Page 25 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| À La Carte Cable Pr c ng

accepted the report’s findings to not mandate pricing. The report’s conclusions
were also partially supported by the U.S. General Accounting Office’s October
2003 study (see http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d048.pdf).
However, the social conservatives in the House Committee, and the vocal
à la carte supporter Senator John McCain, chair of the Senate Committee on
Commerce, Science, and Transportation, strongly encouraged the FCC to con-
tinue studying the issue. Lending momentum for further study was Powell’s
announcement in January 2005 that he would resign, and three months later
President Bush’s appointment of Kevin Martin, an FCC commissioner who
had made opposition to indecency a cornerstone of his television policy, to the
chairmanship. So the FCC’s media bureau went to work on the issue, but instead
of conducting additional research it merely revisited portions of the Booz Allen
study and identified “problematic assumptions” and “biased analysis.” For ex-
ample, the bureau argued that the Booz Allen report mistakenly assumed that
under à la carte, viewers would watch less TV and that diversity would not nec-
essarily decrease because advertisers would likely find niche channels with pay-
ing subscribers more valuable.
But the bureau’s report is most enthusiastic about saving money for “main-
stream” audiences and increasing ratings for the most popular channels. In
supply-side economic language that refers to “market efficiencies” and optimiz-
ing aggregate “consumer value,” the report embraced the likelihood that à la
carte would create more choices for “mainstream consumers” but less “niche
programming that appeals to a small set of subscribers.” What this says to the
civil rights organizations and “niche” channels such as Sí TV and TV One, which
are mostly produced and watched by historically underrepresented groups, is
that a properly efficient marketplace, restored by à la carte pricing, would rightly
weed out these “over-valued” niche networks (see http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/
edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-263740A1.pdf).
As Patricia Williams has demonstrated, in conceiving the general viewing
public as segregated into “mainstream” and “niche” audiences, we suppress the
interests of historically marginalized communities under the guise of a “neutral
‘mass’ entertainment.” Rather than define a mainstream culture that is oblivious
to its dominant status across class, gender, and race, against a ghettoized cultural
“other,” as Williams argues, we should develop “a view of a market in which
there are not merely isolated interest groups, of which the ‘mass market’ may
be one, but in which ‘mass’ accurately reflects the complicated variety of many
peoples and connotes ‘interactive’ and ‘accommodative’ rather than ‘dominant’
or even just ‘majoritarian.’ ” Thus, allowing viewers to channel surf across a va-
riety of channels, even ones they do not watch regularly, creates a more diverse
representation of our mass culture that is available to all.

From ConsumEr ChoiCE To CuLTuraL DiFFErEnCE

Though cable operators have maintained opposition to à la carte, several large
systems have offered “family-friendly” bundles, such as Time Warner’s “Fam-
ily Choice Tier,” which was made available in March 2006. But waiting for cable