A Response to Hans Klein's "Public Access Television: An Institutional Analysis"

Over on the Alliance's Facbook page a few weeks ago, Ben Sheldon posted a link to the Winter 2005 "On Beyond Access" issue of the Alliance's quarterly journal, Community Media Review, eliciting a comment a few days ago enthusing about its still-valid content.  Unfortunately, there is one article in that issue which is severely flawed and needs a response - Hans Klein's "Public Access Television: An Institutional Analysis."  In January 2007 I wrote such a response and made it available to the Alliance's listserv.  I'm now reposting it on my blog here, so that I may add this link to the Facebook page's comment roll.

~ Rob McCausland

From: Rob McCausland
To: ACM Listserve
Cc: hans[at]gatech.edu
Sent: Wed, January 10, 2007 2:16:48 AM
Subject: Ramblin' Wreck from Georgia Tech

Ramblin' Wreck from Georgia Tech

Readers of Alliance-Announce may remember a thread last spring related to some quotes from Professor Hans Klein which had been printed in a New Hampshire paper, more or less to the effect that local cable television channels now were less important for community media purposes than internet capacity.  Misquoted, actually, Professor Klein informed us, after some interesting back and forth on the list.

Readers may also remember a follow-up from Professor Klein, wherein he distributed his paper, "Public Access Television: An Institutional Analysis" (3/16/06).  A slightly abbreviated version was published in Community Media Review - "On Beyond Access," Vol. 28, # 4 (pdf).

Professor Klein's conclusion in this paper is that the institutions of public access television "lessen its capacity to effect social change, and …inhibit the adoption of new community media."

Much of what Professor Klein wrote in that paper deserved a response, I felt, and I began drafting one.  However, events intervened (the Boston conference, a job transition and move, etc.), and I never got around to finishing it off.  This weekend I finally dug out my notes and have now completed a response. 

Before any more intellectual distance is traveled down this "let's chase new media" road (say, at this week's National Conference for Media Reform), I'd like to share my critique of Professor Klein's analysis.  I believe his analysis is deeply flawed.  I believe that his conclusions distort the record of public access, that they are unsupported by the facts, and that they should not be relied upon as the basis for further planning in this important area.

Thanks in advance for your kind and thoughtful attention.

Those who know my on-line writing know that I rarely participate in heated disagreements or flame-wars.  However, you also know I can tend to be too verbose, and, at times, self-indulgent.  I've tried to rein in those tendencies here. 

As I look at Professor Klein's background, I find myself reluctant to critique so accomplished a scholar.  I have not met the gentleman, and I make no assumptions about his motivations or character.  However, there are a couple places where I find his reasoning so bereft that I've allowed myself a ‘Jon Stewart’ moment or two.  No personal slights are intended here, for I am in earnest, as is he, I trust, in the search for good and usable data about, and thoughtful approaches to our community communications missions.

A Response to Hans Klein’s March 16, 2005 paper,
"Public Access Television: An Institutional Analysis"
by Rob McCausland
January 9, 2007

After more than twenty-five years working up data on community access television and looking for serious research on its operations and impacts (see, for example "Audience Measurements: Some Results, Readings, & Reflections" (2001), I was glad to finally see a major academic institution turn its attention to our field of endeavor.

I just wish this paper from Georgia Institute of Technology's Professor Hans Klein had been informed by actual data.  Unfortunately, his paper lacks the minimum standards one expects from an academic research institution: it proceeds without mention of a literature search, it cites no references to support its assertions, and it contains no detailed description of any further research needed.

Professor Klein's stated intention is to present an "institutional analysis" of public access television, and he proceeds to do so in six broad areas:  Mission, Regulatory Framework, Industry Structure, Pressure Groups, Technology, and Professional Culture.  I have detailed responses to his comments in each of these sections, but I first need to mention three general problems with his overall approach.

First, as he uses the term “public access,” Klein is apparently only referring to those public access channels that are managed by non-profit corporations.  For the most part, his analysis cannot be applied to and thus ignores those public access channels managed by other entities such as schools, libraries, governments, and cable companies. 

In addition, his institutional analysis of those NPO entities managing public access channels ignores (again, for the most part) those who also manage so-called educational and/or governmental access channels.  It is of course fair to focus just on public access services.  But in many cases, not taking into account these entities’ larger context of services will render any “institutional” analyses importantly incomplete, and possibly flawed.

Next, throughout Klein’s analysis one detects an apparent assumption that some sort of nationalized model for the provision of public access services would be preferred.  To some extent this assumption conflicts with a central organizing concept of public access – that it exists to meet local, community communication needs.

Finally, beyond his initial presumption of a preference for a national model, Klein is proceeding from the assumption that there is an important and unmet need for “innovation” within the public access sector.  He states this in his introductory premise - institutions "condition the possibilities for further innovation" in public access television -- and he restates it as proven in his conclusion.  However, nowhere does he say what he means by "innovation," nor does he even attempt to describe any evidence for the presumed unmet need for it.  Since this is his starting premise -- that as a sector, public access is failing to innovate -- it remains unexamined throughout the rest of his paper.  His paper cannot prove it or disprove it, because it began and remained for him unnecessary to prove.

MISSION

Klein begins by asserting that public access television has two broad missions – “social change and free speech.”  True, he does qualify this by saying “at least” two broad missions -- but he only mentions these two – and he concludes saying that he will show that the “free speech” mission is winning out.  Klein can set these two missions up in opposition if he wants to, but his subsequent analysis will be incomplete and possibly flawed if he doesn’t take into account an access provider’s other missions. 

Presentations of high school sporting events, for example, local history discussions, regular municipal meetings, or even announcements of community events, don’t seem as if they could be fairly classified either as serving a “social change” or a “free speech” mission.  Yet such programming is common on US public access television channels.  It is often the most watched, and judged among the most valuable by viewers.  Whatever “institutional analysis” is applied to these channels’ providers, ignoring the diversity of their community communications functions will likely lead to conclusions that don’t apply very well to their real world circumstances. 

It would be more useful to acknowledge that each and every public access channel was created in response to a perceived set of local needs.  This is not to say that no useful generalizations can be made about public access television channels’ missions – just that leaving it at these two is too glib by far to be very helpful in the world that most access practitioners inhabit today.

REGULATORY FRAMEWORK

In this section Klein makes the point that most public access entities exist as a result of a franchise process controlled by local governmental authorities, and thus they can be rendered “less assertive in pursuing a social change mission.”  He cites one example of governmental interference with content, but gives no data showing how common or widespread such interference actually is.  That’s unfortunate, since it leaves one of his paper’s main conclusions – that these arrangements “lessen PA-TV’s capacity to effect social change” – unsupported by meaningful evidence.

Then too, since Klein is only considering social change and free speech missions, he is unable to comment on how the regulatory framework for public access entities might inhibit or perhaps even promote their many other missions. 

INDUSTRY STRUCTURE

Some of Klein’s statements in this section deserve questioning; many need to be disputed.  First he cites some interesting numbers:

Number of Access Centers: Approx. 400
Total 2001 US Access Funding: $120 million
Total Public Support Over Last Decade: Between $1-2 billion
US Centers with Budgets < $200,000: >50% of Total

I’m curious how Klein came up with these numbers, since he references no source for them.  He doesn’t say, to take one example, what is considered a “public access center” for the purposes of this count, or to take another, what constitutes “total public support.”  We need not quibble about which years “the last decade” covers, I suppose, but what about the fact that the range of support cited in that example is, shall we say, quite broad?

Here’s a case where the application of minimum standards of academic research would have been quite helpful.  I don’t mean to insinuate that here we’re seeing the proverbial "lies, damned lies, and statistics."  Rather, there are a lot of us who care deeply about the health and viability of this and other forms of community media.  The types of figures Klein cites here are being sought by many of us.  Useful statistics (in any field, I suppose) require a lot of careful consideration in order to come up with clear definitions and appropriate distinctions, and equal care in collecting and compiling the data. It is just a shame that this effort, coming from such a major institution, was not able to provide more credible and more meaningful baseline data, since that’s one needed thing that such an institution could helpfully contribute.

Regardless of whether or not his numbers are credible and meaningful, however, Klein’s further assertions in this section bear examining, since they are based on unexplained reasoning, unmeasured parameters, and implicitly assumed shared values.

1) Klein states that public access’ fractured industry structure means that the sector is composed of many cash-strapped entities.  However, he does not show how the structure results in inadequate funding levels, nor does he attempt to show how a changed structure would result in increased funding.

2) Since access centers “lack resources to do more than focus on their core mission,” Klein states, “they cannot easily invest in experimentation.”    Nowhere does Klein so much as mention, much less demonstrate any need for “experimentation.” He doesn’t discuss what “going beyond their immediate core mission” might mean, nor has he suggested any reasons why he or anyone else thinks they should try to.  He assumes we all should just take it as read that public access centers need to experiment and go beyond their core missions.  Perhaps if access centers had the same impoverished views of their missions that Klein has, that assertion might make some sense. 

3) This alleged lack of investment in experimentation, Klein then speculates, may contribute to the sector’s slow adoption of new media technology.  But again, Klein doesn’t even attempt to present information that establishes that the sector’s adoption of new media technology has been slow.  He has not even suggested what he or anyone else thinks would constitute an “appropriate” rate of adoption.

I have no doubt that research would disclose that public access television as a sector is adopting new technologies – partly because of low funding levels.  I believe research would show that new technology adoption levels more closely correlate with the life cycle of the access entity.  Access providers that have just come on line in the last few years are more apt to have purchased current generation equipment than those who are even a few years older (and more and more access centers are coming on line all the time).

Over time, camcorders and edit decks break down, eventually reaching the end of their life span.  As digital format equipment continues to drop in price and increase in functionality and ease-of-use, it seems reasonable to assume that more access providers over time have been migrating to these new platforms, and are now starting to reap the synchronistic benefits that come with these new technologies.  (As centers begin to adopt MPEG-4 for cablecasting, for example, more centers will then be able to more easily exchange programs via the Internet.)  If this rate of adoption is too “slow” for Klein’s taste, it is nonetheless in line, I suspect, with much of the rest of the public sector – not everyone can afford to replace installed capital base every time a new technology becomes available.

4) “Although there are noteworthy exceptions,” Klein states, “PA-TV is not a sector characterized by innovation.”  Once again, Klein presents no evidence to support this – he just states it as accepted fact.  He doesn’t even define what he means by “innovation,” what he would consider an appropriate measure for innovation, or what he thinks would constitute a “good” level.  Interviews with access directors across the country would likely yield numerous examples of access centers who are innovatively doing more production and programming with fewer resources, and who, in so doing, are helping their communities communicate in ways which never had existed before their channels were created.

Before summarizing this section, Klein makes mention of the Alliance for Community Media.  “Strapped for resources, it too focuses on its core mission of holding an annual conference and defending its sector from hostile policy initiatives in Washington, DC.”  Reducing the ACM’s core mission to those two activities, as Klein does, ignores the many multiples of conferences, seminars, workshops, newsletters and such produced several times each year not only by the ACM, but by its regional and state chapters, as well – not to mention the robust listservs the ACM makes available for its members and other interested participants.  In fact, for Klein to neglect including in this list even the very journal carrying his article – the Community Media Review, published quarterly by the ACM, seems a bit cheeky, to say the least.  His perfunctory dismissal of the ACM represents a bald-faced willful devaluation not just of the ACM, but more importantly for the credibility of his argument, of the broad range of PEG access interests the ACM represents.

The picture Klein paints is one where public access exists through a scattered collection of individual entities, cut off and disconnected from the larger stream propelling community media forward.  I think that’s an inaccurate picture of the reality.  In my experience as a PEG access advocate in the Northeast for the last twenty-five years, it is often true that communities taking over local channel management from their cable operators may have little-to-no idea of the larger community of public access.  However, judging from what I’ve seen, once a community has taken charge of its channels, it doesn’t take them long to come up to speed. 

Additionally, through the variety of means it employs, the ACM and its state and regional chapters have been quite successful in aiding in the diffusion, not just of new technologies, but of new techniques, as well, for building community through community media.  Of course, that’s just an assertion of mine, based on no more data than Professor Klein’s assertions.  But I suspect that if one were to go back and look at the conference sessions over the last 25 years, and the CMR articles, and the listserv discussions, one would easily discern a steadily rising curve in the content development representing new technologies and techniques, as well as ancillary discussions tracing the path of how these technologies and techniques emanated outwards from the early adopters to become part of our industry’s standard kit bags and practices.  The move from analog to digital tape is but one example.

PRESSURE GROUPS

In opening this section Klein says, “As discussed above, local government officials are the most influential external force on an access center.”  The problem is, Klein did not discuss that earlier.  In cases where the franchise is granted by the local authorities, he did state a case that such authorities' potential influence was substantial, but he did not assert nor attempt to show that those local governments wielded the most influence over these centers, nor did he assert that local governments had any influence in the many instances where they were not the franchise authorities.

As Klein frames his now expanded argument, all access centers face three categories of pressure groups – local government officials, video producers, and viewers.  I believe framing the argument this way does not help Klein’s attempt to produce a useful institutional analysis.  Access practitioners, I think, are benefited more in their day-to-day operations by concerning themselves with a variety of client types.  An access center’s clients include producers, viewers, and local government officials, yes, but also educators, local businesses, non-profit organizations, and other community principals, whether or not they produce programs or view the channel.  In this larger, more real-world description of an access center’s environment, the center’s board, staff, vendors, even in-state and out-of-state colleagues, all can usefully be seen as clients of that center’s experience and resources.

To take but one simple example, an access center needs to accommodate a community’s needs for displaying community announcements, usually not because viewers, producers, or government officials require it, but because doing so fulfills part of its mission of service to its community.  Perhaps in his model one of Klein’s three pressure groups could prevail in convincing an access center to do otherwise, but not if that center were keeping faith with serving its multiplicity of clients.

Klein postulates that the second most important external influence on an access center is its producer base (odd, the world view of external vs. internal influence which his framing sets up).  Since a center’s viewers are less likely to be heard from than the producers who are on site, Klein says, the producers’ needs are more apt to be addressed.  “Most access centers experience strong pressure from producers and weak pressure from viewers.”  Again, Klein just states this as if it were an accepted fact – he gives us no data to back that up.  I only make this point about his glibness here once again because I know that for many access centers the reverse is much more likely to be true.  It really just all depends -- and you can’t pretend to know until you’ve asked them the questions – thoughtfully and carefully.

Then Klein says something really curious.  “Viewer neglect is a problem for the social change mission”, he says. “The social change mission sees viewers as the recipients of the medium’s powerful message.”

Well, actually, it’s a decades-old theory of the political effects of mass communications, the “hypodermic needle” model, which saw the viewers as recipients of the medium’s powerful message.  That’s long since been discredited as far too simplistic a description of the relationship between media and social change. 

I daresay many, if not most, public access practitioners understand that for the most part any significant social change they help create in their communities is due more to the process of community communications than to the product.  When it comes to community media, you might say, the significant and lasting pay-off comes in the doing, not the viewing.

But I’ll admit – this is just an opinion I’ve formed based upon my own experience, and which I’ve heard shared by a number of other access practitioners.  I don’t have any survey results to point to on this.  It’s a good question though, isn’t it?  How best to measure the multifaceted impact community media has upon its communities? 

Maybe coming up with answers to such research design questions would be a useful first step as many of us proceed to explore the next new forms of media which are claimed to hold similar potential for building community. (Or – I’m sorry - was that “social change” we said was our mission here?  I forgot.)

TECHNOLOGY

Although Klein started out saying he was going to apply an institutional analysis to the public access sector, in this section he examines not so much the institutions surrounding public access television, but the very medium itself – the technology of television.  His first point is that because video is not easy to make, it is not always well-suited to be a community medium.  This is not a critique stemming from any institutional analysis, but a critique on the whole concept of community television.  Why bother, he seems to say, when “the vast majority of local programming features a simple talk show or talking head format.”

If Klein were attempting to make a case here for the application of additional media which might meet community needs in ways which television could not (which I believe is his real purpose in this paper, or at least in this section), then his points here bear consideration.  However, he purports to examine the institutions of public access television, choosing here instead to question the value of television itself as a community medium.  Talking heads or no, I’ll wait until television’s appropriateness as a community medium is more thoughtfully challenged before I make any lengthier comments on that subject.

PROFESSIONAL CULTURE

In this short section Klein basically asserts that public access practitioners are from an earlier generation, and that this “may have contributed to technological conservatism.”  “The leaders of the PA-TV sector may even see new media as a threat to their prevailing television-based culture.”

So then, it is television, the media itself, that Klein is questioning as inappropriate, rather than the structural institutions of public access?  So it would seem.  Why not just be honest about it, and title the paper something like, “Reasons Why Television Is Inappropriate For Use as a Community Media”?

CONCLUSIONS

The careful reader of Klein’s paper will note the careful phrasing of most of his assertions.  Note his use of qualifiers, for example, in the quotes just cited: “may have contributed”; “may even see new media as a threat.”  This kind of hedging is shot through Klein’s paper – for one thing, it relieves him of the responsibility of presenting any data to back up these pseudo-allegations. 

This would be perfectly acceptable if this were a student’s proposal for a research project.  Here are some potential dynamics which warrant applied research, the student would aver.  The professor would then question the student’s ability to design and implement methodologies that could yield discriminating data.  Professor Klein, however, uses all these pseudo-allegations as a house-of-cards basis for his own hasty, data-barren conclusions:

“The institutions identified here have powerful effects.”
No argument there.

“They lessen PA-TV’s capacity to effect social change, and they inhibit the adoption of new community media.”  

Well, OK then. QED!  All those qualified “possibilities” of course lead inexorably to this definitive conclusion.  How could any intelligent reader miss it?

But seriously…

I would not want you to be so distracted by his logical sleight of hand here, or by my calling it to light, that you miss the subtle value assumption he tries to slip past you at the end.  You should care, he is saying, about a lessened capacity “to effect social change.”  This is the mission, he says, which all you noble public access practitioners embraced, for which your channels were set aside and funded, and which is now being lost, forgotten, or betrayed. 

It’s just that “to effect social change”, even if that were actually our mission, is not defined here.  Klein cares not to define it, nor speculate on how it could be measured.  He cannot tell us when we’ve succeeded or when we’ve failed in pursuing this mission he says is ours, nor does he even seem to be aware that trying to measure it might be a good and necessary thing.  Yet he is certain that public access is limited in its ability to get us there, and he seems to be just as certain that “new media” escapes those limitations.

Well, maybe.  But maybe, rather than some lame exercise in “institutional analysis” which yields only the results we want because we forego asking pertinent questions in the real world, we’d be better served by first trying to think through more carefully what exactly the goals of community media are or should be, and how we can effectively measure progress towards those goals.

…?

Naah!  Let’s just go out and buy some fun new toys.  Have you seen the great new cell phones that are coming out?  10 megapixel cameras in Europe!  Wowza!  I can hardly wait.  How ‘bout you?