An Address by
Lawrence K. Grossman
Perhaps it is because we are on the cusp of the new millennium
that we seem so preoccupied with technological change these
days. Virtually every new technology development is touted
as "revolutionary"; we're said to be living through
the Telecommunications Revolution, the Digital Revolution,
and the Information Revolution; take your choice. And as the
century ends, we are also exiting and entering all manner
of eras and ages, going from the Industrial Age to the Service
Age, from the Mass Media Era to the Cyberspace and Internet
Era.
Normally sober and sensible people have
taken to hailing the Internet as "the greatest invention
since Gutenberg gave us moveable type." And no less a
venerable authority than banker Walter B. Wriston tells us,
"We are now living in the midst of the third great revolution
in history."1 After the Agricultural Revolution
and the Industrial Revolution comes the Information Age, the
third revolution, being ushered in, Wriston says, by "the
marriage of computers and telecommunications," which
"has demolished both time and distance." Truly,
a marriage, that can demolish both time and distance,
had to be made in heaven unless, of course, it was made in
hell.
"Some fear that
the electronic republic will bring too much democracy.
Soon online, keypad balloting will be able to replace
voting machines, just as voting machines replaced paper
ballots. Imagine this: 'Press 1 to vote for candidate
A. Press 2 to vote for candidate B. Press 3 if you think
we should go to war. Press 4 if you think we should stay
out. Press 5 if you want more information. Press 6 if
you want to suggest which targets to bomb.'
"For the new digital electronic era, the nation has
the potential to create an interactive, multimedia, public
service freeway system on the telecommunications superhighway.
It could be an electronic throughway that will reach into
every home, school, university, library, museum, hospital,
public health center, daycare center, prison and nursing
home."
Excerpted from Technology Governance: A Public Interest
Vision for the Telecommunications Age |
Remarkable social and economic changes,
prompted by computer and communications technology, are indeed
coming upon us at a furious pace. Revolutionary or not, those
changes are transforming the workplace, transforming global
markets, and transforming the quality of our lives. Those
technology changes are also transforming our centuries' old
democratic political system, a fact largely overlooked amidst
all the hype over the high tech glitz of the new electronic
world.
Americans have always had faith that new technology will solve
their problems. Radio and television, for example, weresupposed
to reform democracy; make people "more contented citizens;"
make government "a living thing instead of an abstract
and unseen force," and make elected representatives "honor
their responsibilities to those who put them in office."
None of that has happened, of course, although thanks to TV
news and CSPAN, the congressional floor and the White House,
at least, are no longer unseen, which some do not regard as
a totally unmixed blessing.
Notwithstanding this century's astonishing technological changes,
people remain the same flawed beings they have always been,
dealing with the same basic concerns they've always had making
a living, bringing up children, staying healthy, living their
lives from day to day, cursing government, and blaming elected
officials for failing to honor their campaign promises. So at
least some skepticism is in order about the inevitable cornucopia
of improvements that technology is supposed to bring.
With that equivalent of an obligatory Surgeon General's warning
out of the way, I propose to use the bully pulpit of this Webb
Lecture to talk about the ways in which new digital telecommunications
technology is transforming our nation's political system, our
form of government, and to give you my own prescription for
what should be done to insure the longevity of our democratic
republic, so it will survive through the third century
of its existence. After all, our federal system was designed
late in the eighteenth century to govern a small, weak and remote
new agricultural nation. Miraculously, it survived largely intact
through the twentieth century to govern the world's greatest
industrial superpower. Is there any reason to believe it won't
continue to flourish in the Information Age through the century
ahead?
Seen from today's perspective, though, the nation's political
vital signs do not look so good. We enter the new millennium
with a healthy economy but a desultory, disaffected body politic.
The more access to information people have, the less they vote
and the more they drop out of the political process. The last
presidential election had seven million additional eligible
voters, five million additional citizens who registered to vote,
and nine million fewer voters than in the previous election.
Polls show profound voter alienation and a high degree of public
discontent with politics as it is now practiced.
For most of the middle class, who make up the backbone of the
electorate, dropping out of politics is a perfectly sensible
and rational response to the fact that who wins or loses on
election day probably will make precious little difference to
their lives and wellbeing. The focus of today's "me generation"
has been selffulfillment and personal satisfaction, rather than
concern for the common good and the general welfare. Politics
has become largely irrelevant to most middle class lives.
Nor have today's political practices made it very easy for sensible
people to respect public office or its occupants. In 1996, 752,000
paid political commercials ran in the top 75 markets between
April 1st and election day, at a cost of $400 million. As Russell
Baker wrote recently, "We are"awash in political advertising,
those floods of insincerity that pass for political discourse
in America". Everybody down to the dimmest threeyearold
recognizes these commercials as brazen nonsense."2
Political consultant Dick Morris, who hires himself out to all
sides of the political spectrum, represents to me, the ultimate
professional perversion and corruption of American politics
today, in which the means of winning elections have become
all consuming, obscuring the ends, the very purpose
of getting elected.
Our election campaigns are nasty, negative, content free, staged
affairs, filled with cynicism and double talk. The bloated cost
of political campaigns imposes a stranglehold on the political
agenda, demanding tribute from every candidate for major public
office, whether incumbent or challenger. Will any of that change
in the digital telecommunications age, where information flows
with the speed of light, not just from the top down, from one
to many as it has in the television and print eras, but now
also from the bottom up, from everyone to everyone, everywhere
from the people back to the government as well as from
the government to the people?
Looking ahead, most people want a form of government in which
their voice can be heard, in which they have a say in
major policy decisions, and in which big money does not count
for more than they do. We see many signs of that at the state
level. In the states, the electorate has consistently voted
for term limits to curb the power of entrenched incumbents.
Increasingly, major government decisions are made by the electorate
in the voting booth through ballot initiatives and referenda,
rather than made in state legislatures by elected officials.
And direct primaries have replaced party bosses and party delegates
in choosing presidential candidates. Political power is being
devolved back to the states, supposedly to bring government
closer to the people and give them more control. (But are there
any governments more remote, and about which people have less
knowledge than their state governments? Print and electronic
media coverage of what goes on in our outoftheway state capitals
is virtually nonexistent.) And at every level of government
federal, state and local public opinion polling holds center
stage in the decisionmaking process.
All of that, I suggest, adds up to a rather new and unprecedented
form of governance. And telecommunications technology is serving
as the catalyst that is helping to bring it about. In my book,
I called the new form of governance the "electronic republic,"3
a hybrid political system that is beginning to meld America's
traditional representative republic with new elements of electronic
direct democracy. The shape the electronic republic is taking
is becoming increasingly clear.
For one thing, the new political system deprives government
of most of its independent initiative in policymaking and decisionmaking.
Officials have little choice but to react to, and accommodate
public opinion, special interest groups, and organized segments
of the population. Like an instant giant voting machine, daily
public opinion polls record in real time the views of the electorate,
no matter how illinformed or unformed their views may be. Incessant
polling, email, 800 numbers, telephone banks, faxes, the internet,
and callin shows have exponentially increased the daily exposure
of public officials to their constituents. "Big brother"
turns out not to be the Orwellian tyrant, who keeps every citizen
under continuous electronic surveillance. Instead, "Big
brother" turns out to be the ordinary citizen, who can
now keep his or her elected leaders under continuous electronic
surveillance; intruding on both their public and private
lives.
Elected officials no longer go off in relative isolation to
the swamps of Washington, D.C., or to remote state capitals
like Sacramento, Albany, Lansing, Springfield, and Tallahassee
to pass laws. For the first 150 years of the republic, legislators,
once they were in session, had virtually no contact with
their constituents. On most issues, they had no choice but to
exercise their own independent judgment. The classic debate
among political theorists over how much elected representatives
should reflect the opinion of their constituents back home took
place in a world in which many groups could not vote, news was
scarce and hard to come by, and no one really knew how to measure
public opinion other than by an election. The difficulty of
travel and irregularity of mail delivery made communication
between government officials and their constituents problematic
in the extreme. Thomas Jefferson could cut a deal to buy the
Louisiana Territory from France, doubling the size of the nation,
without letting anyone know about it for a year or more.
Now, we are in the age of nonstop public opinion polling and
focus group interviewing. No major political decisions are made
without first taking the people's pulse to see what will be
acceptable. No longer is democracy a leisurely system where
the people vote every few years to elect a handful of representatives
who are supposed to make all the important decisions for them.
California has reached the point where the rising tide of ballot
initiatives and referenda now are responsible for the majority
of the state's major political decisions. In California, more
money is now spent lobbying the general public than lobbying
government officials, which is one reason the cost of politics
has soared. And as California goes, so goes the nation.
In the words of Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan, "As
the speed of information increases, the tendency for politics
is to move away from representation and delegation of constituents,
toward immediate involvement of the entire community
in the central acts of decision." Whig Congressman Daniel
Bernard said it best a centuryandahalf ago, "Perhaps the
severest trial to which the virtue of any people can be subjected
is when everyman has a share in the government; for when everyone
governs, few indeed are willing to submit to be governed; when
everyone commands, nobody likes to obey."
All of which may help explain today's gridlock government and
the spread of single issue politics. Because electronic signals
do not respect geographical boundary lines, the electronic republic
is redefining the meaning of community itself, and is at least
partly responsible for the decline of sectional politics and
the emergence of single interest politics. Geography still provides
the structural foundation of our political system: We vote where
we live; the work of government is rooted in election districts,
wards, counties, and states. Yet all over the country people
sitting in their kitchens, dens and living rooms with laptop
or desktop PCs, are generating small political upheavals. Using
the internet, they overcome barriers of time and geography to
communicate, conspire, and organize with distant fellow citizens
who share their passion for abortion rights, prayer in schools,
immigration restrictions, welfare reform, home education, or
health insurance expansion.
That has its problems. In the words of new Carnegie Corporation
president Vartan Gregorian, "The popular prediction that
electronic communication would create a global village is wrong.
What is being created," Gregorian said, "is less like
a village than an entity that reproduces the worst aspects of
urban life: The ability to retreat to small communities of the
likeminded, where we are safe not only from unnecessary interactions
with those whose ideas and attitudes are not like our own, but
also from having to relate our interests and results to other
communities."
We long for the oldtime civic spirit, the warmhearted community
atmosphere when people turned out together to fill the town
square for election rallies, picnics and torch light parades,
brass bands and fireworks, and listen to hours of political
speechifying. Politics then was the centerpiece of the nation's
social and community life. It was the public's primary source
of free entertainment. Today, however, politics can't begin
to compete with the torrent of professional entertainment and
sport that now fills everyone's television screens all hours
of the day and night.
Still, the convergence of satellite, computer, television, telephone,
radio, print and the Internet in the digital age makes it possible
for the public to participate in the political process in extraordinary
new ways. Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox made everybody
a publisher. Interactive telecommunications is making everybody
a potential lobbyist. We see the most dramatic evidence of that
in today's global markets. Traders throughout the world sit
at their computer consoles issuing buy and sell orders, making
instant judgments on governments' policy decisions, forcing
even the most powerful nations to react instantly in turn. Witness
the recent Asian currency meltdown.
A remarkable metaphor for the electronic republic's new hybrid
political system can be found in, of all places, the apocalyptic
Book of Daniel, the Old Testament's parable of the Dream of
King Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar dreamt that his kingdom
of gold would be replaced by a kingdom of silver, then by a
kingdom of bronze, and finally, by a fourth kingdom, "strong
as iron," the Bible says, but mixed with common clay. The
fourth kingdom, the Bible predicts, "shall be partly strong
and partly brittle." But it "shall not be stable,"
for iron does not mix well with clay. We are entering an era
in which the iron of our representative republic, where officials
make all the key decisions, is being mixed with the common clay
of new style electronic direct democracy. And, so far, if not
instability, gridlock seems to be the main result.
The electronic republic holds much promise. It offers more
democracy, giving the public a seat at the table where major
political decisions are made, and the opportunity for more
firsthand participation in the life and death decisions that
directly affect people's lives and future. People, no matter
how far from the centers of power, now have the capacity to
act, in effect, as a fourth branch of government.
Some fear that the electronic republic will bring too
much democracy. Soon online, keypad balloting will be able to
replace voting machines, just as voting machines replaced paper
ballots. Imagine this: "Press 1 to vote for candidate A.
Press 2 to vote for candidate B. Press 3 if you think we should
go to war. Press 4 if you think we should stay out. Press 5
if you want more information. Press 6 if you want to suggest
which targets to bomb."
Will it come to that? With the keypad ballot, we will no longer
need to wait until election day to vote. We can vote wherever
we are, at any time, whenever public feedback is useful, as
often as any elected official wants to know what the public
thinks. In effect, that is exactly what is happening now unofficially,
with continuous electronic polling and focus group interviewing.
There are serious dangers to all this, of course:
- Those with the most money and greatest
access to the media are in a unique position to manipulate
public opinion.
- Without some system of checks and balances,
in the electronic republic a runaway majority can trample
on the rights of an unpopular minority. Thus, it's one thing
for judges to declare unconstitutional a law passed by a
legislature. But imagine the overwhelming pressure on judges
who decide to overturn ballot initiatives or referenda that
directly reflect the expressed will of the majority, especially
in states where judges are elected.
- An increased dose of direct democracy
certainly makes strong leadership more difficult to achieve.
As Winston Churchill once said, "The leader who constantly
keeps his ear to the ground is hardly in a position to be
looked up to by his constituents." Yet in the electronic
republic no leader can afford not to keep an ear to the
ground at all times.
The founding fathers sought to avoid any hint of direct democracy
with their elaborately contrived system of constitutional checks
and balances and separation of powers. Their chief motivation
in writing the Constitution was to replace the populist, too
democratic Confederation of States with a federal republic that
would protect the new nation from an excess of democracy, from
rule by a passionate, illinformed and, worst of all, ignorant
and poor majority.
Can today's citizens of the new electronic republic be trusted
to make sound, sensible, subtle public policy decisions, when
according to every survey, their ignorance of so many key issues
is so profound? In the oftquoted words of Thomas Jefferson,
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state
of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."5
Now that the people have the power to participate directly in
major political decisionmaking, obviously, it is essential that
something be done to lower their level of ignorance and equip
them with whatever level of civic information and education
they need. Interactive telecommunications technology has given
us the tools, if only we can put them to good use.
It is ironic, though, that one of those tools, television, is
held responsible for much of the public's ignorance, for our
impoverished civic life, for the current crisis of political
disaffiliation, for the nation's cynicism about government,
for people turning their back on the public sphere. And that
blame is well placed. But I suggest that in this media age,
we have highly unrealistic expectations of the media; we rely
heavily on the press, especially TV, to provide all the
civic information we need, and to deliver it in fairminded,
thoughtful, and interesting fashion. We expect the press to
operate in the public interest and to stimulate people's informed
engagement in civic life. So, why then does television, our
chief source of information about what is happening in the world,
do such a rotten job? With people in this digital age having
access to so much more information than ever before, why do
they show so little interest in the democratic process? What
has gone wrong?
A good deal of the fault, I suggest, lies with our national
telecommunications policy, which these days does virtually nothing
to stimulate and encourage the electronic media to operate in
the public interest, except to require several hours a week
of educational programming for kids. By contrast, 75 years ago,
the first broadcasting era was shaped by the conviction that
the foremost mission of the powerful new medium of radio should
be to serve the national and the public interest. In every country
except the United States, public interest or state broadcasters
dominated radio and then television service, and held national
monopolies. The BBC in England, NHK in Japan, RAI in Italy,
Gostal Radio in the former Soviet Union and their governmentsponsored
counterparts in other nations dominated the broadcasting era
throughout most of the world. Most countries took many decades
before commercial radio and television were even allowed on
the scene. While those public systems professed to serve the
national and public interest, too many existed essentially to
serve the government in power.
Even in the United States, the one nation that began
with commercial broadcasting largely free of government content
control, and where public TV and radio have been a weak, underfunded
afterthought, it was the public interest standard that drove
broadcast policy. Broadcasters were viewed as public trustees,
charged with special public interest obligations under the law
in order to get and retain their radio station licenses. That
meant airing news, education, religious and children's programming,
and covering controversial issues of concern to the community
in a fair and balanced manner. License renewals were supposed
to depend on how well stations fulfilled that role. The FCC's
public interest regulatory scheme was always more rhetoric than
reality and was never effectively enforced. But it nevertheless
spawned an honorable broadcast network news and journalistic
tradition in an era when the three radio and television networks
dominated the industry.
By contrast, local news, which barely existed during broadcasting's
first 50 years, was never so highminded. Local news came to
prominence only after the public interest doctrine was
seen to be a paper tiger and the FCC a weak and docile agency
that for most of its history protected broadcaster interests
more than the public's interest. Local newscasts, which have
blossomed into largescale station profit centers, never developed
any such highminded journalistic tradition. Crime stories, feelgood
features, anchor chatter, sports and weather fill local news
shows from one end of the nation to the other. And that is scary
because today, local TV newscasts are the public's number one
source of news, the place most people turn to for most of their
information about what is happening in the world. People even
rank local TV newscasts higher in importance than network news,
newspapers, newsmagazines or any other source. And that is really
scary.
As we enter the new century, and begin the global race into
the second era of electronic communications, the Information
and Telecommunications Era, the conventional wisdom is that
the public's access to civic information and education are bound
to increase. Is the conventional wisdom accurate? Unlike the
start of the Broadcasting Era, the race into the Telecommunications
Age is being driven entirely by marketplace imperatives, and
the race is being led by a handful of global multimedia giants,
mostly American companies DisneyABC, TimeWarner, GENBC, Rupert
Murdoch's News Corp., WestinghouseCBS, TCI and Viacom. Their
singleminded mission is to create commercial value and make
money. Performing public service, serving the public interest,
and doing good works are not their prime priorities and, in
fact, are basically irrelevant to their multimedia business.
They are in business to generate cash flow, raise their stock
price and produce a bigger profit than last year for their owners
and managers. That is how their success or failure is judged.
That is how the markets expect them to perform. That is their
reason for being. These companies choose programs to attract
audiences and advertisers, not to improve the human condition.
And if a media conglomerate decides that replacing global news
with light features or crime stories will attract more viewers
and make more money, or if it decides that reducing program
standards will increase audience appeal, that's exactly what
it will do.
Public service and public interest telecommunications do not
make money; they lose money. As governments all over the world
shrink and privatize, as budgets for public service broadcasting
diminish, and as deregulation largely frees multimedia companies
from even their token public interest responsibilities, the
public interest invariably gets redefined to be "whatever
interests the public." Today, U.S. radio and television
stations merely send the FCC a post card to get their licenses
renewed. The people receive a full diet of what they want, and
a wholly inadequate diet of what they need. The result is too
much sizzle, too little substance. The dilemma is that in this
new digital telecommunications era, there's no way that any
government agency can, or should regulate the thousands
of radio and TV channels and digital outlets that send out their
signals via cable, global satellite, overtheair broadcast, cassette,
computer and even telephone. In a free society, we should actually
welcome the end of the era of government regulation of
electronic communications, a regulatory scheme that gave radio
and television second class status in First Amendment matters
and never worked properly in the first place. But the total
marketplace approach to telecommunications policy does not supply
all the answers either.
The marketplace approach has meant, realistically, the end of
the public interest standard. It has also produced the most
phenomenal outpouring of entertainment, sports, and electronic
commerce imaginable , simply because entertainment, sports,
and electronic commerce produce virtually all the money and
profits the industry makes. When Disney chairman Michael Eisner
was asked why Disney bought ABC, he attributed the acquisition
to ABC's potential to exploit the world's insatiable appetite
for "nonpolitical entertainment and sports."
Eisner was right. Even today's prime time network news offerings,
popular and profitable newsmagazine shows like NBC's -Dateline,-
CBS' -48Hours,- and ABC's -Prime Time- and -20/20,- do not bring
us news in the traditional sense, but nonfiction entertainment.
That helps explain the -dumbing down,- the tabloidization, the
focus on crime and sex, happy talk, soft features and heartwarming
stories about pets, instead of reporting on government, international
affairs and important public issues. It is diversion and amusement
entertainment that attracts the biggest audiences and the most
advertisers, and that makes the most money.
News, once the proud centerpiece of all three nationwide broadcasting
companies, now represents a relatively insignificant financial
blip on the balance sheets of the major telecommunications conglomerates.
Corporate investment in global news coverage, foreign news bureaus,
documentaries on critical issues, civic information and public
affairs is actually shrinking, even while the same multimedia
companies pour increasing billions into the fabulously lucrative
businesses of entertainment and sports. Billions for basketball,
a pittance for serious reporting. Yes, we have an explosion
of 24hour cable and online headline news services. But, ironically,
what is most remarkable about the mainstream multimedia entertainment
companies today is how little, not how much they spend
on what used to be viewed as vital, serious news reporting and
public affairs.
We are in the paradoxical position today of relying on a handful
of global multimedia entertainment companies to bring
us virtually all the information most Americans receive
about what is going on in the world. For Disney, TimeWarner,
Fox, NBC, Westinghouse, Viacom are all essentially entertainment
companies. So, notwithstanding the conventional wisdom, that
we are heading into the Information Age, I suggest it is more
accurate to say that we are heading into the Entertainment Age
and the age of electronic commerce. Those are enormously important
services. But what is missing, as we rush headlong into the
new digital telecommunications era, are the vital categories
of civic information, education, public affairs, culture and
quality children's fare. All are essential for the health and
stability of our democratic society but none will ever be funded
sufficiently in the marketplace because there's no profit to
be made in any of them.
So the critical question remains: How do we use our marvelous
new interactive, digital multimedia technologies not only for
entertainment and amusement, and not only for electronic commerce
but also to enrich people's lives with lifelong education, civic
information, the dissemination of arts and culture and the delivery
of quality children's fare? How, in such an environment, can
we fulfill the essential information and education needs that
the marketplace by itself does not provide for us?
That will require an entirely new model, a new paradigm, a new
vision; a new public interest telecommunications policy for
the digital age. In the digital, interactive telecommunications
era, all media will be integrated. Through the convergence of
computers, satellites, television, radio, telephone and even
the printing press, citizens could have free access not
just to informative and interesting public radio and television
programs but also to educational offerings in every medium,
including telecourses, audio and videocassettes, texts, CD Roms,
printouts on demand, Internet web sites, electronic town meetings,
group discussions, you name it. The next generation of TV sets
with digital and interactive capacity will provide everyone
with high speed access to twoway Internet and other multimedia
services, as well as to television programs. And the recent
FCC decision to convert TV stations from the analog to digital
standard means that eventually everyone will have to acquire
new digital TV sets or converters in order to watch any television
at all.
For the new digital electronic era, the nation has the potential
to create an interactive, multimedia, public service freeway
system on the telecommunications superhighway. It could be an
electronic throughway that will reach into every home, school,
university, library, museum, hospital, public health center,
daycare center, prison and nursing home. Equally important,
if not more important, the nation needs to allocate sufficient
funds to create and produce the multimedia, interactive content
that will be carried on the electronic public freeway. Without
the money for quality content, the public freeway itself will
be merely a wasted resource, the way public access channels
today are wasted resources in most cable areas. The new telecommunications
content should address the nation's priority needs for lifelong
education, civic information, free political time, quality children's
fare and the like.
I list lifelong education first because one of the most remarkable
achievements of this century has been the addition of the equivalent
of an entire generation, almost three decades, to the average
American's life span. In 1900, the average person lived to age
47; in 1997 the average person is living to age 76. And people
are healthier, more energetic and more active than people in
their 40's a century ago. So the critical need has been extended
beyond the traditional frontloading of education for children,
to include job retraining and lifelong learning.
The new public policy I have in mind would bring about a great
interactive, multimedia, public telecommunications network
designed to serve all the people; a public network run not by
the government, but run by a grand alliance of the nation's
research universities, its public library systems, museums,
arts and science academies, as well as notforprofit public institutions
such as the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian and the public
broadcasters. The goal of our new public telecommunications
policy should be to have these notforprofit institutions come
together in a broadbased public telecommunications alliance
and operate the new information system devoted to the public
interest locally, regionally and nationally.
The good news is that we do not have to start from scratch to
build such a model. The resources and talents that are capable
of creating, distributing and validating all the educational
and informational content the public needs already exist
throughout the United States. Today, our notforprofit research
universities, public library systems, museums, and science and
arts academies educate and inform millions of Americans who
come through their doors. The trick now is to give these public
institutions and public broadcasters the resources they need
to take full advantage of the new interactive telecommunications
delivery systems that will enable them to operate outside their
walls and enrich the lives of all Americans. America's
libraries, museums and universities were completely bypassed
by the television and radio age. It would be incredibly wasteful
and destructive to allow them also to be bypassed in the telecommunications
age.
Fortunately, the job of building this new broadbased public
telecommunications grand alliance should not be all that difficult
or expensive. It can be accomplished simply by taking a thin
slice off the top of the many billions of dollars in new revenues
the government should collect from spectrum use fees and spectrum
auctions. Right now, most commercial telecommunications companies
pay the government absolutely nothing for their incredibly lucrative
broadcast and other licenses to exploit the nation's publicly
owned frequencies. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain
has called this telecommunications giveaway, "one of the
great scams in American history," a financial windfall
that is a prime example of corporate welfare.
It's time for the nation to earn a public dividend from the
commercial use of its publicly owned electronic spectrum. With
a small fraction of the money collected, Congress can create
a substantial public telecommunications trust fund, an endowment
that would finance the broadbased, high tech, multimedia information
consortium to operate for the benefit of all the people. The
entire project will cost only a small fraction of the many billions
that the digital spectrum is worth to its commercial broadcast
and other users. The new notforprofit electronic alliance would
be a boon to the entire nation, delivering quality programs,
children's and adult education, job retraining, civic information,
free political time, public health services and arts and culture
to all the people all the time.
Other sources of money are also available to be tapped, including
voluntary public contributions (now public broadcasting's single
biggest source of revenue); foundation and corporate underwriting;
even paid advertising and modest tuition and admission fees
earned from telecourses and electronic information services.
There's a remarkable precedent for this notforprofit public
telecommunications model the farsighted Land Grant Colleges
Act of 1862, passed incidentally by a Republican Congress. That
law revolutionized higher education, opening universities for
the first time to all qualified Americans regardless of income.
The law granted every state 30,000 acres of public land for
each of its senators and representatives. It authorized the
states to sell off that public land and use the proceeds to
finance state universities.
Today's equivalent of the 19th century's public land is the
publicly owned telecommunications spectrum electronic real estate
worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. Congress should
take a leaf from its wise initiative of 135 years ago and authorize
the FCC to sell off, and/or lease out the electronic spectrum.
Spectrum license licensees should pay a modest annual fee based
on the revenues that they reap from its use. A small portion
of the billions that will be collected from those sales and
fees should be earmarked to create a vibrant new electronic
civic and educational public network for the American people
that, in the century ahead, can serve the essential needs of
a civilized society and an informed democracy.
It is clear that we cannot leave the future of the electronic
republic entirely to chance or even entirely to the marketplace,
as is the fashion now. The stakes are far too high. A century
ago, educator Horace Mann said, "With universal suffrage,
there must be universal elevation of character, intellectual
and moral, or there will be universal mismanagement and calamity.
Men are not born into that capability to govern on behalf of
the public good."
It is essential that we devote at least a modest portion of
our valuable telecommunications resources to the job of making
citizens wellinformed, engaged participants in a free democratic
society. Fortunately, the opportunity to do so exists now. We
should take advantage of it before it's too late.
career in print and electronic communications spans almost five
decades. He is currently president of PBS Horizons Cable, a
future cultural and educational network now in development.
From 1984 to 1988 Grossman was president of NBC News. Prior
to that he was president and chief executive officer of the
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).
Grossman served for eight years as president of Forum Communications,
Inc., and has also held positions in charge of advertising at
NBC, and in promotion at CBS and Look Magazine, as well as president
of his own media and public affairs production firm, Lawrence
K. Grossman, Inc. A scholar and prolific writer on media and
political issues, Grossman was a senior fellow at the Gannett
Center for Media Studies at Columbia University and held the
Frank Stanton Chair on the First Amendment at the Kennedy School
of Government at Harvard University. He was a Distinguished
Visitor at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina;
Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Miami,
and recipient of the Ralph Lowell Award for Public Service to
Public Broadcasting and the John Jay Award for Distinguished
Public Service from Columbia University, his alma mater.
He is author of The Electronic Republic: Reshaping Democracy
in the Information Age, published by Viking/Penguin Press in
1995 and 1996; writes a regular column for the Columbia Journalism
Review called, "In the Public Interest," and has contributed
numerous articles to journals, magazines and newspapers.
Mr. Grossman serves on various nonprofit boards including the
International Longevity Center, USA; the International Council
on Global Public Health Progress, Paris; Connecticut Public
Television and Radio; and the American Heart Association Research
Council in New York City.
Mr. Grossman and his wife Alberta reside in Westport, Connecticut,
and Greenwich Village, New York City. They have three children
and six grandchildren.
The Webb Lecture Program honors James E. Webb, whose distinguished
in the public career included service as director of the Bureau
of the Budget and first administrator of the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration. His legacy is inspiration to others
committed to strengthening the capacities and performance of
government.
The annual lecture is sponsored by the Academy's Fund for Excellence
in Public Administration with generous support from the Kerr
Foundation. The annual lecture is presented by a distinguished
public administrator on an important issue of American governance.
The Webb Lecturers
1997 Lawrence K. Grossman
1996 William Ruckelshaus
1995 Daniel Goldin
1994 Robert Reischauer
1993 William Winter
1992 John Gardner
1991 Alice Rivlin
1990 James Watkins
1989 Frank Press
1988 Charles Bowsher
1987 Elmer Staats
1986 Samuel Phillips
1985 Allen Neuharth
1984 Alexander Trowbridge
1983 James Beggs
The National Academy of Public Administration is an independent,
nonpartisan, nonprofit organization chartered by Congress to
assist federal, state, and local governments in improving their
performance. The unique source of the Academy's expertise is
its membership of more than 400 Fellows.
Since its establishment in 1967, the Academy has assisted numerous
federal agencies, congressional committees, state and local
governments, and institutions overseas through problem solving,
research and innovation, and implementing strategies for change.
The Academy is also supported by businesses, foundations, and
nonprofit organizations.
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