Harvard prof. opposes corporate media control

Virgil Wright

In Nolan Bowie’s vibrant paintings of jazz ensembles, angular musicians play together in fevered harmony, rhythms of line and color making sound leap from the canvas.

The music world of Bowie’s imagination, in which syncopation and structure balance improvisation and individuality, serves as an unlikely model for another world the Harvard professor inhabits — the rarified battleground of the broadcast spectrum.

In Bowie’s view, corporate control of digital and analog signals has stifled the glorious noise that should emanate from radio and television broadcasts. He paints a grim picture of government regulators, dominated by powerful media conglomerates, routinely suppressing the diversity of voices available from divvying up the spectrum among a wide range of viewpoints.

Instead of an ordered cacophony of political, social, and cultural messages, Bowie contends that we’re left with a boondoggle benefiting the usual suspects, who eschew competition and turn bandwidth into a license to print money, dumb down culture and undermine democracy.

“Licensing is a form of censorship,” says the lean veteran of Beltway battles over public access to the airwaves. It is an argument that Bowie, who teaches communications law and policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, has been making for close to 30 years.

Recent radical advancements in digital technology have created an opportunity to finally redeem the democratic promise of broadcasting to educate, inform and entertain, says Bowie, who will present his ideas in keynote addresses later this month at a National Federation of Community Broadcasters symposium in Portland and at a University of Pennsylvania panel on “Race, Media, Ownership & Access.”

Wearing black jeans, a black polo shirt, black sneakers and a black leather jacket, the bespectacled academic looks every part the avant-gardist as he leans across the table of a Central Square coffee shop to calmly underscore his argument.

“But for the ‘scarcity rationale,’ government has no legitimacy to regulate broadcasting in any manner. Government cannot arbitrarily undercut the First Amendment right to free speech,” says Bowie, his hands wrapped around his coffee cup.

In the early days of radio, he explains, the chaos of overlapping signals and the “scarcity rationale” as applied to the limited availability of the spectrum justified government control and licensing.

“All of that changed with new technology. Spectrum is like real estate — no more is being created,” he says. What has changed is our ability to slice and dice the available spectrum into smaller exploitable bandwidths — sort of like dividing a rambling old mansion licensed in the 1920s as a single occupancy dwelling into condos and filling it with a babble of new tenants.

Under current licensing, a single high-definition television channel — any local network affiliate, for example —spans six megahertz of spectrum bandwidth. The same bandwidth could accommodate four to six standard definition digital channels, 20 to 24 lesser definition digital TV channels and as many as 120 digital terrestrial radio channels.

By shifting the current regulatory regime from a system based on the scarcity rationale to another based on the spectrum as a “common carrier, “ opening up access to all comers, our airwaves could more broadly serve the common good. Instead, the Federal Communications Commission is moving to allow single companies to gobble up all the channels, a trend begun by the landmark Telecommunications Act of 1996, which lifted longstanding restrictions on ownership, resulting in media giants like Clear Channel acquiring 1,200 radio stations.

“Today, with the advent of digital technology, the same company can have 100 voices in the same market. Scarcity is no longer an issue. Diversity of voices is,” says Bowie.

One hour of channel surfing uncovers the paucity of real choices over the broadcast spectrum — a mix of commercialized sex and violence and infotainment flooding the airwaves. Those without market clout, especially African Americans, are too often left out of the equation of deciding what gets on the air at a time when serious public discourse about education, voting rights and economic justice needs more rather than less attention.

“They’re privatizing the public sector,” Bowie wrote after the 1996 bill went through Congress. “And in such an environment, where are the platforms to promote robust debates about controversial issues of public importance? Democracy demands a place to deliberate, a public forum, a public space.”

Meanwhile, he added, “why should we continue to give exclusive licenses to the haves, the big corporations? Why should we give them a second license, or even allow them to buy up existing spectrum? Why not create new opportunities, common carrier broadcasting channels, designated for specific purposes? You could have a free speech, First Amendment, democracy channel. You could have a children’s network, a health broadcast version of CSPAN at the local, state, and federal level. What we need is political will.”

In a career spanning both courtrooms and classrooms, Bowie has won praise from students and advocates drawn to his vision of diversity and democracy, regularly winning top teaching awards at Harvard and his former academic haunts at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he lived for a dozen years before moving to Cambridge in 1998.

Bowie, 63, grew up in South Central Los Angeles, the son of migrants from Arkansas. His mother, divorced when he was young, washed chitlins in a meat plant in L.A. while raising two sons and shielding them from life on the streets. He starred in track and football at Fremont High School and was dubbed “the Fremont Flash” for his athletic exploits at California State University at Long Beach.

After graduation, Bowie joined the navy and was commissioned as an officer at a time that less than four-tenths of one percent of all officers were black. His first assignment came aboard a supply ship, ferrying food and equipment between Asian ports, and he finished out his navy stint as a recruiter.

An article he wrote for a U.S. Navy publication about the history of African-Americans in the least integrated branch of the armed forces attracted notice from a fellow officer who encouraged Bowie to get a law degree. Bowie went to the University of Michigan Law School, clerked in Washington, D.C., and became the only African-American serving in the public defender’s office in the majority black city.

After a brief stint as a staff attorney with the Watergate prosecution team at the end of the Beltway saga, he turned down a highly coveted job in the U.S. Attorney’s office after Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon. “I refuse to participate in this dual system of justice,” he wrote in the letter declining the job offer.

Instead, Bowie joined the Citizens Communication Center, a public interest law firm in Washington, where he began a career-long focus on media ownership and control. A transition to academics occurred after moving to New York to serve as an assistant attorney general. There, he met Lani Guinier, a celebrated law professor and the daughter of Ewart Guinier, the founder of Harvard’s Department of Afro-American Studies.

Guinier attended Yale Law School with Bill and Hillary Clinton, who came to Bowie’s wedding to Lani in 1986 on Martha’s Vineyard. If that was the high point of their friendship, the low point came when President Clinton withdrew his support of Lani’s appointment to a federal post after a public outcry over her advocacy of proportional representation in voting — a complicated issue made simple by the rantings of radio talk show hosts.

Nolan and Lani have an 18-year-old son, a freshman at Yale. Bowie’s 30-year-old daughter by his first wife is studying for a doctorate in public health at Boston University. Self-taught as an artist but featured widely in exhibits, Bowie smiles at comparisons of his work to the striking colors and composition of Jacob Lawrence.

“Jacob Lawrence was trained,” he says. “I’m not. My brother accuses me of being a Sunday painter.”

A quick tour of the rambling Victorian Bowie shares in Cambridge with Guinier suggests that Sunday comes every day of the week: each room in the house features his work and stacks of paintings line the basement studio. Painting, like democracy, is hard work.

“Democracy is not based on trust of government but on distrust,” says Bowie. “That’s why we must have a balance of power between branches of government. But the whole thing most depends on the involvement of people, the engagement of citizens.

“People need to know what’s at stake, they need to know the giveaways that are going on in Washington — $72 billion worth of broadcast spectrum going to the insiders.”

Bowie pauses. “Martin Luther King said that nothing’s wrong with power, just the way it’s allocated.”