Ieuan franklin
Community: A Contested Term
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5.7 Community: A Contested TermHaving cited some examples of best practice in community collaboration, the broadcasting and circulation of oral history, and the soliciting of self-representation from communities, we can now begin to conclude the thesis by interrogating the very concept of ‘community’ as it has been applied to radio in the industrialized West. As Lewis has observed, the term ‘community’ has been an ambiguous prefix and a slippery concept, which mainstream broadcasters have often appropriated: For them, community has nostalgic and respectable connotations, reproducing at the local level the same claim for a consensus as does ‘nation’ on a larger scale, and conveniently assuming an equation between community and the geographical coverage area of broadcast transmission (Lewis 1984: 139). As Lewis goes on to note, this may instead represent the ‘public relations’ version of community against which Raymond Williams warned, in which community stations are “mere fronts for irresponsible networks whose real centres of power lie elsewhere” (Williams 1990: 149). As Lewis and Booth have observed, Commercial concerns can to a greater or lesser extent ignore or circumvent regulations designed to ensure local origination, whilst the community lobby does not. The result has been that the restrictions of localism apply at an ideological rather than at a commercial level. A commitment to serve the whole audience in the public service tradition leads to fragmentation in programming and audience terms and is probably economically difficult, but as we have seen most Western community radio thinking remains firmly rooted in the public service tradition. For financial and ideological reasons, then, community activists work within the limitations of localism, whilst commercial companies form regional or national links which economise on sales and programming while they continue to lobby for changes in the structure to give them more commercial freedom (Lewis and Booth 1989: 188-189). In a broader context, whereas the process of globalization has operated in favour of an increasingly accentuated economic concentration, the legitimacy of all forms of power emanating from the centre is being increasingly called into question. In this context, decentralization has become a major necessity for the centres of power to recover this lost legitimacy (Mattelart and Piemme 1984: 220). Whereas community radio in the industrialized West had its origins in a particular moment of history (the 1960s), a “confident stage of capitalism when then the state could afford to tolerate and contain decentralized initiatives” (Lewis 1984: 140), it is arguable that alternative and community media activists now operate within the context of an insecure stage of capitalism in the industrialized West (in the 21st Century). In an era of social dislocation and unprecedented economic change, there is a popular impetus for belonging, cultural familiarity and community. Increasing pressure from various sectors and groups for various forms of decentralization is being reflected in governmental rhetoric in the UK. It is important, therefore, to clearly distinguish the movement towards decentralization, when it looms to consolidate a faltering, centralized power, from an idea of decentralization as a constituent element of popular hegemony. For this reason, demands for the return to the “local”, the renaissance of “popular culture”, and the celebration of “closeness” cannot automatically be seen as progressive struggles (Mattelart and Piemme 1984: 221). This distinction can be observed throughout Lewis and Booth’s The Invisible Medium: Public, Commercial and Community Radio (1989); for example, when they observe that BBC Local Radio was introduced at a particular time (1967) when a climate of political decentralization was conveniently harnessed to a shortage of frequencies to create a local radio network with a commitment to serve the whole audience in a locality rather than different interests within it (Lewis and Booth 1989: 95). This expedience is what Mattelart and Piemme criticise as the juridico-political and doctrinaire foundation of [the] public service, which has little relation to the actual plurality of the groups making up civil society (Mattelart and Piemme 1984: 221). Despite the evidence of recognition and plurality of representation that we detected in the broadcast output of the BBC Regions in Chapter 2 (Sam Hanna Bell and Denis Mitchell’s work in giving voice to underprivileged but articulate people), we must note that such work was the exception rather than the rule. Reith had never intended the BBC to foster provincial culture or ‘give voice to the voiceless’; he jettisoned the BBC’s original local (metropolitan) network, and approved elements of the plan (put forward by P.P. Eckersley) for a Regional service solely to provide an alternate choice of listening (Briggs 1979; Crisell 1997: 25; Russell 2004: 135-137). Reith’s Arnoldian philosophy was that the BBC should provide ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world’, and in many ways this was akin to the invention of ‘fine arts’ in the middle of the nineteenth century; an attempt to take the pleasures of one community – those who formed the governing classes – and to present it as a universal criterion for civilization (Kelly 1985). Consequently demotic and radical ‘strokes of inspiration’ from the peripheries of the BBC’s network were tolerated rather than held up as a more accurate portraiture of the cultural pluralism of its audience. However, it was common knowledge that “at the edge of the BBC’s empire there was less distance between producers and listeners” (Lewis and Booth 1989: 64). Several Regional Programme Heads in the post-war (and post-Reith) era believed the use of on-location actuality to reach and reflect Britain’s communities in sound was an unanticipated and unwritten but nonetheless ‘enshrined’ element of the BBC Charter (Beadle 1951, see Chapter 2). However this often tended to be true as far as the antiquarian concern to preserve dialect, folk song and customs as forms of ‘folk art’ was concerned, and not so much as a way of bringing broadcasters and listeners closer to the human life-world at a community level, with its range of constituent opinions, experiences and memories. Nevertheless the latter did happen occasionally, and during the 1950s and 1960s much of the best radio documentary work emerged from the government-sponsored British and Canadian systems, which funded radio sufficiently to allow producers to create ambitious programming, and to develop a style of production or a sound (as with the Radio Ballads). (For a Canadian equivalent, see Appendix C for the CBC work of Imbert Orchard). Certain uses of mobile recording in the BBC Regions did bring listeners into living contact with each other, and served to individualize, amplify and shape regional culture. Now there is a third-tier of community radio in the UK, which has come to serve the same role. It is community radio that can truly achieve this proximity because it gives people rights of access “not just to cultural outputs, but to the means of cultural input” (Kelly 1985), thereby representing a decentralization of the means of cultural production. To some the sector represents a decentralized proliferation of localised public service broadcasting, correcting the centre-periphery relation and single-minded emphasis on outputs that has often tended to characterize the BBC’s definition of public service. ‘The dream deferred’ of community radio in the UK has become a reality only after 30 years of tireless campaigning and advocacy for a third-tier of radio that was more open, personal and participatory than ‘mainstream media’. After decades of experiments aborted and hopes vanquished by the machinations of both Conservative and Labour Governments, community radio eventually gained recognition in policymaking and regulation circles in the context of a wider set of social policies instituted by New Labour, and thus the election of New Labour has been seen as a crucial element in the introduction of community radio in Britain (Scifo, forthcoming). Due to this history of activism and the late arrival of the UK on the community radio scene, there has thus developed a certain tension and discrepancy between the long-standing influence of the European or international movement on UK activists (with its emphasis on self-management or development) and the actual foundation of community radio in the UK as a result of a certain degree of accommodation with New Labour’s top-down and centralised socio-political agenda. To explain and explore this point, we can analyse the way in which New Labour has exploited the concept of community. As Stuart Hall argued in 2003, rather than representing a Third Way, the New Labour project continued where ‘Thatcherism’ had left off, subsuming social democracy within the dominant ideological strand of neo-liberalism (Hall 2003). The notion of ‘community’ has been central to this project, synonymous with the promotion of competition between service providers, and couched in the rhetoric of “community participation, partnership working, strengthening social capital, capacity-building and empowerment” (Mayo 2006: 392-3). Mayo has coined this trend “community as policy”, portraying New Labour’s use of ‘community’ as a component of various citizenship and empowerment initiatives to sanction the colonization of the public sphere by the private sphere.187 Community radio can provide ‘service delivery’; what the sector can uniquely offer can easily be incorporated into forms of ‘survival education’ such as job readiness training programmes and literacy programmes. In this manner community radio blurs the boundaries between ‘pure’ welfare reforms and recreational and social opportunities (Van Der Veen 2003: 580). However, this can only occur on a long-term basis when the sector’s sustainability is ensured, and it may set a dangerous precedent, if there is nothing within a community radio station’s news and current affairs coverage to help listeners understand and question the context in which cuts are made by government to those areas of social policy in which community radio is expected to make a significant contribution (see the argument about Social Action Broadcasting in Lewis and Booth 1989: 104).188
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