The New Americans introduced others to the lives of the 21st-century immigrants and, like other pubcast programs, enlarges our shared understanding of the public. (Photos: Kartemquin Films.)
What makes pubcasting ‘public’ is engagement
The authors head the Public Media ThinkTank at American University in Washington, D.C. With backing from the Ford Foundation they're working to distill the means and motives of a broader realm of public media, including public broadcasting. This is one of their first efforts. A PDF version is available for printing.
Public engagement is the semisecret success story of public broadcasting, and it shouldn’t be. The many community partnerships that flourished with public TV’s June
broadcast of the special on caregiving for
seniors, And Thou Shalt Honor, and the
amazing insights that Story Corps brings
to public radio shouldn’t be heartwarming,
exceptional stories. They should be the
norm.
It is becoming clear that public engagement
is the heart of public broadcasting —
and the best argument why taxpayers
as well as donors and foundations need to
support their public media.
Public media are media whose mission is to serve, build and nurture an informed, engaged public. They include pubcasting stations, cable-access centers, DBS set-aside channels, low-power stations and even media arts organizations and museums.
Even commercial media — such as judicious journalism or commercial cable’s prestige projects — sometimes fulfill public missions.
Some public media are big institutions; some are so informal that they come out of people’s living rooms. What they have in common is that they serve and need the public. That makes them different from other media, which serve and need customers.
Public broadcasting is the crown jewel
of American public media. It serves, for
better and worse, as a model and example
of what public media can be. Public broadcasters
need to play a leading role in cultivating
the public media landscape. Yet too
often the daily business of survival keeps
pubcasters from designing public engagement
into their core activities. Too often,
good-works afterthoughts tag along after
programs. Even with the valiant work of
the National Center for Outreach, outreach
is still treated as an add-on. Programmers
talk of viewers and listeners rather than
members of the many publics in the communities
and the society we share.
Public media deserve public support and investment. Why? It’s not just because of excellent content — commercial media can also have excellent content. It’s not just because anyone can receive the signal or post to the blog. That makes media merely available, not public.
It’s not even because some public
media receive tax-based funding, although
that gives them crucial breathing space
while giving the public a way to hold them
accountable. Still, that doesn’t make a
medium public.
What makes public media essential is
that they treat people as active learners in
and builders of society. They honor the
promise of American democracy—that
people can assert themselves not only as
individuals but also, if they work with others,
as decision-makers and mobilizers of
the public will. They respect this capacity
in the people who use and contribute to
their services. Public media are at the heart
of a democratic society.
People use the word “public” to mean
many things — audiences, consumers, the
masses. These kinds of publics are usually
too uninformed, uninterested or unengaged
to decide on the future of the society.
They’re out at the mall or otherwise
out of it. At the same time, inside-the-Beltway
operatives specialize in manufacturing
outcries and outrage that masquerade
as public will. Their work ironically shows
us how important true public will is — even
fake versions of it have political effect.
Here is another way to imagine the
public, borrowed from the great American
philosopher John Dewey: as a living social
phenomenon. This kind of public isn’t an
interest group or the docile beneficiary of
a think tank’s idea of what the public interest
is. It is people who know enough about
what they have at stake in their world
(whether it’s about traffic or health care
or arts in the schools) to form opinions,
and who have a way to find other people
affected by the same issue. They have
confidence that others will listen to them
and vice versa. That could embrace all of
us if we had pervasive public media that
respects the civic role anyone can play as
needed.
We don’t have a healthy public now, and most media, especially in the commercial sphere, aren’t helping. Politicians, interest groups and public relations professionals expertly spin media. Media businesses seize upon fake controversy, cheap crises and polarized portrayals of issues to grab audiences in an ever-morefragmented ratings environment. Meanwhile, the deluge of unsorted information in our blogs and websites and downloads increases our daily cynicism.
Public media, often operating under
the radar, take on the public engagement
challenge surprisingly well and often.
Consider:
■ Turning data into stories. A public
needs to be able to really understand what
is going on — why people do what they
do and what the consequences are. This
is not just about getting more and better
facts, because we know people don’t even
hear or see facts they can’t understand. It
means telling stories that can make sense
and finding other people to share and
discuss them with. Public radio storytellers
are famous not just for good stories but
for smartly framing them, so that new understandings
emerge. “Driveway stories”
make connections. They make sense.
■ Linking knowledge to action. Members of a public need to know what they can do and the implications of their actions. When the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer not only reports about the humanitarian crisis in Darfur on television but also gives teens more background on the program’s website plus a chance to debate what they can do about it, that’s giving the public a way to turn democratic ideals into practice.
■ Finding stories that enhance and
even change our shared understanding
of who we are, have been and can be. That’s what Eyes on the Prize did, with
such great effect that it became a model
for other historical series. It’s why The
New Americans, a three-part series on
the lives of immigrant families, was so
important. It’s the purpose of ITVS’s
Circle of Stories, an interactive project that
features a half-dozen Native Americans
telling stories of their culture and history
while inviting web visitors to upload their
own. That’s what This American Life and
StoryCorps do, by finding new voices and
new ways to tell and hear stories.
■ Fostering talk that leads to solutions. People need to have more and better opportunities to find each other, in actual places where they can meet face to face. If their knowledge stays locked up in their heads, it can’t help feed the public as a public. After P.O.V., a pioneer of public engagement, showed Farmingville, a documentary about community conflict in Long Island, N.Y., over illegal immigration, the film triggered talk at community meetings all over the country, including places where the same conflicts were brewing. The film helped officials and community leaders meet with people they might never have met and to search out better answers together.
■ Building a community’s civic capital. When ITVS hosts community screenings, when the American Library Association arranges partnerships with public TV strands such as P.O.V., when local stations such as the Twin Cities’ TPT work with nonprofits to co-produce programs, relationships open doors for public engagement. In Austin, Texas, KLRU is not only planning in-depth coverage of the growth challenges facing a region that is expected to double its population by 2040, but it is putting together a community governing board. Local organizations — including KLRU — will convene members of the public to discuss and decide what ought to be done.
■ Turning audiences into sources and partners. Minnesota Public Radio’s Public Insight Journalism project draws on a network of thousands of Minnesotans to get a public take on issues and ideas for stories. Thanks to e-mail and the Internet, MPR can supplement its small newsroom with a gigantic database of voices and insights from across the region. Its listeners are experts.
■ Nurturing cultural expression that
helps people participate in their own
culture. Global music — on public radio,
low-power stations and satellite TV among other public media —has entertained people
while inspiring them to broaden their
sense of global community. Local arts efforts,
including youth media, abound. And
those who watched the public TV show
Continental Harmony saw what happened
when, around the country, composers and
community organizations worked together
and created new compositions.
■ Modeling respectful and engaging
conversation. Public broadcasting is full of
good examples of people cutting through
the coolly ironic sheen of commercial
mass media to communicate — especially
on public radio’s talk shows.
Public media makers intuitively know
all this already, and often do it. The field’s
pioneers, visionaries and gurus, from
E.B. White and Bill Siemering on, have
celebrated its role in the public sphere. It
should be the prime reason public broadcasters give — when talking to potential
donors, taxpayers’ representatives and
strategic planners — why the field deserves
to survive the digital hurricane. But too
often nurturing public culture is not seen
as the central work of public broadcasters —
by both their potential publics and
their own executives.
Putting the project of public engagement
at the center of public media
addresses several nagging problems for
broadcasters. It shows why public broadcasters
are different from other media that
may be noncommercial but not necessarily
public — for instance media produced
by religious groups or nonprofits. It also
shows the difference between having lots
of information (which generates media
smog) and having information that matters.
Putting the public in the center also
demonstrates how public broadcasting is a
nonpartisan and unapologetically vigorous
advocate of public life. It’s the exit from
the squirrel-cage discussion of fairness
and balance. As members of the public, we
need to know more about the underlying
problems of our society and government.
We don’t need someone to calibrate neatly
between two extremist opinions or stake
a middle ground between predetermined
left and right positions. We all need help
cutting through the noise created by loud,
unproductive arguments.
Public engagement is also the answer
to those who ask why public media require
taxpayer support. Ever since 1794, when
Congress granted special low postal rates
to newspapers so that members of the new
nation could understand themselves in relation
to far-flung compatriots, this nation
has recognized the link between communication
and community. In a deafeningly
raucous media environment we need media
whose loyalty is not to their shareholders
or to an ideology but to the building of
public understanding and engagement.
Finally, a focus on public engagement
makes it easier for broadcasters to
grasp opportunities of the digital era. A
democratic public needs public media,
in whatever forms of communication are
available. For pubcasters, the digital challenges
are only worth confronting if they
help to address the challenges of public
engagement.
Pat Aufderheide directs the Center for Social Media in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C., and Noëlle McAfee is deputy director there. The Public Media ThinkTank, launched by the centerin 2005 with resources from the Ford Foundation, focuses on public media for a digital age.
The project’s goal is to develop and share a rich understanding of how media
are and can be public in the great sense that John Dewey gave it — feeding the
social phenomenon of people actively learning about and acting in their own
communities and society. The first task it faces will be to understand the many
ways that dedicated public media professionals practice this project today, to
share the best of those experiences for a vital public media for tomorrow. The
Public Media ThinkTank welcomes comments, reactions and contributions at socialmedia
american.edu.
