Bringing Blue Skies Down to Earth

Introduction

In 1926, as the pay-for-airtime advertising model was becoming increasingly entrenched in American broadcasting, The Independent expressed deep concern about potential misuse of the airwaves: “Any drunken sailor with $5 to spend could, for sixty seconds, fill the air with noises whose only limitation would be indecency or incitement to violence” (Anon. 1927, 58). This quotation and thousands more like it speak to abiding fears of truly public media: What would happen if just anyone were allowed to broadcast? What kind of drunkards, subversives, perverts, and vulgarians would take to the air? Indeed, one of the effects of the federal licensing system was to make the broadcaster “knowable” and accountable to the government, thereby providing a mechanism for protecting the public from, effectively, itself. ¹

If the public’s access to the airwaves had to be controlled from a content perspective, the public’s role in policy making was similarly contained and circumscribed. There were frequent citizen-led policy initiatives at the local level in the early days of wireless, usually seeking to reduce noise pollution and interference, but these early policy efforts were largely superseded by the Radio Act of 1927, which placed most regulation of broadcasting into the hands of federal officials once and for all. ² Despite this federalization of media policy, the public continued to have a nominal role in broadcast regulation under the system of local trusteeship established by the Federal Radio Commission (FRC), as guarantors of the trustee’s performance: it was the citizens’ job to alert regulators if a licensee was not broadcasting in the public interest, making local listeners the ostensible arbiters of appropriate content. However, even this watchdog role for the public was largely illusory since, first, citizens had no standing before the Commission to challenge license renewals prior to 1966, and second, the ultimate decision about whether broadcasts were in the public interest remained with regulators in Washington, not with the local community itself (Classen 1994, 79; Kirkpatrick 2006b, 104).

In light of this long history, it is nothing short of astounding that in the late 1960s, a window opened in American media for ordinary citizens to take significant control of both content and policy for the first time in decades. This was the social, economic, political, and technological rupture known as community-antenna television (CATV) or, more commonly, cable (Le Duc 1987, 37; Streeter 1997). Thanks to changes in federal policy pertaining to the negotiation of rights-of-way in local jurisdictions around the country, the public now potentially had a say in the terms and conditions of local cable television franchises. Although this power was still structured by Federal Communications Commission (FCC) constraints, it provided an important new role for citizens in shaping media policy by identifying and negotiating for local communicational needs and desires. In addition, the provision of public, educational, and government access channels on those local cable systems permitted individuals and groups to produce their own television programs free of prior restraint and free of the censorship of federally authorized licensees.

One of the earliest localities in which this new citizen control was tested was Madison, Wisconsin, a relatively compact city of about 175,000 in the early 1970s and the seat of both the state government and the main campus of the University of Wisconsin. This essay examines the original negotiations for cable television in Madison; while the story of cable has been well told from several vantage points (e.g., Streeter 1997; Engelman 1996; Boyle 1997; Linder 1999; Mullen 2008; Parsons 2008), I wish to use this moment of media policy negotiation specifically to contribute to the paradigm of critical cultural policy studies. Following Justin Lewis and Toby Miller’s call (2003, 2) for more explorations of “the ways in which cultural policies have traditionally been deployed, and a disciplined imagining of alternatives,” this case study allows us to expand our idea of what “media policy” is and how it gets produced at multiple levels. Thus, while I hope that scholars with a particular focus on the history of community media will find the Madison example interesting—and it is worth mentioning that close case studies of local cable franchising from this period are rare in the literature, making this study valuable in that regard as well ³ —my primary focus is not on public access television per se but on policy formation “from below,” what we might call popular or vernacular policy making. My argument is that this moment of policy translation between the federal and local levels illustrates some of the possibilities, risks, and limits of citizen involvement in media policy making. Furthermore, this case study reveals a rhetorics of policy translation, involving metaphors of outcomes, constructions of community identity and power, and tensions between utopian and dystopian discourses; I argue that a better understanding of the rhetorics at work in this case can contribute to the project of empowering contemporary citizen-activists relative to state and private economic interests.

Policy Translation in Critical Cultural Policy Studies

The present study is broadly situated within the field of critical cultural policy studies, an area that builds on a long history of critical approaches to communication policy analysis (Lewis and Miller 2003). Many contemporary iterations of this tradition draw on poststructuralist theory, especially Michel Foucault’s ideas about “governmentality,” to analyze the ways in which cultural policy is not merely about encouraging and supporting a vibrant cultural life, nor simply protecting cultural markets, nor shielding citizens from harmful or dangerous culture, but also about maintaining social control and producing governable citizens, ideally those who govern themselves in the last instance (Foucault 1991; Bennett 2003; Packer 2003; Ouellette and Hay 2008). Cultural policy, including media policy of the kind at issue in broadcasting and cable, is at least partially about making citizens knowable and, ultimately, manageable: the “conduct of conduct.” From this perspective, we need to look past the “face value” of media and cultural policies to better understand how they manage not just communication but also the population by organizing individuals and localities within a modern, bureaucratic, efficient state populated by ultimately self-regulating citizens. Yet much work remains to be done within this paradigm in understanding “popular” forms of policy making, as well as the ways that policy concerns and decisions move up and down hierarchies of local, regional, and national politics. In particular, is citizen policy making of the kind seen in local cable franchising and regulation able to alter the dynamics of governmentality that critical cultural policy studies has found in other, more top–down instances of cultural policy making? To what extent and under what conditions are citizen-policymakers empowered by a bottom–up or “vernacular” process, and with what implications for content?

My goal in this study, then, is to use the Madison example to think through the process of what I will call “policy translation,” that is, how media policy, formulated at one level with one set of concerns, political constraints, and cultural considerations, gets “translated” into policy and media production at another level, one potentially with markedly different concerns. While local cable franchising is still official policy in many ways, since it is sanctioned by the FCC, undertaken under the auspices of local governments, and conducted in and through structures and procedures authorized by the state, it is also vernacular policy in that citizens are expected to participate in the policy-making process as negotiators and decision makers, roles far beyond the commenting and complaining that usually count as citizen participation at the FCC. Furthermore, these citizens are expected to know and speak for a broader local public—a problematic expectation in many ways (Mayer 2011; Anderson and Curtin 1999), but nonetheless a relatively rare opportunity to bring popular perspectives into policy formation. Local negotiations for cable thus represent a strange moment of media policy creation, one occurring at the interface of two jurisdictional authorities, involving empowered actors theoretically unencumbered by federal viewpoints and responsibilities and ostensibly uncaptured by a notion of the media industries as a prime constituent. Therefore, despite their quasi-official status they permit an alternative vantage point on the formulation of policy at the intersection of culture, politics, economics, and law, translated between the federal and local levels, and among the political, civic, and economic realms.

By using the term policy translation, I am attempting to get at the ways in which local enactment of federal policy, such as in early cable franchising, deviates from the rather clean and unproblematic process conjured by the more top–down term policy implementation. Implementation has been one of the ruling metaphors of policy studies since Lasswell (1956) and continues to operate as a privileged term in both the literature and the institutional structures that influence public policy discourse (e.g., the Institute for the Study of Public Policy Implementation at American University). More important than terminology, however, is the top–down perspective that the metaphor encourages, as seen in the definition offered by one study: “Implementation is the carrying out of a basic policy decision . . . [and] the compliance of target groups with those decisions” (Mazmanian and Sabatier 1989, 20-21, emphasis added). Considerations of policy implementation also often locate the primary source of agency with authorities, characterizing policy as primarily something officials do and measuring success by their ability to effect change: “Policy implementation is what develops between the establishment of an apparent intention on the part of government to do something, or to stop doing something, and the ultimate impact in the world of action” (O’Toole 2000, 266). Particularly in those rare cases where ordinary citizens enjoy substantial influence, policy “implementation” implies at least three elements that are, in fact, usually absent in policy negotiations: a clear, shared vision of the desired policy outcome (the teleological problem); a clear, shared consensus on rules and procedures (the deontological problem); and sufficient executive authority to achieve and maintain a desired policy outcome (the power problem).

Although even top–down-oriented scholars recognize that turning policy statements into practices and behaviors is usually a messy process, some public policy scholars have recently begun to argue that a better metaphor is needed; as one study put it, “Policy implementation has too often been practiced as a top-down or governing-elite phenomenon. . . . [I]ts study and practice would be much better served were its practitioners to adopt a more participatory, more directly democratic orientation” (deLeon and deLeon 2002, 467). The metaphor of “translation,” I suggest, more effectively captures the kinds of adaptations that must occur whenever ideas move among cultures, whether it is a poem shifting from one linguistic community to another or, as in the present study, a vision of the media system shifting from the federalized bureaucratic culture of the FCC to the localized activist culture of an individual community. Policy translation describes a less predictable and more culturally inflected process than “implementation,” which is especially appropriate to early cable franchising: the FCC did not simply deliver a plan for cable that local communities should put into action, but established broad guidelines that vaguely described how a final outcome might look, and it was up to citizens to interpret those guidelines against the backdrop of locally dominant understandings of the local community and within local political-economic conditions.

To that end, the remainder of this essay analyzes the negotiations for cable in Madison, Wisconsin, from 1965 to 1975 in order to learn how a local public coalesced around cable issues, how that public organized itself, how it sought to translate federal policy into locally workable media structures, and how the results of these negotiations were translated back to the federal level. Madison makes an appropriate case study for this process for many reasons, not least because its citizen-policymakers received national attention for their efforts and its policy solutions were singled out by the FCC as a particularly noteworthy interpretation of the Commission’s intentions, subsequently serving as a test cast for activist visions of public access and as a model for other cities. It thus represents a “successful” translation from the point of view of the official federal policy sphere, yet a somewhat more ambiguous victory from the perspective of the vernacular policymakers involved. As a result, several features of this case may prove helpful in understanding the experience of other localities and the processes of policy translation more generally.

By studying such acts of policy translation and beginning to identify their discursive characteristics, citizens might better turn such moments to their advantage, resulting in a more democratic policy-making process and, hopefully, a more democratic media system. I also argue that the rhetorics of policy translation identified in this study can function as the beginnings of an explanatory—and perhaps normative—framework for scholars of media policy. The negotiations described below obviously do not allow us to understand the processes of vernacular policy making or policy translation once and for all, but certain features of this case seem both significant enough and generalizable enough to suggest avenues for further exploration and discussion.

Toward a Federal Policy for Cable

As by now is well known, the growth of cable in the late 1960s and early 1970s was partly driven by a utopian “blue skies” discourse that united a wide range of social formations behind a push to expand cable (Streeter 1997; see also Parsons 2008). Abundant channels promised more viewer choice at a time when many were growing frustrated with the narrow range of content available on the networks, and various scenarios for interactivity promised to improve modern life through home shopping, home schooling, videoconferencing, and more. The anticipated social effects were equally rosy: a better-functioning public sphere; wider representation for marginalized groups; and greater understanding between neighbors and strangers alike leading to a more cohesive, less divisive society.

Central to this discourse was the promise of public, educational, and government (PEG) access television channels. American cable access television grew out of a range of initiatives and experiments in Canada and the United States in the 1960s and early 1970s. As described in detail by Ralph Engelman (1996), the Challenge for Change project in Canada played a key role in demonstrating the political potential of putting film and television cameras in the hands of ordinary citizens. One of the participants in this project, George Stoney, subsequently founded the Alternate Media Center in New York; beginning in 1971 the AMC took the lead in producing and distributing citizen-produced television, training the public to make video, and assisting other localities in establishing public access centers through apprenticeships and other programs. By 1972, thanks to the confluence of a wide range of progressive and establishment interests in promoting access channels for cable television, this nascent infrastructure succeeded in seeding vibrant access movements around the country that were central to the social promise of cable.

Less well appreciated, however, is the fact that this blue skies discourse was accompanied by strong dystopian undercurrents. In particular, observers frequently raised the threat of “adult” material entering people’s homes, especially when cable operators began offering R-rated pay-per-view movies such as Klute, a film that was not only more explicit than network fare but that also, as one prostitute claimed, inspired her and thousands of her colleagues to enter the business (quoted in Carmody 1973). This concern was particularly acute when it came to public access channels bypassing the gatekeepers who controlled the rest of the media, and the question of liability for access programming arose repeatedly: few claimed to want to censor content, but who would be responsible if, say, an access user violated obscenity laws? The threat of nudity particularly exercised (and titillated) critics. The New York Times, for example, carefully catalogued the risqué content on Manhattan’s public access station: the man smoking a joint in the tub; the transsexuals who, “carried away with enthusiasm,” displayed the “specific physical results” of their sex-change operations for the camera, etc. (O’Connor 1973; Buckley 1973). Public access advocates sought to reassure critics that access did not pose as great a danger as some feared (see, e.g., Gent 1971); nonetheless, in an era of increasing nudity on the stage and screen, and when “topless radio” and similarly risqué broadcasting often exercised moralists, the risks of uncontrolled public access inevitably formed an important backdrop to negotiations over cable television. The antiestablishment political orientation of many early video “guerillas” merely added to the perceived threat (Boyle 1997).

In March 1972, the FCC released its Third Report and Order, which established various minima and maxima for local cable franchising authorities to adopt, including technical specifications and maximum franchise fees. The FCC was certainly responding to the blue skies rhetoric with this decision, but its approach was tinged with trepidation, particularly when it came to letting citizens control content. For example, FCC Chairman Dean Burch repeatedly characterized public access as experimental and potentially dangerous, invoking fears of the unregulated speaker: “We recognize that open access carries with it certain risks. But some amount of risk is inherent in a democracy.” The FCC saw itself inaugurating a bold and risky venture with public access, and believed that “only with experience will we be able to tell what further general rules, if any, are called for” (Burch 1971, 35-36). By adopting such a stance, the Commission left it up to local systems to translate a vague conception of access into workable policy. This paucity of guidance was accompanied by assurances that cable operators would be protected from the dangers unleashed by PEG channels:

Cable policy at the federal level, then, was effectively little more than a vague vision backed by tenuous promises and the hope that individual municipalities would work it all out. The FCC’s cable policy was thus subject to significant local interpretation and negotiation, as demonstrated by the history of cable franchising in Madison.

Cable Television in Madison: Struggles over Policy

Cable negotiations for Madison, Wisconsin, in the early 1970s, although playing out against a political backdrop that was in many ways sui generis, allows us to consider bottom–up policy making within a sharpened context of strong citizen activism, a powerful community identity, and a visceral understanding of the stakes of a dysfunctional political culture. Madison was, after all, one of the epicenters of U.S. antiwar activity, including various forms of violence, from police brutality to the 1970 bombing of the Army Mathematics Research Center on the University of Wisconsin campus. This is not to suggest that there was a singular “Madison identity”: like everyplace else and certainly every city of any size, Madison was divided by class, politics, geography, race, ethnicity, age, gender, and more (Anderson and Curtin 1999; Curtin 2000). Nonetheless, there was a somewhat coherent dominant identity sustained during this era: Madison as a progressive success story that had effectively unified left-wing politics and the cosmopolitan good life. Radical activist Robert Gardiner skeptically described this dominant self-image in this way:

This dominant identity can be seen at work in the negotiations for cable, with key citizen-activists invoking or reacting against it at various moments.

Although there were efforts in the early 1950s to bring cable television to Madison, no homes had been wired by the early 1970s when the FCC began encouraging the development of cable. A company called Complete Channel Television (CCT) had been hastily awarded a slap-dash franchise in 1965 but had repeatedly delayed construction. In the meantime, various cases of failed and corrupt cable regulation, including franchise trafficking and bribery, were making news around the country, leading several Madisonians to look more critically at the city’s cable prospects (Levine 1976, 11). They quickly became dissatisfied with both Complete Channel and the ordinance it was operating under: the 1965 franchise was unfavorable to the city in terms of franchise fees, and there was no provision for public or government access channels (Research/Action Collective 1974, 6).

Complete Channel soon found itself under attack from various quarters. In the summer of 1971, the first of three highly influential citizen’s groups, Better Television for Madison (BTM), turned its attention to cable. BTM was predominantly a group of public-spirited professors at the University of Wisconsin; broadcast historian Lawrence W. Lichty took the most active role in cable issues. In early August, Lichty drew up a list of criticisms of the 1965 franchise and prepared a call for a moratorium on construction by Complete Channel until the issue could be studied.

The efforts of BTM, combined with several harsh editorials in Madison’s local newspapers, began to arouse wider citizen interest in Madison’s cable future, with several raising the possibility of cutting out CCT entirely through a municipal franchise (i.e., the city would build and operate the cable system itself). In what would soon become a pattern, Complete Channel invoked the potential of public access to fend off criticism, promising “neighborhood broadcasts” as part of its eventual cable service. In an illustration of how unformed the concept of public access still was even in late 1971, this plan, modeled on the community newspaper, envisioned small broadcast studios in “every” Madison neighborhood for residents to produce programming that would then be cablecast only to that neighborhood. In announcing the proposal, CCT’s president Roger Russell explicitly employed one of the major themes of the blue skies discourse, the ability of technology to strengthen community bonds: “Within the framework of this concept, the public will have ready access to truly local activities, whether social, political, athletic, or cultural” (quoted in Anon. 1971a). Still, CCT’s opponents were not swayed by the “neighborhood broadcast” maneuver. The Wisconsin State Journal, for example, candidly wrote that “one probable reason” for the announcement was to convince the city that CCT still deserved the franchise (Anon. 1971a), and on September 7, BTM officially proposed a construction moratorium. A week later, a resolution to withdraw CCT’s franchise failed to pass the Common Council by a single vote.

With franchise-revocation defeated but the threats of a moratorium and a municipal system still alive, panicky representatives of Complete Channel met with Better Television for Madison in September 1971. It is interesting, especially for a study of citizen involvement in policy making, that CCT chose to meet with a citizen’s group instead of with government officials to work out differences between itself and the city. BTM certainly enjoyed a great deal of local credibility and was even singled out by Variety as “one of the more aggressive broadcast protest groups in the midwest” (Anon. 1971b). CCT’s decision may have been part of a strategy to cultivate links with the “weak public” of citizens as a way to apply pressure on the “strong public” of the Council. ⁴ But perhaps more importantly, Complete Channel may have felt it would get a more sympathetic hearing from a group of respectable middle-class broadcast specialists than from the more oppositional citizens involved with the video guerilla movement or even the Common Council, several of whom were “tainted” (from more conservative perspectives) by New Left affiliations. ⁵ In contrast to “firebrand” alders like Paul Soglin, the former student protest leader who took the strongest interest in cable issues on the Council, BTM and CCT shared certain assumptions about “appropriate” policy discourse and the nature of the well-ordered society more generally. This shared corporate-liberal perspective made for relatively smooth negotiations and can be seen in the exchange between BTM and CCT, providing useful insight into the struggles to translate federal guidelines and blue skies rhetoric into actual cable policy:

These provisions and the analogies on which they are based—bookmobiles, community presses, the soapboxes of the public square—are best understood in light of the tensions among blue skies discourses, corporate power, and longstanding fears of unregulated/unfiltered public access to the media. BTM wanted cable to provide tools for empowering citizens and strengthening community bonds (which broadcasting was widely thought to weaken) but preferably in an orderly and “responsible” fashion. Furthermore, this vision of cable as a potentially unifying force in the community—enabling greater but also greatly regulated civic participation in the public sphere—relied not on a revolutionary transfer of communicative sovereignty to the individual citizen but rather on a more modest redistribution of power within a corporate-liberal framework, that is, a conviction that government and business should work together toward a “reasonable” effort to provide somewhat greater tools of expression to the “reasonable” citizen. At the same time, when this conviction was translated into actual policy suggestions, it had to be negotiated from a position of relative disempowerment: as university professors, BTM had high enough status and a compatible enough conception of legitimate political discourse to be taken seriously as a negotiating partner by both the city and the franchisee, but lacked the authority to alter the franchise ordinance or hold CCT to its exorbitant promises. Also, CCT was able to exploit class concerns about both government-controlled speech and abuse of the communications media to minimize the number of channels available to the public: fears of both overregulated and underregulated speech, shared by BTM and CCT, structured the negotiations over public access.

Despite these discussions between CCT and BTM, a consensus was growing that the original 1965 franchise ordinance was beyond repair, and an entirely new one would have to be written (Levine 1976, 83). An Ad Hoc Cable Committee was appointed in January 1972, with Lichty as secretary, to draft the new franchise.

In the meantime, in December 1971, a new company called the Community Communications Corporation applied for a second franchise for Madison. Yet again, Complete Channel invoked blue skies notions of public access in order to defend its position with the city: it argued that a second franchise would not be in the public interest, since a “split system” would dilute the already small audience for access programming. Churches, for instance, would not know on which system to put their programs, and neighborhoods would be divided rather than unified by cable. Complete Channel was effectively claiming that the realization of cable’s utopian potential required nothing less than an unchallenged local cable monopoly. This argument, together with a reluctance to award a new franchise under a seriously flawed ordinance, led the city to reject the second bid, a fateful decision (Ad Hoc Cable Committee 1972). With the competition out of the way, and Complete Channel’s responsiveness to BTM having weakened the push for a construction moratorium, CCT began construction on Madison’s west side in August 1972. ⁷

In September, the second of three major citizen’s groups, the Citizen’s Cable Council (CCC), began working to publicize cable issues to community groups and also to pressure the city to consider community needs while drafting the new ordinance. While BTM was primarily interested in fostering “quality television,” the CCC tapped more directly into the progressive political commitments of many Madisonians by emphasizing community viewing centers, free cable hookups for schools and libraries, and sliding cable rates for the poor. The group soon represented more than 100 local organizations and, as did BTM before it, quickly earned legitimacy with city officials and Complete Channel alike (including gaining a respectful notice in the national Broadband Communications Report [1973]).

From the perspective of bottom–up policy making, the emergence of the CCC illustrates some of the complexity of citizen involvement and the varying degrees of “outsiderness” it can represent. It goes without saying that presumption to speak for “the public” deserves critical scrutiny; as shown by a vast body of work on democratic participation in general and citizen media activism, in particular, rhetorics of citizenship and publicity often mask class division and other structures of privilege and difference (e.g., Anderson and Curtin 1999; Howley 2005; Perlman 2007). These structures help produce, limit, or shape the legitimacy and effectiveness of citizen activism. In the specific case of Madison, Better Television was a relatively disempowered citizen’s group but nonetheless approached the issue of cable with something of a top–down, even elitist, perspective, and worked to achieve insider status by embracing the rhetorical markers of public rationality and the bureaucratized procedures of the official policy world. Its professional-class members were comfortable (and effective) working within the legitimated institutions of local government, federal policy constraints, and the like—even more insiderish than some of the elected government officials themselves. In contrast, the Citizen’s Cable Council represented a tradition of grassroots coalition-building that sought to derive its legitimacy in part from the distance it could claim from authorized, institutional power. The ideological framework within which it understood itself included a strong acceptance of a citizen-consumer binary in which participatory citizenship was antithetical to the workings of capitalism (and only partially integrated into the workings of the state). The difficulty came when the CCC, on entering the debate, was forced to adopt the corporate-liberal procedures of the official policy sphere (e.g., franchise ordinances negotiated between the state and the incumbent franchise holder); the tensions produced at this intersection of popular and official understandings of policy making quickly colored the negotiations.

Although many issues were discussed during these ordinance-revision negotiations, three questions concerning the public access channels primarily motivated organized citizen participation. The first was the administration of public access, including whether the city could oversee the use of the channels: to what extent could local government regulate access content? In May 1973, a compromise was reached whereby citizen boards would handle policy matters and coordinate access, with city officials acting solely as advisors (Citizen’s Cable Council 1973).

The second major issue for the Citizen’s Cable Council was the financing of access. The FCC, in its 1972 cable regulations, had set a maximum franchise fee of 3% of subscriber revenues (up to 5% with FCC approval); at the same time, the CCC was pushing for guarantees of access equipment and training in the new ordinance, guarantees that would obviously require funding from somewhere. Negotiators settled on a 5% franchise fee, of which 40% would be dedicated to supporting access. Although this proposal faced several difficulties, including FCC authorization, it was adopted into the recommendations for the new ordinance (Walsh and Thole 1973).

The third main issue was liability. Complete Channel continued to express deep concern about its potential liability for access content. As the blue-sky possibilities of cable were translated into policy, this concern took on increasingly legalistic forms as CCT asserted a right to control public access programming through prior restraint. The company proposed that requests for access airtime be submitted ten days in advance and wrote:

The Citizen’s Cable Council responded angrily to this assertion of a right of content control, as well as CCT’s overall tone, and the statement merely aggravated an ongoing culture clash between passionate advocates for progressive change in the media system and the attorney-consulting businessmen on whom that change, at this particular conjuncture, seemed to depend. Complete Channel, for its part, dismissed the CCC as unreasonable (despite the CCC having on its side both legal precedent and the FCC’s reassurances that cable companies would not be held liable for access programming). CCT ended up changing the ten-day rule to five days but left its assertion of a right of prior restraint intact (Complete Channel TV 1973b). In other words, Complete Channel effectively disregarded the CCC’s concerns, again demonstrating that these struggles were conducted within a political-economic framework as well as a bureaucratic culture that increasingly favored Complete Channel. Municipal ownership of Madison’s system was looking ever less likely, and the city had rejected the bid for a second franchise; clearly, CCT felt less compulsion to demonstrate great cooperation regarding citizens’ desired outcomes, especially that progressive-activist segment of the citizenry that CCT regarded with open suspicion and hostility.

Extrapolating beyond the specifics of the Madison case, these struggles begin to illustrate the range of competing discourses and the complex web of power relations that had to be negotiated in order to translate blue skies rhetoric into actual policy. On one hand, a workable vision of cable television, including viable if imperfect provisions for public access, was slowly being realized thanks to the power of utopian rhetoric to inspire citizen action. On the other hand, the prioritization of access meant that other aspects of this blue skies rhetoric were simultaneously being contained, even abandoned, during these negotiations. Issues that could have been construed as in the public interest were effectively “lost in translation,” for example, municipal ownership of the cable system, sliding cable rates for the poor, two-way cable, etc. Municipal ownership, for example, when it was discussed at all, was advocated solely in the context of public access as a way to improve use of the channels, not as a broader challenge to the private corporate-commercial structure of the television industry. ⁸ Thus, while the remarkable degree of public involvement demonstrates the power of utopian discourses to engage citizens in bottom–up policy making, the preeminence of public access as motivation for that involvement reduced the most radical visions of cable’s potential to what was often regarded as a highly regulated electronic soapbox, thereby enabling cable to develop closer to the commercial model of broadcasting than the revolutionary communitarian model envisioned by many progressives.

By spring 1974, revisions to the franchise ordinance were well under way. Cable service had begun on Madison’s west side, and several video cooperatives had begun producing access programming. Relations between Complete Channel and access users were predictably tense, with each side complaining bitterly about the other. ⁹ Negotiations between the local and national levels also continued to shape policy translation. Most significantly, the city consulted with the FCC on how best to finance PEG access: either a 5 percent franchising fee or a contractual “extra services package” to be offered by the franchisee. The FCC did not deny the request for 5% but indicated that it preferred the extra services option; based on the FCC’s response, the city drafted a provision asking the franchise applicant to specify “any additional funding, facilities, equipment or personnel beyond those required elsewhere” it would provide to support access. This turned out to be another fateful decision, a road not taken. Translated into local policy, this provision meant that Madison was trading ongoing funding for the duration of the franchise for a one-time gift—a gift, furthermore, entirely dependent on the largess of competitors for the franchise.

Importantly, Complete Channel had already indicated its displeasure with the “extra services package” provision, complaining that it “tends to encourage the inducement to engage in blue sky promises and could be viewed as a subtle threat to potential bidders” (Complete Channel TV 1974b, 74). Setting aside the fact that the company, two years earlier, had been happy to engage in blue sky promises (such as a fleet of mobile studios) when its Madison franchise was at stake, it is revealing that a simple, clear statement of citizens’ desires would be interpreted by CCT as a “subtle threat.” CCT’s statement also reveals the extent to which cable companies recognized and actively resisted the utopian rhetoric of the day (or, more precisely, sought protection from competitive market forces by seeking to exploit or undermine that rhetoric as the situation required). In this regard, it is worth noting that much of the “gold rush” mentality in the cable industry of 1970-1972 had dissipated by this point in 1974: the economic outlook for cable in late 1973 and early 1974 had grown somewhat bleak, with system construction slowed by rising interest rates, falling faith among investors, well-publicized cases of corruption, and ongoing regulatory uncertainty at the state and federal levels (Parsons 2008, 314ff.). Madison had picked a bad time to depend on a competitive marketplace and corporate generosity to kick-start its access channels.

Of course the key problem here was not Madison’s timing but rather the FCC’s failure to imagine the difficulties that the effort to translate its federal policies into local action would almost inevitably create. Specifically, the FCC was reluctant to allow cities to force cable companies to finance PEG channels, but it also failed to foster greater local competition for franchises and overbuilds in order to allow market forces to achieve the same end. As Megan Mullen has pointed out, “Had the FCC truly wished to have local programming play a role in cable’s future, much larger structural changes in the industry would have been necessary” (2008, 99). The FCC’s unsurprising reluctance to undertake more sweeping changes left citizens with no obvious source of guaranteed funding for access and, in most communities, not enough competition for franchises to lead the market to generate that funding on its own, especially once investment dollars for new cable systems dried up. In the case of Madison, in the absence of a second bidder for the franchise, only the threat of a municipally owned system presented a realistic alternative to whatever terms Complete Channel might offer; if CCT could contain or even shut down that possibility, the company could promise only FCC legal minima and pocket the difference.

In September 1974, the Common Council approved the new ordinance, and a public hearing was held to gather community input on the extra services provision. At this meeting, the third major citizen’s group, a coalition of independent video producers and access proponents under the name Madison Community Access Center (MCAC), proposed a three-part plan:

This plan significantly reframed the debate on access support by providing a coherent and plausible model of public access within the limits established by the FCC. Ultimately, it became the proposal to which all franchise applicants would be expected to respond. The MCAC plan also revealed a slightly different vision of public access from previous conceptions, defining a public access infrastructure analogous to a community center: a dedicated studio in a central location that would offer production classes, serve as a recreational space for the community, and foster local interaction and discourse. The plan can also be read for its negotiation of the power relations within which blue skies rhetoric would be translated into policy. The MCAC plan hoped to draw on the resources of the city government and the business interests of the franchisee in order to establish a sphere for access users where they would be relatively free from the interference of both. Consistent with the decision to go with an extra services package, this vision foresaw much less control and regulation of access users than previous plans, but also less ongoing support, essentially requiring public access to fend for itself after the initial startup. The plan drew on previous experiments, notably New York’s Alternate Media Center, but was nonetheless considered both novel and “well reasoned” enough to receive special commendation from the FCC. Commenting on Madison’s application for a Certificate of Compliance, the FCC noted:

With the MCAC proposal on the table, municipal ownership became even less politically viable; as one insider put it, after three years of the refranchisement process “the whole city was just sick and tired of it” (quoted in Levine 1976, 138). If correct, that statement suggests yet another dimension of bottom–up policy making: fatigue and burnout. Citizens in this process were volunteering their time and energy, and if after three years they lacked the will to fight for municipal ownership, that simply reveals a further political-economic weakness that the public faces in policy negotiations with the tireless and potentially immortal legal fictions that are corporations. ¹⁰ The self-understanding of Madison shared by many of the participants may have also encouraged acceptance of a less-than-optimal deal from Complete Channel, in the belief that Madisonians could make it work. As one of the key citizens involved in the negotiations put it:

When the bid application deadline passed in February 1975, Complete Channel was the only applicant for the franchise. Presumably aware that this would be the case, the company had offered substantially less equipment in its extra services package than the MCAC plan had foreseen (worth about $50,000 instead of $80,000). Without a viable competitor in the form of a second bidder or municipal ownership, CCT no longer had any incentive to offer more support for access, much less to engage in promises of two-way cable, sliding rates for the poor, and the like. Many activists, especially those most committed to public access, were outraged. Significantly, though, the two most important citizens groups remaining in the process, MCAC and the CCC, recommended approval of Complete Channel’s application despite reduced access support, calling it “the best we’re likely to get.” This schism within the citizenry finally killed the last remaining possibility of municipal ownership, and on March 18, 1975, a strongly divided Council voted 14-8 to grant Complete Channel a fifteen-year franchise.

Conclusion: Toward a Rhetorics of Policy Translation

I have detailed the ins and outs of Madison’s experience in the belief that a fuller understanding of bottom–up policy making and the process of policy translation can emerge from such close analysis. Some of these details, while telling in themselves, are specific enough to this case as to make broader application difficult. Nonetheless, several salient and possibly generalizable features of the rhetorical features of policy translation stand out.

First, a single media-minded public did not spontaneously emerge when the prospect of cable television arose. Instead, the public that organized itself around cable issues drew from a range of preexisting publics with different agendas tangentially related to the specific issue at hand, such as video artists, community organizers, and media professors concerned with “quality” television. This “cable public” emerged slowly and with some difficulty; different groups approached policy making with different priorities, assumptions, and rhetorical strategies, and an important part of the process of successful policy translation would have been the harmonization of the relations within this citizen movement and between citizen-activists and elected officials. Ultimately, these groups failed to overcome their political and cultural differences, allowing the cable operator to achieve just enough “buy-in” from just enough citizens to get its way on franchising issues. One can, counterfactually, imagine several scenarios that would have favored greater harmonization of interests: a single citizens group as the primary negotiating partner rather than several, an a priori strategic agreement among activists not to take municipal ownership off the table until negotiations with the private sector were completed, and greater dialog between more “establishment” actors like Better Television for Madison and oppositional actors like the video guerillas in order to defang the discourse of the “irresponsible” access user. In the absence of such harmonization, CCT was able to divide this cable public through a series of well-timed promises and threats.

Second, an important stumbling block to the harmonization of citizen interests within this cable public was the channeling of bottom–up participation into top–down legal and bureaucratic procedures. In other words, citizens had to play in a corporate-liberal arena regardless of their own desires or commitments, and official policy at both the federal and local levels made it difficult to imagine an alternative process. Again—and in a lesson for localities considering public solutions to wireless internet infrastructure today—perhaps a stronger citizen push for a municipally owned system might have empowered citizens differently and opened up new possibilities for vernacular policy-making procedures. Nonetheless, the Madison experience seems to suggest the possibly inescapable workings of a bureaucratic governmentality. This was not policy making waged on the level of the popular, nor using the ideologies and procedures favored by the citizen-participants; rather, it was policy making that had been prestamped with market ideologies of property and economic power, premolded into legal and administrative forms, and thus to some degree predetermined in its range of possible outcomes. The “conduct of conduct” here was overdetermined by the larger discursive constraints of official top–down policy, constraints that deemed alternative understandings of processes and outcomes illegitimate (or “unreasonable”), even if those understandings emerged from the local bottom–up policy-making process that the FCC was ostensibly fostering.

Third, although utopian discourses animated public involvement in these policy questions—especially the democratic potential of public access television—it was dystopian discourses that more forcefully structured that involvement. In other words, translating federal policy into local workability became less about maximizing positive visions of cable television than about minimizing fears. In particular, dystopian rhetoric about governmental control of the means of communication worked to delegitimize municipal ownership, while dystopian rhetoric about “irresponsible” access users helped the cable operator divide citizens and maintain control over equipment, facilities, and programming.

Fourth, these fears were exacerbated by a corporate-liberal conception of citizens as the beneficiaries of regulation, not its creators, suggesting that years of exclusion from policy making and media production had led citizens to imagine themselves in opposition to, rather than embedded in, a state-market regulatory apparatus. As Vicki Mayer writes of her experience on municipal cable boards in the 1990s and 2000s, “In local regulatory circles, the most powerful claims were also the most personal, representing the individual citizen who seemed to lack equal opportunity in the marketplace. Whether we invoked the public need for better customer services or inveighed against the company’s transportation or communications infrastructure, our demands incorporated us into the cable corporation as consumer-citizens” (Mayer 2011). In the Madison case, Complete Channel’s impatience with citizen-negotiators and public access users, which was often revealed in its patronizing or dismissive tone and frequent assertions of a right of ultimate content control, suggests the difficulties that bottom–up policy makers face, most immediately in the rhetorical realm, in creating empowered identities for themselves as media regulators.

Fifth, the key galvanizing issue for public involvement in local policy struggles simultaneously became the upper limit of what could be attained. Specifically, to the degree that the promise of public access motivated the public’s interest in cable issues, the scope of the public interest essentially got reduced to that demand. This allowed the cable provider to make promises about access—exorbitant at first, weaker as its position strengthened—in order to progressively advance its interests in negotiations. As a result, other possible features of cable technology that figured prominently in the blue skies rhetoric of the era, such as two-way cable, were increasingly marginalized as negotiations progressed. This process was partially enabled by the fact that the form and structure of public access television was still somewhat undefined while these negotiations were occurring. For instance, when credible opposition to CCT arose, and franchise revocation and municipal ownership were still realistic alternatives, citizens could secure promises of multiple access points, mobile studios, and more. As CCT became entrenched and its hand strengthened, citizens fell back on defensive and significantly less ambitious visions of the future of public access television—compromises that arguably have hampered the effectiveness of public access ever since.

Sixth, these features of Madison’s experience provide larger insights into the struggle for democratic media generally. While there are limits to the conclusions one can draw from a particular historical moment, let alone a specific case study, Madison’s negotiations speak to the conditions within which a media-minded public can emerge and organize itself for reform; the relative power of utopian and dystopian rhetoric; and the mechanisms by which citizens can secure (or lose) policy advantages relative to economically and politically more powerful parties. Madison’s experience validates the power of citizen involvement to affect policy formation, but also illustrates the risks and pitfalls of the policy translation process for progressive media reform.

Finally, as an elaboration of the critical cultural policy studies approach to media and cultural policy—and at a moment when the struggle for network neutrality, strategic anonymity, and other features of a robust popular political culture on the internet are up for grabs—it helps us better understand bottom–up policy making and the ways in which hopes for a more democratic media system—and with it a more just society—can all too easily get brought down to earth.