Abstract
This article argues that many of the traditional distinctions used to distinguish critical from administrative research do not hold up well within the context of communications policy research. This argument is illustrated through an analysis of early communications policy research literature that sought to define the contours and objectives of the field, as well as through an assessment of developments in the field over the past 30 years. This article then uses the recent controversy surrounding the FCC's abandoned critical information needs research as a case study for exploring the prospects for a more integrated critical administrative research tradition.
Introduction
The field of communication research has been debilitated, to some extent, by the adherence to some rigid, ideologically driven dichotomies that have undermined the cross-pollination of research approaches. The period of strong oppositional stances regarding qualitative versus quantitative methodologies,1 which seems to have dissipated, is one such example. Another is the long-standing dichotomy of administrative versus critical research.
The parameters of administrative versus critical communication research were first concretely outlined in 1941 by Paul Lazarsfeld,2 who is widely regarded as one of the founders of the field of communication research.3 In his articulation of the administrative–critical dichotomy, Lazarsfeld succinctly described administrative research as research conducted “in the service of some kind of administrative agency of public or private character.”4 He characterized administrative research as focusing on questions such as the size and composition of media audiences; their responses to—and appreciation of—media content; and whether specific types of intended effects are achieved.
Lazarsfeld described critical research as standing in opposition to administrative research, focusing instead on “the general role of our media of communication.”5 According to Lazarsfeld, critical research addresses problems such as “How are these media organized and controlled? How, in their institutional set-up, is the trend toward centralization, standardization and promotional pressure expressed? In what form, however disguised, are they threatening human values?”6 Ultimately, according to Lazarsfeld, the critical researcher “will feel that the main task of research is to uncover the unintentional (for the most part) and often very subtle ways in which these media contribute to living habits and social attitudes that [the researcher] considers deplorable.”7
Although the specific dimensions of the administrative versus critical research distinction have been the lasting impact of Lazarsfeld's piece, and have inspired substantial discussion and elaboration over the years, what has received less attention is his call for a better integration of these research traditions. In the final section of his piece, Lazarsfeld explores the “specific contributions which the idea of critical research can make to … the administrative research side of the problem,”8 suggesting that a more critical stance might push the administrative researcher to focus on subjects such as the dynamics of control in the production and distribution of informational and cultural products, and the cultural and political implications of various forms of media content. He also considers how critical research might embrace some aspects of the administrative tradition. According to Lazarsfeld, “If it were possible in the terms of critical research to formulate an actual research operation which could be integrated with empirical work, the people involved, the problem treated and, in the end, the actual utility of the work would greatly profit.”9
While much of the scholarly discussion of the critical and administrative communication research traditions that has taken place in the years since Lazarsfeld's piece has either lamented the failure of the field to achieve a stronger integration of these research traditions, or has argued that these research traditions are fundamentally incompatible,10 the contention here is that, within the specific context of communications policy research, the blurring of the boundaries separating these two research traditions is, in many ways, a foundational characteristic of this subfield of communication research. This article seeks to develop this argument through a comprehensive synthesis of the bodies of literature explicating the critical and administrative research traditions, along with the literature that provides the earliest articulations of communications policy as a distinct field of communications research. In this way, it is possible to compare the defining characteristics of critical and administrative research traditions with the foundational parameters and objectives of communications policy research—something that has been missing from the literature exploring the critical and administrative research dichotomy to date.
Moreover, as this article illustrates, in the 30 years since many of the most substantive explorations and critiques of the administrative/ critical dichotomy have taken place, we have seen further advances in the integration of critical and administrative communications policy research traditions. In this regard, this article seeks to provide an up-to-date consideration of the state of the relationship between the administrative and critical research positions. This would seem to be a particularly necessary endeavor at this time when communications policy issues have become more central to political and economic life, with issues such as privacy, network neutrality, and broadband access, to name but a few, all having far-reaching implications and posing a host of policy-centric research questions. From this standpoint, a contemporary consideration of how the communications field is positioned to contribute to communications policy seems appropriate.
However, while this analysis illustrates that the distinction between administrative and critical research has, within the context of communications policy research, always been somewhat blurred—and has become increasingly indistinct over the past 30 years—this article also illustrates that the institutionalization of an integrated critical and administrative research tradition is far from complete. Antagonisms and institutional hurdles to a better integration of these research traditions persist, particularly in the policymaking realm. To illustrate this point, this article uses the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'s recent controversial, abandoned effort to study the critical information needs of the American public as a case study of both the importance and challenges of an integrated critical administrative research approach.
The first section of this article explores the contours of the critical–administrative dichotomy, and considers them in light of the founding parameters and objectives of the field of communications policy research. As this section illustrates, many of the distinctions that have been articulated over the years to distinguish administrative and critical research do not hold up well within the context of the parameters and objectives that were established when communications policy research emerged in the 1970s as a distinct subfield of communication research. The next section argues that the subsequent history of communications policy research has been one in which an increased integration of administrative and critical perspectives has taken place. However, as the third section illustrates, there are certainly important limitations in the extent to which this has been the case. This section uses the recent controversy surrounding the FCC's critical information needs research as a focal point for discussion about the persistent challenges and institutional roadblocks to what we might call critical administrative research. The concluding section considers the implications of the observations and arguments presented here for the next generation of communications policy scholars.
Unpacking the Critical–Administrative Dichotomy in Communications Policy Research
In the years since Lazarsfeld's piece, a fairly substantial literature developed, exploring and elaborating the nature of the distinctions between the critical and administrative communication research traditions. As this section illustrates, when we explore these distinctions within the specific context of the founding parameters of communications policy research, many of these distinctions blur to a greater extent than we would likely find in other areas of communication research. Building upon Slack and Allor's argument that discussions of critical and administrative communication research have tended to oversimplify the differences between them,11 this section argues that this is particularly the case when we focus on communications policy research. This discussion also starts from the position that the critical–administrative dichotomy should not be understood as a pair of binary classifications, but rather as “ends on a continuum, two tendencies—not absolutes.”12 The goal here, then, is to look at some of the commonly articulated distinctions between administrative and critical communication research,13 and make the case that, at least within the context of the earliest articulations of the field of communications policy research, these distinctions do not hold up particularly well.
As a starting point for this discussion, it is important to acknowledge that communications policy research is, at least superficially, inherently oriented a bit more toward the administrative end of the continuum, in that much of this work is conducted with the goal of informing and/or influencing the work of government policymakers (or at least informing/influencing the work of those who seek to influence these policymakers). There is, of course, also a well-established tradition of research that focuses less on policies per se and more on the policymaking process.14 This work often provides useful historical, theoretical, and empirical insights into the institutional dynamics and power relations that determine policy outcomes.
These areas of research are not mutually exclusive. We have seen—particularly within the political economy of communication tradition—a growing body of scholarship explore how the institutional dynamics of the policymaking process have historically led to certain public interest-oriented policy options being rejected or undermined. Often, one of the goals of this type of research is to broaden the range of contemporary policy options that receive consideration, by illuminating policy options that were considered and rejected in previous eras.15 And, so, through a variety of means, a substantial component of communications policy research is fundamentally concerned with informing and influencing policy outcomes.
At the same time, it is also important to recognize the extent to which the ideal typical administrative research paradigm that is the basis for much discussion and critique of administrative communication research16 is something of an historical anomaly, particularly within the context of communications policy research. That is, the initial characterizations, critiques of, and critical opposition to administrative research were directed at the substantial, long-term collaborative arrangements between academic researchers and government agencies (such as the case of the World War II– and Cold War–era media content and effects research of Harold Lasswell), as well as arrangements between academic researchers and media organizations (such as Lazarsfeld's work with and for broadcast networks and motion picture studios). For better or for worse, the reality in the decades since those heydays of this kind of pure administrative research being conducted to meet the needs of government agencies and corporations is that academic communication research has become increasingly disconnected from the governmental and corporate sectors.17
Today, one could argue that the notion of administrative communication research refers more to the overall spirit or analytical orientation of specific research, more than to an explicit connection to any government agency or corporation. Indeed, the communication field has engaged in substantial lamenting and self-recrimination about this failure to reach beyond academia.18 Especially in the realm such of communications policy, very little of the total body of academic communication research has been conducted in close collaboration with—or on behalf of—governmental or corporate partners.19
A glass-half-empty perspective sees this situation in terms of the field's marginalization. A glass-half-full perspective sees this situation in terms of the field's independence. Regardless, to the extent that contemporary notions of administrative research still emphasize this dimension of governmental and industry sponsorship and collaboration, it seems reasonable to contend that such arrangements with communications policy researchers have become (and to some extent always were) quite rare. Academic communications policy research tends to operate at an arm's-length distance from the institutions that formulate and evaluate policy, while at the same time this research often is conducted with the goal of informing and influencing policy.20
Communications policy research further deviates from its superficially administrative orientation through its strong normative dimension. As Lazarsfeld's (1941) original set of distinctions separating administrative and critical research illustrated (see earlier text), a fundamental point of demarcation between the two research traditions has been the extent to which the researchers asked questions and interpreted findings in terms of fundamental human values. Administrative research is typically seen as representative of the notion of “objective” social science, with the researcher as dispassionate observer and interpreter of facts, devoid of any strong normative orientation.21 The critical researcher, on the other hand, traditionally is characterized as having a stronger normative orientation, focusing on the “threats to human values”22 posed by the operation of our media system.
While one could certainly contest the validity of these broad generalizations, the key point here is that within the specific context of communications policy research, a strong normative orientation has existed from the outset.23 In an early description of the parameters of the “emergent communication policy science” (phrasing indicative of a more administrative, rather than critical, orientation), Harms nonetheless emphasized that “This new science must deal with universal values expressed as communication rights,”24 and that the emergent field must recognize “the centrality of communication rights and universal values rather than assuming a value-free stance.”25 In this regard, communications policy research is being positioned in opposition to the mainstream of social scientific communication research. Communications policymaking itself has been characterized as an effort to operationalize an established set of contestable, sometimes conflicting, normative principles, which has provided the impetus for much communications policy research.26 Even Ithiel de Sola Pool's early effort to define the field emphasized the centrality of “normative research,”27 though certainly the particular values reflected within the normative research of de Sola Pool would differ significantly from those traditionally associated with critical communications policy research.
Another commonly articulated distinction separating critical and administrative communication research is oriented around methodological approach. The emphasis on qualitative versus quantitative methodological approaches has historically been a fundamental dimension of the distinction between the critical and administrative research traditions, with critical researchers favoring qualitative methods in opposition to their more quantitatively oriented administrative counterparts.28 To some extent, the critical tradition's hostility toward quantitative methodologies and preference for qualitative approaches seems to extend from the critical tradition's expressed analytical focus on the societal, rather than the individual, level of analysis,29 as well as from concerns about the gathering of social scientific data as mechanisms for social control that ultimately provide an oversimplified representation of social reality.30
What is ironic about this presumed methodological divide between administrative and critical researchers is how often critical communication researchers have acknowledged the value of more quantitative approaches and administrative researchers have acknowledged the value of qualitative approaches.31 In the inaugural issue of Media, Culture & Society, Kurt Lang (1979) went so far as to argue that “There is no inherent incompatibility between the ‘positivism’ of administrative communication research and the critical approach associated with the Frankfurt School.”32
This methodological flexibility has been evident amongst critical communications policy scholars. Indeed, some of the early political economy of communication scholars such as William Melody and Dallas Smythe were trained in economics and employed empirical economic analyses in their work.33 In a piece exploring the potential contributions of critical theory and research to communication scholarship, Smythe (who, somewhat improbably in light of today's policymaking environment, served as the FCC's first Chief Economist, a position that Melody also served in years later) and Tran Van Dinh discuss the potential value of methodologies such as market and survey research, and in this discussion, they note that “critical theorists can also use the results of this genre of research, for it provides invaluable information that they would not otherwise have.”34 Echoing this perspective, political economy of communication scholar Robert McChesney, in many ways his generation's Dallas Smythe, acknowledges that “quantitative communication research sometimes generates valuable findings for political economists.”35 There is a striking similarity in the phrasing of these statements from prominent critical communications policy scholars. Both seem to imply that using the results of quantitative research is well within the purview of critical research, while actually conducting such research may not be.
Conversely, in an early piece on the emerging field of communication policy science—a more administratively oriented take, as the “policy science” term would suggest—Harms emphasized that adherence only to the methodological tools developed by, and employed within, the social scientific communication research tradition would likely be inadequate.36 Rather, there was a need to develop a “unique body of method.”37
The key point here is that the strict methodological divide that is presumed to separate critical and administrative communication research appears not quite so strict within the context of intellectual foundations of communications policy scholarship. The acceptance of critical communication policy scholars of quantitative methodological approaches (to some extent) is particularly important in this regard, given that, within the context of communications policy research, one of the persistent issues that has arisen is the importance of policy research to “play a numbers game.”38 That is, policymakers have historically put (for better or for worse) much more stock in quantitative research (surveys, econometrics, etc.) than in historical, theoretical, ethnographic, or other forms of qualitative research.39 Thus, assuming a communications policy researcher aspires to engage with and/or influence the policymaking process, employing more quantitative methodological approaches provides a greater likelihood of success given the methodological biases that long have characterized the policymaking sector. This situation has placed critical researchers in the position of either challenging the quantitative bias of mainstream policymaking from the outside, or engaging in the quantitative and empirical means of policymaking, using these tools for critical normative ends.
Finally, perhaps the most significant distinction that has been drawn between critical and administrative research involves the nature of the questions asked and conclusions drawn. Specifically, critical research is typically characterized as questioning (even opposing) established institutional structures and power relations. Administrative research, on the other hand, is often categorized as operating within these established structures and power relations and addressing questions that help established institutions enhance their effectiveness.40 Smythe and Van Dinh argue that the key points of distinction are not just the problems chosen and the research methods used, but also the ideological orientation of the researcher.41 This ideological orientation manifests itself primarily in terms of the interpretation of the research results, with the administrative ideological approach leading to “interpretation of results that supports, or does not seriously disturb, the status quo,” whereas the critical ideological orientation involves interpretations that “involve radical changes in the established order.”42 In contrast, with administration research, “issues relating to the structure of economic and political institutions …, the centralization of power, the characteristics of dominant-dependent relations and the incentives of vested interests, are excluded from analysis.”43 Thus, as Melody and Mansell contend, “The real basis for the dichotomy between critical and administrative traditions lies in the allegiance of researchers to the status quo versus changes in existing political and economic institutionalized power relations.”44 Though (importantly), as they also note, not all administrative research is accepting of the status quo, given the prevalence of interinstitutional conflict and competition.45
This critical orientation toward established institutional arrangements can be found in some of the earliest articulations of the parameters and potential for communications policy research. Consider, for instance, Ithiel de Sola Pool's early effort to articulate the contours of communications policy research. Certainly not one to be confused with a critical researcher, de Sola Pool nonetheless characterized the field of communications policy research as conducting “normative research about alternative ways of organizing and structuring society's communications system.”46 As should be clear, there are strong echoes of the critical tradition's strong values orientation (in the focus on normative research, discussed earlier), as well as its tradition of challenging the status quo (in the focus on alternative forms of organization and structure). Of course, as was noted earlier, the particular values espoused by a communications policy researcher such as de Sola Pool (or, at the very least, the means of fulfilling them) tend to differ substantially from those we typically associate with critical communications policy researchers. Nonetheless, consider the similarities between de Sola Pool's previous statement and Smythe and Van Dinh's characterization of critical research as addressing researchable problems related to “how to reshape or invent institutions to meet the collective needs of the relevant social community through devices such as direct broadcast satellites, terrestrial broadcast stations and networks, and cable TV.”47 At the same time, however, de Sola Pool expresses concern/critique about a more critical approach in communications policy research, noting that one danger of the growth of communications policy research “arises from the hubris of scholars who would prefer to play philosopher-king rather than be factual researchers.”48
More explicitly, in another of the earliest articulations of the contours and objectives of the field of communications policy research, Martin concludes that “The stream of social research that seems most closely related to the current procedural demands of socially oriented communications policy research is the one called ‘critical research.’”49 However, as Martin notes, to that point, little of the research in the critical tradition had focused on “shaping the future communications system in which people will have to live.”50
Nonetheless, as communications policy research began to emerge and take shape as a distinct subfield of communication research, implicit and explicit connections with the critical communication research tradition were being forged, even from those with a largely oppositional stance to certain aspects of critical research, which helps to illustrate the extent to which elements of the critical and administrative research traditions were integrated from the outset. Communications policy research is a space where the methodologies, values, and objectives of the two research traditions have, from the beginning, been more tightly intertwined than is commonly assumed.
Toward Lazarsfeld's Vision: Evidence from the Recent History of Communications Policy Research
Building on this last point, this section illustrates how the past 30 years of communications policy research have manifested a further intertwining of the critical and administrative communication research traditions. Toward this end, it is first important to note that the academic climate has evolved in a direction in which the hostility between the critical and administrative research traditions has diminished. This is important in that such reductions in hostilities place less pressure on researchers to exclusively identify with one tradition or the other, creating an environment more conducive to more integrative approaches. If we look, for instance, at the Journal of Communication's occasional state of the field issues, we see in 1983 an overwhelming emphasis on the conflicts, incompatibilities, and critiques, of the administrative and critical research traditions.51 This point of focus is largely absent ten years later, in the 1993 state of the field issue, with the exception of a couple of calls for critical researchers to soften their oppositional stance and better engage with policymaking.52 For instance, in Eli Noam's piece on reconnecting communications studies with communications policy, he argues that the primary reason for the marginalization of communication research from communications policymaking is that “parts of the field have remained inhospitable to empiricism, despite its significant contributions in earlier periods.”53 Although Noam never explicitly identifies critical research per se, it is clearly the focus of his critique, which becomes even clearer when he later says “being mesmerized by the potential of communications media or by the power of their owners is no substitute for thinking along and ahead, providing the world with vision, details, and ways of protecting traditional concerns in the new communications environment.”54 This is essentially a call for critical communication researchers to better engage with the policymaking process.55
By the time the Journal of Communication again addressed the state of the field, the focus was overwhelmingly on the process—and value—of embracing interdisciplinarity.56 Obviously, in such a more inclusive climate, the kind of administrative versus critical research turf wars that characterized the field in 1983 have become very much a thing of the past, and thus an academic climate much more conducive to the integration of the critical and administrative communications policy research traditions has resulted. From this standpoint, it is not surprising then that a recent assessment of the relationship between critical scholarship and communications policymaking has concluded that “there is some consensus in the communication studies literature that an epistemological commitment to critical research should neither scuttle policy work nor obscure the pursuit of quantitative and, more broadly, strong evidence-based theorization in undertaking it.”57
This intertwining of the critical and administrative research traditions has even extended beyond the confines of academia. The contemporary media reform movement in the United States provides a compelling context for witnessing the mingling of administrative and critical research traditions. For instance, the scholarship of Robert McChesney has provided the intellectual foundation for Free Press, one of the largest and most effective communications policy advocacy organizations in the United States. Free Press brings perspectives and policy objectives from the political economy of communication tradition directly to bear on contemporary communications policy issues.58 This organization engages directly with many of the communications policy issues confronting the FCC and Congress.59 In this regard, the organization works within the established parameters of the contemporary media system, advocating both for substantial alterations of the status quo, as well as, on some occasions, incremental change or (as in the case of the organization's work against media ownership deregulation) the maintenance of the status quo.60
Further, in its work toward these ends, Free Press often conducts its own sophisticated quantitative research that competes for influence alongside industry-sponsored research.61 In this regard, we can also point to the scholar–activism of someone like Consumers Union's Mark Cooper, whose decades of work in the communications policy arena often took a strong normative stance in opposition to established institutional arrangements, but did so via the sophisticated analysis of quantitative data that allowed him to operate on the same playing field with the stakeholders he was fighting against, and to engage with policymakers using the vocabulary with which they were most familiar and comfortable.62
This kind of willingness amongst critically oriented researchers to engage with policymaking contrasts with years past. As a somewhat tangential example, Braman tells the disheartening story of when representatives of the Clinton administration approached cultural studies scholars at the University of Illinois for advice on developing the White House's position on cultural policy, only to have the scholars there refuse to respond to the invitation.63 Such a response can arise from a variety of legitimate concerns, ranging from the misappropriation nor misinterpretation (intentional or unintentional) of academic work to the professional vulnerabilities and criticisms that can arise from participating in the highly politicized and often hostile policymaking process to skepticism (born of past experience) that the work will have any meaningful impact.64 Today, however, it appears somewhat more common for the critically oriented communications policy researchers to engage—and even do battle—with the institutions that make and evaluate policy.65
Another development worth noting is that, in the policymaking sphere, the oft-criticized overwhelming emphasis on quantitative research (particularly of the economic variety)66 has recently begun to soften. For instance, in 2010 the FCC commissioned a report on Broadband Adoption in Low Income Communities that employed interviews with over 170 non-adopters of broadband service, community access providers, and other intermediaries, in order to develop a deeper understanding of the factors affecting non-adoption than could be achieved via the Commission's related survey research.67 This increasing methodological diversity within the FCC68 can be seen as a slight breaking down of the traditional administrative/quantitative research paradigm within the policymaking sector.
Further, the FCC has begun to engage with larger institutional questions that are raised by the massive technological and economic changes taking place in the media sector. Thus, for instance, the FCC's recent, massive Future of Media inquiry was notable for the broad range of social, economic, and political questions it sought to address.69 Many of these questions extended beyond the traditionally perceived boundaries of the FCC's regulatory authority and addressed the very dynamics via which contemporary journalism is produced, disseminated, and consumed. This example is discussed in greater detail in the following section, but the key point here is that the contemporary communications policy research landscape has become one in which the traditional distinctions separating administrative and critical research are becoming even more difficult to apply.
Where We Stand: Lessons From the FCC's Critical Information Needs Research
The previous section has illustrated that, in many ways, the field of communications policy research has exhibited an increasing integration of the critical and administrative communication research traditions. However, while the previous section focused primarily on the state of academic research, in many ways the more important question involves how research is conducted and used in the communications policymaking process. This section does not attempt to provide a comprehensive treatment of this important issue; rather, the more modest goal here is to examine a recent controversy involving the role of communications research in communications policymaking, in an effort to explore the extent to which a more critical administrative research approach has been institutionalized within the communications policymaking process. The goal here, then, is to use the brief intellectual history of the field of communications policy research discussed earlier as a lens through which to analyze a prominent and controversial contemporary case of the role and function of communications research in communications policymaking.
The case in question involves the FCC's abandoned “critical information needs” research, which the Commission canceled in 2014 under pressure from various industry groups and from conservative members of Congress. What is particularly interesting about the FCC's critical information needs research is that it emerged from a rare and (especially for a regulatory agency) ambitious effort to reevaluate the very technological and institutional foundations of the American media system.
To understand the origins of the FCC's critical information needs research, it is necessary to go back to 2008, to the formation of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.70 Supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and administered by the Aspen Institute, the Knight Commission was a group of seventeen American media, policy, and community leaders. The Commission was cochaired by then–Google executive (and current Yahoo CEO) Marissa Mayer and former Solicitor General of the United States, Theodore Olson. The Commission was charged with three objectives: “1) Articulate the information needs of a community in a democracy; 2) describe the state of things in the United States; 3) propose public policy directions that would help lead us from where we are today to where we ought to be.”71 Ultimately, the Knight Commission “sought to look comprehensively at the circulation of news and information in local communities.”72
The Knight Commission (2009) put forth a number of general recommendations. These included: directing media policy toward innovation, competition, and support for business models that incentivize quality journalism; increasing support for public service media; enhancing digital media literacy; supporting efforts to increase broadband adoption; and developing quality measures for local community information ecologies that could be used to analyze their relationship to social outcomes.
The Knight Commission's report inspired a substantial amount of debate and discussion within policy, industry, and academic circles about the state of the American media system and what needed to be done to improve it. Consequently, in 2009, the FCC initiated its own proceeding. Dubbed the “Future of Media” proceeding, this initiative was led by journalist and media entrepreneur Steve Waldman.73 In announcing the proceeding, the FCC was concerned with the broad framework of community information provision and dissemination, with a particular emphasis on the increasing fragility of the institution of journalism in the United States and the importance of policymakers gaining a deeper understanding of the state of the media marketplace and possible mechanism of intervention to “help businesses, facilitate innovation, and ensure a thriving media marketplace.”74
This proceeding ultimately produced a 468-page report, The Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age.75 The report provided a comprehensive assessment of the state of virtually every sector of the American media system, documenting how technological changes were dramatically undermining established business models and journalistic resources, while also giving rise to new and innovative journalistic forms and organizations.
Like the Knight Commission's work, the fundamental underlying premise of the FCC's inquiry was that the media environment may have changed in ways that were undermining—rather than enhancing—the extent to which the news and information essential to the effective functioning of communities were being produced, disseminated, and consumed. So, in this regard, the FCC's inquiry was directed at the very status of the institution of journalism, and whether any policy interventions to protect and promote it were necessary.
However, given the breadth and scope of the work undertaken, the final outcome was in many ways illustrative of the common critical critique leveled at administrative research (see earlier text). None of the conclusions or recommendations in any way questioned—or suggested alterations to—the status quo. Given the magnitude of the changes, challenges, and problems that the research illustrated, it was striking that the report concluded with a set of relatively inconsequential policy recommendations, such as enhanced disclosure and transparency for broadcast and cable outlets; greater targeting of government ad spending toward local media; and the ever-popular universal broadband.76
The report also seemed to delegate a fair bit of the onus of responsibility to other institutions, encouraging charitable foundations, for instance, to increase their support of nonprofit journalism, and community media centers to place a greater emphasis on teaching digital literacy, though this tendency was in part a reflection of the ambitious scope of the initial inquiry, which certainly extended beyond the traditional bounds of the FCC's regulatory authority. From this standpoint, perhaps it was inevitable that the solutions proposed in the conclusion of the report seemed disconnected from the problems identified in the body of the report.
Perhaps because of the shortcomings of the Future of Media report in terms of meaningfully addressing the core question of how to assure that communities' critical information needs were being met, the FCC soon commissioned another report. This report, titled Review of the Literature of the Critical Information Needs of the American Public, was an effort to ground the question of if and how communities' critical information needs were being met in a comprehensive overview and evaluation of the relevant academic literature.77 The FCC articulated the objectives of this research as follows:
In order to assess whether government action is needed to ensure that the information needs of all Americans are being addressed, to determine the relationship, if any, between meeting critical information needs, and the available opportunities for all Americans to participate in the communications industries, it is first necessary to examine what prior research has been conducted with regard to how the public acquires critical information, how the media eco-system operates to provide critical information, and what barriers exist to participation.78
A consortium of scholars led by the University of Southern California's Annenberg School produced a 110-page literature review that concluded with a set of recommendations for future research. Perhaps the most significant of these was the recommendation that the Commission develop and implement a multilevel analytic framework that could be employed in assessing local communities and determining whether barriers to participation were affecting the extent to which communities' critical information needs were being met. The authors recommended that this analytical approach integrate quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches and that it develop robust and testable indicators of media performance.
The report ultimately provided the basis for a research design developed for the FCC by a research and evaluation firm, Social Solutions International.79 The proposed research would examine six US media markets and would include two components: (1) a media market census and (2) a community ecology study. The media market census would include a content analysis of broadcast, newspaper, and online content to determine the extent to which this content was addressing critical information needs. It would also include in-depth interviews with local media providers. The community ecology study would include general population surveys directed at measuring communities' actual and perceived critical information needs, as well as in-depth interviews with community members.
If we think about communication research in terms of the critical–administrative communication dichotomy discussed earlier, there are a number of salient features of this proposed project. Obviously, at the most basic level we are talking about research conducted for a government agency, which places this work securely within the administrative tradition. However, methodologically, the proposed research integrated both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Perhaps most important, this work clearly exhibited the broader societal orientation (particularly in its focus on community information needs) that characterizes critical research, as opposed to the more individual orientation characteristic of administrative research. The focus of the proposed research really was on the institution of journalism, how it functions, and how it addresses the needs and interests of communities. And so, in many ways, this research initiative was reflective of an integration of the critical and administrative research traditions.
Perhaps, then, it was inevitable that this proposed research produced a firestorm of controversy, which was touched off when Republican FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai published an editorial in the Wall Street Journal chastising the FCC for an initiative to “thrust the federal government into newsrooms across the country … to grill reporters, editors, and station owners about how they decide which stories to run.”80 Congressional hearings ensued, as well as threatened legislation to kill the research.81 Industry groups expressed opposition as well.82 As Pai's statement illustrates, the focal point of critiques was the component of the study involving interviews with outlet owners, journalists, and editors about their editorial decision making, under the notion that such research represented an overt intrusion by the federal government into the operation of journalism, and thus a threatened intrusion on First Amendment freedoms. The newsroom interviews element of the study was ultimately dropped in response to these objections. However, criticism and pressure continued to mount until the FCC ultimately canceled the entire study.83
This episode is a reminder of Entman's argument regarding how the First Amendment effectively impedes both the conducting of communications policy research and the use of such research in policymaking.84 More important to this analysis, this episode shows us that, while the academic field of communications policy research has (as was illustrated earlier) exemplified a substantial integration of the administrative and critical communication research traditions, the same cannot yet be said for the institutions that commission and utilize research to make policy.
It would seem, based on the nature of the opposition, that the FCC's proposed critical information needs research drifted too close to Lazarsfeld's central question for critical communication research: “How are these media organized and controlled?”85; and in so doing activated the full set of institutional pressures that can be brought to bear to maintain the status quo. Even the threat of findings that might raise critical questions about how the institution of journalism functions, and whether it functions effectively, was enough to trigger this response.
But in many ways, the fact that this research was almost conducted can be seen as an encouraging step in the right direction (once again a question of whether the glass is half full or half empty), a swinging of the policymaking pendulum back in the direction when (virtually impossible to imagine today) critically oriented researchers such as Dallas Smythe and William Melody held the chief policy research position within the FCC. Ultimately, it took the involvement of stakeholders outside of the FCC (industry, Congress) to effectively stifle the FCC's effort to conduct research that, in many ways, went beyond the traditional administrative research paradigm. And so, perhaps the key question to end with is this: What is ultimately of greater significance—the fact that this research was abandoned, or the fact that it was almost conducted in the first place?
Conclusion
This article has argued that the field of communications policy research has, in terms of both its origins and its evolution, served as an important point of intersection and integration of the critical and administrative communication research traditions. To some extent, the field of communications policy research seems emblematic of Kurt Lang's statement from almost 40 years ago, that “we are all critical, with or without a capital ‘C.’”86 Indeed, in the 30 years since the contours of the administrative–critical dichotomy were last substantively evaluated from a variety of perspectives, this article has illustrated specific developments in communications policy research, policymaking, and policy advocacy that have further illustrated this trajectory.
However, as this article has also illustrated, we are not yet at a point where this integrated approach is being accepted within the policymaking process. Nonetheless, the fact that there have been efforts in this direction in the policymaking realm is perhaps an important indicator of the strides that the field of communication research has made since the 1980s, when the focus was much more on the squabbling between somewhat divergent research traditions, and the 1990s, when the focus was on the marginalization of communication research from communications policymaking. As this article has hopefully illustrated, the past decades have seen significant progress toward reaching Lazarsfeld's vision of a policy-relevant, integrated critical administrative research approach.
This development bodes well for the next generation of communications policy scholars, who should have a more well-rounded training in the theoretical approaches and methods of communications policy research, as well as a more holistic perspective on the relationship between research and policymaking. This next generation of policy scholars will face the same challenges as their predecessors, in terms of attempting to navigate and influence a policymaking process in which the research–policymaking dynamic has become increasingly politicized, in which external support for communications policy research is limited, and in which, at some institutions, policy research continues to be tarred with the dreaded “applied” label, and in which the frustrations and professional risks that come from engaging with the policymaking process (and that can discourage such engagement) persist. However, assuming these challenges can be overcome, this next generation of more well-rounded communications policy scholars should have much more to bring to the table.
Footnotes
Beltran; Ewen.
Lazarsfeld.
Morrison; Rogers.
Lazarsfeld, 8.
Ibid.
Ibid., 10.
Ibid.
Ibid., 14.
Ibid. Lazarsfeld also made what have been regarded as failed efforts to integrate the administrative and critical research traditions, bringing Frankfurt School critical scholar Theodor Adorno to the United States in 1938 to join his Princeton Radio Project (the project was terminated a year later), and entering into what has been described as a failed collaboration between his Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia and the European Institute for Social Research. See Melody and Mansell; Slack and Allor; Splichal.
Dervin et al.; Ewen; Smythe and Van Dinh.
Slack and Allor. See also Lang.
Sterne, 68.
de Sola Pool, “What Ferment?”; Rowland, “Deconstructing,” “American Telecommuni cations.”
Melody, “Implications.”
See, for example, McChesney, Telecommunications; Pickard.
See, for example, Rowland, “American Telecommunications.”
Noam. See also Melody, “The Strategic Value.”
Mueller; Napoli and Gillis; Reeves and Baughman.
Melody, “The Strategic Value.” And to the extent that industry organizations or policymakers do commission anything along the lines of communications policy research, these days this work is more likely to be conducted by economists, who tend to produce something very different from what is produced by communication researchers.
This situation would seem to create something of a Catch-22, which in many ways perfectly explains communications policy research's long-standing position in something of an academic no-man's land between applied research and more traditional, theoretically driven academic research.
Ewen.
Lazarsfeld, 10.
See, for example, Melody, Children's Television.
Harms, 81.
Ibid., 85.
See, for example, Napoli.
de Sola Pool, “The Rise of Communications,” 31.
See, for example, Ewen; de Sola Pool, “What Ferment?”; Splichal; Stevenson.
See Smythe and Van Dinh; Stevenson.
Ewen.
See, for example, Dervin et al.; Stevenson.
Lang, 83.
For discussions of their work, see Mansell et al.; Wasko et al.
Smythe and Van Dinh, 120.
McChesney, “The Political Economy,” 110.
Harms.
Ibid., 79.
Docherty et al.
Abramson et al.
Carey; Haight.
Smythe and Van Dinh.
Melody and Mansell, 118.
Ibid., 104.
Ibid., 109–10.
Melody and Mansell.
de Sola Pool, “The Rise of Communications,” 31 (emphasis added).
Smythe and Van Dinh, 118.
de Sola Pool, “The Rise of Communications.” For his more expansive critique of critical research, see de Sola Pool, “What Ferment?”
Martin, 19.
Ibid., 20.
For example, de Sola Pool, “What Ferment?”; Smythe and Van Dinh.
Docherty et al.; Noam.
Noam, 201.
Ibid., 204.
See also Docherty et al. in the same issue.
See, for example, Benoit and Holbert; Herbst.
Abramson et al., 305.
McChesney, in fact, cofounded the organization. See McChesney, Communication Revolution.
Gangadharan.
Somewhat ironically, a distinct “media justice” movement has emerged in the United States in part in response to what was perceived as the insufficient radicalism of media reform organizations such as Free Press. See Themba-Nixon and Rubin.
Turner.
Cooper.
Braman.
See, for example, Braman; Karaganis.
Gangadharan.
Blevins and Brown.
Dailey et al.
See also Social Solutions International (discussed in the following section).
See Waldman and the Working Group on Information Needs of Communities.
Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.
Ibid., I.
Ibid., VII.
Federal Communications Commission, Steve Waldman Named to Lead.
Knight Commission, 1.
Waldman and the Working Group on Information Needs of Communities.
Ibid.
Friedland et al.
Federal Communications Commission, Amendment of Solicitation, 2.
Social Solutions International. It is worth noting that none of the academic communication researchers who produced the report outlining the research recommendations were retained to conduct the subsequent research.
Pai, 1.
Eggerton.
See National Association of Broadcasters.
Flint. As an indicator of the level of hostility that this proposed research provoked, it is rumored that the principals of Social Solutions International, Inc. received anonymous death threats due to their involvement in this research.
Entman.
Lazarsfeld, 10.
Lang, 95.
