Read Thomas Hazlett article for class today and was a bit surprised at the tack it took. I tried very hard not to scoff at much of the first part which speaks about the only problem the FRC was assigned to solve was the problem of transmission overlap. Of course his minor argument is that prior to the court decision that invalidated the 1912 ruling that allowed the secretary of commerce to regulate the spectrum, Hoover (in that role) was pretty much letting the market take care of it and not having to use the big boot of government that often to keep things in order.

I was fairly certain that he was going to agree with Coase (1958?9) that the auction would have been the best approach to redistributing the wavelengths and that it would have been much more efficient to simply sell spots on the dial to the highest bidder, thus reducing the possibility for "rent seeking" behaviour on the part of networks or regulators. This is the party line and I expected him to follow it. Surprisingly, he was much more interested in looking critically at this moment and, except for his unwillnigness to admit the inequities of power among the "interest groups" involved (this is where McChesney is really useful in that he focuses on the civil society aspect, however ineffectual it actually was) Hazlett ultimately has a fairly rich understanding of what went on. It was really refreshing to see that it is possible to employ those methodological tools and still come up with an ideologically complex understanding of a social, political event.

And he also inadvertently indicates something that is often overlooked in this debate, it was always about the audience and the legitimacy that an institution builds for itself within that audience. He uses the analogy of Homesteading, which is really politically problematic when we think of the way that practice has been used (somewhere between squatting and genocide) but nonetheless, he is right that from that perspective handing out bandwidth to the major networks made the most sense. And, furthermore, both he and McChesney (in the chapters we read for today anyway) say that one of the fundamental weaknesses of the movement for non-profit media allocations is that those people didn't really have a product to present yet. It makes projects like Pacifica and Democracy Now! so much more important in our current day because they are doing what these eariler folks seem to have been unable to do--and what more people should be doing. It is so easy to bitch about all of this, to look at the problems and get pissed off. But if there are people out there--or if we believe at all that things on TV begin to create their own demand--who are interested in alternative ideas, then why not just use the model that exists instead of fighting tooth and nail to get someone else to pay for it. Ultimately that is what it will take. Except for the internet (and even this takes precious labor time as well as al sorts of energy) all of these forms of media production will cost money--to get it produced, distributed, etc. And if the goal is to reach as many people as possible, our ancestors have already built this great big megaphone for us to use. The bandwidth allocation is small potatoes compared to the problems of funding the adventure until you can get some public (i.e. popular) support for it. If we have faith in people to really be ready and willing to hear the ideas we think should be out there, then we should do something about it. There is obviously an issue to be resolved, and watching the FCC ownership rules to keep the consolidation from getting any more insane is imperative, but we should also make the media change ourselves rather than begging them to do it b/c we happen to be loud and, sometimes, smart.