Crosstalk disturbs the curtained clouds of America's airwaves
Censorship is only one of many threats to freedom of speech
A new arrival in heaven was on a tour of his new home, the old joke goes. The angels were flying him from cloud to cloud, pointing out important landmarks and the homes of celebrities, when the new guy noticed that one of the clouds had curtains all around it. "What's up with that?" the newbie asked (he was from Jersey, OK?). "Oh, that's the [insert name of religious group here]," one angel explained. "They think they're the only ones up here."
Until very recently, radio in America was a lot like that, with public radio and commercial radio rarely even acknowledging each other's existence even though they were next-door neighbors on what was once called "the dial." Listeners, of course, have always seen right through those curtains, if they perceived them at all. They routinely jump from one station or band to the other, they assume that everybody in radio probably knows everybody else, and they don't hear much real difference between the loud, compressed ads on commercial radio and the slick-but-subdued "underwriting" on public radio. Those listeners would be surprised to learn how uncommon it is for journalists or other radio "talent" to move successfully -- or even attempt to move -- from one realm to the other.
Not only do public radio and commercial radio each have their own organizations, conventions, and publications, but other than engineers -- who focus on laws of physics that apply everywhere -- people who work in one radio world rarely get together with their colleagues in the other realm. Shop talk would be difficult in any case, because they even have separate jargon, and to be honest, the public folks kind of look down at the commercial people as having sold out for advertising, while those in commercial radio look down at the public people because, frankly, underwriting generally produces smaller paychecks than advertising does. Similarly, AM and FM radio do acknowledge each other, especially when they share the same markets and/or owners, but they also tend to keep to themselves.
But early in 2004, distressing sounds began filling the airwaves, to the extent that all the curtained clouds in radioland suddenly started picking up each other's signals. That cacaphony of crosstalk delivered a disconcerting message: not only are they not alone, but they're not in heaven, either. And if they're not very, very careful, they may not even be in radio much longer.
The problem began not with a sound but with a sight: the notorious Super Bowl flesh flash. Days earlier, there was a touch of dramatic foreshadowing, but it seemed more humorous than ominous at the time. When candidate Dennis Kucinich held up a pie chart to illustrate a point in a January radio debate, everybody laughed and pointed out that visuals don't matter on the radio. Turns out they do, as Congress, the Federal Communications Commission, and private enterprise have subsequently made clear. (Once again, Kucinich was right, and once again, it did him absolutely no good.)
So now you've got your public-radio people coming out in support of the likes of Howard Stern, and the embattled shock jock speaking out on behalf of a public-radio commentator who was fired by one of the nation's top public stations because an obscenity she blurted in a prerecorded program didn't get edited out before it aired. You've got right-wing pain-pill-aficionado Rush Limbaugh taking Stern's side as well. And you've got one of the most progressive, open-minded people in public radio taking shockingly conservative action to protect her station and its license from the aural equivalent of the exposed areola.
So far the FCC's jurisdiction does not extend into new-media spheres such as cyberspace or satellite networks. Nor does the FCC regulate cable-television programming as it does the public airwaves, so cable comics can continue using words that can't be broadcast and adult channels can still be adult. But as economist William Hamilton pointed out some decades ago, and Clear Channel Communications illustrated just last week, “Business succeeds rather better than the State in imposing its restraint upon individuals, because its imperatives are disguised as choices.”
In the case of the Nipplegate ripple effect, private enterprise may well be making the choices it does in response to such powerful government imperatives as a 20-fold increase in fines. But while government may be taking the lead in protecting us from bare breasts and worty dirds, that censorship is only one of many serious threats to our public avenues of communication. For the past decade or so, under Democrats, under Republicans, more and more of what was traditionally considered public intellectual property has been claimed as private. Every time the copyright on Mickey Mouse was about to expire, Congress extended the term for all copyrights, and those extensions were upheld by the Supreme Court. Public-domain material whose copyright has long since expired, distributed digitally with copy-protection, has become the private property not of the original author, but the owner of the copy-protection code. Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig tells us all about it in his new book,
Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity:
That book won't be officially published until later this month, but even as Lessig was finishing it, yet another threat to the public discourse emerged, yet again in the halls of Congress. Traditionally, while compilations of facts, such as directories or databases, can be protected by copyright, the facts themselves were considered public property. But in January, the "Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act," a bill that would have put the raw material of those databases -- just plain facts -- under copyright protection for the first time, got preliminary approval from the House Judiciary Committee. Now that some light has been shown in its direction, the bill appears dead for this session, with nary a mention remaining on the web site of the congressman who sponsored it. But the threats to the
public domain, to
fair use, and to free expression are still very much alive.
I was reminded of all that the other day when my husband and I were shopping, and the cashier made a mistake, giving our receipt to the customer in front of us, and vice versa. "Oh, %$#@!" she exclaimed when she realized what had happened. She's lucky she doesn't work in radio. And she's even luckier that so far, the word she used hasn't become anybody's private property.
