President's Message: The Return of the Repressed in Communication Studies
As one who came of academic age in the 1960s - whose final semester of graduate school combined completion of a dissertation with climbing in and out of university buildings as an antiwar protestor, dodging police batons and horses - the demand that academic pursuits be "relevant" to the most important and pressing real world issues is both familiar and persuasive. However, the climate of academic pursuits of the past few decades has not retained the heat and passion of those heady times and, truth be told, it's far from clear how widely held those convictions were even then.
What is certainly true is that the 1960s were followed in many parts of the world by a concerted counterrevolution that, while not all that visible at the time, was determined to recapture the hearts and minds of the academy or at the very least intimidate and bully them into submission.
In what follows, I will mostly be describing the forms that political and cultural reaction took in the United States, but I know that these forces were also present in other parts of the world. Often there were direct connections, as in the case of the U.S.-abetted coup and subsequent Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. In other instances there was mutual admiration and encouragement, as in the parallels between Thatcherism in the UK and the "Reagan Revolution" in the US.
I am inviting other ICA members to join this conversation - send comments, elaborations, and, certainly, disagreements - and we will happily open the pages of the Newsletter to an ongoing discussion of these issues; hopefully one that will broaden the scope beyond the locales and examples included in this article.
During the 1970s the counterrevolution in the United States took shape largely in the political arena, as cultural conservatives joined with newly politicized evangelical Christians to attack the efforts and successes of the social movements of the 1960s; and by the end of the decade the self-styled Moral Majority could claim much credit for the election of Ronald Reagan.
While conspiracy theories are often more fervently held than they are empirically sustainable, in this instance a fair case can be made for a conscious effort on the part of the "establishment" to roll back what they saw as an assault on their power. The case rests in part on the existence of a document that I think of as "The Protocols of the Elders of Wall St.," but it is better known - though not nearly well known enough - as the Powell Memorandum. Lewis Powell, a successful corporate lawyer, wrote a memorandum in August 1971 addressed to the director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The memo outlined the dangers Powell believed the corporate establishment needed to comprehend and counter:
"No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack. This varies in scope, intensity, in the techniques employed, and in the level of visibility...what now concerns us is quite new in the history of America. We are not dealing with sporadic or isolated attacks from a relatively few extremists or even from the minority socialist cadre. Rather, the assault on the enterprise system is broadly based and consistently pursued. It is gaining momentum and converts....The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism come from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians. In most of these groups the movement against the system is participated in only by minorities. Yet, these often are the most articulate, the most vocal, the most prolific in their writing and speaking." http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_accountability/powell_memo_lewis.html
The Powell Memorandum laid out in great detail not only the causes for alarm but a strategy for counterrevolution. Powell's advice has been credited with turning on the faucet that has poured millions of dollars into funding rightwing institutes, think tanks and advocacy groups. Powell understood the need for a long march strategy and his vision has been vindicated by the political shifts in the United States during the past 4 decades. President Richard Nixon must have appreciated Powell's wisdom, as he appointed Powell to the U.S. Supreme Court shortly after the memorandum was written.
In the spirit of the Powell memorandum, the right wing in the US broadened the focus of the counterrevolution from their perennial targets of popular culture to encompass the domain of elite culture. U.S. politician and sometime presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan sounded the alarm: "While the right has been busy winning primaries and elections... the left has been quietly seizing all the commanding heights of American art and culture." Buchanan called for "a cultural revolution in the '90s as sweeping as the political revolution in the '80s... Just as a poisoned land will yield up poisonous fruits, so a polluted culture, left to fester and stink, can destroy a nation's soul."
As the Cold War diminished the Kulturkampf advocated by Buchanan became a contender for its place at the top of the political agenda. Pursuing a military metaphor, columnist George Will labeled Lynn Cheney, Bush Senior's Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, "secretary of domestic defense. The foreign enemies her husband, Dick [then Secretary of Defense], must keep at bay are less dangerous in the long run, than the domestic forces with which she must deal. Those forces are fighting against the conservation of the common culture that is the nation's social cement." Wills warned that "many of the most enlightened defenders of our cultural patrimony (sic) are now out in the 'practical' world, including government, and many Philistines are in the academies shaping tomorrow's elites, and hence tomorrow's governance."
Communication scholarship and teaching figured in an important way in the debates over the role of the academy because we are among those who can be accused of "diluting or displacing" canonical texts in favor of the degraded products of popular culture. By devoting serious attention to the products of the mass media, communications scholars were among the earliest members of the academy to question the sanctity of the elite cultural canon. In fact, I would argue that the relative status of communications study within the American academy suffered for years -- and probably still does -- from our association with mass culture.
What these "threats" had in common, and what provoked the enmity of right-thinking politicians, journalists and academics, is that they represented a specter haunting our society: subordinates getting uppity, silenced voices starting to speak out, new perspectives shifting the center of gravity towards the margins. But, despite the ferocity of the counterattack mounted against them, the marginal voices and forces were not in fact remotely as successful as the public was told.
However much communication scholars expanded - or corrupted - the curriculum, and however much they challenged the universality of traditional canons, the field of communication studies in the United States was also retreating from an explicit engagement in the realm of politics and economics at the very moment in which the upheavals in communication technologies and media industries were transforming the national and global landscape. Whether by design or unhappy coincidence the critical engagement of communication scholarship with these momentous developments and policy debates diminished, along with the imperative to train our students to participate in and contribute to these important decisions.
The results is that public policy debates are taking place today with little meaningful input from communication scholars, and thus often with little, questionable, unreliable, or biased empirical data and research to inform them. While many of our programs train graduate students to study media effects, media content, and media processes, too few of our students are trained in the study of media economics, law, regulation and policy, and fewer still are able to do this in a way that produces research that is both academically rigorous and yet useful and accessible to policymakers, media activists, and interested citizens.
One nascent response to this situation in the US was initiated several years ago by the communication doctoral programs at the two Annenberg Schools, the University of Illinois, and the University of Michigan, joined at times by colleagues from other institutions. We called our enterprise COMPASS, for Consortium On Media Policy Studies [the initial group of coconspirators here were Michael delli Carpini, Susan Douglas, Robert McChesney, and myself].
We agreed to harness our programmatic efforts towards a collective response. This was no small decision: Programs such as ours are used to competing with each other for faculty, students, grant money, and prestige, and while we all acknowledge that this competition will not disappear, we are convinced that institutional collaboration at this historical moment is essential for our field and for the future of media policy and media literacy. Our overarching mission is nothing less than to address the paucity of well-informed, well-researched media policy and regulation, and the threat this poses to democracy, both in the United States and around the world in an era of ever greater corporate domination. We hope to do this by stimulating and generating a new cohort of scholars, activists, and policy-makers armed with the skills and knowledge to effectively address the realities of contemporary state and business power, and the resultant democratic deficit experienced by people in the United States and around the globe.
We strongly believe that any systematic effort to create a new breed of "scholar-activists" and a new line of "public scholarship" must combine rigorous academic training with hands on experience. More importantly, we believe that high-level practical experience will enhance the real-world value of the research questions asked by communication scholars, enrich the caliber of their scholarship on policy matters that emerges from our field, and ultimately elevate the public importance of communication research. This belief was reinforced by a miniplenary at last year's ICA conference that featured communication scholars who have worked on both sides of academy/policy divide: Robin Mansell, London School of Economics, who chairs the IAMCR Task Force on Media and Communications Policy; Ben Scott, a communication PhD from the University of Illinois, who serves as Policy Advisor for Innovation at the U.S. State Department; Vinod Pavarala, Dean of the School of Arts & Communication, University of Hyderabad, and president of the Community Radio Forum of India; Ernest Wilson of the USC Annenberg School and past board chair of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting; and Irene Wu of the Consumer and Governmental Bureau of the FCC and adjunct professor at Georgetown University.
In the summer of 2011, with funding from the Annenberg Foundations' Sunnyland Trust, we were able to expand our COMPASS program by inviting doctoral students from around the U.S. to participate, and we sent eight students, from six universities, to spend the summer in Washington, working on policy related projects at the FCC and a number of foundations and NGOs. We look forward to building on this program to further expand the engagement of communication scholars with the backstages of communication and media policy. We hope that versions of this sort of engagement already exist in other parts of the world and that more will emerge in the future.
We recognize that this is not an easy road to travel, as the lack of research and training in media policy and political economy presents us with a chicken-egg dilemma that is not easily solved. But it must be addressed and solved if we are to make the field of communication studies truly relevant to some of the most important issues facing the nation and world today.
As with my discussion of the corporate counterrevolution, my examples of nascent efforts to strengthen the domain of communication policy have been primarily drawn from the United States. I repeat my invitation and request for others to join this conversation and expand our awareness of challenges and opportunities faced by communication scholars elsewhere.
Throughout the world, governments and citizens are grappling with the policy challenges of the new digital technologies that are transforming our lives, whether the issues are privacy vs surveillance and commercial exploitation; free expression vs. political and corporate control over the flow of information; the flourishing of a creative and democratic commons vs. commercial ownership of culture and the enclosure of the public sphere; etc., etc. Just as transnational corporations are turning globalization to their benefit, so too the academic community of communication scholars needs to embrace the complexity of a multifocal world, and deploy the power of our theoretical tools and analytical skills in the practical struggle to empower citizens. The philosopher Simone Weil wrote that, "If we know in what way society is unbalanced, we must do what we can to add weight to the lighter scale." In this increasingly corporatized world, we must do what we can to add weight to the side of the people.
