MAKING HISTORY TODAY: Media and U.S. Politics - Allison Perlman on Public Interests

Making History Today, produced by the History program at Fitchburg State University, connects the classroom to historians working in their fields. In these conversations, students discuss works assigned in class and develop questions for the authors, which are then posed in these episodes.

The first series of conversations emerges from Prof. Katherine Jewell's graduate course in Fitchburg State's online Master's program in History in summer 2023 on Media and U.S. Politics.

In this episode, students engage with Dr. Allison Perlman at the University of California Irvine and her book, Public Interests: Media Advocacy and Struggles Over US Television (Rutgers UP, 2016).

Allison Perlman is an associate professor in the departments of history and film and media studies at UC Irvine. Her research examines the intersections between television history, American social movements, and broadcasting policy. Her publications include articles in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Feminist Media Studies, Television and New Media, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Cinema Journal, and Communication, Culture and Critique.

Episode transcript can be found here.

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This episode was edited and sound mixed by Adam Fournier, a member of the Perseverantia staff and a student in the Communications Media department.

Click here to learn more about Perseverantia. Join us for programming updates on Instagram. Or reach out with ideas or suggestions at podcasts@fitchburgstate.edu.

Transcript

Making History Today: Media and Politics - Allison Perlman on Public Interests

Katherine Jewell: [00:00:00] Alison Perlman is associate professor at University of California, Irvine, in the Departments of History and Film and Media Studies. Her research examines the intersections between television history, American social movements, and broadcasting policy. Her publications include articles in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Feminist Media Studies, Television and New Media, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Cinema Journal, and Communication, Culture, and Critique.

History students read her book, Public Interests, Media Advocacy, and the 

Allison Perlman: Struggles over U. S. Television 

Katherine Jewell: from Rutgers University Press in 2016, which was the winner of the Outstanding Book Award from the Popular Communication Division of the International Communication Association. Here's Eric Diaz discussing public interests.

Eric Diaz: Allison Perlman's Public Interest Media Advocacy and [00:01:00] Struggles Over U. S. Television, written in 2016, focuses on the history of how the public sought to regulate television in order to reflect their social and political beliefs. Perlman offers insight into how social movements transform the way television operates, specifically from communities often in the margins of history, while tracing the evolution, public interest, and the wake of social change.

Perman's book is a series of case studies to highlight media advocacy. The Black Freedom Movement, the National Organization for Women, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Parents Television Council, and the National Hispanic Media Coalition took different approaches in how they responded to the deregularization of media.

Most notable is how groups pushed back to the definition and understanding of television and what was best for the public interest. Of particular interest as a Latino myself, was Perlman's chapter on the National Hispanic Media Coalition, Spanish Language Broadcasting, and Latino Media Advocacy. The NHMC was like other groups, [00:02:00] fighting for more inclusion in broadcasting and enforcement of minority media policies.

With the understanding that Latinos were the most dynamic TV market in the U. S. and expanding rapidly, it was no surprise that networks were eager to access this market. I appreciate that Perlman's book shows social and political movement seizing the opportunity to change television to benefit their communities.

To understand reform of communities in this lens allows us to see public interest through time, people, and movements rather than a fixed term and expand our view of media advocacy.

Katherine Jewell: Welcome Professor Perlman. So could you just tell us a little bit about yourself? 

Allison Perlman: I'm Allison Perlman. I work on the history of television. I'm currently working on a history of public television. before, the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act in 1967. My first book that we'll be talking about is a history of media activism, specifically struggles over [00:03:00] broadcasting policy from the late 1940s to the early 2000s.

Katherine Jewell: Students in the class put together a set of questions that I've arranged into some themes. First set of questions has to do with this question of media representation. And so, Raymond asked, what was more difficult to get onto the airwaves of the television? Topics of the civil rights movement or topics of the women's movement.

He says you talk about the women's movement in particular and the difficulties they faced and how they sort of piggybacked on the issues of civil rights. What sort of differences do you see in how they went about securing representation or the different obstacles that they faced for those two different social movements?

Allison Perlman: I would differentiate between getting coverage of social movement actions, issues, particular campaigns, or particular struggles of civil rights activists versus feminists, and then the representations of people of color versus representations of [00:04:00] people of women in, let's say, primetime entertainment programming.

One aspect of the Black freedom struggle, especially in the late 1950s and early 1960s, that will be instructive for so many other social movements. Was that many leaders were incredibly savvy about the necessity for getting television coverage. And so many of, especially the Southern campaign, so efforts to desegregate public facilities in the South or efforts to register African American voters, many of these actions were specifically designed to elicit a confrontation with the white power structure in local communities. These confrontations were very televisual. They were dramatic, they were often violent, and they clarified in stark moral terms the lines of divide between civil rights activists who were seeking participation in the political, social, and economic life of the nation.

And there were opponents who were seeking to maintain a system of [00:05:00] racial hierarchy that subordinated Black citizens to positions of inferiority within local institutions and local politics. Television news networks were incredibly interested in these stories. There's this amazing story of a civil rights movement that's emerging that's dramatic and Urgent and really televisual that's occurring simultaneously with this very strong need to have compelling news programming for both local stations and national networks, the coverage of the black freedom struggle will start to shift in the later 1960s when a lot of the activism or struggle moves away from the South and into the North, especially when it takes the form not of nonviolent protest, when those tactics are abandoned by a number of people who are exhausted with the slow pace of reform. Many people are living in segregated communities with subpar housing, with no economic opportunities, and especially our communities that are subject to routine forms of police brutality. They often turn to forms of urban violence as an [00:06:00] expression of rage and sense of despair.

Television networks cover these acts as well, but the tone of the coverage is quite different. Many journalists were sympathetic to the civil rights activists in the South. Part of the sympathy lay in the fact that they were covering nonviolent protests. But many white Southerners who are opposed to civil rights saw a national news coverage, individuals who were not attuned, in their view, to the dynamics of local communities and who were misrepresenting their homes to a national audience. And they often turned their anger towards journalists themselves. And so if you're an NBC reporter covering Selma or Birmingham, it's not unlikely that opponents of civil rights are going to be targeting you as well.

Whereas with the urban rebellions of the North, many of the journalists who are covering these incidents often overly rely on reports by the police or local officials, and they present it not in the same frame as this is an act towards trying [00:07:00] to create the beloved community of racial harmony that ostensibly the nation is moving towards.

Feminists faced a really different situation because first, with the emergence of organizations like the National Organization for Women in 1966 and the blossoming of what we have called second wave feminism, the concept of sexism didn't exist until feminists created it. So the idea that women who would become the face of what was a Far more diverse movement ,where white or middle class or educated that they were making claims of discrimination and harm for many people seemed frivolous or not incredibly substantial.

 They were making these claims in a media environment that was dominated by male journalists who were not very attuned to the concerns that feminists were articulating. So feminists themselves would think about what can we do to get media attention. Probably one of the biggest actions in the early part of this movement is Women's Strike for Equality in 1970, which were marches across the country of women taking to the streets to demonstrate [00:08:00] that gender discrimination is real, it's multifaceted, it limits our capacities in almost all areas of life, and we're gathering together to fight against it. While there was network news coverage of these movements, it tended to diminish and demean a lot of the participants. And to frame them in the language that for many feminists was at the core of why they were fighting. So they would talk about how attractive the women were or the images of the newscast would focus on the bodies of the women.

 So it was much more difficult for feminists to get sympathetic news coverage that saw feminism as a legitimate political movement in comparison to the Black Freedom Circle. 

Katherine Jewell: The students were particularly struck by seeing an era of broadcasting that seemed to have a lot of limits, particularly on content and representation as well as activist voices.

So taking Anna's question, she says, today it seems like there's almost no rules or limits for what's acceptable on television. How has that [00:09:00] changed? When we think about that category of either liberal or permissive, how do you assess that? And then she also wonders if activist groups are still attempting to change the regulations around media.

And if they are, why is this not in our public consciousness in the same way as it was say in these eras?

Allison Perlman: The Federal Communications Commission tried to be somewhat proactive in assuring what was congressionally mandated for broadcasting stations. I think that's really hard to imagine because we're living in an era of media abundance.

But pretty much from the 1920s through the early 1980s, most people saw the broadcasting landscape as an era of media scarcity. By that I mean that in order to operate a radio station or television station required a federal license. And the FCC limited how many radio licenses they would issue and how many TV licenses they would issue.

Television, especially by the end of the 1950s, will become the dominant medium that people [00:10:00] turn to for entertainment, for news, for sports. It structures the rhythms of people's days. It's really the primary binding form of culture for the nation. There are very few stations that are controlling the content that is the substance of that binding culture of the nation.

And so there was a sense during the period that given the fact that there were so few entities that were controlling both local and national culture, there needed to be regulatory requirements to make sure that they were being responsible to the diversity of their communities. There were a few other rules that were focused on diversity of perspective, and probably the one that has oddly resurfaced in our contemporary moment is the Fairness Doctrine.

What the Fairness Doctrine told stations is that they had an affirmative obligation to address controversial topics, and they had to provide both sides of the controversy. It was a really unclear, nebulous rule that the commission had to clarify all the time, and it was never entirely clear, like, did it only apply to news programming? Did it apply to advertisements? Did it [00:11:00] apply to entertainment programming? The FCC has always been really nervous about how its regulations rub up against the first amendment and the speech rights of local broadcasters. And so it historically has preferred to create structural regulations over content regulations.

 For example, it would always prefer to say you can only own X number of broadcasting stations rather than tell particular owners, you have to have particular perspectives on your broadcasting station. And that's essentially how they handle the issue of racial diversity on the air. By the 1970s, less than one half of 1 percent of television stations are owned by people of color or women.

So, so, which is a way of saying all TV stations are essentially controlled by white men. It's a little bit better in radio, but not much. There's a concern that if we believe that there's a nexus between ownership and perspective, and there's only one group of people that control all of the television stations in the country, then there probably are perspectives that are not being represented on the [00:12:00] air. The one area where the commission has been most aggressive, I would say, in terms of content restrictions is over indecency. And it's one of the most resilient, like, like almost everything that I've just described to you is repealed in the 80s and 90s in a period of pretty robust deregulation. 

But the 1934 Federal Communications Act, which creates the Federal Communications Commission and becomes the template for broadcast regulation up until 1996, has a prohibition against indecent, obscene, or profane content over broadcasting stations. But indecency is a different category of speech.

There's not a lot of clarity about what does it mean to prevent indecent speech over radio and television. The way that the commission handles it, for most of its is by fielding individual complaints against local stations. These often come from listeners who are especially listening to community radio in the fifties and sixties, who will hear our program, for example, in which a number of gay men in the [00:13:00] 1950s are talking about what it's like to be a gay man in cold war America.

And a listener will hear that and think the discussion of homosexuality in and of itself is indecent and complain to the FCC. As content, especially on radio stations. starts to get more sexually explicit and more open to diverse forms of sexual expression, the commission is getting more and more complaints and it's getting more and more pressure to codify a policy of what stations are or are not allowed to do in this realm of indecency.

You can't be explicit about sex , sexual intercourse, sexual practices, or about things like defecation, you know, in a manner that is in violation of community standards for broadcasting public between the hours of 6am and 10pm, which is considered the time when children might be in the broadcast audience.

That rule still exists. It only applies to broadcasters. It wouldn't apply to cable casters, but it's always been part of the way that Congress has understood the limitations on broadcasters, but it takes a number [00:14:00] of decades for the commission to solidify a policy about it. 

Katherine Jewell: So, students had questions about how the FCC functions, this question of the Fairness Doctrine, and in particular, these practices that were in place for such a long time and how the FCC and broadcast media in general look in our now internet era.

And so we had a bunch of questions about moving past the era of scarcity. And does the fact that we have so many different media outlets and forms now mean that maybe activist boycotting doesn't have the same effect as it did in the past and at the same time, can the FCC respond to new problems that are emerging or new challenges such as the dissemination of false information.

Allison Perlman: You don't see as much activism, especially of the kind that I wrote about in the book, in part because beginning in the 1980s, we see a pretty big shift in the regulatory sphere [00:15:00] away from a somewhat interventionist approach to regulation to an embrace of deregulation.

Fairness doctrine by 1987, the FCC says we're not going to enforce it anymore. All the minority ownership programs. that meant to bring more people of color into ownership positions. They are ruled unconstitutional. So there's this belief in markets that the communications marketplace is the best mechanism to deliver the public interest, that citizens vote with their feet as consumers.

We tell media entities what matters to us by what we listen to or what we watch. And that, from this perspective, is the best way to assure that the public interest is met and, and the government intervention is an obstacle to that. So I think that's one reason why we see less media activism around broadcast television today.

But I think the other reason is that, civil rights organizations and feminist organizations and a lot of communities are much more interested in thinking about policy around digital media infrastructure, social media platforms, and the [00:16:00] digital space, because they understand that as potentially supplanting broadcasting as the primary site of the public sphere or the space where opinion is formed, information is circulated, communities are formed.

So it seems more vital, for example, for a number of activist groups to think about the issue of net neutrality, which is can internet service providers determine what kind of content we can access when we go online? And are they able, for example, to charge higher access feeds so that they can profit from collecting those fees.

But also then they're shaping how we actually navigate the internet. Because I mean, I include myself in this, if it takes like five seconds for a website to load, I get really impatient and I will go somewhere else. And we're currently living in an era where there are no net neutrality protections for internet users.

The other concern that we've definitely seen over the last eight years or so is this concern over disinformation and misinformation. 

The commission actually had created [00:17:00] rules back in the 1960s over what it called use distortion.

Broadcast networks and public television were interested in creating muckraking documentaries that were exposing social problems and had a kind of advocacy bent towards them and there were some viewers who thought that they were distorted or that the documentary practices were misrepresenting what was actually happening on the ground and a number of complaints were filed to the FCC about this. 

The Democratic National Convention in 1968, which depicted police violence towards anti war protesters on the streets becomes a high watermark of viewers thinking that journalists on television are irresponsible stewards of the public because they're misrepresenting the news. And so in response, the commission is incredibly nervous because they don't want to step on the toes of the press and they recognize that the first amendment protects the freedom of the press and freedom of speech and they're disinterested in being the arbiter of what is true.

That is something FCC does not want to do. They do think that news distortion or staging is a violation of the public interest. And [00:18:00] so they're willing to take action on it, but in order to take action, they require what they call extrinsic evidence of an intention to distort. The owner of a station or the head of the news division has to have known in advance and approved, ideally, in some form that could be conveyed to the commission, like a memo that says, like, let's distort this.

And then they can act. And so it's an incredibly high bar to hold people to account for lying on the air. But almost like the Fairness Doctrine, it's an articulation of a set of values that if you are using the public's airwaves, you should not be using them to intentionally misinform people.

Katherine Jewell: In this new era of media that we're in, what is the future of any kind of government supported media like educational broadcasting? What do you see as the future of the educational realm going forward, 

Allison Perlman: Unlike so many other countries, the U. S. doesn't have a very long tradition [00:19:00] of government supported public service broadcasting.

There's been a long tradition of people who see noncommercial uses for media as vital for both educational purposes, informational purposes, but also to be able to address topics or issues that might not seem viable. But the heartbreaking thing about public media is there's this huge victory, it's 1967 and Congress and the president like, Yes, we're gonna give you money forever because they think you're really important. And you have a new administration that sees public media as overly liberal as hostile to the interests of the administration and tries to reshape it by withholding its funding and staffing the Corporation of Public Broadcasting with political allies that want to reduce journalistic or public affairs programming in the sector.

And things kind of stay messy from then on, where we still have public support for public media, but it's often under threat. It's levels that are necessary, but in no way support the sector. [00:20:00] There's still such a need for every facet of the public media infrastructure to raise money from people like us, from foundations, from, wealthy donors and so on, because it's, it's sort of habitually underfunded.

 I think that there's a real question that we all should be having about what its function is in the 21st century. When the public broadcasting act was passed, it was that same moment where you might have two or three television stations in your community, and they're all commercial and they're all affiliated with the national network.

And so the thought was public media could do something different, you know, to could add a different perspective, add different voices to the public sphere. As cable became a service distinct from broadcast television, and as it started proliferating channels, even then, by the 1980s, there was rumblings that public media was no longer necessary because now we had cable.

So we were out of this period of media scarcity. We had media abundance. There were cable networks that were all about food and all about gardening and all about, [00:21:00] you know children. And so there was already diversity on the airwaves, why are we spending federal money on public media? The sector has been just the subject of so many political hits because of documentaries that it's aired over the decades that have spot lit communities that are often invisible within mainstream media spaces, and a number of politicians have used that as an opportunity to indict the sector as not being representative of the public, and it's a real testament to advocates of public media that it still receives any level of federal support because there's so many moments when it was at risk.

The one thing that the public media sector has never done effectively is settle on a legible, clearly articulated mission and function. You know, so it's always wanted to do lots of different things and there's always been disagreement about who and what it's for. And in some ways that's been a productive disagreement over time, but there's never been a resolution to this.

And I think there's an. open question about how or if it is necessary today. The other side [00:22:00] of that is that public radio in some ways has never been more esteemed or popular. And with the expansion of podcasting, public radio in particular seems vital and important in ways that it didn't 20 years ago because so many podcasting genres owe their aesthetics and their orientation to public radio programming. And I think people understand that synergy between the public radio world and the proliferation of podcasts that has been such a remarkable transformation in especially sound media the last two decades.

Katherine Jewell: this has been so fascinating and raised so many interesting issues that I hope we will continue to address when we read more in depth about the network's coverage of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago with Heather Hendershot's book. Certainly we will continue to think about this.

So thank you so much for joining us. 

Allison Perlman: Yeah, thank you so much. Those were really great questions and it was so nice to talk with you.

This is [00:23:00] Alex Paola. I'm majoring in history with a concentration in education. Class of 2025, you're listening to Perseverancia, the Fitchburg State Podcasting Network.