Introduction
SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHERS HAVE NOW ACCUMULATED ENOUGH DATA TO KNOW WITH SOME CONFIDENCE THAT MASS MEDIA, BY ITSELF, RARELY HAS A SIGNIFICANT EFFECT ON INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOR OR SYSTEMIC SOCIAL CHANGE. But when mass media gets people talking to each other about the subject being presented, the changes are often significant. Some researchers call this “mass-media generated interpersonal communication.” When sufficient numbers of people view a social issue media project and then talk about difficult social issues, the impact can be profound. Often, this kind of discussion comes about by chance. Recently, social issue media producers and their partners have become more strategic in encouraging discussion through carefully orchestrated public engagement campaigns.
The 1987 television documentary series, “Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years” was a critical success. Released with the broadcast was an array of materials designed to integrate the documentary series into social institutions. The project helped to educate a generation of young people in high schools and colleges all across the country about the nation’s heritage, the struggle for freedom, and the potential of ordinary citizens working together for the common good. Its use in schools, training programs, human resource departments, courtrooms, libraries and
businesses expanded after the release of the series on videotape, shortly after its original broadcast. It generated discussion in newspapers, on radio, and in living rooms across the country.
Similarly, the film “Hoop Dreams” (1994) and its accompanying outreach campaign showed a nationwide audience that a serious, insightful and poignant documentary about race and urban youth can help break down stereotypes and misconceptions and put complex realities into a meaningful context.
In 2000, the documentary “On Our Own Terms” mobilized hundreds of national and regional organizations dealing with end-of-life care issues. It helped thousands of families connect with resources and helped frame a difficult subject in an accessible and thoughtful manner.
These films represent clear examples of success of social issue media having a significant impact. They demonstrate a documentary’s ability to galvanize a nation by connecting with local communities. But with each passing year, with each much-heralded media corporation merger, with each announcement of media technological breakthroughs and the constantly increasing fragmentation of audiences, such an impact is harder and harder to achieve.
Thoughtful documentaries that explore difficult social issues while maintaining editorial integrity have traditionally helped citizens understand complex problems or allowed them to share in a common heritage.
In discussing social issue media, Sally Jo Feiffer, the president of ITVS (Independent Television Service), noted that shared media is “humanity’s most powerful tool…you can’t get by without it.” Producer Sam Pollard notes that social issue “documentaries on television used to be an incredibly powerful tool for learning and for creating common understanding.”
“Commercially released films, including documentaries, can sometimes have an impact, but nothing comes close to the democratic impact of social issue documentaries broadcast for everyone on public television along with an aggressive, well-funded outreach campaign,” noted producer Bennett Singer.
Many advocacy filmmakers consider their work to be social issue media. But for the purposes of this report, we do not include advocacy documentaries in our definition. Advocacy media is thriving in numerous formats – to the point where all media is having a difficult time garnering the public’s trust. As Coby Atlas, of PBS, told us, “If all we have is advocacy work being done in the name of social issue media, then we’ll just have everyone in their own corner shouting.”
This report looks at the near-term future of non-news television documentary projects that address social issues and seek to improve the common good. While we briefly look at other distribution options, our focus is on documentaries that are presented free of charge to the public (usually on public television). Other research projects are exploring possible structural and legal changes regarding media production, archival access, and distribution that might help social media producers inform the public on key social issues over the coming decades. This report focuses on improving the effectiveness, success, and thereby the “fundability” or viability, of social issue media over the next three to five years. We examine the problems, changes, and new ideas relative to social issue media television documentaries. Our intent is to frame the problems in a helpful manner and to examine innovations that may prove strategic. The changes we have witnessed in the industry are massive, but there are many more changes to come. As Robert Luff, of Nielsen Media Research, said in 2005, “Television and media will change more in the next three to five years than it’s changed in the past fifty.” There is no one model that can solve the complex problems faced by the industry. Indeed, with rapid technological changes, and with the marketplace being in a constant state of flux due to commercial forces, it is too much to expect one model to show the way.
We are convinced that broadcast television, while undergoing a profound transition, will remain the most accessible and democratically important distribution point for noncommercial factual films for at least the next three to five years. The problems confronting the broadcast of social issue media are substantial and growing. Nonetheless, no viable, noncommercial alternative to over-the-air public television has yet emerged. Although our focus is public television, it is our view that in today’s saturated media environment, the traditional approach to using public television to improve the common good no longer works. The interviews we conducted for this report point out the obvious problems confronting social issue media today funding is harder to come by, airtime for these programs has been reduced, audiences have become deeply fragmented and opinion-maker response has become difficult to elicit and gauge. For these reasons, even in the near term, all participants need to adjust to and learn from the emerging innovations in other areas of media in order to carry the social issue documentary through these turbulent times successfully. Otherwise, the core values of this work will not be adapted to future opportunities brought about by new technologies and a changing media infrastructure.
There are several kinds of documentary film projects that seek to have a social impact, to foster change in society. Some are made as artistic expressions; some to “educate the converted,” as one interviewee told us; others to present the results of investigative journalism.
Some are strategically created to return a profit; some to win awards; and some to agitate. There is value in all of these kinds of documentary film projects. But in an era of diminishing resources for serious social issue media and an era that is witnessing increasing fragmentation, partisanship and social isolation, we believe that balanced, free, thoughtful social issue media, media with high editorial integrity, needs support and guidance. The media landscape is being altered by commercial forces, with little regard for the public interest. Those who recognize the vital role that social issue media plays in civil society must make certain that the industry both succeeds in this transition from an analog to a digital environment, and that the values and skills of this industry find new and secure footing in the emerging media world.
With unpredictable ebbing and flowing, television documentary productions over the last fifty years have substantially helped frame the way the American public thinks, talks about and acts upon social issues such as race, violence, income inequality, sexism, pollution, persistent poverty, educational inequity, journalism and democracy, and politics. And while having a social impact through television was never easy, it was generally seen as possible and worthwhile. Documentaries on television that questioned and challenged existing power relations in American life played an invaluable role in ending red-baiting (“See It Now”), advancing America’s understanding of the importance of civil rights (“Eyes on the Prize”), women’s rights (“Shoulder to Shoulder”), sounding the public’s voice on issues of war and peace (“Vietnam”), and numerous other issues of justice and the common good.
For reasons that this report will explore, the ability of documentaries to frame public opinion has diminished significantly. Additionally, there is no longer a consensus even among participants that balanced, inclusive, public-serving social issue media is worthwhile or possible. Veteran television producers are leaving the field or pursuing it part time while working in universities or at commercial enterprises. A handful of wealthy (or wealthy-familied) independent producers are bankrolling their own vision of social justice. Jeff Skoll, a co-founder of eBay, has “promised to put his money behind films that make a difference.” According to his company’s Web site, Participant Productions “believes in the power of media to create great social change.” Based on our numerous interviews, there is a clear sense among media professionals that traditional underwriters are reducing their commitments to social issue media projects. And even when funding is secured, and productions completed, broadcasters are hesitant to provide air time, particularly national prime-time spots, for these projects unless they fit into the few remaining strands (“POV” being the primary example). The demand for shorter-format programs is related to the difficulty in getting and keeping the public’s attention in this increasingly noisy media landscape. It may be true that the audience for long-form series has declined. Unfortunately, the demise of the multipart social issue series inevitably means that the one-hour social issue programs or specials that succeed in getting produced and broadcast attract less attention from reviewers and the media and less promotion through corporate sponsorships than a series. These programs also lead to fewer commercial products (trade books, CDs, enhanced DVDs) that provide additional sources of revenue and extend impact.
It is true that commercial funding for theatrically released partisan documentaries is on the rise, and these films are being held up as a model for duplication. However, these films usually do not have the editorial rigor of social issue documentaries and they do not seek to provide multiple points of entry to engage those with different points of view. Rather than building understanding and common ground, they tend to further the political fragmentation of society along ideological lines and frequently treat the role of the documentary as a polemic.
The negative trends that are diminishing the impact and viability of social issue documentaries tend to reinforce each other. But given that no accessible replacement has emerged for this method of informing and involving the public, the authors see this as an unacceptable loss as we transition to new media.
Documentary producers are unlikely to think about their projects as “products,” or to consider who in the marketplace might be their “customers.” But from a business perspective, it is useful to identify who actually pays filmmakers to make their products. Documentary customers include philanthropic underwriters, broadcasters, theatrical distributors and, to some extent, individual viewers who purchase or rent DVDs or videos. It is a very small pool of customers, which makes filmmakers especially vulnerable to disruptions in the marketplace. New technologies represent a major disruption to the marketplace.
Indeed, most of the challenges described in the following report can be attributed to the sweeping change to the entire industry being wrought by new technologies. Revolutions in digital data production, storage and distribution are restructuring once healthy industries and causing chaos to already vulnerable social issue media producers. More than politics, economics or demographics, changes in media technology are reshaping the fundamentals of the documentary business. Low-cost equipment has removed barriers to entry – now everyone can produce his or her own film cheaply. Satellite television and, increasingly, video-over-the-Internet are taking viewers away from traditional channels. People are spending more time than ever consuming media on their computers, cell phones (“mobisodes”), iPods, satellite radio and televisions, but spending less of it watching social issue media documentaries. On-demand cable service and technologies such as TiVo and digital video recorders are further weakening the social impact of broadcasts (and cablecasts). The Internet has changed the breakeven point for distributing DVDs directly to consumers and soon, Internet television (ITV) will further weaken traditional distribution channels. And over the next three years, as digital terrestrial television (DTV) rolls out, audience fragmentation will continue, driven by the birth of numerous new channels for both broadcast digital television and broadcast digital radio. Digital projection equipment has changed the breakeven point for art-house screenings. While these changes offer opportunities to reach distant niche audiences with programming, and offer additional sources of revenue, they have profoundly undermined the ideal of a broad, engaged public sharing common media experiences and thoughtfully deliberating important social issues. There is no such thing as a public anymore – today there are publics, millions of them. Or, as was predicted in a recent report from the consulting firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, “The mass audience becomes a mass of audiences.”
PBS, comprising 349 member stations and under constant pressure to raise money and accommodate government oversight, is notably slow in adapting to these sweeping changes. It has been a pioneer in experimenting with new technologies but has not been able to restructure itself to make use of these technological changes effectively. And public television is not the only institution reeling from these changes. Broadcast television, with significantly more resources, is also struggling because of these changes along with the changes in advertising revenue. But as public television struggles to define its mission over the next three to five years, it is clear that thoughtful, balanced social issue media projects are at risk of disappearing.
Broadcasters, Webcasters, and cablecasters of social issue media must compete for viewers’ attention in this noisy and expanding media environment. The competition may threaten the editorial integrity of social issue media. An increasing number of documentaries are framing stories in a personal, situational manner and not looking at systemic issues. That makes for good storytelling, but without context this type of project becomes an entertainment. We all like to be entertained, but it has been the task of social issue media producers to provide context for reflection and deliberation. Emotionally charged stories are easier to watch, but the viewer is not left with a moral or ethical need to take action. Instead the response to “the feel-good-feel-bad movie,” as a New York Times writer noted concerning this trend, is that viewers feel that “witnessing acts of kindness were equivalent to performing them.” As a European researcher noted, “The pervasive media focus on people rather than principles, events rather than themes, and simple rather than deep causes, is adversely affecting the problem-solving capabilities of democratic societies on a broad variety of issues, ranging from poverty to international conflicts.”
The 1987 television documentary series, “Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years” was a critical success. Released with the broadcast was an array of materials designed to integrate the documentary series into social institutions. The project helped to educate a generation of young people in high schools and colleges all across the country about the nation’s heritage, the struggle for freedom, and the potential of ordinary citizens working together for the common good. Its use in schools, training programs, human resource departments, courtrooms, libraries and
businesses expanded after the release of the series on videotape, shortly after its original broadcast. It generated discussion in newspapers, on radio, and in living rooms across the country.
Similarly, the film “Hoop Dreams” (1994) and its accompanying outreach campaign showed a nationwide audience that a serious, insightful and poignant documentary about race and urban youth can help break down stereotypes and misconceptions and put complex realities into a meaningful context.
In 2000, the documentary “On Our Own Terms” mobilized hundreds of national and regional organizations dealing with end-of-life care issues. It helped thousands of families connect with resources and helped frame a difficult subject in an accessible and thoughtful manner.
These films represent clear examples of success of social issue media having a significant impact. They demonstrate a documentary’s ability to galvanize a nation by connecting with local communities. But with each passing year, with each much-heralded media corporation merger, with each announcement of media technological breakthroughs and the constantly increasing fragmentation of audiences, such an impact is harder and harder to achieve.
Thoughtful documentaries that explore difficult social issues while maintaining editorial integrity have traditionally helped citizens understand complex problems or allowed them to share in a common heritage.
In discussing social issue media, Sally Jo Feiffer, the president of ITVS (Independent Television Service), noted that shared media is “humanity’s most powerful tool…you can’t get by without it.” Producer Sam Pollard notes that social issue “documentaries on television used to be an incredibly powerful tool for learning and for creating common understanding.”
“Commercially released films, including documentaries, can sometimes have an impact, but nothing comes close to the democratic impact of social issue documentaries broadcast for everyone on public television along with an aggressive, well-funded outreach campaign,” noted producer Bennett Singer.
Many advocacy filmmakers consider their work to be social issue media. But for the purposes of this report, we do not include advocacy documentaries in our definition. Advocacy media is thriving in numerous formats – to the point where all media is having a difficult time garnering the public’s trust. As Coby Atlas, of PBS, told us, “If all we have is advocacy work being done in the name of social issue media, then we’ll just have everyone in their own corner shouting.”
This report looks at the near-term future of non-news television documentary projects that address social issues and seek to improve the common good. While we briefly look at other distribution options, our focus is on documentaries that are presented free of charge to the public (usually on public television). Other research projects are exploring possible structural and legal changes regarding media production, archival access, and distribution that might help social media producers inform the public on key social issues over the coming decades. This report focuses on improving the effectiveness, success, and thereby the “fundability” or viability, of social issue media over the next three to five years. We examine the problems, changes, and new ideas relative to social issue media television documentaries. Our intent is to frame the problems in a helpful manner and to examine innovations that may prove strategic. The changes we have witnessed in the industry are massive, but there are many more changes to come. As Robert Luff, of Nielsen Media Research, said in 2005, “Television and media will change more in the next three to five years than it’s changed in the past fifty.” There is no one model that can solve the complex problems faced by the industry. Indeed, with rapid technological changes, and with the marketplace being in a constant state of flux due to commercial forces, it is too much to expect one model to show the way.
We are convinced that broadcast television, while undergoing a profound transition, will remain the most accessible and democratically important distribution point for noncommercial factual films for at least the next three to five years. The problems confronting the broadcast of social issue media are substantial and growing. Nonetheless, no viable, noncommercial alternative to over-the-air public television has yet emerged. Although our focus is public television, it is our view that in today’s saturated media environment, the traditional approach to using public television to improve the common good no longer works. The interviews we conducted for this report point out the obvious problems confronting social issue media today funding is harder to come by, airtime for these programs has been reduced, audiences have become deeply fragmented and opinion-maker response has become difficult to elicit and gauge. For these reasons, even in the near term, all participants need to adjust to and learn from the emerging innovations in other areas of media in order to carry the social issue documentary through these turbulent times successfully. Otherwise, the core values of this work will not be adapted to future opportunities brought about by new technologies and a changing media infrastructure.
There are several kinds of documentary film projects that seek to have a social impact, to foster change in society. Some are made as artistic expressions; some to “educate the converted,” as one interviewee told us; others to present the results of investigative journalism.
Some are strategically created to return a profit; some to win awards; and some to agitate. There is value in all of these kinds of documentary film projects. But in an era of diminishing resources for serious social issue media and an era that is witnessing increasing fragmentation, partisanship and social isolation, we believe that balanced, free, thoughtful social issue media, media with high editorial integrity, needs support and guidance. The media landscape is being altered by commercial forces, with little regard for the public interest. Those who recognize the vital role that social issue media plays in civil society must make certain that the industry both succeeds in this transition from an analog to a digital environment, and that the values and skills of this industry find new and secure footing in the emerging media world.
With unpredictable ebbing and flowing, television documentary productions over the last fifty years have substantially helped frame the way the American public thinks, talks about and acts upon social issues such as race, violence, income inequality, sexism, pollution, persistent poverty, educational inequity, journalism and democracy, and politics. And while having a social impact through television was never easy, it was generally seen as possible and worthwhile. Documentaries on television that questioned and challenged existing power relations in American life played an invaluable role in ending red-baiting (“See It Now”), advancing America’s understanding of the importance of civil rights (“Eyes on the Prize”), women’s rights (“Shoulder to Shoulder”), sounding the public’s voice on issues of war and peace (“Vietnam”), and numerous other issues of justice and the common good.
For reasons that this report will explore, the ability of documentaries to frame public opinion has diminished significantly. Additionally, there is no longer a consensus even among participants that balanced, inclusive, public-serving social issue media is worthwhile or possible. Veteran television producers are leaving the field or pursuing it part time while working in universities or at commercial enterprises. A handful of wealthy (or wealthy-familied) independent producers are bankrolling their own vision of social justice. Jeff Skoll, a co-founder of eBay, has “promised to put his money behind films that make a difference.” According to his company’s Web site, Participant Productions “believes in the power of media to create great social change.” Based on our numerous interviews, there is a clear sense among media professionals that traditional underwriters are reducing their commitments to social issue media projects. And even when funding is secured, and productions completed, broadcasters are hesitant to provide air time, particularly national prime-time spots, for these projects unless they fit into the few remaining strands (“POV” being the primary example). The demand for shorter-format programs is related to the difficulty in getting and keeping the public’s attention in this increasingly noisy media landscape. It may be true that the audience for long-form series has declined. Unfortunately, the demise of the multipart social issue series inevitably means that the one-hour social issue programs or specials that succeed in getting produced and broadcast attract less attention from reviewers and the media and less promotion through corporate sponsorships than a series. These programs also lead to fewer commercial products (trade books, CDs, enhanced DVDs) that provide additional sources of revenue and extend impact.
It is true that commercial funding for theatrically released partisan documentaries is on the rise, and these films are being held up as a model for duplication. However, these films usually do not have the editorial rigor of social issue documentaries and they do not seek to provide multiple points of entry to engage those with different points of view. Rather than building understanding and common ground, they tend to further the political fragmentation of society along ideological lines and frequently treat the role of the documentary as a polemic.
The negative trends that are diminishing the impact and viability of social issue documentaries tend to reinforce each other. But given that no accessible replacement has emerged for this method of informing and involving the public, the authors see this as an unacceptable loss as we transition to new media.
Documentary producers are unlikely to think about their projects as “products,” or to consider who in the marketplace might be their “customers.” But from a business perspective, it is useful to identify who actually pays filmmakers to make their products. Documentary customers include philanthropic underwriters, broadcasters, theatrical distributors and, to some extent, individual viewers who purchase or rent DVDs or videos. It is a very small pool of customers, which makes filmmakers especially vulnerable to disruptions in the marketplace. New technologies represent a major disruption to the marketplace.
Indeed, most of the challenges described in the following report can be attributed to the sweeping change to the entire industry being wrought by new technologies. Revolutions in digital data production, storage and distribution are restructuring once healthy industries and causing chaos to already vulnerable social issue media producers. More than politics, economics or demographics, changes in media technology are reshaping the fundamentals of the documentary business. Low-cost equipment has removed barriers to entry – now everyone can produce his or her own film cheaply. Satellite television and, increasingly, video-over-the-Internet are taking viewers away from traditional channels. People are spending more time than ever consuming media on their computers, cell phones (“mobisodes”), iPods, satellite radio and televisions, but spending less of it watching social issue media documentaries. On-demand cable service and technologies such as TiVo and digital video recorders are further weakening the social impact of broadcasts (and cablecasts). The Internet has changed the breakeven point for distributing DVDs directly to consumers and soon, Internet television (ITV) will further weaken traditional distribution channels. And over the next three years, as digital terrestrial television (DTV) rolls out, audience fragmentation will continue, driven by the birth of numerous new channels for both broadcast digital television and broadcast digital radio. Digital projection equipment has changed the breakeven point for art-house screenings. While these changes offer opportunities to reach distant niche audiences with programming, and offer additional sources of revenue, they have profoundly undermined the ideal of a broad, engaged public sharing common media experiences and thoughtfully deliberating important social issues. There is no such thing as a public anymore – today there are publics, millions of them. Or, as was predicted in a recent report from the consulting firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, “The mass audience becomes a mass of audiences.”
PBS, comprising 349 member stations and under constant pressure to raise money and accommodate government oversight, is notably slow in adapting to these sweeping changes. It has been a pioneer in experimenting with new technologies but has not been able to restructure itself to make use of these technological changes effectively. And public television is not the only institution reeling from these changes. Broadcast television, with significantly more resources, is also struggling because of these changes along with the changes in advertising revenue. But as public television struggles to define its mission over the next three to five years, it is clear that thoughtful, balanced social issue media projects are at risk of disappearing.
Broadcasters, Webcasters, and cablecasters of social issue media must compete for viewers’ attention in this noisy and expanding media environment. The competition may threaten the editorial integrity of social issue media. An increasing number of documentaries are framing stories in a personal, situational manner and not looking at systemic issues. That makes for good storytelling, but without context this type of project becomes an entertainment. We all like to be entertained, but it has been the task of social issue media producers to provide context for reflection and deliberation. Emotionally charged stories are easier to watch, but the viewer is not left with a moral or ethical need to take action. Instead the response to “the feel-good-feel-bad movie,” as a New York Times writer noted concerning this trend, is that viewers feel that “witnessing acts of kindness were equivalent to performing them.” As a European researcher noted, “The pervasive media focus on people rather than principles, events rather than themes, and simple rather than deep causes, is adversely affecting the problem-solving capabilities of democratic societies on a broad variety of issues, ranging from poverty to international conflicts.”
