Ver. 2. July 18, 2005

DRAFT – Comments would be welcomed

Comparative Advantage

Some Considerations Regarding the Future of Public Media[1]

By David Steinberg

http://www.houseofdavid.ca/

David.Steinberg@houseofdavid.ca

 

1. Democracy is Dependant on Information

An informed citizenry is essential in a democracy.  As Thomas Jefferson said, "The information of the people at large can alone make them safe."’[2]

In our 100+ channel TV world it is hard to remember, that in the 1950s-1970s the everyone watched the same few channels because that was all there was.  This had an advantage in that TV news etc created a common basis of knowledge and experience which probably did build social cohesion and consensus. It also had negative consequences –

In a modern, technologically complex society, access to the mass media is a necessary condition for a voice to contribute to the national political debate. …”

The political effects of mass communication are closely linked with the tendencies toward conformity, apathy and political “silence” which stem not so much from what is said as what is unsaid, from what communication filters tacitly exclude from the daily order of public attention. Silence is … the most effective agent for subliminal persuasion in mass communication, and the most suitable instrument for a kind of negative homologisation of an information-based public.  The political integration of information-based societies comes about far more through tacit reduction in the complexity of the topics of political communication than through any positive selection or discussion of them.”

Promise and Problems of E-Democracy: Challenges of Online Citizen Engagement - OECD - January 2004

Good, investigative journalism is of great importance.  Such journalism will include data, including interviews, synthesis, conclusions, and possibly recommendations.  Such journalism is presented on a range of media including meetings, radio, TV, BLOGs[3], newspapers, magazines and books.  It is not unusual for these to be used in combination eg. a website may contain the video or audio file of an earlier broadcast wit an invitation to participated in a threaded on-line discussion or, as is done by PBS, additional background material related to a broadcast is provided on a website.

See

Models of Democracy and Concepts of Communications by Jan van Dijk; Digital Democracy and Political Systems by Martin Hagen; and, especially, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere by John Keane all in Digital Democracy : Issues of Theory and Practice -- by Kenneth L Hacker (Editor), Jan A G M van Dijk (Editor)

Abandoning the News

NBC could create Internet blogs

 

2. Impact of Life Style

  • We spend considerable time in cars listening to radio.  Thus radio, listened to in cars, is a particular potent vehicle for community information, news synthesis and interviews, introduction of new artistic talent etc
  • The social aspect of going out to the movies or watching TV as a family increases participation in these media and tinges them with extraneous emotions.
  • Generational issues

“Don't think for a minute that young people don't read. On the contrary, they do, many of them voraciously. But having grown up under the credo that information should be free, they see no reason to pay for news. Instead they access The Washington Post website or surf Google News, where they select from literally thousands of information sources. They receive RSS feeds on their PDAs or visit bloggers whose views mesh with their own. In short, they customize their news-gathering experience in a way a single paper publication could never do. And their hands never get dirty from newsprint.

“The Post experience merely mirrors the results of a September study (.pdf) by the Online Publishers Association, which found that 18- to 34-year-olds are far more apt to log on to the internet (46 percent) than watch TV (35 percent), read a book (7 percent), turn on a radio (3 percent), read a newspaper (also 3 percent) or flip through a magazine (less than 1 percent).

“And when young people go online, they tend to browse for news in much the same way they window-shop for jeans or sneakers: sampling a headline here, a blog entry there, a snippet of a story there, until their news cravings are satisfied.”

From Newspapers Should Really Worry By Adam L. Penenberg  

 

3. Impact of the Internet

The hypertext approach of the Web is similar to the way people laterally associate ideas and is ideal for providing many links to context.  It is true that, as in books, the linkages chosen by the author limit the nature of information linked to but the reader has instant access to Google which will usually turn up masses of information that the author might not have chosen to guide the reader to.

The Internet has drastically changed the information and social context[4] of society[5] and production within which politics[6] and information/news television must work[7] in the same way as:

  • radio in the 1920s drastically changed the role of newspapers; and,
  • television wiped out newsreels drastically changed the role of radio and newspapers in the 1950s.

Using the Internet, anyone can now get, from home access to a vast range of information and views with little effort and anyone can put material on public view expressing their own views[8].

 “Feedback is the core of the democratic potential of the Internet.  No information source before the Internet provided such scope for direct responsiveness. Digital communications technologies break down the traditional barrier between producer and consumer; broadcaster and audience. Citizens use the Internet to become informed, but also to inform others.  All information becomes susceptible to contestation. Internet users share knowledge about issues that matter to them, ranging from health to travel to recipes to household tips.  Participants in these sites tend to be both knowledge seekers and knowledge providers....”

Promise and Problems of E-Democracy: Challenges of Online Citizen Engagement - OECD - January 2004

 

The main impacts of the Internet on the democratic process concern[9]

“AN INFORMED PUBLIC[10]

Empirical research on mass political knowledge in industrial democracies … has drawn heavily on the ‘information cost’ perspective … to explain why the public is so poorly informed. Because it takes time and energy to seek out, interpret, and remember political information, it may be rational to free-ride on the civic attentiveness of others. The political promise of the Internet is that it significantly lowers the behavioral costs of finding, storing, and communicating specific and personally relevant political information at convenient, timely intervals.

The literature reveals, however, that after controlling for education and political interest, there is little evidence of an effect of Internet use on political knowledge. Those who seek political information online are generally well informed to begin with, politically oriented, and heavy users of other media…. At present, the Internet supplements and complements rather than replaces traditional sources of political information….

AN ENGAGED PUBLIC

The economic and psychological dynamics of Web-based human communication, however, are potentially distinct enough from those of traditional print and broadcast news media that in time we may see evidence of an Internet effect. For example, news sites often provide interactive links that encourage users to “send a copy of this article to a friend or colleague.” The capacity for horizontal interpersonal communication, to rebroadcast a news article with personal commentary, enhances the capacity for discussion, engagement, and the two-step flow that serves as the critical antidote to anomic mass communication (Kornhauser 1968). Evolving third-voice technologies would permit users to unilaterally convert every mass-medium Web site into an open public discussion (Dibbell 1999). Discussion groups on the Web at present lack the selective, highly edited character of letters to the editor and citizen op-eds. But though they may not achieve the ideal of deliberative discourse envisioned by Habermas (1981, Elster 1998), they would appear to be a step in that direction....

POLITICAL POLARIZATION

Perhaps the most central question for sociological analysis of changing technical structures of interpersonal and mass communication is the tension between forces of social integration and polarization (Neuman 2000). Many fear that the Internet will weaken the cultural center and “political commons” that network television and metropolitan newspapers provided (Neuman 1991, Hirsch 1978). Negroponte, for example, predicts that an artificially intelligent Web-based DailyMe will select news and information based on the predilections and prejudices of the individual cybercitizen and further displace the cultural commons (Negroponte 1995).

Research on earlier media, however, indicates that individuals tend to be aware of the most popular cultural artifacts and to monitor the latest hot programs and motion pictures (Neuman 1991). Ideologically inclined individuals do choose to attend to media that reinforce their prejudices (e.g., conservatives listen to conservatively oriented radio talk shows), but expose themselves as well to opposing views (Freedman & Sears 1965, Frey 1986). The Net’s capacity for anonymous communication may heighten the level of extremist and hate speech in the early stages of diffusion. But institutions of self-regulation may emerge to constrain such expression in cyberspace, as they have in non-electronic public forums (Lessig 1999).

DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY

Web proponents …. insist that the Internet will enhance the quality of political discussion and the viability, meaningfulness, and diversity of the public sphere by lowering the access barrier to meaningful public speech. No longer is it necessary to own a newspaper or television station to participate: The Web is a two-way medium, and every Internet receiver can be a publisher as well.... It is clear that the Internet significantly lowers entry barriers and other Downsian cost factors for participation in the electronic public sphere. Bimber finds that many of the distortions of group discussion resulting from dominant personalities and group dynamics are reproduced in cyberspace, but he concludes that virtual political space (notably Usenet-style threaded discussion groups) has its place as a significant supplement to, if not replacement for, the face-to-face discussions of Habermas’ idealized nineteenth century salon (Bimber 2000, Hill & Hughes 1998, Schneider 1996). Lowering the economic costs to initiate and sustain an accessible political voice—compare a teenager’s bedroom-based Web site to the cost of sustaining a printed magazine or broadcasting facility—can lower access barriers for minority voices, as well.

Skeptics argue that the commercial incentives of advertising-based media may lead ultimately to an Internet culturally indistinguishable from modern commercial television (Davis 1998, Margolis & Resnick 1999, Rheingold 1993). This debate is particularly interesting in the case of Web-based political campaigning in the United States, where by 2000, most candidates had their own Web sites, many with detailed issue and policy information unavailable through traditional media (Schneider 2000b).Will such diverse sites attract sufficient traffic to sustain themselves? Or will dominant commercial portals like AOL or specialized startups like voter.com dominate attention, paying for access to the public sphere through political advertising? As of this writing the jury is out, but researchers are actively studying elite and mass behavior (Schneider 2000a).”

From Social Implications of the Internet

http://www.princeton.edu/~artspol/workpap/WP17%20-%20DiMaggio,%20Hargittai,%20Neuman,%20Robinson.pdf

An interesting paper is E-Government and Democracy:Representation and Citizen Engagement in the Information Age by Steven J. Clift. This paper covers:

  • Democratic Outcomes
  • Trust and Accountability
  • Legitimacy and Understanding
  • Citizen Satisfaction and Service
  • Reach and Equitable Access
  • Effective Representation and Decision-Making
  • Participation through Input and Consultation
  • Engagement and Deliberation
  • Conclusion

In his summary, Clift writes:

Leading governments, with democratic intent, are incorporating information and communication technologies into their e-government activities. This trend necessitates the establishment of outcomes and goals to guide such efforts. By utilizing the best practices, technologies, and strategies we will deepen democracy and ensure representation and citizen engagement in the information age. It is upon this foundation that opportunities for greater online engagement and deliberation among citizens and their governments will demonstrate the value of information and communication technologies in effective and responsive participatory democracy.

 

3. Role of Public Media

How the public become informed, and the role of public media, will vary with political structure, social structure, technology etc..  

The traditional argument for public broadcasting, and more broadly public media, has been mainly based of the concept of “market failure.[11]  This has been recently restated at length in Building public value: Renewing the BBC for a digital world  and been attacked by David Elstein in Building Public Value: a new definition of public service broadcasting?

Some public media is easily justified and measured for impact.  Thus, if a public health department puts out a pamphlet on, say, colon cancer it is relatively easy to:

  1. determine whether it simply duplicates other easily-available pamphlets;
  2. is scientifically sound;
  3. through market research, determine whether the target population is accessing the pamphlet;
  4. again, through market research, determine whether the target population is understanding the message when they read the pamphlet.

 

The situation with publicly supported broadcasting, web sites, discussion fora, film making etc. is much more difficult. They must:

§         be discussed within the new information context after establishing that, within that context, there is still an important market failure;

§         determine options on how the market failure should be addressed – the medium; whether through regulation, subsidy or through one or more public funded media;

§         be based on models of public funding and control that have been shown to work in the real world[12].

 

 

 

Comparative Advantage of the Various Media

(This is my first run at the subject)

Values

Issue

Live Meetings

Printed Media

Theatre

Movie Theatres

Electronic Media

 

 

 

Books

Newspapers/magazines

Major

Minor and Amateur

 

Radio[13]

(digital succeeding analogue)

Television

(digital succeeding analogue)

Electronic paper-ink

DVDs and CDs

(often available free from libraries)

e-mail, Instant Messenger, Discussion Groups, BLOGS

Internet Video-Servers Using High Compression (e.g. MPEG[14])[15]

Cultural[16]

Classical Performing Culture e.g. dance, theatre and opera

Lectures and discussion groups largely marginalized by electronic media.

Specialized books and magazines widely read

Small audience partly due to cost

Small audience

little role

Narrowcasting[17] enables a wide range of programming[18]. Main strength would be to introduce new talent and art works to public.  Effective regulation will be important.

Will start to take over book and magazine market

Has take over market for pre-recorded films, documentaries, operas etc.

Discussion and reviews

Possibly eventually take over role of DVD

Innovative Performing Culture – bringing talent and audiences together to break new ground

?

no

yes

no

yes

Could enable new performers to offer their works to wide audience as the Web now does for painters

Social and community

By enabling Canada’s various communities to see what they hold in common and how they differ.  Hopefully, this will lead to the building of social cohesion and tolerance through greater understanding

yes

yes

yes

no

yes

Modest role

Modest role

yes

yes

yes

Educational

By offering audiences of every age a world of formal and informal educational opportunity in every medium

NA

yes

Modest role

no

Modest role

little role

Narrowcasting enables a wide range of educational programming.  Effective regulation will be important.

yes

yes

Yes – likely to be of great importance

Democratic

Information required for informed democratic discussion and decision - trusted and impartial news and information that helps citizens make sense of the world and encourages them to engage with it.

yes

yes

yes

no

no

no

yes

yes

Modest role

discussion

yes

Open discussion of important issues

yes

yes

yes

no

no

no

yes

yes

Modest role

yes

yes

Consultation

yes

no

no

no

no

no

yes

yes

Modest role

yes

Modest role

Consensus forming

yes

yes

yes

no

no

no

yes

yes

Modest role

yes

Modest role

National Unity

formation of Canadian Consciousness

yes

yes

yes

yes

yes

Modest role

yes

yes

yes

yes

yes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Documentary Films*

Can be used to stimulate discussion fora

NA

NA

NA

NA

yes

yes

yes

yes

yes

Yes-likely to become main avenue of distribution world-wide

 

* Note on documentary films. It is hard to know where to put documentary films within the above grid.  Undoubtedly documentary films are an important cultural product which, ideally, should have an educative impact which should support the democratic process.  In television and film documentaries, in contrast to books and printed thought pieces, the medium itself tends to play on the emotions while repressing critical thinking and limiting the “audience’s” access to key contextual information as well as to competing views. Documentaries shown in the cinema or on TV do not allow the necessarily passive viewer to stop, review and rethink.  However, documentaries accessible via the Web, can be interrupted, repeated and linked to critical reviews etc.

 

Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting

 



[1] Plural of medium, a channel or system of communication, information, or entertainment

[2] Quoted from THE DECLINE AND FALL OF PUBLIC BROADCASTING by David Barsamian, SOUTH END PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS 2001

[3] A BLOG is a regularly updated online journal of information and opinions. What sets blogs apart from other online writing, is their dynamic nature (as opposed to static Web pages) and their voice (style).

newspapers worldwide have been—and seem destined to keep on—losing readers, and with them advertising revenue. In 1995-2003, says the World Association of Newspapers, circulation fell by 5% in America, 3% in Europe and 2% in Japan. In the 1960s, four out of five Americans read a paper every day; today only half do so….   young “digital natives” increasingly get their news from web portals such as Yahoo! or Google, and from newer web media such as blogs. Short for “web logs”, these are online journal entries of thoughts and web links that anybody can post….  with 44% of online Americans aged 18-29 reading them often, according to a poll by CNN/USA Today/Gallup.

Blogs, moreover, are but one item on a growing list of new media tools that the internet makes available. Wikis are collaborative web pages that allow readers to edit and contribute….  Photoblogs are becoming common; videoblogs are just starting. Podcasting … lets both professionals and amateurs produce audio files that people can download and listen to. …

The most popular bloggers now get as much traffic individually as the opinion pages of most newspapers….   True, many thrive on debunking, contradicting or analysing stories that originate in the old media. In this sense, the blogosphere is, so far, mostly an expanded op-ed medium. But there is nothing to suggest that bloggers cannot also do original reporting. Glenn Reynolds, whose political blog, Instapundit.com, counts 250,000 readers on a good day, often includes eyewitness accounts from people in Afghanistan or Shanghai, whom he considers “correspondents” in the original sense of the word.

“The basic notion is that if people have the tools to create their own content, they will do that, and that this will result in an emerging global conversation”….

The tone in these new media is radically different….  For today's digital natives… it is anathema to be lectured at. Instead, they expect to be informed as part of an online dialogue….

… it remains uncertain what mix of advertising revenue, tips and subscriptions will fund the news providers of the future, and how large a role today's providers will have. What is clear is that the control of news—what constitutes it, how to prioritise it and what is fact—is shifting subtly from being the sole purview of the news provider to the audience itself. …

Quoted from The future of journalism-Yesterday's papers, the Economist , April 21, 2005

[4] From New Currents in Politics and Policy in DIGITAL DEMOCRACY: POLICY AND POLITICS IN THE WIRED WORLD edited by Cynthia J. Alexander and Leslie A. Pal, OUP 1998

Rapid technological innovation in the field of informatics has contributed to tile seismic shifts altering our intellectual foundations, political institutions and processes, and local, national, and international economies…. The process of technological innovation can be characterized by conflict, agenda-setting, and consensus-building. At every level of politics, at stake is the allocation of a new power resource with the potential to redefine the winners and the losers in the wired world…. Harnessing our technological capabilities to advance human progress depends on political leadership and policy acumen; the willingness to rethink our institutions and processes with more than narrowly defined notions of efficiency in mind; the character and pervasiveness of our collective values and aspirations vis-a-vis those assumptions, values, and priorities….

However sophisticated a system may be, technological change offers no easy 'solution' to alleviate complex social and political problems or ameliorate sociopolitical and economic cleavages….

While the potential of new telecommunities has often been extolled, less consideration is given to the negative temporal implications of borderless communication. For example, the new instantaneous communicative environment may imperil democratic deliberation. Taylor and Saarinen caution: 'if politics is the art of negotiation, speed is the death of the political. Negotiation takes time. . . negotiation and deliberate decision become impossible. Speed privileges certainty and assertion. . . . It is not possible to slow down long enough to allow time for uncertainty and questions.' There is potential for the technology to facilitate communication between individuals dispersed across geographical and temporal boundaries; however, the quality of the dialogue within and between these discussion groups merits serious examination before we can state that the technology exposes individuals to a broad diversity of perspectives, fosters rational, constructive discourse, generates an exchange that stimulates greater understanding, and cultivates consensus between diverse and/or opposing interests. In the 'global village' we may be less-not more-communicatively competent. In the Information Era, we may possess a more impoverished, not a more enhanced, understanding of world issues, events, and ideas….

The new technologies are creating new opportunities and social forces that are shifting the centre of political gravity away from states towards corporations, non-governmental organizations, and activists. States remain an important organizing framework for contemporary politics, but the new technologies are decentralizing power to a variety of non-territorial domains. He explores this argument through an analysis of four areas: transnational production, global finance, civil society networks, and state-security practices.

[5] From Altered Worlds: Social Forces in the Hypermedia Environment by Ronald J. Deibert  in DIGITAL DEMOCRACY: POLICY AND POLITICS IN THE WIRED WORLD edited by Cynthia J. Alexander and Leslie A. Pal, OUP 1998

The result of this convergence between the hypermedia environment and the transnationalization of production is the rapid emergence of a much more complex and cross-cutting non-territorial organization of production. Not only are new corporate structures emerging that are less hierarchical and more 'weblike', but firms all over the planet are now embedded in a global 'networked' environment composed of overlapping and complex transnational production arrangements ranging from formal equity-sharing or co-production arrangements to informal alliances and joint ventures. Although we are still far from a completely 'borderless' economy, the changes that have already occurred are significant and growing, suggesting important consequences for the architecture of political authority….

The changes to global production and finance … above have undermined the effective power of state regulatory systems within territorial-political jurisdictions…. Governments at all levels-provincial, state, and regional-now engage in competitive deregulatory and re-regulatory 'locational tournaments' designed to attract global investment.

The second consequence has been the creation and emergence of multiple and overlapping layers of authority designed to respond to and govern globalizing economic forces. Most states now find themselves enmeshed in an ever-widening network of informal and formal international institutions, regimes, organizations, and regional trading blocs that have arisen in reaction to the transnationalization of production and finance.…

A third set of social forces thriving in the hypermedia environment is transnational social movements with multiple, overlapping, and often competing interests. These new movements represent the emergence of … a 'global civil society': that is, transnationally organized political networks and interest groups largely autonomous from anyone state's control.  In ways that are similar to the transnationalization of production and finance … the rise of a global civil society presents fundamental challenges to the modern world order paradigm by diffusing a dense network of social and interest group activities across territorial-political boundaries. Although hypermedia do not generate these new social movements, they do create a communications environment in which such activities flourish dramatically. As computer networks have grown, transnational social movements have exploded, forming complex non-territorial-based links that defy the organization of political authority in the modern world order.

To some extent, there have always been social movements throughout modernity whose interests transcend political boundaries. A good example … is the nineteenth-century anti-slavery campaign.... These movements continued to grow such that by the 1980s they were becoming a common feature of the world political landscape. …

The movements that together comprise this emerging global civil society are not homogeneous in their orientation or organization, but rather consist of scores of 'heteronomous' networks of political associations. The causes around which these movements are formed are equally varied….

The majority of these transnational social movements do not operate through the traditional lobbying procedures and political channels of participation as defined by state structures.  Most of them cannot be characterized as political parties campaigning for government office. Indeed, their very importance as a challenge to the modern world order paradigm lies in their willingness to sidestep traditional political structures and sovereign boundaries 'to address international problems, and to reflect a global sensitivity…. The rise in the visibility and density of these transnational social movements cannot be divorced from the communications technologies that have empowered them. As Spiro notes, 'this explosion in nongovernmental activity reflects the dramatically heightened permeability of national borders and improvements in communications that have allowed territorially dispersed individuals to develop common agendas and objectives at the international level.'[5] Although telephones and faxes have long been staples for international co-ordination, computer networks-in particular, the Internet-have vastly transformed the scope and potential of these transnational movements.…

Of course, not all of these transnational social forces are working with the same goals in mind, and not all can be said to be working to the betterment of the human condition: such technologies have also facilitated the rise of transborder criminal activities, including pornographic distribution systems, terrorist activities, and the money-laundering schemes of organized crime. One of the more effective transnational social movements in exploiting hypermedia has been the neo-Nazi movement....

Less important (for the purposes of this chapter) than the values of these social movements, however, is the extent to which their interests are defined and their actions organized largely without respect to sovereign-territorial boundaries. By moving around and through political boundaries to influence populations, they undermine states' monopoly of legitimate authority over a territorially defined populace, which is one of the central ideas of sovereignty.[5]….' The monopoly claims of territorial states over legitimate authority, in other words, are increasingly challenged by global civil society networks that buttress their actions on wider, universalist aspirations.[5]

What do these changes mean for the character of an emerging post-modem world order? Probably the most significant is the way considerable social, political, and economic practices are increasingly decoupling or 'unbundling' from sovereign-territorial spaces. In many respects, a 'space of flows' is coming to dominate and transcend a 'space of places' as the defining characteristic of postmodern world order. Certainly this describes the organization of the global economy, not only with respect to the transnationalization of production but particularly with respect to global financial trading activities. It also accurately portrays the interactions of the many heteronomous transnational social movements now operating through the global non-territorial spaces of computer networks.

In fact, these movements may be but one manifestation of a larger 'demassification' of group identities fuelled by the hypermedia environment. The two-way, interactive nature of computer networks that has favoured transnational social movements is also contributing to a flourishing of multiple and overlapping transnational 'niche' or 'virtual' communities-what Howard Rheingold has aptly called an 'ecosystem of subcultures'. The values of these niche communities are multiple and contradictory and reflect widely varying aspirations, from religious fundamentalist groups to ethnic diasporas, and from functionally defined interest groups to terrorist organizations. What is perhaps the most significant aspect of these communities, however, is the extent to which they are not bound by traditional notions of territory or place as prerequisites for membership-an orientation that in many respects mirrors the decoupling or unbundling of economic and interest group practices described above.

Amid these wider changes, the purpose and forms of states themselves are being transformed….  this transformation is that states are evolving from 'container' to 'transmission-belt' organizations designed to facilitate flows of information and capital and to provide an interface between multiple and overlapping layers of authority. While there is enough cultural and historical diversity among states to ensure a variety of separate trajectories within this process, nearly all states have taken similar liberalizing measures primarily in response to the structural pressures of global market forces. With the flourishing of both transnational corporate interests and transnational social movements, the locus of authority, once monopolized by sovereign states, has been disaggregated and diffused to a much wider domain-to what Rosenau calls 'diverse subnational and supranational sovereignty-free actors'. A quasi-feudal, multicentric system is emerging as the architecture of the post-modern world order

[6] From Digital Democracy or Politics on a Microchip by Edwin R. Black in DIGITAL DEMOCRACY: POLICY AND POLITICS IN THE WIRED WORLD edited by Cynthia J. Alexander and Leslie A. Pal, OUP 1998

Information and communication technologies are changing more than just national governments. City councils, legislative assemblies, provincial governments, and public regulatory authorities are all acting differently because of changes in the business of public collection, manipulation, and computerized manufacturing of 'facts' about our affairs. What is involved goes far beyond fancy record-keeping and data bank matching. It means a rapid evolution in some of the most important aspects of the state: the political legitimacy of representative government versus 'direct democracy';

§         the ways in which the opinions of interest groupings and various sectors of the voting public are determined and assessed;

§         the operation of new biases or sets of values in what appears to be the mechanics of information handling;

§         the importance assigned in budgetary battles to quantified approaches to developing and delivering 'soft services';

§         changing bureaucratic subcultures that deal with the framing, phrasing, and weighting of policy choices.

In short, the ever-spreading use of digital information technologies is transforming both how we are governed and the institutions of that governance. Whether these developments are for the better remains to be demonstrated….

Those with interests in government and politics should keep an eye on at least two sets of phenomena. The first is the most likely to be neglected: the rapid changes in our political institutions, processes, and subcultures set in motion by the exploitation of information technologies in all phases of political life. No communication system can exist shorn of power, purpose, or organization. Although seldom recognized because of their spurious claim to scientific neutrality, information and communication technologies (ICT) are as subject to social values and partisan biases as the 'worst' state or provincial highway proposal. More likely to attract a student's attention-as demonstrated by the work in this book-are the second sorts of phenomena: the public policy issues. These relate to automation and employment, public access to public information, law and public morality, the health or survival of a host of trades and industries, the financial and educational spheres, and, ultimately, to questions of national security

Particular, and often new, sets of social biases operate at all these levels. Information specialists and senior government officials will protest in vain; it is difficult for any student of society to agree that processing systems in use on today's scale could be neutral in their effects on either policy or administration. Not only would that be difficult to believe, it would be impossible in practice….

Part of the problem in analysing and adjusting to enormous technological changes in the creation, manipulation, and transmission of data is that we scarcely understand the nature of information and its social role. This causes major problems for policy-makers because information is not easily quantified and assigned numerical weights. More difficult to grasp are the distinctions to be drawn among data, information, meaning, and knowledge. The old catchphrase tells us 'knowledge is power'. The possessor of knowledge, however, unlike the owners of many commodities, does not necessarily lose value by sharing the information or giving it away. Today the question is not so much who possesses particular information as it is a question of who has access to certain stores of data and who has the skills to turn it into exploitable knowledge. For all of the egalitarian impulses allegedly inherent in some conceptions of digital democracy, nobody has yet shown how these qualities will do anything other than to make the badly-off even worse off in comparison to the better-educated….

Bureaucratic and ministerial power resources continue to expand, thanks largely to lCT. Does that leave much room for the people's elected representatives to improve significant public control over our government in between elections? The answer is no, not if past Canadian and American experience is 'any guide at all. If present trends go very far-and they will if there is not more examination of the issues presented here in Digital Democracy-the computerization of government could mean the end of meaningful public interest in representative government and its replacement by a plebiscitarian dictatorship under the guise of direct democracy. The triumph of converging information technologies married to digitized entertainment systems is busy stripping representative resentative legislatures of their last shreds of dignity and threatening all governments in their attempts to shape popular culture.

[7] From Technologies of Abstraction Cyberdemocracy and the Changing Communications Landscape by Michael R. Ogden in DIGITAL DEMOCRACY: POLICY AND POLITICS IN THE WIRED WORLD edited by Cynthia J. Alexander and Leslie A. Pal, OUP 1998

If we are to believe the government hype, then life 'in cyberspace. . . will shape up exactly like Thomas Jefferson would have wanted: founded on the primacy of individual liberty and the commitment to pluralism, diversity, and community'  In this vision of cyberspace, people can live (physically) almost anywhere they want without forgoing opportunities of association or useful and fulfilling employment by 'telecommuting' …. The best 'schools' (such as they would exist in cyberspace), teachers, courses, and vast storehouses of information would be available to all students without regard to geography, distance, resources, or disability This promotes a vision of education as a mechanism of encouraging individual student exploration, interaction, discovery, and growth with the instructor acting as mentor and guide.

Furthermore, in the new global economy, where knowledge is the key resource-and thus, the key to prosperity-the principle of lifelong learning becomes essential for ensuring competitiveness. Workers will begin to demand access to the widest possible variety of learning opportunities and tools, pushing the integration of computer-based technology and learning and creating business opportunities in course-ware development, course delivery, and software applications. Likewise, services that would improve health care and respond to other important social needs would all be available 'on-line' without having to wait 'in-line' whenever and wherever one needs them. Because of the free flow of information across local, state, regional, and national boundaries, access to government information at all levels becomes a 'right' of all citizens in the facilitation of their informed participation in the democratic process at whichever level they so choose. As well, businesses would use the network to develop new ideas and new modes of interactive use, or use the network as a way to restructure themselves, improve communications, share ideas more effectively, and get closer to their customers. Small manufacturers could get orders from all over the world electronically, and with detailed specifications in a form that the machines could use to produce the items.  Individuals would also have access to movies-on-demand and all the hottest video games, and could do their banking and shopping from the comfort of their own homes whenever they chose….

Thus, individuals of all age groups, income levels, ethnic backgrounds, and educational attainment are able to use this equipment, if given proper training and support, in the context of activities that serve their needs and capture their interest. One of the compelling aspects of this vision is 'interactivity', If we see the (Internet) … as a meeting place, then we will recognize that the purpose of the information superhighway is to bring people together, to foster community Access would therefore be open to everyone and interaction would be encouraged. This type of connectivity will further allow users to participate actively in communities of interest, not in 'virtual' isolation from each other, but as an overlay to real-life communities.

The important issues will be social, not technical: How do people interact? What kind of facilities are needed to support co-operation and group work? How can people with similar interests find one another? How are the benefits and costs of the system shared equitably? The communication landscape of this scenario is seen as always growing, adapting, and changing in response to new ideas and initiatives. Governance is not so much about imposing rigid control as building an environment that fosters co-operation and trust….

Will the information superhighway be decentralized, inexpensive, and open? Will it facilitate grassroots production and distribution? Or will it permit the media giants to establish a one-way flow of home shopping and movies-on-demand?

… The same technology that is able to identify and link citizens and political institutions to facilitate the conduct of direct democracy-as well as other forms of legitimate constituent participation in the democratic process-could also, if not formulated correctly, facilitate nationwide identification systems and increased governmental surveillance..

In the end, however, 'The’ question is not whether the transformation to instant public feedback through electronics is good or bad, or politically desirable or undesirable. Like a force of nature, it is simply the way our political system is heading. The people are [already] being asked to give their own judgment before major governmental decisions are made; political parties and special interest groups employ a multitude of pollsters for just this purpose....

Herein lies the dark lining to the silver cloud of cyberdemocracy; direct democracy via sophisticated information technology could also bring with it the inevitable tendency to pressure political leaders to respond quickly-perhaps too quickly-to every impulsive ripple of public opinion and hold the nation hostage to the tyranny of the majority Such a tendency could fundamentally alter the conduct of government and perhaps even threaten some of our most cherished constitutional protections….  So far, the information revolution has been largely waged by highly educated and informed advocates, people who often have tremendous resources at their disposal. These advocates have spoken quite well on behalf of their own needs; some have even attempted to speak to the needs of the 'information-poor'. But the 'information-rich', however well-meaning, have largely determined and prioritized the issues of the information revolution and the emerging cyberdemocracy according to their own visions and realities….

Within the US, the problem of melding old but still valid concepts of constitutional rights with new and rapidly evolving technologies is, perhaps, one of the most profound challenges to the 'common good' yet faced by our society. The meaning of freedom, structures of self-government, definition of property, nature of competition, conditions for co-operation, sense of community, and nature of progress will each need to be redefined….

Information technology provides us with the key to restructuring our governing system, simultaneously permitting more distribution and new concentration of power. The result may be more equality and more inequality, more cohesion and more splintering, more cooperation and more competition, more democracy and less.

[8] Eg. Znet

[9] See also E-Government and Democracy http://publicus.net/e-government/ ; Trust, Civic Engagement, and the Internet by Eric M. Uslaner http://www.pewtrusts.com/pdf/vf_pew_internet_trust_paper.pdf

[10] See also

TABLOIDS, TALK RADIO, and the FUTURE OF NEWS: Technology's Impact on Journalism by Annenberg Senior Fellow Ellen Hume http://www.annenberg.nwu.edu/pubs/tabloids/default.htm

Particularly section Conclusions: The New Marketplace for News

http://www.annenberg.nwu.edu/pubs/tabloids/tabloids09.htm

Radio and Television News Directors Foundation – Future of News http://www.rtnda.org/resources/future.shtml

Abandoning the News: What's the future of the news business? This report to Carnegie Corporation of New York offers some provocative ideas. http://www.carnegie.org/reporter/10/news/

The dramatic shift in how young people access the news raises a question about how democracy and the flow of information will interact in the years ahead. Not only is a large segment of the population moving away from traditional news institutions, but there has also been an explosion of alternative news sources. Some have been assembled by traditional news organizations delivering information in print, on television and on the radio as well as via the Internet and mobile devices. Others include the thousands of blogs created by journalists, activists and citizens at large.”

Use Of Sources For News (PowerPoint) http://www.carnegie.org/pdf/AbandoningTheNews.ppt

[11] As stated in MADE POSSIBLE BY: The Death of Public Broadcasting in the United States by JAMES LEDBETTER, VERSO, 1997

Excepting the broadsides launched by a few professional ideologues, American public television is rarely considered part of a political philosophy; most fans of Barney or This Old House would be hard pressed to discern an ideology behind their favorite shows. Still, an archaeological dig to PBS's roots unearths the 1967 report of the Carnegie Commission, Public Television: A Program For Action. This blueprint for American's public broadcasting networks is a classic document of the Great Society. The report was not officially issued by the Johnson administration, and was not specifically designed to improve the lives of the poor or elderly. But barely hidden in its bureaucratic plan is the seemingly indestructible optimism that marked the American public sector of the 1960s. It is a quiet manifesto, expressing the belief that government action and technology can and should be catalysts for perfecting the human spirit.

"Public Television," the Commission report declared simply in its introduction, "includes all that is of human interest and importance which is not at the moment appropriate or available for support by advertising."! In a more expansive section entitled "Fulfilling the Promise," the Commission laid bare its grand belief that public television could transform the airwaves from what FCC commissioner Newton Minow had, just a few years earlier, dubbed "a vast wasteland" into a tool for enlightenment. "Public Television programming can deepen a sense of community in local life. . . . It should bring into the home meetings, now generally untelevised, where major public decisions are hammered out, and occasions where people of the community express their hopes, their protests, their enthusiasms, their will. It should provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard."

As if the community mission were not broad enough, the Commission believed, along with Marshall McLuhan and the trendier communications theorists of the 1960s, that the technology of television could transform the planet into a global village (provided that the technology was guided by the proper, government-funded hands). The Commission's international rhetoric was sweeping: "Through Public Television programs, and through advances in the technology of communication, Americans should have rapidly increasing opportunities for greater insight into the nature of other nations and cultures, for a clearer understanding of struggles and settlements between nations, for a view far beyond our own borders into the ways of the rest of the world."

… The existence of a government regulatory agency is an acknowledgment sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit-that the free market alone is incapable of achieving certain social goods (such as a clean environment or safety in the workplace). The Carnegie Commission report, and the initial federal funding for public broadcasting, constituted a much rarer American observation; namely, that the media market alone is incapable of achieving certain cultural goods.

The Carnegie commissioners were candid on this point. Dr. Hyman Goldin, a 20 year FCC veteran and the Commission's executive secretary, concluded that commercial broadcasting's cutthroat competition for viewers was the culprit that limited what could be put on the air. "A public affairs program or a news analysis sometimes will deteriorate as it passes through the various stages of production," wrote Goldin, "because the producer is seeking desperately for some device to increase its rating. . . . In the end, commercial television remains true to its own purposes. It permits itself to be distracted as little as possible from its prime goal of maximizing audience."

The Commission was echoing a sentiment widely held among the country's opinion-makers: Americans were poorly informed, in measurable part because commercial television made them that way. In an influential March 1967 New York Times Magazine article, "A Program for Public Television," veteran Times editor Lester Markel-who himself hosted a weekly educational television program complained that "the state of the Union, informationally and culturally, is not what it should be and. . . television is not contributing what it could toward the advancement of that state." Of the 34 new programs introduced in the 1966-67 TV season, Markel noted, "not one was related even remotely to public affairs."

Here again, ratings-driven decisions were to blame.... Thus, one tenet of the Carnegie report was that public broadcasting had to be insulated from commercial forces in order to achieve its ideals. This implied at least some government funding-an unsurprising conclusion, since most industrialized nations already had taxpayer-funded broadcasting agencies. …

The leading communications authorities of the day told Congress they were standing on the edge of a historical era….

Taxpayer-funded public broadcasting represented a pinnacle of what historian Godfrey Hodgson has called the reigning "liberal consensus" of postwar America.

The position conservatives developed in later years-namely, that regardless of public broadcasting's content, government has no business subsidizing an industry best developed by the private sector-was little in evidence, even among conservatives….

In April 1967, the Ford Foundation formally petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to construct a satellite system for public television's interconnection. The Foundation's plan may have been a rather dry one about little-understood science, but it was imbued with the rhetoric of public service, and-like its Carnegie counterpart-presented public broadcasting almost as a moral imperative. Noncommercial television, insisted the Foundation, "has unlimited potential, for human welfare and for the quality of American life."

Indeed, said Friendly and Bundy and their allies, "nothing is more needed-for television itself as well as for the country-than a first-rate national non-commercial service."  

[12] The American model is particularly problematic. As stated in MADE POSSIBLE BY: The Death of Public Broadcasting in the United States by JAMES LEDBETTER, VERSO, 1997

Despite 30 years of debate and promises, a variety of experiments, and more commission reports than any mortal could digest, American public broadcasting lacks any systematic, long-term way to pay for itself. So much of public broadcasting's internal bickering and inefficiency grows out of the endless struggle for money; if funding were adequate and reliable, goes the argument, many-perhaps most-of the system's problems would evaporate.

To bolster this case, advocates point to the far greater levels of government support in other industrialized nations. According to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, in 1993 the national government of Japan spent $32.02 per citizen on public television, Canada spent $31.05 per citizen, and Great Britain $ 38.99-and the U.S. federal government just $1.09….  The sobering reality, however, is that if the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and its nationwide affiliates were funded at three or four times current levels-a political pipe dream-the system would still be hobbled by a host of contradictions that public broadcasting's chieftains have refused for decades to resolve...

Most of the difficulties revolve around the concept of "public" broadcasting, an adept, stirring term that was never precisely defined, and therefore attracted factions of supporters with conflicting interpretations. For example: in order to serve the population-which has invested trust, airwave resources, and taxpayer dollars-a public broadcasting system must try to reach as many viewers as it can. It may not be necessary to maximize audiences for every single program, but clearly public broadcasting must be viewed by a reasonable portion of the nation's audience. At the same time, public broadcasting must resist or surmount commercial and dumbing-down pressures that inevitably accompany efforts to attract large audiences. Willard Rowland, a onetime PBS researcher who is also one of the system's most incisive critics, has succinctly labeled this dilemma the "contradiction of popularity."…

There is ample evidence, however, that in seeking to serve these millions of viewers and listeners-and secure their donations-PBS and NPR programming is moving further and further from the goals laid out by its founders. This is not merely a complaint from outside critics; it is an idea widely held by people within public broadcasting. Having collected testimony from dozens of station and program managers before authorizing the 1988 public broadcasting bill, Congress voiced its concern about PBS's programming drift: "Some public television stations increasingly are turning away from traditional public, educational or informational programming and broadcasting....” During the late' 80s and early '90s, the fastest-growing program on public television was reruns of The Lawrence Welk Show….  (Such programming falls) outside the purview of a medium the Carnegie Commission instructed to capture "the great debates in public life, the crucial hearings, the great performances, moments of national tragedy and triumph."

The question of public participation is equally vexing. Is the "public" in public broadcasting mere rhetoric, meant simply to mark a distinction from commercial television-or should the public have an active role in public broadcasting, one that transcends paying taxes and writing checks? Over the years, this question has been answered in various ways. Early experiments-such as the Public Broadcasting Laboratory (PBL) described in chapter 2-interpreted "public" liberally.

For some episodes, for example, PBL brought members of the public into studios for moderated debates over timely issues....  today-despite a public deemed to be far more media-sophisticated-PBS allows the general public no comparable was to influence content. The system's early effort at institutionalizing public participation-the Advisory Council of National Organizations (ACNO), an umbrella group of unions, advocacy, and civic groups-has been disbanded (see chapter 7)….  The decline of any mechanism for public involvement means that today "the public" appears rarely on public television ….   the commercial broadcast 60 Minutes exhibits a greater dedication to interacting with the public than does The News Hour with Jim Lehrer.

The Carnegie commissioners were insistent that public television should "deepen a sense of community in local life," and should be a forum "where people of the community express their hopes, their protests, their enthusiasms and their will.,, This role grew naturally out of public television's educational roots…. In the' 80s and '90s, however, a number of powerful forces within the public television bureaucracy have leaned on stations to move toward a more uniform schedule. PBS has recently implemented a so-called common carriage feed, whereby stations agree to show the national schedule on the same night-which benefits big underwriters who crave effective nationwide promotion. Consequently, locally based programming stands little chance of being picked up for system-wide distribution, an increasingly important revenue source for many stations.

The unacceptable but inevitable result is that some of the nation's largest cities have virtually no public television devoted to what goes on in their own backyards…. Far from supplementing commercial television's skimpy community news offerings, WNET actually trails far behind…. rather than provide an outlet for New York's four million blacks and Latinos, WNET lazily rebroadcasts Visiones and Positively Black-programs picked up from New York City's NBC affiliate. Critic Marvin Kitman, who has tracked decades of public television on WNET, told an interviewer in 1993: "This station has totally abdicated its role as a local television outlet."…   Large stations such as Boston's WGBH- TV and Los Angeles's KCET- TV have been hit by similar local programming vacuums….

This book focuses on the interplay between American politics and the public broadcasting world, in the belief that pressure from Congress, the White House, and a few special interest groups plays a much greater role in shaping and determining the public broadcasting schedule than is generally recognized. …. throughout the 30-year history of public broadcasting, its taxpayer subsidy has repeatedly been used as a club with which to clobber that very commitment. Like a dog that has learned to flinch at the mere pantomime of the master's lashing, public broadcasters know to avoid topics and methods of criticism that might bring down the hand of rebuke. In those few instances when explicit threats are made to remove funding based on unpopular content-such as Dole's 1994 Senate attack on NPR for commissioning commentaries from a journalist convicted of killing a police officer-public broadcasters generally back down.

Such timidity has not always been the norm: it is learned behavior, based on survival instincts…. The first great wave of retrenchment followed Richard Nixon's public and private war on perceived enemies in PBS; the system responded by dramatically slashing the amount of airtime devoted to critical assessments of sitting presidents and Congresses. Hence, today the best way to get a full-length documentary about a presidential-related topic on PBS is to produce one on a president who has not been in office for 20 years….  (Commentators) with more sweeping, damning criticisms-from any political perspective-will simply not be invited to appear. In this way, public broadcasting's government subsidy functions like hush money to protect powerful incumbents.

Another method of political influence-the specialty of Democrats such as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton-is to voice support for public broadcasting as a way of controlling and defining it for political gain. …

Another significant area where public broadcasting looks increasingly like its commercial counterpart is business journalism. At one time, public television's national business programming-which includes the half-hour Nightly Business Report, and the weekly Wall Street Week in Review and Adam Smith's Money World might have been justified by arguing that televised business news was a rare commodity.

But the 1980s and '90s witnessed an unprecedented explosion in this category, catapulting televised business and financial news into what is surely its Golden Age…. By 1996, it was simply preposterous to argue that there could be a significant number of viewers who wanted stock and bond updates and reports on mergers and acquisitions who had not figured out a way to get them before the Nightly Business Report came on public television. Suggestions from labor and consumer advocates that PBS could produce distinctive business programming by focusing on the lives of working people rather than the portfolios of investors have been ignored.

…. With cable due soon to reach nearly every American household and to expand, as most predict, to either hundreds of channels or an individually tailored CD-ROM or "push technology" format, it is nearly impossible to see what makes PBS's programming unique-or even necessary.

The televisionaries who conceived of the need and role for public broadcasting did not foresee how a multichannel cable environment would alter television content and the advertising base that supports it. In the Big Three network environment of the 1960s, it seemed eminently logical to assume that corporate television sponsors would never be satisfied by the thin audiences attracted to offbeat or highbrow fare. But by scattering audiences to dozens of channels, by offering low-cost saturation advertising-and, most importantly, by charging subscription rates that few in the' 60s would have dreamed possible-cable television's "narrowcasting" has succeeded in forging a commercial foundation that supports a great deal of PBS-type programming, even where the number of viewers is too small for A. C. Nielsen to care to measure…. cable's growth has robbed public television of one of its most powerful rationales. It is one thing to argue that PBS programming provides a unique service to poorer or remote populations unserved by cable; it is quite another to say that PBS should be satisfied with simply duplicating, in content and in form, benign programming that most American television viewers already watch elsewhere.

 

The melding of commercial and public broadcasting priorities is not schizophrenia, or some random breakdown of public broadcasting's identity. It is a logical result of the increasing, now dominant use of public broadcasting as a marketing and promotional outlet. As public television relies more and more on corporate underwriting and an array of commercial gimmicks for its funding, its programming approach-even its on-screen talent-will look more and more like those of commercial networks. (Public radio, as I argue in chapter 6, while subject to precisely the same forces, behaves somewhat differently.) Today, corporate underwriting represents more than 16 percent of PBS's overall budget-up from 10 percent a decade ago-and 27 percent of its national programming costs. Though that may appear to be far from a controlling interest, there are virtually no programs on the PBS dial that are not in some way beholden to private, commercial firms.

Public broadcasters, quite naturally, perceive underwriting as an essential form of support. It is also, however, an inevitable censor. There are perspectives on certain topics-including gays and lesbians, American foreign policy, abortion, and the environment-that cannot be aired on national television without provoking a peculiarly American firestorm of criticism. The commercial networks, whose advertising lifeline almost automatically seeks in advance to avoid such controversy, learned back in the 1950s that the best way to prevent such flak was to sharply curtail the programming that makes it to the nation's living room. Networks enforce genres-soap operas, situation comedies, game shows, half-hour newscasts-because both advertiser and audience have signed an implied consent decree to not be offended by … what is broadcast within those boundaries…. Commercial television's self-imposed straitjacket is the primary reason why public television was founded. Few would have predicted that public television would, a quarter-century into its existence, have tailored a distinctive, but equally bland, straitjacket of its own. Thirty years into the experiment of public television finds a typical evening that draws from depressingly few genres: largely duplicative news and business programming, aging imported British drama or mystery, nature and science programming often indistinguishable from that shown elsewhere, and arts programming that usually deviates little from the tastes of the local elite.

There are many observations to be made about such programs, but they share either the avoidance or the defanging of contemporary political controversy, the kind that would bring trouble for powerful patrons. Where, as Raymond Williams asked of American public television back in the '70s, are the documentaries? With the genre essentially extinct on commercial television, documentaries are clearly an area where public broadcasting could distinguish itself. And if the medium is to provide a sustained, intelligent, critical look at American society-as its founders certainly intended-it must examine the actions and faults of America's most powerful institutions: government, finance, insurance and real estate industries, oil companies, media, tobacco and agriculture, lobbyists, federal bureaucracies, pharmaceutical companies, auto makers, and the military. Yet public broadcasting treads cautiously around the nation's and the world's most pressing social problems….

 

[13] Radio listened to in cars is a particular potent vehicle for community information, news synthesis and interviews etc.

[14] The latest iteration of the Moving Picture Expert Group's standard, MPEG-4 reduces the bandwidth requirements to as little as 40 kilobits per second—some 50 times leaner than MPEG-2—while preserving clarity. At higher bit rates, MPEG-4 manages near-DVD quality. MPEG-4 incorporates 23 different mathematical profiles. These enable users to adapt its algorithms to operate on a variety of devices, including pocket PCs and set-top boxes.

[15] Video compression technology has now reached a stage where very high quality film can be streamed to the home from anywhere on the Internet via fast (DSL or cable modem – now 50% of subscribers in North America) internet connections which are now possessed by a major and fast growing section of the Canadian and world public.  This enables individuals to set up a video server and give away or rent movies etc.  It is the dream of narrow-casting.  Soon you will be able to view Hebrew, or Malayam movies and news reports in your home world-wide.

[16] Digital Technology and Cultural Policy by Kieran Healy, University of Arizona, August 15, 2001

http://www.pewtrusts.com/pdf/cul_tech_and_cultural_policy.pdf

[17] CATV term distinguishing cable from broadcasting, it describes the function of distributing a range of TV channels or programs designed for minority interests rather than mass appeal. www.wtcs.org/snmp4tpc/jton.htm