchange and Latino Issues Forum also noted that the Guardian was a useful ally in local policy debates.
14 NPR and Pacifica Radio – a public and an independent radio station – were also seen as generally having more space for social change communication. However, a decision by NPR not to cover “routine” protests, concerned the spokesperson for Day Laborers; for them, street protests were one of the few ways that they could be heard. For some, alternative media still tends to mean Anglo media. As the Latino Issues Forum spokesperson noted, "Most of what is called “alternative” still does not deal with ethnic communities.” Latino groups reported that they are more likely to read and try to access commercial Spanish language press than alternative media in English. They were also more likely to have their issues and communities covered by national or international Spanish speaking national networks – for example Univision – than the local English press. Though they make some important distinctions between channels – the Latino Issues Forum, for example pointed out that commercial Spanish channels can also be problematic – the Latino groups generally orient themselves towards Spanish language media.6 As the Mujeres Unidas spokesperson noted, the Spanish press related more to the lives of Latino communities and paid attention to what was going on there. The Day Laborers group noted the limits of English speaking media for all immigrant communities; ethnic media, they said, especially Spanish, Chinese and Filipino, know their communities. APIWC, in turn, noted the importance of coverage by the Japanese and Chinese language (Mandarin) publications. Overall, movement groups who cannot easily access mainstream media – whether for resource, language or content-based reasons – are turning to alternative and ethnic media outlets. Closures and Openings The fight for media justice is central to all struggles for all organizers who are working in communities and confronting crises today – Third World Majority, San Francisco, 2004 Commercial media seem to be functioning even less democratically in the wake of deregulation and downsizing. But this closure is affecting some groups more than others. The best-resourced and more professionalized groups are continuing to interact 6
This finding is in line with a recent report that a quarter of Bay Area residents rely on Spanish speaking media.
15 successfully with mainstream news media, though it is costing them more to do so. Other poorer or more grassroots groups find the commercial sphere closed or closing to their voices, and are turning more to native language or ethnic media sources, Similarly, it is the best resourced – in terms for education, knowledge, media literacies, and material resources – that are best positioned to take advantage of the possibilities of net communications. For the most tech savvy and resourced groups, in fact, the web has offered a new form of influence. Alongside an increase in web use, social change groups are also increasing their self-publishing efforts and connecting with existing alternative media. This increase in self-publishing and in web use was accompanied in many cases, though, by a sense of unease about whether these communications would reach the right audiences. In particular, groups were concerned about how their social change communications would make it into dominant spheres of decision-making and resource allocation -- how their messages would get to leaders and publics outside of the counter public spheres. In this regard, our respondents share a question of central importance with many observers of contemporary communications systems and social change – how will new sites of communication, such as social change web sites, blogs, on line art, and video upload sites, connect to existing democratic communication flows? This is a critical question shared by many in contemporary media studies (Kidd and Barker-Plummer, 2001; van de Donk, Nixon, Loader and Rucht, 2004; Russell, Ito, Richmond, Tuters, 2005-2006) and one that we have only begun to investigate in this project. We have traced the communication efforts of these groups. The reception of social change communications remains an important question (Downing, 2003). The Bay Area is one particular location, with its own dynamics, of course, and this sample of groups, though we tried to have as wide a range of groups as possible, cannot stand in for all groups. However, these dynamics of closings and openings, structured also by resources, ethnicity and class, seem to us to offer a useful beginning sketch of the changing dynamics of the counter public sphere in the wake of commercial media restructuring and technological change.
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