Media Policy Research Pre-conference -  January 11, 2007, Memphis, Tennessee

Remarks by Craig Calhoun, President of the Social Science Research Council

I want to add my thanks to Joe, Rik and Monique from the SSRC team and Bob and his colleagues from Free Press and stress the importance of the co-sponsorship and working together here. I want to thank Commissioner Adelstein for being here today. And I want to thank even more all of you.

Because it would be phenomenally boring and useless for all of us to be up here and speak if there weren’t an opportunity for an engagement with a larger community that is going to turn some of this discussion into practical activity in a variety of different arenas.

I found our problem exemplified in the lobby of the hotel today.  We had two news sources: The Wall Street Journal and USA Today. There are some virtues to the Journal and USA Today. And there are some considerable limits. Particularly if you have a forced choice between these sorts of information sources.

This is central to the whole concern that shapes issues of media reform. Not simply that one point of view succeed. But that forced choices --  especially forced choices that reveal arbitrary limits shaped by commercial power or other kinds of consolidation of control -- be stopped.

The goal here is a vibrant public sphere.  A range of different communities, perspectives , analyses, interests to be heard. To be heard in a wide variety of media, to be heard more effectively.  Not only to be heard, but to be engaged, so there are opportunities for communication in multiple directions. 

The theme of this SSRC project, funded by the Ford Foundation, is “Necessary Knowledge for a Democratic Public Sphere.”  I want to simply articulate my firm belief that democracy requires knowledge. 

We really shortchange democracy if we imagine somehow it is a matter of participation and various formal mechanisms and processes, without thinking about the knowledge that is needed.

We really shortchange democracy if we imagine somehow it is a matter of participation and various formal mechanisms and processes, without thinking about the knowledge that is needed. The importance of these different perspectives being able to contend with each other and inform each other in the public sphere is precisely that this is shaping of and communicating of knowledge.  If there was no knowledge coming out of it, if it was just expressions of opinions -- “hey I like Mexican better than Indian food” – if it was just expressions of personal consumer choices, no matter how active that public sphere was, it wouldn’t matter in the same way. 

It matters because it informs us in crucial ways that enable our action and participation.

And at a second level, activism to improve the public sphere depends on knowledge as well. Knowledge is necessary because it enables us to be effective in our different kinds of action, not only when we present formal briefings or appear before various kinds  of public bodies to speak, but when we reflect on our own practices. When we say, Did this strategy work well in our campaign? Why didn’t it reach some of the people we wanted to reach? Are we reaching disproportionately a white middle class audience? Is that who we wanted to reach? How do we reach others? These are questions of knowledge.  Questions that require us to reflect in various ways on our practices.

Those of us with somewhat less money and power need knowledge even more.  It is easy for those with lots of money and power to influence debates simply by running more ads, simply by getting their message out with money behind it, into more media markets. It is important to contest that sort of power, not just with numbers – yes, more people blogging is good --, but with knowledge, with better information, with better arguments, more conclusive evidence. So that decisions can be based on that knowledge. This is empowering for people who aren’t empowered by having as much money as some other actors.

Now in this context where knowledge is so important, it is a tragedy when academia cuts itself off from active participation in the public sphere. It is a tragedy when academic scholarship is evaluated solely on publication in refereed articles where things will be read by six other specialists if you are lucky. The mean number of times an academic article is cited in the literature is slightly less than once -- between 0.8 and 0.9.

Certainly that is not a very promising starting point for stressing the importance of academic research. Of course it is a mean, and there are a lot of exceptions to the mean. There is work that is hugely influential , and work that is influencial beyond narrow academic practices. But it has been a broad trend in the academy throughout the period since World War II for there to be a turning inward.  A turning of academic productivity and discussion towards debates with other academics in the field. Debates with advisors of dissertations, or rather defending the point of view of your dissertation advisor against all comers, if you are smart. 

For a variety of internal discussions, there are huge resources deployed. There is a great deal of knowledge generated.  Powerful analytic techniques. It’s not that this is not a significant kind of knowledge production, but it is very poorly engaged with broader public discussions .

There are a lot of aspects to this.  Like producing the crucial and definitive academic study two years after the crucial and definitive policy decision was made. Surprisingly that has less effect.

It’s not just time lags. It’s also the jargon within which things are presented. It’s also the topics that chosen for research.

Part of the commitment here is developing  a culture of collaboration which will try to change this situation. Not just by communicating better the knowledge of academics. Sometimes what academics think engaging the public means is that more people ought to read their work. And therefore it ought to be published in the Atlantic or the New Yorker. Or at very least that Malcolm Gladwell should interview them and write about what they were already doing.

But the issue isn‘t to do the same things that people are already doing and have better PR agents. The issue of a culture of collaboration is to have a mutual exchange that changes the way that work gets done. Not only how timely it can be but also whether it speaks to the issues in ways that be effective in a contemporary set of problems.

Now communications research grew up during this post war period in which a new kind of academic insularity was created, particularly in the United States. It was created partly because the universities got big and there was lots of jobs and tremendous growth in this sector.

Communications Studies has a particular history that is a challenge to us as we try to work on issues like media reform, with better knowledge and better collaboration between academics and activists. It’s very fragmented. It grew out of a variety of departments from film to speech from mass communications research to journalism and so on and so on.  The internal struggle to try and achieve and effective place in the university system and in the academy has often been at odds with the public engagement which is important for the field.

I’m not going to try and lay out a lot of that history, but it’s worth thinking about the extent to which there is a two-directional struggle for people in communications. One is to overcome the academic narrowing. And two to overcome the further narrowing of the division of the various approaches and perspectives and subfields which tend to divide even the academic audience for research into different journals and audiences.

These are also connected to heirarchies and boundaries that don’t need to be so strong. 

What I would stress about the kind of collaboration we are talking about, the kind of relationship between academics and activists here is that it is not just about getting better knowledge to the activists. It is about getting better knowledge to the academics. Better knowledge of what is going on in a variety of practical arenas. And it is about overcoming some of that fragmentation.

Because public policy problems do not come divided up into academic fields. Public policy problems cut across those academic fields. They demand collaboration, they demand the integration of different kinds of knowledge. Knowledge about cultural impact, knowledge about political participation, knowledge about economic market questions have to come together in order to deal with different public policy questions.

Therefore this agenda of a greater practical engagement can be one that helps to produce a more effectively integrated communications studies even in academic terms. Bob, Free Press, and Compass have worked on this. We need more and more of these efforts.

They need to continue because we face the success of a previous effort of academic activist collaboration.  It’s easy to think that academics and activists were all like the people in this room. But the late Milton Friedman was an academic with strong connections to a variety of activists. Along with a variety of others, he helped to make it conventional wisdom that private solutions are better than public solutions, that private property is obviously a crucial value but the public good is only contingently and sometimes a crucial value.

Margaret Thatcher, one of Milton Friedman’s fellow travelers, paraphrased Jeremy Bentham in saying “the Community… what’s that?” Individuals, they suggested, clearly existed. They knew what they were, But comunities, publics? Those were just figures of speech.

We face all the time, at arenas from local to national to international , the presumption and easy recognition of private property interests and the challenge of articulating the public interest and the public good when that set of vocabularies has not been as well articulated.

So there’s an example of the power of an academic / activist linkage. And don’t think that there weren’t a lot of activists working with the Milton Friedman language. Don’t think there wasn’t a concerted effort to make sure that that was how people would think about issues. That ownership would come first and that the public interest would have some secondary, derivative consideration. 

If we are committed to the public sphere and having a public interest be fully articulated, we need to work equally hard and we need the articulation that can be used in different kinds of arenas of action – in universities, in the popular media, in local activism.

We need to contest the privatization of everything.

We need to do this because we need to contest the privatization of everything. 

I don’t mean to suggest that there are not activities that are crucially privately organized. But the presumption of privatization as the way that things should work is a problematic one. It reveals the power of language, rhetoric, research, and effective findings.  It’s not like economics doesn’t have any findings that contribute to its power. It is that there is an ideological distortion to how a lot of this is used.

All of that power is revealed and can only be anwered directly, and not just by saying “Oh, we don’t like it that way.”

A culture of collaboration is hard to achieve but really necessary.

I want to close with an element of self-critique on this. Throughout these remarks I have used the words “activists” and “academics”, but this is really misleading. It presumes that we could re-arrange the room and say “academics over here and activists over there.” But it wouldn’t be true. It is a false distinction. It is a distinction that is encouraged by those academic fields and heirarchies and a rewards systems that encourages us to present ourselves as “pure academics” to put certain things on their CVs. And other things that they do that are important to them aren’t rewarded in the university system, aren’t on the CVs or are treated secondarily. Or maybe even are problems. We have heard about people whose tenure cases became controversial because they were blogging and things like this. 

It is a false distinction to divide academics and activists. There are indeed different perspectives. There are occassions where it is really important to have the kind of certification of strong research knowledge that academic researchers are well qualified to produce. But we should see the falseness of the distinction. And in fact we should work to make it more false..

Let us make sure that this distinction that I relied on between academics and activists matters less all the time.

Thanks for coming today.

NOTE: An MP3 audio recording of Mr. Calhoun's remarks is also available for download.