Ideological narratives and the American airwaves: Reconstituting the public interest.

Abstract

This study asks how and why did public officials get away with adopting a market model for a public good--the American airwaves? I hypothesize that public officials were able to do this because they used the public interest ideology as a rhetorical frame and replaced the theory inside the frame that had historically defined it--a public trustee model--with a market model. Narrative and rhetorical analyses are used to test this hypothesis. Contending that these narratives for the airwaves create competing identities, I use legal, bureaucratic, and other kinds of historical documents to track the claims and justifications embedded in the ideological narratives of public officials in the 1970s and 1980s for broadcast deregulation. The analysis of rhetoric and narratives reveals that public officials are successfully using the same metaphor (public interest) to describe both public trustee and market models of regulation. One implication of the findings is that congress and regulators may well be in violation of the Communications Act of 1934. As the first study to specifically question how government officials justified their adoption of an economic model for the airwaves, the findings are expected to be of interest to scholars in such disciplines as law, political science, history, philosophy, and sociology. The analysis is expected to be of interest to scholars researching such phenomena involving the airwaves as: the increased violence on TV shows, legislative efforts to defund non-commercial (public) broadcasting, the onset of home shopping networks on regular television, the paucity of educational programs for children on regular TV, loud commercials, and the buying and selling of the nation's airwaves.