China Paper (2): Media and Democratic Theory
Introduction:
- According to classical liberal theory, the media have 4 key democratic functions: to inform, scrutinise, debate and represent
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- This litany is not wrong. Indeed, this understanding of the democratic role of the media seems to me to be in essence both right and inspiring.
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- However, it is also wrapped in cobwebs. It needs to be updated to take account of intensified globalisation, the rise of mass entertainment, and of new media. Let me indicate some of the ways this might be done.
Media’s Watchdog Role
… is part of media democratic theory that has weathered best. There are many heroic examples of investigative journalism can be cited. For example:
The US television network, CBS’s disclosure, in 2004, of the torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by American military personnel in the Abu Ghraib Jail.
The Secret Policeman, the BBC’s award-winning, undercover documentary that exposed in 2003 racism in the British police force. It showed among other things a police trainee wearing a Klu Klux Klan hood simulating for pleasure the beating up of Asians.
The reporting on 24 April 2003 in Guangzhou’s South Metropolis Daily of the killing of Sun Zhigang, and subsequent press and television investigations which revealed that his death - officially attributed to a heart attack - was in fact caused by a severe beating in a detention centre in which he had been wrongly held. These revelations resulted in the successful prosecution of the people responsible, and the reform of the 1984 law dealing with homeless, migrant workers.
Even more dramatically, the Brazilian journalist, Caco Barcellos concluded in 1992 that out of 3200 cases of people officially reported to have resisted arrest over a twenty year period, only 28 had survived. The furore that greeted his book led eventually to significant reform of Brazil’s military police.
All these genuinely heroic examples of investigative journalism – whether taking place in the United States, Britain, China or Brazil – have one thing in common: they exposed the abuse of state power, and led to public redress.
However, the media’s traditional watchdog role needs to be extended to include private power, not least because the efficacy of the democratic nation state is in decline. The rise of deregulated, global financial markets, the growing importance of large transnational corporations, and the increasing clout of global regulatory agencies like the World Trade Organisation have brought into being new centres of economic power that are imperfectly accountable. They need to be subjected to effective media surveillance.
Representational Role
- If the watchdog role of the media needs merely to be extended, the traditional conception of the media’s representational role ought to be rethought.
- In traditional democratic theory, the media are viewed as the voice of the people, the agency that represents public opinion to authority. This simplified view dates from the eighteenth century when the media system was small and a unified public was easily represented since most people were excluded from the political system.
- This traditional, and still constantly reiterated perspective, needs to be replaced by a more complex model, in which it is recognised that different media connect to society in different ways, and contribute different things to the democratic process.
Thus, one part of the media system should represent the views of sectional groups (for example, women as distinct from men, ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, trade unionists), assist their self-organisation and, where appropriate, mobilise pressure for their concerns to be addressed by the political system. These media are generally adversarial and partisan, and assist the functioning of civil society.
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Another part of the media system – in the west, mass television channels and monopoly local dailies – bring together different social groups and individuals in a reciprocal debate about the public direction of society. These media usually follow the precepts of ‘balanced’ journalism, typified by the reporting of different viewpoints within the same news report. This core media system also has a special responsibility to assist the functioning of the political system.
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The development of the Internet has further strengthened the functioning of the media system in two important ways. It facilitates self-expression: and through the rise of the blogosphere (self-published online publications) has created a citizen system of monitoring and influencing the media. It is also facilitating the emergence of a global civil society that is seeking to exert public pressure on new global structures of power.
Let briefly illustrate the democratic potentialities of the blogosphere.
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Self-government
The third, key revision that is needed is to rethink the democratic role of media entertainment. The traditional approach thinks of self-government exclusively in terms of law-making and public administration, and conceives the democratic role of the media narrowly in terms of their political content. However, self-government also takes the form of unwritten rules that guide our every day behaviour. These include our understanding of obligations that derive from our social roles (for example, that of a married or single person, parent or child), and understanding of what behaviour is appropriate for a particular occasion or context (for example, in someone else’s home as distinct from one’s own). These public norms regulate our lives, and are part of the way in which we collectively govern ourselves.
The media have a central, and often unrecognised, role in this process of normative regulation. Through media entertainment, public norms are debated, revised or reaffirmed. Let me give you an example:
The Daily Mail (Britain’s second largest daily paper) published a two page article last year with the headline ‘Is this the most selfish woman in Britain?’. It featured a hitherto unknown woman, Kim Marsham, who had gone on a two-week holiday with her new boyfriend leaving a note for a neighbour asking her to look after her five children. Unknown to her, the neighbour was away, and her distraught children were taken into local state care. The newspaper article attacked her irresponsibility and also her general life style, in a way that was clearly designed to arouse readers’ indignation. [Apparently, she and her boyfriend had borrowed money to go on holiday, and ‘dined on steak and chips every night’]). Though publicly naming and shaming Kim Marsham, the paper was indirectly reaffirming the norm of maternal responsibility.
However, if Kim Marsham had appeared in a television talk show format, such as Oprah Winfrey in the US or Trisha in Britain, she would have been allowed to answer back. Part of her defence might have been that absent fathers should also be involved in looking after children, and should shoulder some of the responsibility for what happened. In this case, the norm of single parent, maternal responsibility would have been contested, and made subject to public debate.
This example merely illustrates, in a condensed form, the cumulative and incremental way in which we conduct - through different TV programmes, films, newspaper and magazine articles, novels, and internet chat rooms – a running debate about our common social processes, and how these should be managed through unwritten rules. Media fiction and entertainment contributes to this informal system of self-rule through the collective ratification or revision of public norms. It is important that different values and perspectives, held in society, are represented in this collective dialogue. The need for pluralism applies to fiction, as well as democratic political debate.
Endnote
What I have sought to do is not to extol uncritically western democratic media theory, but to indicate some ways in which it needs to be updated and rethought. In the time available, I have focused on just three things. The media’s watchdog role should be extended to include private as well as state power. The media’s representational role entails a division of labour in which different media sectors contribute different things to the democratic process. And, lastly, media entertainment is not necessarily a distraction from self-government but contributes to normative self-rule.
I should add one small postscript. How the media ought to function in democratic theory should not be confused with how they actually function in practice. Indeed, the needs of the market conflict with the requirements of democracy.
Much of the media of the west is controlled by big business. This weakens its representative character. For example, all the papers controlled by the right-wing tycoon, Rupert Murdoch around the world – over a hundred of them – support the current unpopular war in Iraq.
Growing hyper-commercialism, arising from the increased competition generated by a growing number of channels, is leading to cut-backs in investigative journalism in the United States, and elsewhere. This is because investigative journalism is both expensive and generally fails to generate high audience ratings.
Increasing market pressures are also causing a cumulative decline of primetime public affairs coverage on mass television channels, and a reduction of foreign news coverage unrelated to military action. Between 1988 and 1998, foreign coverage dropped from 15 per cent to 7 per cent of current affairs programme content on ITV, the main British commercial TV channel. Its main new rival, channel 5, was dedicated in the words of its then programme controller, Dawn Airey, to ‘films, fucking and football’.
Commercial pressures also gave rise to misinformation. ……
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In short, market pressures can undermine the democratic functioning of the media in a variety of ways. There are four principal responses to these problems:
1. Social responsibility approach.
2. Social market approach
3. Staff rights
4. Public service broadcasting (inform; diversity; impartiality)
Conclusion: Media democratic theory is inspiring, though in need of revision. The real difficulty arises when one tries to put its admirable precepts into practice.
