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Access to Content

by Joe Karaganis — last modified 2008-11-17 17:33

Many areas of media policy are designed to regulate content. The FCC has mandates to support diversity, localism, educational programming, and other normative goals in programming. Unfortunately, our ability to evaluate the effects of these policies--or any other claims about programming content--is extremely limited. There is no audio-visual archiving that is analogous to the extensive, overlapping forms of print archiving. There is no systematic record of our increasingly audio-visual culture. 

SSRC Collaborative Grants have struggled repeatedly with this issue, from efforts to independently analyze the programming content used in FCC media ownership studies to supporting community efforts to monitor election coverage. Such projects usually involve the laborious construction of small content archives tailored to the research task at hand. There are legal obstacles to maintaining and sharing these archives, and no norms or infrastructure for ensuring that metadata can be shared and compared. This is a recipe for inefficiency and poor research outcomes. 

At present, the main impediments to better archiving are legal rather than technical. Copyright issues especially hinder efforts to aggregate and expand collections. Broadcasters’ reporting obligations are a subject of long-term neglect. And there is no regulatory role to address the growing Internet-based repositories of audiovisual material.

The obvious test case for reform is the analysis of local TV news.  Local TV news remains the primary source of information for most Americans and is a product with almost no resale value. It is a key interface between media and community, and a fundamental part of the cultural record.

News, however, is just the tip of the iceberg. At present, there is no serious effort to address the growth of audio-visual culture distributed outside the regulated broadcast system. As these channels proliferate, we risk losing any effective ability to describe the public sphere, much less ensure that some part of it meets public needs. 

Programming and Content Analysis
Voices

In our work, acquiring and analyzing local television newscasts was crucial to examining FCC policies regarding localism and media ownership. But content analysis is hard. First, you need to get the actual content. This poses technical and often legal challenges. It means developing a capture and archival process. It means conducting systematic analysis to generate usable data. Both processes are time-consuming and labor-intensive. Finally it means doing both in a legal and policy context that is oblivious to -- when not actually hostile toward -- the goal of audiovisual archiving. Policymaking suffers in this context. Civic participation suffers. And American culture goes down the memory hole.

-- Danilo Yanich, University of Delaware