Public Attitudes

How does the public view the transition from radio to audio?

Sorting through the answer shows several components, but a key one is whether listeners’ attitudes toward how they get radio — whether they are willing to pay for it, how portable they want it to be and whether they want it commercial-free —matter more than what content they want there. Another major question in a changing information landscape is how much people will turn to radio as a source for news.

As noted in the section on audience, only 30% of Americans believe that the new audio will result in the complete demise of traditional radio.¹ Another study, by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, found that of the 11% of Americans who an MP3 player or iPod, only 30% had ever downloaded a podcast or Internet radio program so they could listen to it later. In short, the penetration of the new audio technology is only beginning.²

Still, there is evidence that people are open to new sources. In a study commissioned by the Public Relations Society of America with Harris Interactive, the vast majority of adults, 71%, indicated they had a defined set of news sources that they trusted. Of that number, a sizable minority 42%, said they relied on “independent sources like Internet chat rooms, blogs or other alternative media to get news and information.”³ Only a slight majority, 54%, stated they continued to rely exclusively on traditional sources. Perhaps most interesting, more than half, 65%, said they “actively look for news and information that challenges [their] political opinions and social beliefs.”⁴ Whether they really do is uncertain, but the numbers suggest they believe they should.

So it might be that the growing array of options is not replacing so-called old media outlets, but supplementing them.

The question for radio is to what extent people want to continue to hear the news, rather than to read it as text or see it on video.

There are some answers already. When it comes to national and international news it appears only a minority look to radio as a prime source. A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center indicated that less than a quarter of survey participants got this kind of information from their radios — just 22%, compared to 74% for television, 44% for newspapers and 24% for the Internet. (Survey respondents were able to select more than one response, so the total figures add to more than 100%).⁵

This may be a chicken and egg dilemma. Perhaps people don’t turn to radio for this type of information because it’s not available there. If it were available, as in the past, maybe more people would rely on the medium for it.

There is some indication that the same low numbers may also be true nationally for breaking news. In a separate survey conducted by the Pew Research Center , only 17% of respondents indicated that they were getting their news about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath from radio, compared to 89% for television, 35% for newspapers and 21% for the Internet.⁶

In truth, a national overview about media may not offer the full picture of radio’s value. During Hurricane Katrina, for instance, the accessible nature of radio —including the portability of radio receivers, the low cost of buying radios and free nature of the content, and ability to run on multiple power sources even when the electrical grid is down — made it a critical lifeline for those stranded by the storm.

That was true not just for those in New Orleans who utilized resources like the constant information stream provided by the United Radio Broadcasters (See Ownership), but also for those evacuated to the Houston Astrodome, where radios were distributed and a mini-radio station was set up to aid communication and speed family reunions. In other words, while there will always be a desire to move to the ”next big thing,” there must also be consideration of what can potentially be lost.

Will the new media make the old no longer economically viable, or will they be added on as an interconnected web? The answer will have important civic as well as economic implications.

And one factor in all this may be regulatory. In early December 2005, Chairman Kevin J. Martin of the FCC suggested the creation of so-called “à la carte” offerings for cable television. As a way to provide people with greater control over the media content that comes into their homes, Martin proposed that cable companies allow consumers to pick and choose what individual channels they receive and pay for.⁷

The success of that proposal could have broad implications on which cable producers survive, and what they produce. It could also set the parameters of how other new technologies develop, and whether older technologies like print can begin to get money from their online activities by bundling them the way cable has.

It is difficult to guess how such a change would affect satellite radio, but the basic situation is virtually identical. Like cable, satellite listeners have intentionally purchased special equipment to receive content and have made the decision to receive that content by paying a membership fee. Also like cable, XM Satellite even offers a blocking option. On its Web site, the home page of the “Opie and Anthony” radio show (a shock jock duo whose antics on traditional radio included the broadcast of a couple supposedly having sex in St. Patrick’s cathedral as part of a competition) includes a link to information on how to use XM’s channel blocking. And Sirius satellite radio’s Web site, like some television programming, advises parental discretion for programs like the Howard Stern Show.

If an á la carte system like the one Martin has proposed for cable were to be applied to satellite radio, the biggest question would be how, exactly, members would be charged for the pick-and-play system. Would members choose nine stations for one price and then ten more for an additional fee? Turning to content, would a changing membership structure affect the networks’ willingness to program channels that might not be able to attract enough members to pay for themselves? Would an “á la carte” system degrade the niche content that originally made satellite radio desirable?

Indecency Regulations

When President George W. Bush moved Kevin J. Martin from his seat on the FCC to the position of chairman in March 2005, the agency seemed to be entering a new phase of aggressive policing of the public airwaves.

The former chairman, Michael K. Powell, had initially stayed away from regulation of broadcast content, but the Janet Jackson halftime show at Super Bowl XXXVIII on February 1, 2004 , brought the issue to forefront. The FCC began leveling some of the heaviest and most wide-reaching fines in its history. By the end of his four-year tenure, according to an accounting by the Washington Post, Powell proposed 28 fines against television and radio broadcasters for so-called indecency violations. As the Washington Post noted, that is 30% of the 92 known proposed fines issued by the agency since Chairman Dean Burch in 1969.⁸

Under Powell, not only were broadcast networks being fined, but individual affiliates who aired the “indecent” content faced financial consequences as well. Those fines had a pre-emptive effect. In November 2004 more than 60 ABC affiliates to choose not to air the network’s broadcast of Saving Private Ryan for fear of being fined for the film’s use of foul language and violence. Powell had publicly said that he would ask the FCC to dismiss any complaints brought against the film because the language used was not indecent given the context in which it was used. Yet the rules of the road naturally differed case by case. In other instances, the agency was dismissing content disclaimers, digitized body parts and bleeps as sufficient protection for listeners and viewers. In the same way that the Supreme Court has said of pornography, indecency was something you knew when you saw it rather than something that could be defined easily in rules.

Radio, which had been publicly dealing with the FCC and its indecency regulations for some time, was also under the FCC’s gaze. One public radio affiliate fired a correspondent over an editing error that failed to ”bleep” a curse word ( See State of the News Media 2004, Content ). Facing a fine of nearly $500,000 from the FCC (which was later absorbed into a $1.75 million settlement covering multiple charges) Clear Channel did the virtually unthinkable by removing the incredibly popular Howard Stern Show from its stations.

The agency’s actions throughout 2004 seemed to be the opening trumpets of a concerted war by the FCC against so-called indecent content. After Powell departed, Martin assumed chairmanship of the FCC. As a board member Martin had suggested the need for broader FCC powers to enforce decency standards. In February 2004, weeks after the Janet Jackson incident, Martin wrote in a report to the Senate: “I hear a call for the same rules to apply to everyone — for a level playing field. If cable and satellite operators continue to refuse to offer parents more tools such as family-friendly programming packages, basic indecency and profanity restrictions may be a viable option that also should be considered.”⁹

That call for a level playing field may have come from broadcasters who complained that cable had an unfair advantage. To what degree was it also coming from citizens? How much of an issue is indecency for the public?

Working from the numbers, the answer is cloudy. The number of broadcast indecency complaints (television and radio) filed with the FCC shows that activity, while periodically spiking in the post-February 2004 time period, is not a constant stream. The numbers exceeded 100,000 complaints four times between September 2004 and January 2005. In most months, there was little or nothing nationwide. In February 2004, the biggest month, the FCC received more than 543,000 complaints.¹⁰ That is an impressive number, but it also represents less than .18% of the U.S. population.¹¹

Inevitably, there is also evidence that some of the complaints are orchestrated. In July 2005, after a period of extremely low complaint activity, the FCC received 23,547 complaints. The Broadcasting & Cable Web site reported on November 14, 2005 , that 23,542 of those complaints were brought by members of the Parents Television Council. That figure meant that that only five complaints came from a source outside the PTC. (A significant portion of the complaints was lodged against the Fox program “The Inside” for what some saw as violent and sexually inappropriate content. A larger portion, 12,767 complaints, was lodged against ABC’s airing of the benefit Live 8 Concert, which included a profanity that made it past the East Coast monitors.)¹²

Beyond the number of complaints, other evidence suggests there is broad support for tighter federal restrictions. A survey conducted by Time Magazine and SRBI Research found that 51% of all respondents believed that the FCC should be stricter in its control of sexual language on the radio. Some 11% thought the FCC should be more lenient, 34% felt enforcement should stay the same and the remaining 4% said they didn’t know.¹³

When the conversation is moved outward to the new audio, the public’s attitude toward governmental enforcement changes. Fully 57% of those surveyed felt that governmental regulations should not be enlarged to cover content broadcast on satellite radio. An even larger portion (64%) did not believe that should be done for cable television networks.¹⁴

The opening eight months after Martin’s appointment went by relatively quietly, with no action taken on indecency complaints.¹⁵ The commission’s activity instead was later revealed to have been of a broader nature. In October 2005, the FCC launched a new Web site designed to fully explain its rules governing indecency, how its complaint system works and its enforcement procedure.

The site also includes information on the television rating system and information on the V-chip and channel blocking. Martin himself spoke of the importance of such technology and even put out a call for more such devices in October when speaking to a group at the inaugural Helms Forum in Charlotte, N.C. “We need an easy way for consumers to be able to control content,” he said, adding that “it’s important for parents and families to have more tools to have more control over content.”¹⁶ Broadcasters themselves have been encouraging and promoting parental-control technology, in the hope that if the public begins to police its own living rooms there will be less call for federal policing of the airwaves. The trick, however, is getting consumers to actually use the technology. For the most part, parental blocking technology like the V-chip has gone largely unused.

At a congressional hearing in late November 2005, Martin returned to an earlier theme of his — the regulation of the cable and satellite television industry — advocating the creation of those “á la carte” cable packages so that consumers could choose not to have offending channels in their homes. The outcome of this is by no means certain. Some religious broadcasters fear Martin’s proposal would be the end of their channels because not enough consumers would choose to pay for them and they would die.

Kenneth Tomlinson & the Mann Report

In 2005, public radio found itself ensnarled in a public argument with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and its chairman, at the time, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson.

Tomlinson had become CPB chairman in September 2003. From the outset he was a vocal critic of what he perceived as the liberal bias in public broadcasting, and a strong proponent of the creation of such ideologically “balancing” programs as PBS’s “The Journal Report,” a program hosted by the editor of the Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial page, Paul Gigot. (In December 2005 the program, hurt in part by the refusal of some local PBS stations to air it, moved to the Fox News Channel.) Tomlinson was also a key player in the creation of a CPB ombudsman’s office charged with monitoring and reporting on the content of both public radio and public television.

On May 2, 2005, the New York Times revealed that “without the knowledge of [the CPB] board, the chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, contracted last year with an outside consultant to keep track of the guests’ political leanings on one program, ‘Now With Bill Moyers.’ ”¹⁷ What was not publicly known at that time was that the study, authored by Frederick W. Mann, was not limited to “Now” (which is no longer hosted by Moyers but by the former host of American Public Media’s Marketplace program, David Brancaccio) but also included “The Diane Rehm Show,” NPR’s “Tavis Smiley Show” (a new radio version of which is now distributed by Public Radio International) and the PBS program “Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered” (which is no longer on the air). The report covered programs aired from October 2003 to June 2004.

While some critics claimed such monitoring of content was inappropriate and risked having a chilling effect on speech on public broadcasting outlets, such review is not outside the responsibilities of the CPB board. A report from the CPB’s Office of Inspector General regarding the Mann report and the actions of former Chairman Tomlinson noted that such oversight would be appropriate. According to the report, in a November 19, 2002, resolution the CPB Board “reaffirmed its commitment to objectivity and balance”¹⁸ and stated that “CPB management must ensure that programming CPB funds comports with this statutory mandate” for objectivity and balance.¹⁹ What came under greater scrutiny, and was in the end faulted by the inspector general, was Tomlinson’s approach.

First, Tomlinson commissioned the study without CPB board’s knowledge, and picked the study’s author on his own in secret. Next, the man Tomlinson had selected to do the study, Frederick W. Mann, had previously been associated with the National Journalism Center , a project of the Young America Foundation. That foundation, according to its Web site, is “the principal outreach organization of the Conservative Movement…”²⁰ Those ties, and Tomlinson’s belief going in that PBS programming had a liberal imbalance, raised suspicions about how scientifically detached and methodologically sound Mann’s report might be. When Mann’s methodology was examined, questions only increased.

The study reportedly graded program guests not only on their ideology (“liberal,” “conservative,” or “neutral”) but also on whether they were “pro-Bush” or “anti-Bush” or if their views supported or opposed the administration. Senators Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) and former Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) were categorized as “liberal” and “anti-administration.” The Washington Post’s Robin Wright was categorized as “liberal” because, the study noted, “Ms. Wright’s viewpoint was that U.S. intelligence was geared to fight the Cold War and did not adapt to the new threat of terrorism.”²¹

When it was learned that the $14,000 study was commissioned by Tomlinson without the approval or consent of Kathleen Cox, then the CPB’s president, or its board, it triggered an investigation into whether Tomlinson had violated his authority.

With regard to NPR alone, Tomlinson, according to the May 16, 2006 , New York Times, had also reportedly been considering a plan to monitor the radio organization’s Middle East reporting. Again apparently without discussion with other members of the CPB board, Tomlinson had been in contact with S. Robert Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs “…about conducting a study on whether NPR’s Middle East coverage was more favorable to Arabs than to Israelis… [Lichter] added that although there were follow-up conversations as recently as February [2005], officials at the corporation had not moved ahead with the project.”²²

Critics of the actions of Tomlinson and the CPB board also questioned the separate (though some would assert related) move by some board members to advise staff that funding should be moved away from news programming, particularly national news, and into music programs. In one particularly heated Boston Globe op-ed piece about the anticipated push, Tom Ashbrook, host of “On Point” on the NPR member station WBUR, wrote, “ When government media masters ask broadcasters to replace news with music, watch out. That was the Kremlin’s way on bad days in Soviet-era Moscow . Days when someone important had died. Days when things had gone badly wrong. Now, the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson, is ushering in an era when National Public Radio member stations may, reportedly, soon be encouraged by the corporation to shift their programming from news to music… Years ago, on the other side of a Cold War wall, Soviet citizens got music instead of news when the news was too difficult.”²³

By November 4, 2005 , Tomlinson had resigned from the CPB’s board following the delivery of the inspector general’s report.

In the end, Tomlinson’s motives about wanting to ensure the integrity of PBS’s and NPR’s programming schedule may have been sound, and the issue of whether that schedule is sufficiently balanced may be unresolved; it was his approach that brought him down. (It should be noted that Tom Rosenstiel, the director of PEJ and principal author of the State of the Media Report, worked as a consultant to PBS in redrafting its editorial standards and guidelines in 2005. Those guidelines, too, reaffirm the requirement that PBS content achieve balance over the breadth of its programming schedule and other content offerings.)

How does the public see public broadcasting on television and radio?

According to a survey by Harris Interactive for the Public Relations Society of America, 61% of Americans say they trust news shows on National Public Radio and public television. That is higher than the trust level for national newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times (56%) and commercial broadcast television (53%). It is also significantly higher than public trust of either liberal or conservative talk radio hosts. The survey shows that the public trusts conservative talk radio hosts at a level of 35%, and only 31% of those surveyed indicated that they trusted information provided by liberal talk radio hosts.²⁴ In another survey, by The Tarrance Group for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (released in December 2003), fully 61 % agreed with the statement that NPR provided “high quality programming.” More than half of those surveyed, 55 %, agreed with the statement that NPR programming was “fair and balanced.”²⁵

A 2003 CPB survey adds further to the picture. In telephone surveys, fully 37% indicated that they believed public radio had no apparent bias. Another 22% felt it had a liberal bias and 11% felt it was conservatively biased. The final 31% were unsure. The figure for no apparent bias, 37%, was unmatched by any other media outlet save public television. CBS, ABC, and NBC scored 36% or lower. As has been the case in other surveys, self-identified conservatives are more likely to feel public radio is liberally biased (24%) than their liberal counterparts (19%).²⁶

The conclusion of the Tarrance survey for CPB offered two ideas to consider. First, that one “could argue that there is a serious disconnection between what American people think of public broadcasting and its news and information programming and what politically engaged policymakers think of public broadcasting and its news and information programming.”²⁷ And, second, that the “…majority of the American public simply does not feel that public television and public radio are biased in one direction or the other. Indeed, some of this can be attributed to the fact that a sizeable portion of the population is completely unfamiliar with the news and information programming on public broadcasting, but this fact does not make their opinions any less relevant.”²⁸

When Kenneth Tomlinson appeared on The Diane Rehm Show on May 18, 2005 , Rehm asked about studies demonstrating “that a majority of the U.S. adult population does not believe that the news and information programming on public broadcasting is biased.”²⁹ Tomlinson replied that Rehm’s statement was “a proper reflection of the poll…”³⁰ Rehm questioned how, then, “…does that lead us to believe that we must have something to balance a program like Bill Moyers?” After some back and forth, including the reading of a listener e-mail, Tomlinson replied, “I think there is a residue of positive feeling for public broadcasting in this country reflected in that poll.”³¹

Independent survey data from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press suggests that the picture for public radio may be more complicated. If one measures use, there are only slight differences in party identification. In 2004, 31% of Republicans said they sometimes or regularly listened to public radio, compared with 38% of Democrats, and 37% of Independents. (The viewership of the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer was even more balanced, though smaller, 18% of Republicans, 20% of Democrats and 21% of Independents).³²

Yet if one measures public radio by the degree to which audiences “believe” what they hear there, the gaps by party affiliation are larger. A third of Democrats said they “believe all or most of what they get from public radio,” more than twice the 15% of Republicans who said that. (Similar gaps were seen with the NewsHour). Yet it should be noted that similar gaps in believability across party lines applied to most media outlets, including C-Span, which mostly just broadcasts events live. Democrats were more likely to trust even the Wall Street Journal than Republicans. Only Fox News garnered higher levels of believability among Republicans than Democrats.

Heading into 2006, this much probably can be said with some confidence about the attitudes toward public radio: The audience remains strong. Public surveys also continue to show significant degrees of public trust, and a fair amount of bipartisan use. Nonetheless, there remains sincere concern among conservative elites about whether taxpayer-supported public radio content is balanced. Whether that concern is borne out, and what if anything should be done to address it, was more frustrated than clarified by the actions of the former CPB chairman Tomlinson.