Communications Research in Action: Scholar-Activist Collaborations for a Democratic Public Sphere

Foreword

FOREWORD Communications Research in Action is a timely and important book for scholars , legal advocates, and community organizers interested in making a difference in communication and information policy (CIP) but not sure quite where to begin. CIP is a broad, interdisciplinary, and international arena of scholarship and practice that includes several overlapping policy sectors: broadcasting, telecommunications, the Internet, freedom of information, technology, and intellectual property. The work in this volume is also a gift to community organizers, policy advocates, and their funders who may have experienced the disappointment of calling, in vain, for help from the academic community. These contributions represent a series of welcome achievements in this regard. They bear witness to the fact that much scholarship is indeed a collaborative act (Barlow 2007). In these chapters, activists are not simply the objects of scholarly study, but equal partners in social change. Last and certainly not least, the book captures a very brief moment of five years where a vision of authentic collaboration was realized, at least in part. Those involved in the work represented here know that many of the projects were funded by a deliberative process nurtured and managed by an intermediary organization,1 the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). The SSRC should be congratulated for its efforts to recognize the value of partnering with civil society in its experiment to nurture ‘‘necessary knowledge.’’ Part of this experiment emerged from the Ford Foundation efforts between 2001 and 2007 to develop a new funding stream at the Foundation ix x b e ck y l en t z and within philanthropy for the CIP field. Commissioned studies and interviews (see Lentz 2009) revealed that for more than twenty-five years, powerful industry lobbying had all but dismantled many of the public interest protections that grants in the 1960s and 1970s had helped to secure.2 During the Reagan administration, for example, the FCC lengthened TV and radio license periods, eliminated numerous regulations related to children’s programming , ended mandates dictating the amount of news and public affairs programming required of broadcasters, and lifted obligations that had kept broadcasters’ program logs open for public scrutiny. In 1987, the FCC suspended the Fairness Doctrine, which had been established in 1949 to increase the diversity of ideas by requiring broadcasters to air opposing viewpoints on public issues. FCC decision making has also eroded progress achieved during the Civil Rights era that required radio and television broadcast stations to interview a diverse range of local leaders in order to ascertain the issues of interest to all segments of the community they were licensed to serve. In 2003, as part of its congressionally mandated quadrennial review process , the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), despite widespread bipartisan congressional and public opposition, further relaxed ownership restrictions for media corporations. This opposition served as a watershed moment that catalyzed an advocacy infrastructure in the United States. Alongside the effects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the media consolidation debates created a perfect storm that helped build internal Foundation support for media policy work.3 This support was bolstered by comparing the size of the policy obstacles to the limited number of resources available to the small ecology of underfunded institutions that had been fighting tirelessly to maintain the few remaining public interest safeguards . Civil society organizations were working on a range of policy issues that included privacy and surveillance, copyrights and patents, equitable deployment of broadband services, community radio, wireless communications , media industry consolidation, and radio frequency spectrum reform. However, until public interest and media reform advocates could find a common language and a shared cause,4 funding organizations believed that their efforts would continue to be disconnected, fragmented, and underfunded . Put simply, the field had no consensual definition of the public interest to unite its disparate efforts. Advocacy groups, for example, were having difficulty capturing press and public attention to build viable constituencies in support of the diverse set of issues that they were working on. Historically, nonexperts have had little voice in this field because the issues are so technical; policy discourse about broadband access, intellectual property rights, privacy law, and media concentration is monopolized by highly specialized legal and technical professionals focused primarily on what goes on in Washington, D.C. Furthermore , media policy and telecommunications decision making historically has not been resolved by voters, but by regulatory bodies populated disproportionately by industry representatives. The FCC is not...