5

Citizenship and Media Ownership

John McMurria

A common concern in the vast literature on media ownership is whether media facilitate democratic deliberation and promote diverse viewpoints and cultural expressions (Rice, 2008). Some have argued that the growth of large media conglomerates has decreased competition and delimited diversity, while others have suggested that this is not the case, because a proliferation of new media outlets through cable television and the Internet has decentralized distribution. Often democratic deliberation is understood as a normative goal, and positions on ownership differ according to how diversity is defined and measured.¹ Recent critical work on media and cultural citizenship understands ideas about democratic deliberation to be dynamic and constituted through broader economic, social, and cultural relations.² From this latter perspective, the study of media ownership is not restricted to measuring the impact of media ownership on content diversity. Rather, deliberations on media ownership are considered as sites of contestation over the contours of citizenship more broadly.

This essay assesses three orientations to media ownership in the US with attention to how each invokes particular rationales for citizenship. The first orientation is the critique of media conglomeration that emerged in the 1980s and the anti-corporate populist expressions of citizenship that have informed recent campaigns to reduce the power of corporate media. The second is toward perceptions that new interactive digital technologies have the potential to free individuals from corporate and government power. Though varied and ranging from libertarian to “commons” approaches, these Internet-centered perspectives share expressions of citizenship focused on eighteenth-century concepts of individual liberty. Lastly I consider the movement, since the 1970s, to increase minority ownership of media. Here access to media ownership is framed within conceptions of citizenship informed by past and present conditions of racial discrimination. In each of these orientations consideration is given to how ideas about the transformative power of media in democratic societies engage with political and cultural struggles over rationales for citizenship.

The concept of citizenship has gained renewed interest as a contested terrain for defining boundaries of inclusion and exclusion across the social and cultural registers of class, gender, sexuality, race, and nation (Miller, 1998; Singh, 2004; Lister, 2003). Citizenship specifies the rights and obligations that formally define a person's legal status as member of a democratic community (Turner, 2001). The parameters of rights have been understood as ranging from eighteenth-century conceptions of “civil rights” that prioritize individual liberty from state power, including the rights to speech, thought, faith, property, and due process, to the more expansive “social rights” of the twentieth-century social welfare state, which include the rights to economic security, health, education, and cultural recognition. Eighteenth-century concepts of civil rights are founded on classical liberal ideas of the individual as autonomous and self-actualizing, and they define freedom in negative terms, as the individual's freedom from government interference or coercion. Twentieth-century concepts of social rights derive from understandings that economic, social, and cultural relations create unequal conditions for full democratic participation, conditions that require positive action through the redistributive authority of the state (Marshall, 1950).

Citizen rights are tied to certain obligations, which define particular moral and cultural rationales for proper conduct (Lister, 2003, pp. 13–42). Critical approaches to these rationales for conduct consider the ways in which they discriminate or exclude across registers of cultural difference (Miller, 1993). Recent historical transformations have given the concept of citizenship exigency. A neoliberal political movement has narrowed the scope of social rights since the 1970s by promoting free-market ideologies, dismantling the social welfare state, and promoting personal responsibility and volunteerism in order to solve social problems (Duggan, 2003; Harvey, 2005). Also, an increasing transnational integration of national economies and of frequent movements of peoples across borders has prompted contestations over citizenship and new cultural parameters for belonging and exclusion (Benhabib, 2004; Lister, 2003, pp. 1–3).

In considering the three orientations to media ownership in the US, attention is placed on how conceptions of citizenship in each orientation articulate with the neoliberal movement and with the politics of recognizing cultural difference. Regarding anti-corporate populist critiques of media conglomeration, I consider the writings of Ben Bagdikian and Robert McChesney as political protests against the ideologies of neoliberal policies, which they consider to have widened social and economic disparities. But, in their populist expressions, they subordinate the cultural politics of difference to a broader critique of corporate power and, in McChesney's case, they obfuscate our understandings of how cultural politics has informed past and present media reform movements. In the case of Internet-centered approaches to media ownership, I consider how commitments to eighteenth-century notions of individual liberty have animated sentiments to protect an open Internet from government and corporate power. Yet these concepts of individual liberty invoke a narrow range of rights, which diminish the redistributive scope of government – which has, historically, secured social rights – even as “commons” approaches have constructed collective conceptions of intellectual property and have challenged corporate power. Further, Internet-centered articulations of citizenship as individual liberty emphasize a classical liberal conception of the individual that elides the cultural politics of difference across social formations of class, race, gender, and nation. Conversely, advocates of minority media ownership invoke broader social rights in tying a cultural politics of difference to economic opportunity. Lastly, I assess the commonalities and differences of the three orientations to media ownership in conflicts that emerged over the issue of network neutrality. The chapter concludes with thoughts on how conceptions of media ownership articulate with the broader prevailing discourses of neoliberal citizenship.

Anti-Corporate Populism and Media Ownership

As media deregulations in the 1970s accelerated corporate mergers and the growth of media conglomerates, the issue of “media monopoly” or “corporate media power” became a focus for media ownership critiques. The two most prominent critics of “big media” are Ben Bagdikian, who from 1983 to 2000 published six editions of his widely read The Media Monopoly and in 2004 an extensively revised and augmented edition, titled The New Media Monopoly; and Robert McChesney, who since the first publication of his Rich Media, Poor Democracy in 1999 (McChesney, 2000) has written several books and dozens of newspaper articles critiquing corporate media. Bagdikian offers a perspective from his experience as a journalist, Washington Post editor, and professor of journalism and dean at the University of California, Berkeley (Bagdikian 1995). McChesney found himself alienated in a mass communication discipline oriented toward quantitative and qualitative social sciences and turned toward Marxism, the critical political economy of Herbert Schiller and Noam Chomsky, and the public-oriented writing style of Bagdikian (McChesney, 2007, pp. 92–97).

Bagdikian's, central thesis is that “[m]odern technology and American economics have quietly created a new kind of central authority over information – the national and multinational corporation” (1983, p. xv). This authority was evident in 1981, when “forty-six corporations controlled most of the business in daily newspapers, magazines, television, books, and motion pictures” – a power that had extended to just six corporations by 2000 (2000, pp. x, 21). For Bagdikian, corporate media power reduced investigative journalism, prompted journalists to avoid stories that are critical of their commercial employers, and proliferated lifestyle and celebrity material. McChesney concurs with him on these points and writes that corporate media have increased “public ignorance and apathy about the political system” while “inequality has mushroomed” (2004, p. 125). McChesney adds that advertising and profit motives promote a “hyper-commercialism” that has “carpet-bombed every corner of the nation” through content that supports advertising pitches, targets affluent consumers, incorporates product placements, and pitches junk food to children (pp. 138–173).

Such expressions of corporate power over a defenseless public can be understood as anti-corporate populism. Albertazzi and McDonnell define populism as “an ideology which pits a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous ‘others’ who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity and voice” (2008, p. 3). Bagdikian and McChesney each depict the corporate media as the dangerous other to a broadly defined and victimized people, referred to as the “body politic,” “the audience,” or “the population.” Bagdikian exemplifies this populist language by stating:

Because the corporate media do not relate “political and social events to real forces in society,” the people are helpless to challenge this corporate power: “[a] population unable to select alternative patterns of power sustains the status quo” (ibid.). Similarly, McChesney argues the corporate media produce “content that will not be difficult for audiences to grasp, will not be too expensive to produce, yet will capture people's attention” (2004, p. 195). The “people,” for McChesney, are mostly passive and do not necessarily know what they really want, but they require a different media system to “cultivate” their interests. In reference to the decline of foreign-language films in theaters, of classical music in radio, and of documentary film on television, McChesney argues that “there is little incentive over the long term for commercial media to cultivate tastes or develop interests in new material” (pp. 201–202).

In his study of populist movements, Taggart found that “populism is concerned with returning people to their natural and spontaneous condition to which they belonged before having been subject to some sort of spiritual collapse” (2000, 16). This is evident in Bagdikian's work, when he laments that “modern technology and social organization have intensified the problems of centralized control of information” because they have replaced small-town life, where “citizen talked to citizen about public policies that affected them” (1983, p. xv). With reference to Disney, Bagdikian states that “power is so concentrated, ubiquitous, and artful that, to a degree unmatched in former mixtures of entertainment, it dilutes influences from family, schooling, and other sources that are grounded in real-life experience, weakening their ability to guide growing generations” (2000, xx). McChesney (1993), too, exemplifies this tendency to reference a past less dominated by corporate power by probing historical moments when radical critiques of commercial media, as he argues, had the potential to create noncommercial alternatives.

According to Taggart, these references to better times, which precede the emergence of an overwhelming power, are linked to “fundamental dilemmas that make [populism] self-limiting” – including a general hostility to the institutions of representative government (2000, p. 2). Bagdikian and McChesney exemplify this deep pessimism by viewing the institutions of representative government as hopelessly corrupted by corporate power. Though Bagdikian proposes policy reforms such as banning multiple broadcast station ownership, taxing advertising, and subsidizing postal rates for newspapers, he remains doubtful that the corporate media would allow a full debate over such policies, because “nothing truly significant will change while there is a fundamental imbalance of power in society at large” (1983, pp. 229–237). For McChesney, the current regulatory structures have been “corrupted” by commercial interests, and alternatives must come from grassroots campaigns that support noncommercial and public-funded alternatives (2004, p. 11).

Concerned about structural inequalities in society, and in particular about class inequalities, this anti-corporate populism promotes a concept of citizenship that is concerned with the diminishing of social rights under neoliberalism. However, by representing the “people” as an undifferentiated whole and by championing noncommercial or public-funded media as the only real alternative to the fundamental dilemma of commercial media power, the populist orientation of Bagdikian and McChesney obfuscates issues that pertain to the cultural politics of difference. In their analysis, considerations of race and gender are subordinated to the broader critique of commercialism, and value judgments that seek to elevate tastes elide the class hierarchies that inform such judgments (Bourdieu, 1984). Work in critical cultural studies has engaged these issues, but McChesney has found these perspectives soft on capitalism, heavy in jargon, and less interested in media policy reform (McChesney, 2007, pp. 58–60). One way to bridge these differences is to assess McChesney's use of the concept of critical junctures, which he adapts from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci – a seminal figure for work focused on political economy and on cultural studies.

McChesney understands critical junctures as historical moments when “important new media technologies emerge, when the existing media system enters a crisis, or when the political climate changes sufficiently to call accepted policies into question or to demand new ones” (2004, p. 24). McChesney considers the broadcast reform movement of the 1930s to be an example of a critical juncture, when anti-commercial activism mounted a radical critique of advertising-sponsored radio and advocated non-profit or publicly funded alternatives. However, McChesney's anti-commercial fundamentalism on the media is at odds with Gramsci's framework for understanding class, ideology, and historical transformation. By revising classical Marxism, which invested the ruling class with an authority to assert understandings of the world that solidified their power, Gramsci theorized a more complex notion of relation of forces, one that saw them diffused across a range of class strata. The displacement of a hegemonic order required the emergence of an aligned block of class interests that could win the consent of a broad societal base through the institutions of civil society, including the media (Bennett, Mercer, & Woollacott, 1986, pp. xv–xvi). But the broadcast reform movement of the 1930s did not constitute an aligned block of class interests that won broad societal support. Rather it was limited mostly to Protestant reform-minded educators and to a professional class of critics whose cultural preferences were at some distance from those represented through popular commercial broadcasting.

McChesney argues that, between the 1927 Radio Act and the 1934 Communications Act, a “feisty broadcast reform movement composed of displaced educational broadcasters, religious groups, organized labor, farmers, women's groups, journalists, and civil libertarians like the ACLU” thought advertising-sponsored broadcasting constituted a form of “private censorship” and produced “seemingly trivial and silly programs” (1993, p. 240). The movement ultimately failed, McChesney explains, because commercial broadcasters launched an “elaborate public relations campaign to promote commercial broadcasting as an inherently democratic and American system” (pp. 40–41). Often the reformers expressed a cultural distaste for commercial radio, calling it a “moronic drivel and oral garbage” that catered to “the vulgar horde, who lack good taste and intelligence and ambition for culture. . .” (pp. 94–96). Although recognizing the cultural elitism of such language, McChesney downplays its relevance. But these cultural sensibilities are not just moments of expressed elitism among a principally anti-commercial, pro-democracy movement; they are rather structurally linked to particular class formations that emerged in the transition to advanced capitalism in the early twentieth century. Barbara and John Ehrenreich (1979) argue that, in the wake of anti-corporate populist unrest and against the growing power of Gilded-Age profiteers in the late nineteenth century, there emerged a growing class of professionally trained managers and experts who played a mediating role between labor and capital, as administrators of increasingly complex economic structures of monopoly capitalism. Facilitated by the rapid expansion of higher education and funded by the industrialists' surplus capital, these professionals ran institutions of public health, charity, and education that “represented a politically motivated penetration of working-class community life: Schools imparted industrial discipline and ‘American’ values; charity agencise and domestic scientists imposed their ideas of ‘right living’; public health officials literally policed immigrant ghettoes, etc.” (1979, p. 15).

These professional-class sensibilities were closely linked to what historians have called a “Protestant hegemony” in media reform at the time (Jowett, Jarvie, & Fuller, 1996). When jazz recordings led the record sales in the early 1920s, the General Federation of Women's Clubs, whose predominantly White Protestant members shared anti-pluralist Victorian values (Lichtman, 2008, p. 22), organized so as to “annihilate” this new music, which they believed was created by “barbaric people to stimulate brutality and sensuality” (Hilmes, 1997, p. 47). Protestant reformers thought that popular amusements lured working-class immigrants, many of whom were Jews and Catholics, away from an ethic of austere work and moral rectitude (Nasaw, 1993, pp. 174–185). Protestant reformers funded extensive social-science research projects to study the effects of popular commercial culture – including the Payne Fund, established in 1927 by Standard Oil heiress Frances Payne Bolton, which was primarily designed to find empirical proof that the movies encouraged immoral behavior (Jowett et al., 1996, pp. 1–122).

The Payne Fund awarded broadcast reformers a $250,000 contribution, without which, according to McChesney, “there would not have been much of a broadcast reform movement, if there would have been one at all” (1993, p. 62). In praising the Fund for making the reform movement possible, McChesney is inattentive to the elitist cultural politics of the Fund and of the reformers it supported. For example, McChesney considers the efforts of the National Committee on Education by Radio to represent a defense of “the foundations of a democratic society” (1993, pp. 48–49). But the Committee was less interested in giving voice to those who lacked access to commercial radio than in inviting educators to use “radio as a cultural agency” in order to combat the negative effects of popular commercial radio, including the prevalence of “jazz of a debased sort with ‘crooning’” (Tyler, 1934, p. 99; Ouellette, 2002, p. 71). The reformers' opposition to jazz and their disregard for its popularity were revealing of race and class privilege more than establishing a precedent for democratic media reform (Smulyan, 1994, pp. 93–111). Since Gramsci considered critical junctures of historical transformation to work through proximities to popular lived experience, the broadcast reform movement of 1930s was hardly a critical juncture.³

Understanding such proximities to popular cultural currents is equally relevant to considering media citizenship in recent times. The more fundamental anti-commercialism of McChesney's critiques misses the ways in which oppositional politics and popular commercial culture have converged, for instance through the 2010 political marches on Washington convened by commercial media icons Glen Beck, Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert.⁴ And the anti-corporate populist tendency to subordinate the politics of cultural difference to championing the cause of “the people” fails to engage critical citizenship struggles over racial exclusion (Alexander, 2010) and immigration (Chavez, 2008).

Though subordinating issues of gender and racial exclusion to a populist class politics, anti-corporate populist-oriented media reform has created a rallying ground for a range of constituencies to voice dissatisfaction with corporate media, be they constituencies of professional journalists frustrated at working within profit-oriented news organizations, of religious conservatives offended by indecent programs, or of the thousands who petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to tighten media ownership rules in 2002 (Blevins & Brown, 2006). To harbor these anti-corporate sentiments, in 2002 McChesney co-founded the media reform organization Free Press, to hold media reform conferences and to lobby government agencies and lawmakers (2007, pp. 153–221). The organization's increasing prominence in media policy circles is testament to the political valiancy of anti-corporate populist sentiments.

The Internet and Citizenship as Individual Liberty

While anti-corporate populist orientations to media ownership target media corporations for restricting democratic deliberation and for accentuating economic inequalities, another orientation to media ownership perceives the Internet as centrally transformative of social relations in spite of corporate power. This orientation traverses a range of positions, from libertarian to “commons” approaches, which advocate conceptions of citizenship anchored in the eighteenth-century ideals of individual liberty.

An early advocate of a libertarian approach to media ownership, Ithiel de Sola Pool published Technologies of Freedom: On Free Speech in an Electronic Age (1983) in the same year in which Bagdikian released his first edition of The Media Monopoly. Founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Department of Political Science and participant in Cold War psychological warfare research at the Center for International Studies, de Sola Pool was not concerned with commercial power but with government encroachments on individual liberty. His influential work argued for “reduc[ing] the public control” of broadcast, cable, and telecommunications media through an extension of the First Amendment freedoms of the printed press to all media in the “electronic era.” He found the existing “regulations on cross-ownership of electronic media” among newspapers, broadcasters, and cablecasters to be “striking testimony to the extraordinary pervasiveness of government regulation” (1983, pp. 8, 52–53). Sola Pool, however, was not guided by a long-term ideological commitment to such libertarianism. In 1959 he argued that “real free enterprise is impossible” in broadcasting and that “it is a proper responsibility of government vigorously to assure that this facility is used for the public good,” including for the “raising of public knowledge and taste” (Sola Pool, 1960, pp. 19–20). Two decades later, Sola Pool believed that the potential for the “convergence” of print and electronic media would negate such need for government intervention. But the potential for technological convergence prompted Sola Pool to achieve more than just an adjustment to technological developments: it made him revise his position on broadcast regulations since the 1920s. In libertarian fashion, his new position was that the government should never have been allotted such regulatory authority over broadcasting (1983, pp. 23–54, 138–139).

Whereas Cold War ideologies and enthusiasm for media convergence prompted Sola Pool to support a libertarian position on media ownership, Fred Turner (2006) traces the way in which a digital utopianism sprang from the New Communalist Movement of the late 1960s, which fused communitarian and libertarian values. Unlike some counterculturalists who protested the Vietnam War and racism in the 1960s, the New Communalists rejected urban-centered political activism and fled instead to “frontier” rural areas, to find psychic wholeness through self-sufficient communal living. Inspired by the cybernetics vision of Norbert Weiner, Stuart Brand created in 1968 the Whole Earth Catalog, which fused practical tips for communal living with the technocentric theories of Marshall McLuhan and others. As the communes waned, Brand and the New Communalists found interest in the nascent networked computer developments in Silicon Valley, which envisioned the potential for a new “electronic frontier” (Turner, 2006, p. 6). The New Communalists' aspirations for a decentralized and egalitarian society fused with free-market and libertarian evangelism in the pages of Wired magazine, begun in 1993 by former Whole Earth Catalog editor Kevin Kelly. Here digital technology visionaries such as Esther Dyson, John Perry Barlow, and George Gilder joined high-tech stock analysts and right-wing politicians who sought individual liberty from government control through the promotion of free markets as the best means to realize the promise of the so-called “digital revolution.” But the New Communalists' vision of a libertarian model of citizenship and media ownership that could create psychic well-being and nonhierarchical harmony by dismantling bureaucratic government and corporate structures was, in practice, highly exclusionary. The patriarchal back-to-the-land communes were almost exclusively White and relegated women to subservient roles. The early electronic networks, including the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link and the Global Business Network, existed as exclusive clubs of White men, mostly affluent, in an immaterial “cyberspace” (pp. 100–101, 255–261).

A more recent articulation of individual liberty as a citizenship priority in media ownership is found in the work of Lawrence Lessig (1999), professor of constitutional law. Lessig was skeptical of the libertarian fundamentalism of many digital utopians, but he shared their priority to preserve individual liberty in cyberspace. Lessig expressed concern about the increasing role of government and commercial regulations over the Internet in the 1990s. These regulations included laws that expanded telephone wiretapping, criminalized copyright-circumventing software, and allowed television content-filtering technologies (1999, pp. 30–60). They also included commercial Internet providers restricting chat-room sizes, implanting “cookies” on computers to trace user activities, and requiring authenticating mechanisms for e-commerce (pp. 66–71). For Lessig, these new modes of encroachment on personal liberties were made possible by a new form of regulation, which he calls “code” (the software that runs the Internet), and which operates “more pervasively over time than any other regulator in our life” – even in our “social and political lives,” or in our “ordinary lives” (p. 233). Lessig argued that we need to think about regulating software in the same ways in which the eighteenth-century founding fathers thought about placing limits on government, namely through constitutional checks and balances and through protections of free speech, privacy, and due process. These constitutional values, applied to the Internet, require free or open software, because “the lack of ownership, the absence of property, the inability to direct how ideas will be used – in a word, the presence of a commons – is key to limiting, or checking, certain forms of governmental control” (p. 7).

In his subsequent work, Lessig (2001) extended this advocacy for a software commons to a commons approach for the physical infrastructures of telephone and wireless communication. He embraced the universal interconnection legacy of telephone regulation and opposed the government licensing requirements for broadcasting, citing a few postwar economists who argued that a more efficient use of the broadcast spectrum rendered government licensing unnecessary. For Lessig, a commons in spectrum would be better realized through free markets, with the stipulation the spectrum be used efficiently (2001, pp. 74–77). Also, Lessig advocated the creation of a commons in media content by promoting less restrictive copyright laws to facilitate the right of the public to appropriate creative works. Lessig (2004) has promoted a Creative Commons copyright license that allows creators to choose from a variety of protections, less restrictive than those in existence under current copyright laws – including no restrictions on copying with simple attribution to the original author.

Lessig's arguments for a commons approach to media ownership have informed recent campaigns to limit corporate control over copyright and to preserve the principle of network neutrality, in order to ensure that content sent over the Internet is treated uniformly. Unlike the digital utopians, who preach a free-market fundamentalism, Lessig promotes a role for federal regulations in ensuring that forms of communications software and hardware are treated as resources held in common. Yet, by elevating the significance of open Internet software, hardware, and content as instruments central to the promotion of eighteenth-century concepts of individual liberty over any other regulatory issues in our “social or political lives,” this Internet-centric articulation of citizenship either assumes that an open Internet will diminish the need for state redistributive functions to address social rights (equal access to education, health, and a living wage), or it subordinates concern for social rights to the goal of freedom through an open Internet. Unlike anti-corporate populism, which seeks to address the inequities of a capitalist society through media ownership reform, Lessig's Internet commons approach is explicitly not a critique of capitalist forces. Revelatory in this respect is Lessig's response to the bi-partisan coalition that opposed the FCC's loosening of broadcast-ownership restrictions in 2002. Though pleasantly surprised about the scope of this opposition, Lessig wrote that “the movement misses an important piece of the puzzle,” because “freedom is not threatened just because some become very rich, or because there are only a handful of big players.” Rather, it is the corporations' ability to enclose the domain of intellectual property laws, and therefore to restrict how others might remake commercial culture, that makes them “bad” (Lessig, 2004, p. 269). Also, Lessig's reliance on eighteenth-century conceptions of freedom as individual liberty, conceived of universally, in spite of the historical legacies of race, class, and gender exclusion, renders insignificant the cultural politics of difference in his advocacy for a commons-centered framework for citizenship.

Legal scholar Yochai Benkler also has found the legal enclosures that threaten an open Internet to be seminal to media ownership concerns. While Lessig's position is more narrowly focused on attaining a commons in information property, with the implied notion that this commons is essential in enabling individual liberty and prosperity in all life, Benkler has offered a more comprehensive, idealized vision of society – one based on the revolutionary promises of a “networked information economy” (Benkler, 2006, p. 2). According to Benkler, if unconstrained by big government and corporate power, the networked information economy “holds great practical promise: as a dimension of individual freedom; as a platform for better democratic participation; as a medium to foster a more critical and self-reflective culture; and, in an increasingly information-dependent global economy, as a mechanism to achieve improvements in human development everywhere” (ibid.). Benkler believes that government regulations during the “industrial information economy” preserved the power of Hollywood, of the recording industry, and of broadcasters to shape opinion and to “program toward the inane and soothing, rather than that which will be politically engaging” (p. 11). While this articulates with the cultural sensibilities of anti-corporate populists who dismiss the existence of political negotiations in popular commercial culture, Benkler does not call for more government regulations of corporate media. Rather, government regulations in the “networked information economy” should be minimized, to allow “non-market” and private voluntary modes of “social production” to bloom – for example the 50,000 volunteers who monitor the collaboratively authored Wikipedia (pp. 16–28, 70–74). Further, “because the outputs of the networked information economy are usually nonproprietary, it provides free access to a set of basic instrumentalities of economic opportunity and the basic outputs of the information economy” (p. 13). But can voluntary modes of participation through the Internet really provide “a set of basic instrumentalities of economic opportunity?”

Ellen Seiter (2008) has questioned these assumptions in Benkler's theories through reference to Pierre Bourdieu's work on how the interrelations between social, cultural, and economic capital create impediments to realizing opportunities in the information economy. For Bourdieu (1984), social capital comprises the set of resources that are available to an individual or group by way of their affiliation with particular social, familial, and institutional relationships and networks. In her work on digital education, Seiter found that a “lack of social capital screens out working-class youth from employment in the highest income and most challenging jobs in the digital realm,” and that “good jobs in new media are jobs for the young, the well connected, and those with enough family capital to float them through lengthy education, and long periods of employment-seeking in expensive housing markets” (Seiter, 2008, pp. 40–42). Technocentric conceptions of citizenship such as Benkler's subordinate these dynamics of social and economic capital to the emancipating promises of networked computing. In doing so Benkler offers a more libertarian conception of citizenship, which places individual autonomy and volunteer social production above consideration for social rights and for the redistributive functions of the state in addressing unequal access to education, housing, and work. By evoking classical liberal notions of individual autonomy, Benkler's conception of citizenship, much like Lessig's, eclipses consideration for the cultural politics of difference (ibid., pp. 133–175).

To sum up, the Internet-centered orientations to media ownership considered above include Sola Pool's advocacy for extending print standards of free speech to electronic media, a New Communalist-inspired digital utopianism, Lessig's commons approach, and Benkler's network information economy. Each case favors a form of citizenship that, in turn, prioritizes eighteenth-century conceptions of individual liberty from government and from corporate authority. For Sola Pool and the digital utopians, freedom is the lack of government encroachment. For Lessig, an information commons creates the freedom to innovate and create without surveillance. For Benkler, the information economy promises all of these and has the potential for a more equitable distribution of resources and economic opportunities worldwide. In prioritizing individual liberty over an open Internet as the foundational means to achieve equality of opportunity in society, each of these Internet-centered approaches articulates a concept of citizenship that no longer requires the redistributive authority of the state to secure social rights. Built as it is upon a foundation of an eighteenth-century liberal conception of the universal, autonomous, liberal individual, each of these Internet-centered conceptions of citizenship and media ownership fails to recognize class, gender, race, or national privilege as impediments to liberty, to democratic participation, or to equal opportunity. Such dismissals of our need for the state to redistribute economic and cultural resources are challenged by those who are concerned with racial minorities' lack of opportunities to own media.

Minority Media Ownership and the Cultural Politics of Social Citizenship

In 1973 the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia required the FCC to consider race as a factor in granting broadcast licenses. The ruling involved a case in which the FCC awarded a television license to a business organization comprised of people who were all white and residents of the station's service area over a business organization comprised of African Americans who were not all local residents. The FCC assumed that the “Communications Act, like the Constitution, is color blind” and that “service to the public in programming” was the sole criterion for consideration – “not the race, color or creed of an applicant” (TV 9, Inc. v. FCC, 1973, p. 936).⁵ Disregarding race as a factor, the FCC followed its long-stated goals to facilitate localism in broadcasting and prioritized the applicant with station owners who were all local residents.⁶ The appellate court faulted this color-blind logic and argued that the “public interest” is “a broad concept, to be given realistic content,” which cannot be interpreted through constitutional law alone. Further, the court argued that, “when minority ownership is likely to increase diversity of content, especially of opinion and viewpoint, merit should be awarded” (ibid., pp. 936, 938).

The court's decision prompted civil rights leaders to organize media advocacy groups in order to expand minority media ownership and enforce the Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) laws that Congress adopted in 1968. However, these efforts were frustrated by a recalcitrant FCC. The National Black Media Coalition (NBMC) submitted 61 minority ownership and EEO proposals to the FCC, but all were rejected. The first African American FCC commissioner, Benjamin Hooks, dissented on 30 of these rejected proposals (Honig, 1984). The FCC crafted vague and variable guidelines and worked within a “zone of reasonableness” that largely evaded enforcement, even though minorities owned just one half of 1% of all broadcast licenses (Fife, 1987, p. 494). Continued advocacy prompted the FCC in 1978 to adopt two proposals: a Tax Certificate Policy, which gave tax relief to broadcasters who sold their properties to minorities; and the Distress Sale Policy, which allowed broadcasters whose licenses were threatened with revocation to sell to minority buyers at 75% or less of fair market value. However, between 1976 and 1984 the FCC held no hearings on EEO violations, despite receiving hundreds of complaints (Honig, 1984).

In the 1990s Congress and the courts became more resistant to government provisions to assist minority media ownership. In 1995, in a partisan political maneuver, the Republican-controlled Congress repealed the Tax Certificate Policy (Ofori and Lloyd, 1999). That same year the Supreme Court revised the minority-ownership reasoning of the 1973 appellate court decision by requiring a higher level of evidence for identifying and addressing racial discrimination. This meant that the Supreme Court was less likely to recognize the constitutionality of government programs tailored to assisting minority media ownership than it would race-neutral remedies such as aid to small businesses (Horwitz, 2005; Williams, 1995). In 2007 the FCC adapted 12 new rules to assist small media businesses that had some benefit for small minority-owned media businesses. Civil rights organizations lobbied to include provisions for “socially and economically disadvantaged business,” to no avail (Honig, 2007).

Though Congress, the courts and federal administrators have moved away from recognizing a causal relationship between minority-owned media and the expression of cultural difference as a compelling government interest, research on minority-owned media has demonstrated such a relationship. In a 1999 study, researchers conducted interviews with staff at Black-owned commercial radio and television stations and found that minority-owned broadcasters delivered “a wider variety of news and public affairs programming and more ethnic and racial diversity in on-air talent” than stations not owned by minorities (Bachen, Hammond, Mason, & Craft, 1999). Another study found that, in mid-2009, 73% of the 815 minority-owned radio stations aired “minority-oriented formats” – including “Spanish, Urban, Urban News, Asian, Ethnic and Minority-oriented Religious formats such as Gospel and Spanish-Christian” (Sandoval, 2009, pp. 19–20). In her study of the Black-owned Chicago commercial talk radio station WVON and its listening audience, Squires found that Black station-owners and staff produced programming that addressed race-conscious issues and frameworks that created a space for challenging racial discrimination through forms of political action and organization. Listeners felt strongly about supporting Black-owned media because they felt that “White-owned and mainstream media sources continue to misconstrue the Black community” (Squires, 2000, p. 83). Of course, correlations between diverse ownership and diverse content are complex within particular commercial dynamics. The Black-owned station group Radio One changed the format of its Louisville, Kentucky station from urban to country in 2004, and that of its Augusta, Georgia station from blues to modern rock in 2003, though most of its stations air gospel, urban and jazz music formats (Reed-Huff, 2006). Even so, these examples offer evidence for a compelling relationship between minority ownership and expressions of cultural difference, and how these expressions have facilitated dialogue and action to address past and present forms of discrimination.

Campaigns designed to promote minority media ownership share anti-corporate populist orientations in their general impetus to challenge the leveraged power of media conglomerates and to support more decentralized media ownership. But anti-corporate populist critiques make no reference to the specificities of racial discrimination in relation to media ownership, implying that a broader normative critique of commercial economic structures and advocacy for nonprofit or noncommercial media will address racial discrimination. This position ignores historical struggles against racial discrimination that recognize the relationships between racial and economic disparities. For example, Singh traces how the civil rights movement from the 1930s through to the 1960s articulated a form of social-democratic citizenship that never reduced racial inequity to the inequities of capitalism but also insisted that racial discrimination demanded affirmative measures for addressing structures of economic inequality. As he put it, “the symbolic struggles for black rights and recognition within the nation-state could not be separated from the material struggles over distribution” (Singh, 2004, p. 214). Advocates of minority media ownership have made such connections in prioritizing economic access to a communication industry invested with representational authority.

The anti-corporate populist language of decentralization or “localism” also fails to address racial discrimination. As the above FCC case regarding television allocation and race reveals, the FCC used the concept of localism to validate “color-blind” reasoning in assessing public interests. Cautioning against “mindlessly jumping on the anti-consolidation pro-localism bandwagon,” legal scholar La Vonda Reed-Huff (2006, p. 103) argues that racial discrimination requires more than access to local expressive outlets. Rather it requires deliberation on a national scale, for instance through the widely syndicated radio talk shows of Tom Joyner and Tavis Smiley, who have faced racial barriers in seeking nation-wide syndication (pp. 131–134). Also, anti-corporate populist scholars who assert that commercial media and democracy are incompatible ignore the historical precedents for how Black commercial media have helped to constitute a national Black identity and culture. For example, Adam Green traces how African American participation in commercial music in Chicago in the 1940s and early 1950s promoted a national “sense of racial distinction” where “[t]he market played a catalyzing, rather than diluting or compromising role in these arts' developments” (2007, pp. 13–14).

Recent ownership debates regarding the Internet have revealed conflicting priorities across the three approaches to media ownership considered here. Anti-corporate populist and Internet commons approaches to Internet ownership have prioritized maintaining the network neutrality principle, which prevents Internet access providers from discriminating against users regarding the flow of content, applications, and services over the Internet. Lessig and McChesney (2006) co-authored an opinion editorial in the Washington Post that combined anti-corporate populist and market libertarian sensibilities:

In contrast, the Minority Media & Telecommunications Council (MMTC), representing dozens of civil rights organizations and minority media advocates, has not made network neutrality an Internet policy priority. Rather, MMTC's broadband Internet advocacy has focused on extending user access to “low-income, minority and multi-cultural communities” by way of subsidies, literacy programs, teacher training and provisions to aid minority business owners in bidding for spectrum (Honig, Lazarre, Miller, & James, 2009 – p. iii). The MMTC's policy on network neutrality supported the concept of an open Internet, but it also expressed concern about how network neutrality rules might inadvertently raise user rates, particularly on wireless broadband, which African Americans and Latinos use more than White Americans. Also, the MMTC was concerned that network neutrality could restrict broadband service providers from charging heavy corporate users more and from using these additional revenues to keep consumer rates low, to invest in extending service, or to facilitate minority participation. To ensure that such additional profits would get channeled to low-income and minority businesses, the MMTC recommended a program modeled on the Community Reinvestment Act. This law was based on the concept that lending institutions have an affirmative obligation to meet the credit needs of local communities. The MMTC proposed to extend such affirmative efforts to broadband Internet providers; and this, in turn, might include extending services to low-income areas, funding digital literacy programs, or providing technology support for new business entrants. The MMTC also recommended considering extending network neutrality discussions to Internet platforms and search engines to ensure that Google and other dominant providers do not unfairly favor established brands or businesses in ordering search results, a concept that would likely disturb libertarian proponents of network neutrality (Honig & Lancaster, 2010).

The reluctance to fully support network neutrality in the civil rights community ignited consternation among some supporters of network neutrality legislation. Sixteen civil rights organizations, including the National Black Caucus of State Legislators and the League of United Latin American Citizens, officially supported the MMTC's position on network neutrality. Eighteen members of the congressional Black caucus signed a letter of caution regarding the potential negative consequences of network neutrality for communities of color. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP) was neutral on the issue. When a spokes-person for the advocacy group Public Knowledge insinuated that “minority groups” opposed net neutrality because of their financial ties to telecommunications companies or because of their ignorance of the issue, the NAACP and the Hispanic Technology and Telecommunications Partnership found these charges “astoundingly offensive” (Aguilera, 2009, n.p.). But other minority interest groups supported network neutrality; these included the National Hispanic Media Coalition and the Center for Media Justice, as well as online journalism sites focused on issues of importance to African Americans, for example colorofchange.org and Black Agenda Report. Ensuing debates within African American communities were inflected with intergenerational conflicts when younger activists faulted veteran civil rights organizations for their ties to big corporations and for their ignorance of the potential benefits of an open Internet (Dixon, 2010, n.p.).

Despite having different priorities for network neutrality, these communities of color reconciled their priorities by recognizing that network neutrality alone would not broaden access and opportunities for low-income and minority communities. Addressing broader structural barriers to opportunity, as Center for Media Justice Executive Director Malkia Cyril put it, requires taking on

This insistence on coupling network neutrality with broader structural reforms was absent in Lessig, and McChesney's claiming network neutrality created “free and competitive market for Internet content” that required little capital for new entrants. Similarly, the anti-corporate populist-oriented Free Press characterized network neutrality as creating a “level playing field” for all, using an image of an African American boy to illustrate its universal benefits (Perlman, 2010, n.p.). Anti-corporate populist and commons orientations to network neutrality ultimately subordinated issues of structural racism by severing the relationship between economic opportunity and structures of racial discrimination. As discourses of citizenship, these positions invoked the neoliberal promise that market competition over an open Internet would create equality to a seemingly full range of life opportunities, regardless of one's social, economic, or cultural location in society. Such Internet-centric orientations to economic opportunity diminish the scope of social rights that, otherwise, call for redistributive programs to address structural forces of inequality – from the race-conscious broadband initiatives promoted by MMTC to the broader defense of social rights such as affordable healthcare, quality education, economic security, and cultural recognition.

Conclusion

Media ownership debates and research have focused on whether or not commercial media ownership structures facilitate diverse viewpoints for democratic deliberation, and on how to measure media content diversity accurately enough to assess this. Rather, this chapter draws from critical work in media and cultural citizenship, in order to consider media ownership debates as sites for constituting and contesting conceptions of citizenship that have significance beyond debates over media ownership regulation. To do so, it has considered the articulations of citizenship that informed three orientations to media ownership: anti-corporate populist, Internet-centric, and minority ownership. Emphasis was placed on the historical contexts of each orientation's emergence, on the rights and values that each prioritized, and on their broader significance to the status of social rights and cultural politics in neoliberal times.

Anti-corporate populist critics of media ownership defended a victimized “people” against the commercial power of ever-expanding media conglomerates. According to this view, these profit-oriented media conglomerates fed apolitical information and frivolous culture to a mass audience, creating ignorance and apathy in the body politic. Only when this corporate media stronghold is broken can a more democratic challenge to moneyed interests take place. Anti-corporate populism has resonated as a common framework for media ownership reform, including support for public-funded media alternatives. However, in championing the cause of “the people” as a homogeneous whole, anti-corporate populism obfuscates the ways in which economic disenfranchisement has been interrelated with race and gender exclusion. Also, anti-corporate populism's tendency to equate commercial media culture with corporate domination loses sight of how oppositional struggles have worked through popular, lived experience via popular commercial culture, and how noncommercial media movements have been bound to class, race, and gender privilege.

Internet-centered orientations to media ownership, from those of digital utopians to commons approaches, emerged out of perceptions that networked computing has fundamentally restructured the economic, social, and cultural conditions for democratic society. While anti-corporate populism promotes the redistributive authority of the state in order to secure social rights, a political goal that is impeded by corporate media control, Internet-centric approaches call upon the state only minimally, to secure a commons in intellectual property and an open Internet. According to this perspective, with the democratizing power of an open Internet to spur innovation, creativity, and citizen participation, corporate power throughout society will dissipate, as well as the need for the state to redistribute economic and cultural resources. Rather than articulate citizenship through twentieth-century conceptions of social rights and of the welfare state, Internet-centric approaches draw from eighteenth-century conceptions of citizenship that prioritized individual liberty from state power. While the twentieth-century movements to expand social rights recognized class, gender, and race privilege as barriers to equal opportunity and freedom, eighteenth-century expressions of citizenship emerged from a more abstract, universal conception of the individual in society, which subordinated consideration of class, race, and gender privilege. Inspired by this universal ideal of individual liberty, Internet-centered conceptions of citizenship and media ownership consider the liberating potential of an open Internet to transcend class, gender, race, or national privilege.

For civil rights organizations and minority media advocates, conceptions of citizenship have been less media-centric, reduced neither to populist critiques of media conglomerates nor to the sole opportunity-creating power of an open Internet. For disempowered communities of color, gaining access to media ownership was but one among broader ongoing struggles to gain access and opportunity across all societal institutions. Addressing these broader forms of racial exclusion in society required the redistributive authority of the state, including provisions to increase minority media ownership. For minority media advocates, media ownership was both an avenue for economic opportunity and a means to engage in the symbolic struggle over cultural recognition. In conceptualizing the interrelationship between economic opportunity and the cultural politics of cultural recognition, civil rights organizations and other advocates for minority media ownership clashed with anticorporate populist and Internet-centric orientations to media ownership over the issue of network neutrality. Rather than claiming that network neutrality was a means to level the playing field of economic opportunity for everyone, as did those from anti-corporate populist and Internet-centric positions, minority media advocates insisted on connecting support for network neutrality with advocacy for broader structural reforms to address racial inequality, including affirmative obligations by state and market actors to make economic and cultural resources available to disenfranchised groups.

While the three orientations to media ownership share the goal of expanding viewpoint diversity in media and find that corporate power would impede this goal, the conceptions of citizenship invoked through anti-corporate populist and Internet-centric approaches to media ownership reform inhibit their capacity to consider the ways in which race and gender privilege operates within corporate media and throughout society at large. If widening economic and cultural opportunities is a goal of these media ownership reform movements, it seems imperative to consider the rationales for citizenship that emerge in minority media ownership debates not only for addressing complex issues of media ownership, but also for conceiving of a more inclusive and expansive notion of citizenship more broadly.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author thanks Mari Castañeda and Vicki Mayer for their insightful comments and suggestions.

NOTES

1 For a positive assessment of competition and diversity in media from an economic perspective, see Compaine and Gomery (2000). For negative assessments from normative legal perspectives, see Baker (2007) and Cooper (2003), For proponents of matrices to measure media diversity, see Noam (2009) and Napoli (2007). For a social-theory approach to the cultural industries that includes more contradictory findings, see Hesmondalgh (2007).

2 See, for example, Banet-Weiser (2007); Hartley (1999); Hermes (2005); McCarthy (2010); Lewis and Toby (2003); Miller (1993, 1998, 2007); Ouellette (2002); Zoonen (2005).

3 The importance of cultural proximity to popular, lived experience in hegemonic struggles comes from Gramsci's observations of the Catholic church at the time he was writing (Hall, 1988, p. 432). For applications of Gramsci's framework to understanding how the emergence of neoliberalism worked through proximities to working-class cultural sensibilities, see Hall (1996) and Harvey (2005, pp. 49–50).

4 For more on the convergence of politics and commercial entertainment, see van Zoonen (2005), Gray (2008), and Jones (2005).

5 For prior activism that won African Americans legal recognition as interested parties in FCC broadcast licensing hearings, see Classen (2004).

6 For a discussion of the vague and often “fictional” ideal of localism in FCC policymaking, see Horwitz (1989, pp. 192–194).

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FURTHER READING

Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (Q. Hoare & G. N. Smith, Eds. and Trans.). New York, NY: International Publishers.