Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times

13. Pay-for Culture: Television Activism in a Neoliberal Digital Age

254 | 13 Pay-for Culture Television Activism in a Neoliberal Digital Age John McMurria As television has undergone significant industrial, technological, and cultural transformations with the expansion of cable/satellite delivery and its “convergence” through the Internet, so too have the strategies and orientations of television activism. At the height of television’s classic network period in the 1970s when three broadcast networks drew nearly 90 percent of the viewing audience, advocacy groups representing communities of color, women, gays and lesbians, child advocates, religious conservatives , and other organizations campaigned to impact the prime-time network representations that held such symbolic power. Public interest provisions in federal broadcast policy gave advocacy groups legal leverage to mount national protests, challenge local broadcast license renewals, demand access to ownership and employment opportunities, and negotiate with the networks through their “standards and practices” divisions. But by the 1980s the social movements that had fueled much of this activism were marginalized as a neoliberal political movement advocated for free market mechanisms over redistributive programs and civil rights media advocacy organizations lost nonprofit foundation support.1 Television policy changed too as deregulatory sentiments reduced broadcast public interest rules, insulated cable operators from public interests provisions, and facilitated the growth of media conglomerates with ownership ties across print, film, cable, broadcast, and Internet media. Broadcast networks no longer command such symbolic power as audiences have fragmented across proliferating cable/satellite networks, nor do they maintain such financial significance as they have become marginally performing assets held by larger media conglomerates—cable networks are now more profitable with dual income from advertising and subscription revenues. Within this current period when television distribution is more dispersed, media ownership more integrated, and media policy more liberalized, this Pay-for Culture | 255 essay considers how orientations to television activism have navigated this neoliberal environment. The essay begins with a consideration of two prominent orientations to television activism. The first targets media conglomeration as a threat to democracy and orients activism toward dismantling corporate ownership structures. The second looks to new forms of activism in fans of popular culture and how their grassroots communities can democratize television.2 Each is concerned about the power of media conglomerates, but the first considers popular commercial television as a symptom of corporate media power and the latter a passionate avenue through which fans can challenge conglomerates to be more accountable to consumer interests. Though each orientation supports expanding democratic participation in a neoliberal media age, I consider how their invocations of neoliberal theories, particularly through adherence to the idea that individual direct payments for television programs constitutes a more democratic television culture, obfuscates the complexities of commercial television practices, and subordinates considerations for the historical conditions that have produced class, race, and gender privilege. To further explore the issue of individual direct payment for television, the essay considers two case studies with particular attention to the cultural politics of activists supporting and opposing this neoliberal ideal of resource allocation. The first considers contestations over direct payment television in the postwar period, when a professional class of regulators, cultural critics, and educators promoted pay-TV to uplift a commercial broadcast network television culture they thought had sunken to a lowest common denominator . However, activists representing women’s groups, veteran’s associations, and labor unions perceived pay-TV as an unjust commodification of television that would stratify access to quality television based on viewers’ ability to pay. Here structures of class privilege and hierarchical orientations to popular culture are integral to understanding activism and direct payment television. The second case study considers the more recent activism surrounding the issue of requiring cable systems to offer subscribers the option to purchase only the networks they want rather than having to purchase a package of networks. A bipartisan coalition of conservative religious organizations and progressive advocacy groups lobbied for so-called à la carte pricing as a more democratic form of television but did so with the assumption that this would promote “mainstream family values” despite the protests from civil rights and religious organizations. Unlike proponents of à la carte pricing who supported concepts of free market competition and consumer choice, historically marginalized communities opposing à la carte pricing 256 | Community, Movements, Politics framed access and participation in ways that recognized the socially constituted structures of media industries and broader sociohistorical axes of discrimination and exclusion. The essay concludes with thoughts on how placing these formations of television activism in...