POLITICS, DEMOCRACY AND THE MEDIA

DEMOCRACY AND THE MEDIA: A CRITIQUE

Introduction:

In spite of the various functions and advantages of the media in democratic societies, it has been criticized for its failure to achieve certain things. Let’s not forget that in our last discussion led by Dr. Aderibigbe, he enumerated five functions of an ideal media in democratic societies. These include:

(a) First, the mass media must inform citizens of what is happening around them (what we may call the surveillance or monitoring function of the media). (b) Second, the mass media must educate as to the meaning and significance of the ‘facts’ (the importance of this function explains the seriousness with which journalists protect their objectivity, since their value as educators presumes a professional detachment from the issues being analysed) (c) Third, the mass media must provide a platform for public political discourse, facilitating the formation of ‘public opinion’, and feeding that opinion back to the public from whence it came. This must include the provision of space for the expression of dissent, without which the notion of democratic consensus would be meaningless. (d) Fourth, the mass media’s function is to give publicity to governmental and political institutions – the watchdog role of journalism, exemplified by the performance of the US media during the Watergate episode and, more recently, the British Guardian’s coverage of the clash-for-questions scandal, in which investigative journalism exposed the practice of members of parliament accepting payment for the asking of parliamentary questions. (e) Finally, the media in democratic societies serve as a channel for the advocacy of political viewpoints.

These functions – and indeed many others – have been credited to the media. However, like almost every phenomenon, the media is not perfect. It has therefore been criticized for failing to achieve certain things in democratic societies. Some of these failures have been outlined by McNair (2011), which will guide our discussions today.

In order to fully understand the discussions from McNair (2011), we must first internalize the teaching and apply the situation to the Nigerian democratic setting. This way, we will fully appreciate the critique of the media in democratic societies.

Please, be in a relaxed mood/atmosphere to fully understand and appreciate the critique outline by McNair (2011: 21 – 25)

DEMOCRACY AND THE MEDIA: A CRITIQUE

Since the eighteenth century the media, and the functions listed above, have grown ever-more important to the smooth workings of the democratic political process. The achievement of universal suffrage in most advanced capitalist societies during the twentieth century was paralleled by a technological in the means of mass communication as print, then film, radio and television became available to mass audiences. Since the 1950s especially, and the expansion of television into virtually every household in the developed capitalist world, interpersonal political communication has been relegated to the margins of the democratic process. Nowadays, as Colin Seymour-Ure puts it, television has become an ‘integral part of the environment within which political life takes place’ (1989, p. 308). Surveys show that for the vast majority of people the media, including now the internet, which grows in importance with every year, represent the main source of their information about politics.2 How, then, does the reality of contemporary political discourse as communicated through and by the media correspond to the ideal described above? To what extent do the media perform the role allotted to them in liberal democratic theory? Answering these questions requires a critical examination of both democratic structures and the media environment around them. It would, of course, be naive to expect that these two sets of institutions should function perfectly. It is important, however, to acknowledge the ways in which they fall short of the ideal, and the significance of these shortcomings.

The failure of Education

First, it is argued by some observers that the normative assumption of a ‘rational’ citizenry is not realistic. For Bobbio, one of the great ‘broken promises’ of liberal democracy is the failure of the education system to produce rational voters, a failure which he sees reflected in the growing political apathy characteristic of such democratic exemplars as the US. ‘The most well-established democracies’, he argues, ‘are impotent before the phenomenon of increasing political apathy, which has overtaken about half of those with the right to vote’ (1987, p. 36). When those who have the right to vote decline to do so, democracy is clearly less than perfect. In the UK general election of 2001, only 58 per cent of those eligible actually voted. Turnout was 65 per cent in the general election of 2010.

Looking at the phenomenon of low voter turnout from another angle, it may be argued that political apathy is an entirely rational, if slightly cynical response to a political process in which it may appear to the individual citizen that his or her vote does not matter. While democratic procedures must include regular elections, it may be felt that voting once every four or five years for one of two or at most three rather similar parties is ineffective and pointless, particularly when, as is routinely the case in Britain, one party retains power with substantially less than 50 per cent of the eligible electorate’s support. In the 2005 UK general election, won only 35.2 per cent of the votes cast, securing with that number an absolute majority of 67 seats in parliament. In 2010, the Conservatives won 36 per cent of votes, to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. For Jean Baudrillard, the guru of post-modern nihilism, voter apathy is viewed as an intelligible strategy of resistance to bourgeois attempts to incorporate the masses into a ‘game’ which they can never really win. The ‘silent passivity’ of the masses is characterised by him as ‘a defence . . . a mode of retaliation’ (1983, p. 23). If democracy is, as some argue, principally a set of rules intended to legitimise bourgeois power, voter (and particularly working-class) apathy (the denial of mass participation) may be interpreted as an assertion of the fundamental illegitimacy of bourgeois power.3

Absence of Choice A further limitation on democracy is often argued to be the absence of genuine choice, or pluralism. One could reasonably argue that there are more similarities in the policies and ideologies of the US Democratic and Republican parties than there are differences. In Britain, where the Labour and Conservative parties have traditionally been distinct ideologically, the 1990s saw a coming together of agendas and policies on many social, economic and foreign policy matters. In the 1997 general election, ‘New Labour’ unashamedly adopted many of what had previously been viewed (including by most members of the Labour Party itself) as right-wing Conservative policies, such as privatisation of the air traffic control system.4 In doing so, New Labour proclaimed itself at the ‘radical centre’ of British politics, emulating the Clinton administration’s 1996 reelection strategy of ideological ‘triangulation’ (Morris, 1997). Triangulation in the US, like Labour’s radical , meant taking what was popular and commonsensical from the free-market right (such as the reduction of ‘big ’), while adhering to the core social democratic values of social justice and equality of opportunity. In his campaign to win the 2010 election in the UK, Tory leader David Cameron was marketed as the ‘new’ .

Although, in the post-Cold War environment, there may be good reasons for the abandonment of long-standing ideological and political slogans which reflect an earlier phase of capitalist development, in such circumstances the voter may reasonably feel that a vote for one party or another will have little or no impact on the conditions and quality of life.

Democratic procedures, in short, usually contain anomalies and biases which make them less than fully democratic.

Capitalism and Power Socialist and Marxist critiques of liberal democracy are more fundamental, arguing that the real loci of power in capitalist societies are hidden behind formal political procedures: in the boardrooms of big business; in the higher reaches of the civil service and security apparatus; in a host of secretive, non-elected institutions. The people may elect a Labour government, the argument goes, but any attempt to implement a genuinely socialist programme (even if the government wanted to do so) inevitably meets with resistance in the form of bureaucratic obstruction, flights of capital abroad, the use of the Royal prerogative, and dirty tricks of the type described by Peter Wright in Spycatcher (1989). From this perspective, the democratic process as pursued in Britain and most other developed capitalist societies is merely a facade, behind which the real levers of political and economic power are wielded by those for whom the citizenry never has an opportunity to vote.

Some of these criticisms are accepted even by the most ardent defenders of liberal democracy. Let us assume, however, that the procedures of democratic politics are fundamentally sound; that election results are meaningful and effective in shaping and their behaviour; and that voters will respond rationally to the political information they receive from the media and elsewhere. Were all these assumptions justified, we may still identify a fundamental weakness of democratic theory as it relates to the media. According to the theory, the citizen is a rational subject who absorbs the information available and makes appropriate choices. He or she is, as it were, the repository of knowledge existing out there in the world, which is converted unproblematically into political behaviour. In reality, however, what the citizen experiences as political information is the product of several mediating processes which are more or less invisible to him or her.

The Manufacture of Consent These processes begin with the politicians. The legitimacy of liberal democratic government is founded, as we have noted, on the consent of the governed. But consent, as Walter Lippmann observed in the work cited above, can be ‘manufactured’. ‘The manufacture of consent’ (1954, p. 245), indeed, had as early as 1922 become a ‘self-conscious art’ in which politicians combined the techniques of social psychology with the immense reach of mass media. The detailed analysis of these techniques and their evolution over time will be the subject of most of this book, but by acknowledging their existence at this point we recognise a major flaw in democratic theory: if the information on which political behaviour is based is, or can be, manufactured artifice rather than objective truth, the integrity of the public sphere is inevitably diminished. To the extent that citizens are subject to manipulation, rather than exposed to information, democracy loses its authenticity and becomes something rather more sinister.

The distinction between ‘persuasion’, which is a universally recognised function of political actors in a democracy, and manipulation, which carries with it the negative connotations of propaganda and deceit, is not always an easy one to draw. But only those with a touching and naive faith in the ethical purity of politicians would deny that the latter plays an increasingly important part in modern (or post-modern) democratic politics.

Politicians, however, also seek to conceal information from citizens, sometimes for reasons of what is called ‘national security’, and sometimes to avoid political embarrassment. The public nature of politics identified as a prerequisite of liberal democracy by Bobbio often conflicts with the politicians’ desire for survival, and may be sacrificed as a result. While secrecy, deception and cover-ups are hardly new features of politics, their continued use and occasional dramatic exposure (for example in Italy’s tangentopoli scandal of the mid-1990s) remind us that what the citizen receives as political information in the public sphere is often an incomplete and partial picture of reality. We may be conscious of that incompleteness when, for example, secrecy legislation is deployed on national security grounds. More commonly, the fact of concealment is itself concealed from the audience, unless a journalist or campaigner succeeds in making it public.

Manipulation of opinion and concealment (or suppression) of inconvenient information are strategies emanating from political actors themselves, pursued through media institutions. In some cases, journalists will attempt to publicise and expose what is hidden. As we shall see in Chapter 4, the media often have an interest in playing the watchdog role over the politicians. On the other hand, the media may be complicit in the politicians’ concealment of sensitive information (if, for example, a news organisation is strongly committed to a government it may choose to ignore or downplay an otherwise newsworthy story which could damage that government).

More generally, there are many aspects of the process of media production which in themselves make media organisations vulnerable to strategies of political manipulation. In 1962 Daniel Boorstin coined the term ‘pseudo-event’ in response to what he saw as the increasing tendency of news and journalistic media to cover ‘unreal’, unauthentic ‘happenings’. This tendency, he argued, was associated with the rise from the nineteenth century onwards of the popular press and a correspondingly dramatic increase in the demand for news material. The first interview with a public figure was conducted in the US in 1859, and the first American press release issued in 1907. ‘As the costs of printing and then broadcasting increased, it became financially necessary to keep the presses always at work and the TV screen always busy. Pressures towards the making of pseudo-events became ever stronger. Newsgathering turned into news making’ (1962, p. 14).

An important source of pseudo-events for the media has of course been the political process – interviews with government leaders, news leaks and press conferences all provide reportable material (McNair, 2000). Thus, argues Boorstin, the twentieth century has seen a relationship of mutual convenience and interdependence evolve between the politician and the media professional, as one strives to satisfy the other’s hunger for news while at the same time maximising his or her favourable public exposure. For Boorstin in 1962, the trend was not welcome.

In a democratic society. . . freedom of speech and of the press and of broadcasting includes freedom to create pseudo-events. Competing politicians, newsmen and news media contest in this creation. They vie with each other in offering attractive, ‘informative’ accounts and images of the world. They are free to speculate on the facts, to bring new facts into being, to demand answers to their own contrived questions. Our ‘free market of ideas’ is a place where people are confronted by competing pseudo-events and are allowed to judge among them. When we speak of ‘informing’ the people this is what we really mean. (Ibid., p. 35) For Boorstin there is something illusory and artificial about the rationalist notion of public information and its contribution to democracy. The political reportage received by the citizen has become dominated by empty spectacle. The Limitations of Objectivity A further criticism of the media’s democratic role focuses on the professional journalistic ethic of objectivity. This ethic developed with the mass media in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and has been assailed ever since as fundamentally unattainable (McNair, 2009c). For a variety of reasons, it is argued, the media’s political reportage is biased and flawed – subjective, as opposed to objective; partisan, rather than impartial. As Lippmann put it in 1922, ‘every newspaper when it reaches the reader is the result of a whole series of selections as to what items shall be printed, in what position they shall be printed, how much space each shall occupy, what emphasis each should have. There are no objective standards here. There are conventions’ (1954, p. 354).

Reference McNair, B. (2011). An Introduction to Political Communication. Fifth Edition. Routledge: USA. P. 21 – 25.