Page 26 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

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giants like Comcast (which owns TV One) and Time Warner (which owns Sí TV)
to decide what constitutes diversity and how much we should pay for bundled
programming does not solve the structural issues of vertical integration, media
conglomeration, and the unequal distribution of advertising dollars for programs
that include the perspectives of communities of color. When the progressive
Consumers Union and the Free Press support à la carte in opposition to a broad
spectrum of communities of color, and they do so by framing the issues using the
classical economic language of individual consumer choice (the title of a Consum-
ers Union report supporting à la carte is “Let the Market Decide”), we risk repro-
ducing the abstracted, universalistic discourses of consumer choice and neutral
markets that have reinforced current neoliberal free-market structural arrange-
ments rather than invoking the cultural rights of historically disempowered groups
and the necessity that we all interact broadly with cultural difference instead of
walling off our television viewing through personalized channel subscriptions.
Rather than narrowing viewership of culturally diverse networks such as Sí
TV through à la carte pricing, perhaps the industry needs prompting to make
these diverse networks more widely available. Placed on limited digital tiers, Sí
TV reached less than 14 million subscribers as of 2007, while close to 80 million
households had access to “mainstream” cable/satellite networks. In this case, the
cable marketplace, as a space for the general public to participate in the diversity
of Latino culture in the United States, falls far short of creating a common space
for engaging with cultural difference.
see also Cable Carriage Disputes; Conglomeration and Media Monopolies;
Government Censorship and Freedom of Speech; Media Reform; Minority Media
Ownership; Obscenity and Indecency; Regulating the Airwaves; Representa-
tions of Race; Representations of Women.

note

An earlier version of this article was published in Flow, an online journal of television and
media: see “À la carte Culture,” Flow 4, No. 3 (April 2006) at www.flowtv.org.
Further reading: Gripsrud, Jostein, ed. Television and Common Knowledge. New York:
Routledge, 1999; Lewis, Justin, and Toby Miller, eds. Cultural Policy Studies: A Reader.
Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002; Secrest, Lawrence W., and Richard E. Wiley. “Recent
Developments in Program Content Regulation.” Federal Communications Law Journal 57,
no. 2 (March 2005): 235–42; Williams, Patricia J. “Metro Broadcasting, Inc. v. FCC:
Regrouping in Singular Times.” In Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed
the Movement, ed., Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Pelle, and Kendall Thomas,
191–200. New York: The New Press, 1995.
John McMurria

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