The Boobs Tube

Who owns the air?

Despite its simplicity, this is a question that many of my students got wrong.  Whenever I’d ask it in my Mass Media class, a few brave souls would confidently call out “the government.”

Wrong.  It’s mine.  Mine, mine, mine.

The problem (or the virtue, depending on one’s perspective) is that it’s also yours.  The air, or more accurately the electromagnetic spectrum that passes through it, is owned by the American public (at least within the United States.)  If anybody wants to use it for private purposes, they have to have my permission. 

Yours, too. 

And everybody else’s.

It wasn’t always that way.  In the infancy of radio, anybody with the simplest of equipment could start broadcasting anything they wanted.  After all, the First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech and of the press, doesn’t it?  We’re a free people, aren’t we?  So all across the country aspiring broadcasters—bakers, car dealers, entertainers, charlatans, religious leaders, even kids in their basements with tubes affixed to mom’s breadboard—started filling the airwaves.

And, quite quickly, they made an unfortunate discovery:  the electromagnetic spectrum, and particularly the part of it devoted to radio and television signals, is a severely limited resource.  There’s only a certain amount of “water” that can fit through this “hose.”  Signals started crossing.  Those with greater power drowned out those with less.  Distant stations interfered with local ones broadcasting on the same frequency.  Everybody was talking at the same time. The entire medium faced a collapse into chaos.

Somebody needed to be a traffic cop, and since radio waves don’t respect local boundaries, that cop had to be the federal government.  First in 1927, as the Federal Radio Commission, and with expanded powers in 1934 as the Federal Communications Commission, that regulator was established by Congress.  And broadcasting, the most powerful medium in human history, the most influential force in American life of the 20^th Century, has been censored. (Yes, I know:  even the FCC claims that they lack “censorship” power, and technically that’s true; nobody is jailed for violating their regulations.  But I’m thinking of “censorship” in a broader sense, as I’ll try to explain below.)

“Wait,” you’re thinking about now.  “Where are the boobs you promised?  Why are we getting a lecture on media law?”  Don’t worry:  here they, or at least one of them, are.

During the halftime show of the Super Bowl in 2004, singers Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake “accidentally” exposed, for a microsecond, one of her breasts.  Writer Marin Cogan analyzes the “event” and its impact in far more detail than I could, but the upshot is that this one microsecond of partial nudity exposed (pun intended) the glaring hypocrisy of television regulation.  Led by an organized campaign, half a million people complained to the FCC for this violation of “decency” standards, and the FCC fined 20 Viacom-owned stations $550,000 (later reversed by the courts).

Just the next month, viewers so inclined could have watched Season 5 of The Sopranos and enjoyed multiple blood-spattered murders, graphic sex and nudity (one frequent setting was a strip club) and profanity-saturated dialogue, as well as a story line which, some might argue, made mobsters into sympathetic characters.  The FCC acted on no complaints about The Sopranos; no fines were imposed or even contemplated.

The difference?  The Sopranos was produced for Home Box Office (HBO), carried by cable and satellite and available only to those willing to pay a rather hefty premium for it.  HBO did not need to seek public permission to use the medium, and the FCC has no jurisdiction over it.

And here’s the paradox of television:  programming (or at least some of it) is much better now than ever before, of a quality that often exceeds even the best movies.  Such series as The Sopranos, The Wire, House of Cards, Mad Men, etc. exemplify the most complex and challenging writing, acting and production available in American culture today.  And yet they’re only possible because television has transformed from a democratic medium to one for the elite.  Ironically, the First Amendment now protects programming that is not available to large numbers of Americans.

Broadcast television, using the public airwaves, was democratic; it was required by law to offer something for everybody—all the owners of the airwaves.  Of course, it never really did this; it always catered to a white, middle-class audience, the target of mass advertisers.  In fact, this kind of “democracy” actually led to a kind of tyranny—the tyranny of the conventional.  Since programming was ratings-driven, television was dictated by majority rule—and the majority, in this case, wasn’t just ethnic, but also economic.  The result was a fairy-tale view of American life, a fantasy of family and manners that never existed, and never could have.  Lucy and Ricky slept in separate beds, even when she was pregnant (a word she couldn’t use).  Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhuru exchanged an interracial kiss—but only under compulsion by aliens.  Western heroes contested hundreds of gunfights, but the bullets never drew blood from the bodies they punctured. And the language television characters spoke was decorous and “moral”, as far removed from real American English as any Shakespeare production.  Good triumphed and evil was punished, and even the news edited out graphic content to avoid disturbing complacent viewers.  And half-time shows featured marching bands and clean-cut, “Up With People”-style choral groups.  The standard for decades, agreed upon by the FCC and the broadcasters themselves, was the “least common denominator”; that programming is best which offends the fewest.

Pay television has radically changed that.  Some might argue that The Sopranos is no more “realistic”, in the long run, than Gunsmoke; fair enough.  Any dramatic structure with a beginning, a middle and an end is going to distort the chaos of real life.  But at least there’s more variety, more complexity of characterization and plot development, more willingness to explore uncomfortable issues.  And, yes, more boobs.

But what of a medium for a democracy?  What are the consequences of segregating the best programming, the best sporting events, the concerts and topical comedy, behind an increasingly burdensome pay wall?  What is the morality of leaving the “leftovers” for the poor or those without cable or satellite service while the elite get to enjoy the “good stuff”?  Granted, increasingly such programming is available directly from internet sources such as Netflix or Hulu.  But these still require disposable income—lots of it. 

We used to be able, at least, to discuss the latest episode of M*A*S*H the next morning at work.  Have we lost even that basic bond?