Category Archives: Problem Practices

Communication behavior or analysis that is often counter-productive

Muting the Dream

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Source: commons wikimedia
Source: commons wikimedia

It’s difficult to judge if King knew what taking his discourse out of the public domain would mean. 

The release of the film Selma this month adds meaning to the holiday honoring Martin Luther King’s birthday.  But some details about what the producers had to do to put King’s courage on view add a slightly sour note to this year’s tribute.

Most Americans probably do not know that the great civil rights leader’s words may not be rewritten or replayed without payment to King’s heirs.  Soon after the famous “I have a Dream” speech on the National Mall, King moved to legally retain legal ownership of it, and eventually other statements made by him throughout the years of his struggle. He copyrighted his public rhetoric in a way few would ever think possible or desirable.  It’s difficult to judge if King knew what taking his discourse out of the public domain would mean.

The family’s explanation for monetizing and controlling the leader’s rhetoric is that he and they did not want his words used for commercial or unintended purposes. If you want a video copy of the speech, you will need to buy it from Amazon or some other seller of audio content. If you are a documentary filmmaker seeking footage of the era, payment would be required for any portions that include statements from King. And if you are retelling key moments from his life, his words are off-limits, even though the family has apparently licensed segments for use in commercials.

The challenge was especially great for the producers of Selma, who were forced to write their own King-like oratory to recreate the fateful 1965 march. The exclusive film rights to those words have apparently been sold to DreamWorks’ Steven Spielberg.

It even gets even more peculiar. Stanford University runs the Martin Luther King Institute that oversees a “King Papers Project.” But getting access to the papers is not easy. Here’s their online warning:

The Institute cannot give permission to use or reproduce any of the writings, statements, or images of Martin Luther King, Jr. Please do not contact us for this purpose.
Inquiries regarding the use or reproduction King's writings or statements should be directed to the manager of the Estate of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:  Intellectual Properties Management (IPM).

How very strange, for several reasons.  First, in my years in academic publishing, I’ve rarely encountered an editor who had to pay a license fee in order to reprint speeches and statements from major political or social figures. I’m sure it has happened somewhere. But most principals or their estates understand that the nation’s civil culture is predicated on widespread dissemination of foundational documents. The general guideline is usually that it’s more about the ideas than monetizing them.

Second, when you put a price on jeremiads that called on others to join a collective struggle, claiming legal ownership of those words undermines the very ethic of personal sacrifice they are ostensibly about. King asked much of his followers, especially when they were recruited to march—as in Selma—without any police protection.  Given the willingness of so many to selflessly further the cause of civil rights, It’s difficult to understand why he set up an intellectual property mechanism that would put his rhetorical legacy on the auction block.  Freely sharing his words would have been better served the idea that this was a collective struggle.  Surely documents that are part of a nation’s social and cultural advances deserve a better fate than being sold to the highest bidder.

Comments: Woodward@tcnj.edu

The Oppositional Turn

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Source: White House photographer Pete Souza
Obama comforting a Hurricane Sandy Victim Source: White House Photographer: Pete Souza

 Almost all of the energy in our public rhetoric is reserved for unmasking what appears to many as the unjustified and self-serving optimism of political elites.

Anyone listening to any past president surely noticed that their public rhetoric was in a distinctly different key. Assuming that Donald Trump is a one-off anomaly, presidents speak in major chords that emphasize positivity, success, praise, enduring values, and always a degree of hope.  It’s the nature of the office to be affirming.  But such rhetoric is increasingly at odds with the sour and minor keys that tend to dominate the ‘rough music’ that comes with significant national and political events. It can hardly be news that irony and suspicion rule our airwaves, talk shows, blogs, news sites, and twitter feeds.

It’s clear to anyone who is listening that we live in an era dominated by oppositional rhetoric. The cultural voices that command the greatest attention are mostly reactive, negative and frequently vitriolic.  Almost of this energy goes into unmasking what appears to so many as the unjustified and self-serving optimism of political and corporate elites.  Increasingly, the negativity of the internet troll looks less like an isolated aberration than a new and durable rhetorical norm.  As a younger student of political communication in the 1970s, I don’t recall seeing the plethora of books asserting presidential conspiracies than can now be found among the “new releases” on the shelves of our public libraries.  And there is, of course, the current President’s daily vitriol.  It’s hardly news that he excels at making nasty comments.

How did we get here?  A bit of this effect is a matter of perception. The Democratic strategist Tony Schwartz noted years ago that in a simple election between two people there are actually four voting choices; a person can vote for or against either candidate.  Schwartz noted that it was sometimes easier to help people discover who they were against. That insight was enough for him to produce devastating anti-Goldwater ads in the 1964 presidential contest.

In addition, the democratization of news gathering—or at least news commentary—means we hear less from official voices and more from dissenters.  Presidents can no longer easily command broadcasters to turn over prime time for an important speech.  The media competition for attention is too great. At the same time, more of our informational sources have merged straight reporting of public events with the entertainment imperative of centering a program on a host who can issue slicing rebukes. We expect our news with the twist of irony that comes easily in The Daily Show, Real Time with Bill Maher, or online outlets like Slate or Salon.com.  As for talk radio: outside of NPR, no one seems to want to sound like a good-government wonk from Minnesota. A surer route to success is to become the audio equivalent of a professional wrestler tossing unworthy adversaries over the ropes.

In actual fact, as psychologist Stephen Pinker has noted in The Better Angels of Our Nature (Penguin, 2012), we are a somewhat more compassionate society than the one our ancestors knew. But it also seems apparent that we have less interest in advocates motivated to find common ground in civil discourse. This splintering of the culture is thus partly the effect of more decentralized and polarized news media, but it’s also caused by a cultural turn away from the communitarian trope that was proudly uttered in defense of significant advances in social welfare legislation following World War II.  The G.I. Bill, Social Security, and the civil rights acts of the mid-1960s were milestones as enactments of this value, which could be summarized as broad support to use the political resources of the nation for the benefit of all. In this common pre-Reagan belief, government was the solution, not the problem.

The challenge posed by the newer turn toward a more atomized and suspicious culture is whether we and other western democracies can maintain a sense of shared national destiny.  With a fragmented nation now served by fragmented media, finding what unites us is more difficult. That search is compounded by the fact that we no longer pay much attention to Presidents, even when they yearned to be the poets of our national spirit.