Producing Public Television, Producing Public Culture

Barry Dornfeld

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780691044675
  9780691044682
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691225326
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

From 1989 to 1991, Barry Dornfeld had an unusual double role on the crew of the major PBS documentary series Childhood. As a researcher for the series, he investigated the relationship between children and media. As an anthropologist, however, his subject was the television production process itself--examining, for example, how producers developed the series, negotiated with their academic advisors, and shaped footage shot around the world into seven programs. He presents the results of his fieldwork in this groundbreaking study--one of the first to take an ethnographic approach to the production of a television show, as opposed to its reception.


Dornfeld begins with a broad discussion of public television's role in American culture and goes on to examine documentaries as a form of popular anthropology. Drawing on his observations of Childhood, he considers the documentary form as a kind of "imagining," in which both producers and viewers construct understandings of themselves and others, revealing their conceptions of culture and history and their ideologies of cultural difference and universality. He argues that producers of culture should also be understood as consumers who conduct their work through an active envisioning of the audience. Dornfeld explores as well how intellectual media professionals struggle with the institutional and cultural forces surrounding television that promote entertainment at the expense of education. The book provides a rare glimpse behind the scenes of a major documentary and demonstrates the value of an ethnographic approach to the study of media production.

CHAPTER ONE

Studying Public Television as American Public Culture

I CAME UP out of the subway at Columbus Circle in midtown Manhattan, stepping into the buzz and hustle of a morning in New York City. I was en route to begin my first day of fieldwork studying the making of Childhood, a multipart documentary series being produced for public television broadcast in the United States, Great Britain, and elsewhere. The Childhood Project office’s location on the tenth floor of WNET-TV’s building, stretching between 58th and 59th Streets, situated this series in a central place in the geography of the media production industry. At the same time, I was returning to my own geographic past, the metropolitan center I had grown up around but had left to pursue my education and begin a career in independent filmmaking. The ironies of returning home were compounded several weeks later. I accompanied two of the series’ production staff and three freelance crew members on a shoot, on which we followed an African American family transporting their three children to early morning doctor and dentist appointments, then off to their day care center, traversing the suburban town of White Plains, where I had spent my high school years and where my parents still lived. The day care center in this predominantly black neighborhood had, in my youth, been a recreation center, where I had mostly watched, and on occasion played in, some fairly competitive league basketball games (all, quite literally, over my head). But these ironies are probably not uncommon when doing anthropology at home. Although the Childhood series closely followed two families from suburban Westchester County, it was both global in content and topic and local in its texture as a New York City-based television production.

After clearing my name with the guard at the 58th Street entrance, I took an elevator to the tenth floor, which The Childhood Project shared with several other WNET public television ventures. The series’ own offices were painted off-white, the hallway decorated with brightly colored handprints painted on the walls, a graphic motif that also appeared in the series letterhead, brochures, and the opening and closing credits. Some seven or eight offices opened off this main hallway, which led to a reception area in front of executive producer Geoff Haines-Stiles’s office. Aware of my arrival, Geoff called out into the waiting area in a humorously acerbic manner that would continually catch me off guard: “He’s early. Tell him to go back to Philadelphia.” After a moment, he beckoned me into his office where we shook hands, then took me off on a quick tour of the office, introducing me to staff members who were available. Aside from one Steenbeck flatbed film editing machine, a few monitor and VCR setups, and stacks of videotapes on various half-filled shelves, there was little evidence in this workspace that these dozen people were engaged in the production of documentary television programs. Some months later, this space would fill up, with the project eventually converting three offices into full-time editing rooms, where the sounds and images of families raising children in Russia, Brazil, Japan, Cameroon, and the United States would play forward and back through many of the day’s twenty-four hours. But much of the work through the first few months of production centered on writing and talking—writing proposals for additional funding, research reports, letters to scholars in the field of child development, faxes overseas to potential locations, crew members, and the series’ London-based partners, and ultimately television scripts— and talking about all these arrangements and ideas over the phone and face to face, often in group meetings like the script meeting I had come up to observe on this first day of my research.

The rest of the tour took me through nondescript and mostly empty offices, which would later be filled with staff members, Macintosh computers, filing cabinets full of paperwork, books and articles, and shelves of video-tapes. An assistant editor who would not remain with the project very long labored trying to synch up footage that had come in from Moscow. She and Geoff spoke about how charmed they were with the sequence of a Russian mother bathing her baby, and about needing to tell the Russian crew to provide better shot identifications. The brief tour over, Geoff deposited me at an empty desk outside series producer Erna Akuginow’s office, a space I would claim as a resting place for much of this fieldwork project. While waiting for the meeting (waiting became a familiar activity as well), I leafed through the xeroxes of articles on the desk that were ready to be distributed to project staff, presumably to be read for this week’s work. Geoff began the meeting a short time later, assembling the three producer/directors (one of whom would later leave the project), an assistant producer, and myself. After briefly introducing me and providing an update on the families already being filmed in other countries, he moved the discussion to the search for the second American family for the series. They had already selected an African American family, the Gholstons, and were looking for a white family whose children were in elementary school, with enough girls to balance the two older boys in the Gholston family. Family members had to be articulate and representative of some American “mainstream.” They discussed ethnicity, social class, and production logistics, then progressed through the early drafts for four of the programs that would constitute the series. Sandwiches were ordered as the meeting went well into the afternoon, and I took notes on the discussion, trying to be as exhaustive as possible without being too obtrusive on my first day. Although clearly this was not an exotic site for conducting ethnographic research, I felt that I had been allowed inside an occupational world and was given an immediate glimpse of how television programs like these were made.

Public television documentaries are a primary means through which many Americans encounter conceptions about their social and biological lives and witness representations of unfamiliar cultures both outside and within their national boundaries. Through a variety of formats and program genres, public television in the United States presents viewers with depictions of and assertions about the daily lives, institutions, cultural values, and histories of people like themselves or others, both nearby and in far-off places. Through these media texts, viewers grapple with and reproduce understandings of cultural identity and cultural difference. Yet there is a conspicuous and persistant lack of scholarly attention to public television documentary, despite its prominence in American public culture. This book seeks to redress this lack. As a case study of the production of the Childhood series, this book provides a close and grounded view of the production of these programs, while demonstrating what it means to “do ethnography” in a media production context. In doing so, I look at public television representations as a form of popular anthropology within American public culture, a disciplined kind of “imagining” through which producers and viewers construct understandings of themselves and others. Bill Nichols claims that “images help constitute the ideologies that determine our own subjectivity” and “make incarnate those alternative subjectivities and patterns of social relation that provide our cultural ideals or utopian visions” (Nichols 1991:9-10). If so, then I would argue that the documentary material on public television represents a culturally rich and potent corpus of images that needs to be analyzed to better understand how practices of producing and consuming media forms contribute to the constitution of American public culture. This book is going to explore what kind of “larger world that television is always claiming to bring us,” as Michael Arlen put it in the epigraph to this book, and what kind of world it cannot. I will illuminate the institutional and cultural forces that create a situation where television becomes “second rate,” in Peter Montagnon’s words, and how progressive intellectual media professionals struggle with this disconcerting situation.

Public television in the United States is infused with a kind of authority, legitimacy, and importance not given to other channels and formats of broadcast media in what has been termed, following Habermas (1989) and others (Fraser 1990; Garnham 1993), the public sphere.¹ I believe this holds true despite recent assertions about the system’s impending irrelevance (i.e., Lapham 1993), and in light of its slipping hold on audience share and ongoing controversies within and around the institutions that comprise it. Despite the sense of vulnerability surrounding it, the public broadcasting system still represents the only American institution devoted to producing and broadly distributing television and radio programs that receives significant funding from federal and state governments (administered by an amalgamation of public agencies and private institutions). The circulation of its programming extends beyond a prime-time television broadcast audience of about two million viewers, it has become institutionalized in the educational system in this country as providing important material in teaching the humanities and the social and physical sciences. Nonetheless, it is revealing to compare the situation of public television in the United States with government-sponsored broadcasting systems in other countries. Outside the United States, state-owned, controlled, or sponsored channels represent most of the programming choices and hold a major chunk of a nation’s viewership, and debates around public service and the role of broadcasting in national politics and culture take on a public urgency unfamiliar in America.² Still, in the American context, discussions over the notion of the public interest and the state of the civic culture continue to take public television into account in a central way. Whether the imagined but rapidly approaching future of new technologies, new services, and increasing channels and formats of image-based media forecasts a place of decreasing or increasing importance for institutions of public broadcasting remains to be seen and is already being contested. Many find it difficult to conceive of a televisual future without some form of public broadcasting and refuse to give up hope for the system’s potentially progressive contribution to a democratic future.

Yet we are still hindered in these debates due to the dearth of scholarly attention given both to the institutions of public broadcasting and to the media culture involved in the production and reception of the programs they offer. While occasional theoretical and policy-oriented treatises have analyzed the politics, economics, and social organization of public broadcasting (Rowland 1986; Rowland and Tracey 1990; Aufderheide 1991; Hoynes 1994; Lashley 1992), and periodic manifestos have recommended strategic futures for its institutions (Carnegie Commission 1967, 1979; Somerset-Ward 1993), there have been few extended studies of the administrative and production institutions themselves (but see Engelman 1996 and Powell and Friedkin 1983, 1986) and only sporadic writing on the production and reception of specific programs. Whole genres of educational programming have been left out of academic and popular consideration of what the media is and does.³ When seen in relation to the overabundance of scholarly and popular writing on entertainment television programming in its many forms, this lack of attention to a major source of what Nichols terms “discourses of sobriety”— media texts ostensibly produced to advance an argument or disseminate information and knowledge (Nichols 1991)—becomes most conspicuous.

As both a scholar interested in the place of media forms in contemporary social life and a producer of documentary films geared toward broadcast on public television, I became interested in this lack of scholarly attention to a domain of cultural production that I held in high regard. My academic and professional backgrounds oriented me toward areas where the fields of anthropology and communication intersected with media forms and practices, both in the production of documentaries concerned with representing worlds of culture, loosely grouped under the rubric of ethnographic film, and in the analysis of media as cultural forms, an interest that falls into the emerging field of the ethnography of media. I saw in these disparate endeavors a shared concern with the importance of media representation in the forming of social subjectivities and cultural identities, and brought to them a commitment to analyzing these processes of representation in a self-conscious way. Consequently, I reasoned that an intensive ethnographic study of the interpretive frameworks through which producers work and of the media production practices they employ in creating a documentary for American public television would illuminate how some segments of our society grapple with fundamental issues of identity: how they define themselves in relation to the rest of the world, how they represent the kind of society in which they imagine or wish themselves to live, and how these representations become part of public culture.

This book is based on an ethnography of the production unit that created the seven-hour educational series Childhood, which aired in the United States on public television in the fall of 1991, in England in 1992, and in several other countries subsequently, and then entered educational distribution in several formats. Childhood addressed the experience and knowledge that American and British audiences have (or do not have) about child development, as seen across several cultural settings and from specific disciplinary orientations. Executive producer Geoff Haines-Stiles collaborated with WNET-TV, one of the major producing stations in the PBS system, to coproduce and present the series. They added British funding and partnership, as well as a team of producers, freelance crew members, and notable academic researchers in child development, history, and anthropology—disciplines concerned with the life of children and families. A close look at the production of this series reveals a great deal about certain socially situated understandings of ourselves and others; conceptions of biology, culture, and history; and about ideologies of cultural difference and universality across societies at this particular moment in time. What is equally important is what this analysis reveals about the complexities of encoding these understandings in the form of documentary television.

MEDIA AS FORMS OF CULTURAL PRODUCTION

While my principal focus here is on understanding how a public television documentary is produced, I also argue for the value of conducting ethnographies of media as forms of cultural production, examining the social processes of encoding and decoding meaning in media images. While important precedents exist in both anthropology and media studies for this kind of investigation, the ethnographic study of media as a dimension of culture represents a new agenda within these fields. Anthropology, which had historically ignored the study of contemporary societies and the influence of modernizing technologies and social structures in other parts of the world, recently abandoned its proclivity toward a view of cultural holism and traditionalism and its resistance toward the modern and the popular. This shift was largely the result of forceful critiques and a subsequent rethinking of the objectives and politics of doing anthropology in the postcolonial world. Simultaneously, although the field of communication/media studies has long been concerned with global processes and issues of political economy, it has traditionally focused its analytical gaze within the industrialized countries from which imperialist cultural forces emanate.⁴ Some thinkers within media studies are only recently working out an appropriate balance between the global and the local, arguing that the field needs to look into places where the proverbial sitting room (see Morley 1991) might not exist. I make an argument throughout this book in favor of an anthropology of the media, of the convergence of anthropology with the subject matter of media studies, and apply this hybrid perspective to American culture.⁵

We can locate the historical roots of this convergence in the subdisciplines of both visual anthropology and the ethnography of communication, which also comprised my own academic training and led to this study. Writing in 1980, Sol Worth articulated a distinction between “visual anthropology” and the emerging area of the anthropology of visual communication (Worth 1980). He called for a transition from the former, which was mainly concerned with the complexity of representing anthropological ideas in visual and sound images, to the latter, which encompasses a broader agenda for ethnographic research on visual culture. Worth’s writings (Worth and Adair 1972; Worth 1981) emphasized the semiotic aspects of film communication and represented a pioneering, although preliminary, program for what some of that research could become. He attempted to develop an anthropological approach for studying the encoding of social meaning in pictures (still and motion) that would transcend the psychological and linguistic bases of visual studies. Drawing on the emerging paradigm of the ethnography of communication, this approach incorporated social and cultural dimensions of visual communication into a model of meaning and interpretation.⁶ Worth’s objective—“trying to understand . . . how, and why, and in what context, a particular articulator structured his particular statement about the world” (Worth 1981:197)—is an adequate condensation of my own goals in this project.⁷

The reflexive crisis within anthropology in the 1980s also contributed to the anthropology of the media by shifting the field’s focus away from traditional ethnographic sites and practices and to the process of representation itself. Writing by Said (1979) and Fabian (1983, 1990) broke theoretical ground by articulating a powerful critique of the scholarly enterprises devoted to representing other cultures. Anthropologists and others precipitated a critical process of looking at their own practices of representation, particularly the writing of ethnographies (Marcus and Cushman 1982; Marcus and Fischer 1986; Clifford and Marcus 1986), but also the presentation of anthropological materials and non-Western artifacts in other, more public forms: museum exhibits, public performances, and in media formats (see, for instance, Karp and Lavine 1991). The result has been some theoretically rich analyses of contemporary cultural forms in a variety of national and regional settings, emerging as the critique of “discourses of the other,” the phrase that Naficy and Gabriel (1991) use to categorize a broad range of academic and popular texts probing cultural representation more generally.⁸ Pointing to new, productive directions, Appadurai and Breckenridge advocated the study and analysis of “public culture” (1988), the concern with cosmopolitan cultural forms which “raise a larger set of terminological as well as interpretive problems about the way in which public life in the contemporary world is being culturally articulated” (1988:5). Their work draws us to engage with more deliberate, self-conscious, and broadly relevant culture-making and consuming activities than the disciplinary ones surrounding ethnographic writing.

Public television programs about other cultures are a rich area for this sort of investigation and generate analogous questions about the representation of cultural worlds in public form. Ginsburg (1988), in tracing the history of anthropology programs on television over the last twenty years, noted the scarcity of substantive television programs that draw on anthropology and anthropo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: Studying Public Television as American Public Culture
• Chapter Two: Childhood on the Contested Territory of Public Television in the United States
• Chapter Three: Negotiating Documentary Production: Authorship and Imagined Audiences
• Chapter Four: Public Television Documentary Poetics
• Chapter Five: Cutting across Cultures: Public Television Documentary and Representations of Otherness
• Chapter Six: Public Television Documentary and the Mediation of American Public Culture
• Appendix A: Organizational Chart of the Childhood Staff
• Appendix B: List of Academic Observers and Advisors
• Appendix C: Synopsis of the Childhood Series
• Notes
• References
• Filmography
• Index