The Communication Crisis in America, And How to Fix It

Mark Lloyd, Lewis A. Friedland, Mark Lloyd, Lewis A. Friedland

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349949243
• eBook ISBN: 9781349949250
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Social Sciences

with foreword byMichael X. DelliCarpini, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, USA

This book critiques U.S.public policy about communication and offers guidelines to improve public safety and create strongdemocratic communities. The lack of effective emergency communication, basic information about health care, education, jobs and the economy, and civic life is at a crisis state, creating problems for the whole community, not just a vulnerable few. The Communications Crisis in America is not because of changing markets or new technology, it is the failure of public policy. The authors include economists, sociologists, journalists, lawyers and a diverse group of media and communication scholars, all offering an urgent call to action and difficult, but achievable steps forward.

Section 1
Preface: New Approaches to Solving the Communications Challenge

Our first section sets out the foundation of our broad thesis. In order to clearly understand the communications challenge and how to begin to think about it, we must begin to answer: What are critical information needs? What is happening in our communication markets today? And what research is necessary for us to find solutions?

Friedland proposes eight critical information needs of American communities and argues that both their severity and potential solutions vary greatly by community and neighborhood. Napoli demonstrates that the explosive growth of new media has undermined the business model for traditional information, but that new media still depend on “old” media for much of their content, particularly content that addresses critical information needs. Ognyanova reviews the range of approaches and methods that have been used to model community communication ecologies and discusses why these community-based methods are still necessary in a new media era.

While much of the following chapter draws on the Review of the Literature Regarding Critical Information Needs of the American Public written for the Federal Communications Commission and the work of the Aspen/Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, neither this chapter nor this book repeats those efforts. This chapter captures recent research and analysis necessary to understand the new approaches to solving the communications challenge in America.

© The Author(s) 2016

Mark Lloyd and Lewis A. Friedland (eds.)The Communication Crisis in America, And How to Fix It10.1057/978-1-349-94925-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. America’s Critical Community Information Needs

Lewis A. Friedland¹

(1)

University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA

End Abstract

Americans need information to govern themselves, to participate effectively in society, and to be safe. Even as the American public remains divided on so many issues, this proposition should generate near-universal agreement. In order to understand what critical community information needs are and how they are delivered, two points stand out. The first is that our mixed system under-delivers information (public goods) that the public needs to survive and thrive. These public goods are systematically under-produced, penalizing both individuals and whole communities. The second, mirroring the first, is that public policy for the democratic provision of community information needs can make a difference.

For example, without civic information, we cannot know what laws our elected officials are proposing, who may be supporting those laws, and who is contributing to political campaigns. We cannot monitor whether laws are being implemented well or fairly. As fewer and fewer American communities have regular sources of news that cover political campaigns at the local level, we often cannot even know who our candidates are or what they stand for.

Information flows are also the lifeblood of our economic system. But the provision of information by and about markets is uneven at best. Although it is true that information might be more transparent in competitive markets, many information markets really are not competitive. For example, most Americans have no choice in their cable provider or what kind of cable service they receive. Similarly, in the twenty-first century, the “market” for broadband service, the very gateway to an information society, effectively consists of a series of local monopolies enforced by state legislators who too often limit competition, especially from local governments. As a result, large swaths of Americans are squeezed out from real participation in an information society. Our economic system has left us with a fast lane, a slow lane, and an “entrance closed” lane.

In addition to civic and commercial economic information flows, the American system for providing information even in emergency situations lacks transparency and consistent access. The provision of content is often from government (the National Weather Service or the National Centers for Disease Control, for example) via privately owned and operated media, over a delivery infrastructure owned by the public (spectrum and public streets).

This chapter first establishes the concept of critical community information needs. It then offers eight sets of critical needs that individuals and communities need to thrive. We next discuss how critical community information needs are embedded in local communication ecologies, and drawing from authors in this volume, argue that they need to be studied ecologically. Finally, we discuss the failure to develop public policy toward critical community information needs and point to some new directions.

Defining Critical Information Needs

Critical information needs of local communities are those that must be met for citizens and community members to live safe and healthy lives; have full and fair access to educational, employment, and business opportunities; and to fully participate in the civic and democratic lives of their communities.

In 2012, the University of Southern California (USC) was funded by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to examine a wide range of social sciences from multiple disciplines to propose a set of critical information needs (Friedland et al. 2012). USC reached out to a team of scholars collectively identified as the Communication Policy Research Network (CPRN). That group identified more than 1000 articles drawing from the disciplines of communication and journalism, economics, sociology, geography, urban studies, urban planning, library and information science, education, health sciences, transportation, environmental science, and emergency and risk management.

CPRN found that communities need access to eight categories of critical information. Further, this critical information is needed in a timely manner; it must be accessible in an interpretable language; and it must be available through media that diverse communities can reasonably access.

The eight categories of critical needs include information about:

1. (1)
   Emergencies and risks, both immediate and long-term;
2. (2)
   Health and welfare, including specifically local health information as well as group-specific health information where it exists;
3. (3)
   Education, including the quality of local schools and choices available to parents;
4. (4)
   Transportation, including available alternatives, costs, and schedules;
5. (5)
   Economic opportunities, including job information, job training, and small business assistance;
6. (6)
   The environment, including information about air and water quality; environmental threats to health; and access to restoration and recreation;
7. (7)
   Civic information, including information on civic institutions and opportunities to associate with others;
8. (8)
   Political information, including information about candidates at all relevant levels of local governance, and about relevant public policy initiatives affecting communities and neighborhoods.

Everyday and Quality-of-Life Needs

Emergencies and Public Safety

Perhaps the most fundamental need of all is for access to emergency information that allows individuals, neighborhoods, and communities to protect themselves and their families. This should be fundamental to policymakers, but unfortunately, even after Hurricane Katrina and the shootings at Sandy Hook and San Bernardino, there are no clear national standards for the provision of information about dangerous weather alerts, environmental and other biohazardous outbreaks, or human-caused events. Despite public safety threats, including terrorism, child abduction, mass shootings, and other threats to public order and safety, uniform standards for alerting the public simply do not exist. Further, it is abundantly clear that all citizens need access to local (including neighborhood) information on policing and public safety. However, neither the platforms, nor data, or even data standards, exist in most cities, much less a basic level of interoperability across platforms that would be necessary to ensure the equitable provision of information in situations of high risk.

Even with the spread of cell and smartphones, it should not be assumed that everyone has access to social media (or that information found there in time of disaster is accurate). Seniors are much more likely to depend on radio and television. Even in large cities with large concentrations of immigrants, emergency and risk information is not universally and uniformly available via these most basic regulated media that operate on the public spectrum.

Further, in a nation as diverse as the USA, it seems self-evident that emergency information has to be universally accessible in languages that are understood by the large majority of local populations when a natural or human disaster approaches. New York City public schools recognize 176 languages spoken by its students; the borough of Queens alone contains at least 138. It is estimated that 224 languages are spoken in Los Angeles. But despite this linguistic diversity—part of our heritage of immigration—even the needs of Spanish speakers, the largest linguistic minority in the USA, are generally not being met.

Health

Information on local health and healthcare, including information on family and public health is of vital importance. Broadly, we can distinguish three types of healthcare information. The first is information about health risk, disease, and infirmity. While it is widely assumed that this information is available on the Internet (and a great deal is), this doesn’t mean that all populations have equal access to digital services. Nor, as Hargittai and Jennrich argue here, do all members of communities have the skills to find and navigate these sources.

The second category is information about health insurance. While much political furor has been expended on the information exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act, these clearly work unevenly, depending on whether a state has created its own exchange, done it well or poorly, or drawn on the federal exchanges. Regardless, as Hamilton and Morgan make clear, the life skills necessary to navigate information about insurance, whether through the exchanges or Medicaid, are far from equally distributed. Information intermediaries have been shown to be important in assisting many Americans to navigate these sites, but again, there is no uniform policy, provision, or even clear knowledge about where they exist and how well they work.

The third type of healthcare information is the availability of local health services. CPRN found few examples of local, accessible information about which doctors and hospitals accept Medicaid; where prenatal or well-baby care can be obtained; or about chronic illnesses that affect local populations and their treatment. While there is much research on healthcare information systems, and many studies are devoted to specific local and environmental health problems, very little research has been devoted to understanding the critical health information needs of citizens, especially at the local level (Friedland et al. 2012).

Finally, the same issues of accessible languages and platforms exist for healthcare as for emergency and risk. Information is needed on the availability, quality, and cost of local healthcare for accessibility, lowering costs, and ensuring that markets function properly, including variations by neighborhood and city region; the availability of local public health, programs, and services, including wellness care and local clinics and hospitals; timely information in accessible language on the spread of disease and vaccination; and timely access to information about local health campaigns and interventions.

Education

Education is central to the social well-being of all American families. Where children attend school in our US educational system is primarily determined by their parents’ reside...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Preface: New Approaches to Solving the Communications Challenge
• 2. Preface: Communication Challenges in a Changing America
• 3. Preface: Government Capture and Market Failure
• 4. Preface: Net Neutrality Is Not Enough
• Backmatter