Constructing closed‐captioning in the public interest: from minority media accessibility to mainstream educational technology

Abstract

PurposeTo explore the historical construction of the US broadcast television closed‐captioning system as a case study of debates over “public service broadcasting” during the late twentieth century.Design/methodology/approachHistorical.FindingsNeither the corporate voluntarism promoted by the FCC in the 1970s nor the “public‐private partnership” of the National Captioning Institute (NCI) in the 1980s proved able to sustain a closed‐captioning system; instead, a progressive round of re‐regulation on both the demand side (universal decoder distribution) and the supply side (mandatory program captioning) was necessary to bring the promise of broadcast equality to all deaf and hard‐of‐hearing (D/HOH) citizens.Originality/value of paperThe decades‐long legal, technological, and institutional battle to define the “public interest” responsibilities of broadcasters toward non‐hearing viewers was fraught with contradiction and compromise.