Post by Michele Hilmes, Professor Emerita at University of Wisconsin-Madison

The Radio Preservation Task Force (RPTF), a unit of the Library of Congress’s National Recording Preservation Board, will hold its first national conference February 25-27, 2016, in Washington, D.C.

Keynote speakers will include Professor Paddy Scannell of the University of Michigan, a noted radio scholar and historian, and Sam Brylawski, former Head of the LOC’s Recorded Sound Division and a digital recording pioneer.

In 2014, the National Recording Preservation Board recognized the need to address the perilous state of the nation’s radio heritage, which has not received the archival and critical attention of other U.S. media. Over the last two years, the RPTF has coordinated a nation-wide effort to identify major collections of radio recordings and other materials that will help to raise cultural awareness of America’s rich tradition of radio-based soundwork and make it accessible to future generations.

A year and a half later, we have built an organization consisting of more than 130 media studies scholars actively engaged in researching radio’s past and identifying key archival sources; over 350 affiliate archives, collections, and radio producing organizations across the US and Canada; and a growing number of online partners who aid in critical discussion and dissemination of our efforts.

The most recent additions to our group of affiliated organizations include NPR, the Pacifica Radio Archives, the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, the Association for Cultural Equity/Alan Lomax Archive, the Paley Center for Media, the Prometheus Radio Project, the Media Ecology Project, the Studs Terkel Archive, and the Third Coast International Audio Festival.

The Library of Congress Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center located in Culpeper, VA.

Our first national conference, Saving America’s Radio Heritage, will bring these groups together, along with members of the broader academic, archival, media, and general public, to discuss what we have accomplished and plan for future activities. Over three days in February, we will tour the LOC’s Packard Center, meet for a day of panels focused on radio’s history and cultural significance at the LOC’s Madison Building, then move to the University of Maryland’s Center for Mass Media and Culture (formerly the Library of American Broadcasting) for a second day of workshops and caucuses focused on issues of outreach, growth, and education.

The Radio Preservation Task Force curates a regular series for Antenna about radio history and archival issues, which can be accessed here. More information about the RPTF can be found at the organization’s new website. Stay tuned for further news and discussion of the conference and the RPTF’s activities. For additional information about the task force, please contact: radiotaskforce <at> gmail.com. Questions about strategic planning and partnerships can be directed to the RPTF’s National Research Director, Josh Shepperd (Catholic University): shepperd <at> cua.edu.

Sadly, there are no new pig metaphors in Fox Television Stations, Inc. v. FCC, the July 13 appellate court decision that ruled the FCC’s indecency policy to be unconstitutional, though the Pacifica case looms large in the decision.  The latest in a series of decisions over the Commission’s indecency enforcement, the Fox court argued that the FCC’s indecency policy was “impermissibly vague,” had a dangerous chilling effect on speech, and violated the First Amendment. According to the court, the current policy had produced too much uncertainty as to what was or was not indecent and thus encouraged broadcasters to adopt overly cautious practices of self-censorship to avoid Commission penalties.

Though the court acknowledged it lacked the authority to overturn the Pacifica precedent, it indicated that the “uniquely pervasive” rationale at its center seemed like something of a relic, an anachronism in an era of online video, the expansion of cable television, social networking sites, or of technologies like the v-chip that allow parents to block the very content the indecency rules were designed to shield from children. Though this was not the meat of the court’s decision, it has been the part of the Fox case that has received a good deal of praise and attention. Commentators ranging from the New York Times editorial board to former FCC chair Michael Powell have suggested that Fox reinforces a marketplace approach to media regulation, one that interprets all content restrictions as outdated, unconstitutional, and unnecessary in a world of media plenty. With so many potential pigs in the parlor, to treat broadcasting as uniquely pervasive no longer seemed tenable.

Yet to me this is the wrong takeaway from Fox.  The appellate court did not only gesture to how the majority decision in Pacifica may no longer be salient, but also importantly implied that the view offered in Brennan’s dissent was perhaps right after all.  The crux of the Fox decision hinged on the vagueness of the Commission’s indecency rules, which had lead to contradictory and discriminatory outcomes.  How does it make sense, the court wondered, that the Commission deemed the word “bullshit” patently offensive, but not “dickhead”?  Perhaps more importantly, why were expletives permissible when uttered by the fictional characters in Saving Private Ryan, understood as necessary to the verisimilitude of the film, but not when spoken by actual musicians interviewed for the documentary The Blues?  Such inconsistencies, the court surmised, potentially reflect the biases of the commissioners themselves and “it is not hard to speculate that the FCC was simply more comfortable with the themes in ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ a mainstream movie with a familiar cultural milieu, than it was with ‘The Blues,’ which largely profiled an outsider genre of musical experience.”

The vagueness of the rules, in other words, not only made it very difficult for broadcasters to anticipate when and whether the use of terms like  “douchebag” (my example, not the court’s) would be ruled indecent, but provided latitude for the Commission to privilege its own mores and values in determining what should be permissible in the public sphere. It is a view that echoed Justice Brennan’s dissent in Pacifica, in which he warned that that the majority decision would sanction the “dominant culture’s efforts to force those groups who do not share its mores to conform to its way of thinking, acting, and speaking,” and in which he accused his colleagues of an “ethnocentric myopia,” the Pacifica decision itself an imposition of the justices’ own “fragile sensibilities” on a culturally pluralistic society.

Brennan’s concern was not that the Commission’s and the Court’s indecency policy was imprecise, but that its intent seemed all too transparent, as a way to silence speech that offended their sense of decorum, expose taboos they’d prefer to remain hidden, articulate political and social values they find unpalatable.  Not only were they burning the house to roast the pig, but the distinctions they were to draw between pearls and swine would sanction their own presumptions about aesthetics, ethics, and respectability.

And this I think is Fox’s important referendum on Pacifica and the indecency policy it had sanctioned: not that the media marketplace is now a panacea of free speech, but that broadcasting policy too often can operate as a cudgel to privilege the sensibilities and perspectives of particular sectors of the community over others in the guise of seemingly neutral regulations.  It’s not, in other words, that our contemporary parlors are overrun with pigs, but that to many of us those pigs in the parlor may never have been pigs after all.