VYTAUTO DIDŽIOJO UNIVERSITETAS POLITIKOS MOKSLŲ IR DIPLOMATIJOS FAKULTETAS VIEŠOSIOS KOMUNIKACIJOS KATEDRA
Augustinas Šemelis
ŽINIASKLAIDOS KAIP VERSLO BŪKLĖ, ARBA KAS „IŠGELBĖS“ PROFESIONALUMĄ ŽURNALISTIKOJE: „DELFI“ ATVEJIS
Magistro baigiamasis darbas
Žurnalistikos ir medijų analizės studijų programa, valstybinis kodas 621P50002
Žurnalistikos studijų kryptis
Vadovas (-ė): Prof. dr. Auksė Balčytienė
(Moksl. laipsnis, vardas, pavardė)
Apginta ______
(Fakulteto dekanas)
Kaunas, 2015
VYTAUTAS MAGNUS UNIVERSITY
FACULTY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AND DIPLOMACY PUBLIC COMMUNICATIONS DEPARTMENT
Augustinas Šemelis
STATE OF THE MEDIA AS BUSINESS, OR WHAT WILL “SAVE“ THE PROFESSIONAL SIDE OF JOURNALISM: CASE OF “DELFI”
Final Master Thesis
Journalism and Media Analysis Study Program, state code 621P50002
Degree in Journalism
Supervisor: Prof. dr. Auksė Balčytienė
(acad. title, name, surname)
Defended ______
(Dean of the Faculty)
Kaunas, 2015
2
TABLE OF CONTENTS
SANTRAUKA / 4
SUMMARY / 5
INTRODUCTION / 6
1. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK / 10
1.1 Methodology / 10
1.2 The Dialectic between the „Social“ and the „Commercial“ Role of the Media / 13
1.3 Convergence towards the Neoliberal? / 17
1.4 The Neoliberal Ethos / 24
2. MEDIA: AGENCY AND STRUCTURE / 30
2.1 The Logic of Lithuanian Media Policy: Self-denying State Action / 30
2.2 Media as Just Another Private Enterprise / 34
2.3 Market Parallelism / 37
2.4 The New Media and Market Parallelism: Intensification through Interactivity / 42
2.5 The Incredulity towards Journalistic Professionalism / 51
2.6 “DELFI”: The Mirror of Trends / 58
CONCLUSION / 67
LITERATURE AND SOURCES / 69
3
SANTRAUKA
Paprastai didžiausiu pavojumi žiniasklaidos nepriklausomybei ir, tuo pačiu, profesionalumo ir kokybės standartams žurnalistikoje yra laikoma politinė galia. Natūralu, kad nepriklausomybę atgavusios Lietuvos respublikos žiniasklaidos ir žiniasklaidos politikos didžiausias siekis buvo ką tik iš slegiančios cenzūros išsilaisvinusią industriją apsaugoti nuo galimų politinių aspiracijų varžyti žodžio laisvę ir daryti įtaką žiniasklaidos turiniui ateityje. Tačiau ypač liberali žiniasklaidos politika Lietuvoje atvėrė kelią kitokio pobūdžio išorinei įtakai ir žiniasklaidos instrumentalizacijai: tiek privati galia, tiek rinkos dėsniai randa svertų žinių turinio formavimui, „kokybės“ suvokimo kaitai ir profesionalios žurnalistikos sąvokų transformacijai. Politinio paralelizmo išvengusi žiniasklaida atsidūrė rinkos paralelizmo įtakos pavojuje: abiem atvejais kenčia žiniasklaidos nepriklausomybė nuo išorės faktorių. Jeigu kalbėtume apie D. Hallin‘o ir P. Mancini apibūdintą „liberalųjį“ modelį būdingą JAV žiniasklaidos sistemai, tuomet žiniasklaidos komercializacija nebūtų tokia fundamentali problema: šio modelio atveju žiniasklaidos atstovavimas viešajam interesui yra daugiau ar mažiau užtikrinamas nusistovėjusio aukštos žurnalistikos kokybės standartų ir profesionalumo reikalavimų naratyvo atsvaros. Tačiau Lietuvoje šis naratyvas neturėjo progos įsitvirtinti: išsilaisvinimas iš monolitinės cenzūros sistemos iš naujo besikuriančioje Lietuvos žiniasklaidos sistemoje atvėrė neišvengiamą vertybinį vakuumą, kuris ėmė užsipildyti iš Vakarų sklindančiu neoliberaliu etosu, neigiančiu viešojo intereso svarbą – šiam sušvelninti, kitaip nei Vakaruose, Lietuvoje nebuvo tvirtai įsišaknijusių žurnalistikos kokybės ir profesionalumo standartų. Galimas to rezultatas: žininiasklaida, save pozicionuojanti ir veikianti tik kaip privatus verslas, formuojanti savo turinį tiesiog pagal rinkos ir paklausos dėsnius – šitaip rinkos paralelizmas keičia politinę priklausomybę. Tokiu atveju neišvengiamai turi keistis ir žurnalistikos kokybės ir profesionalumo standartai.
4
SUMMARY
Usually it is held that the greatest peril to media independence and the integrity of journalism is posed by the political power. It is only natural that the foremost aim of the media and media policy of the newly independent Republic of Lithuania was to avoid future political overreach in an industry which has so recently experienced an oppressive censorship. However, particularly liberal media policy paved the way for a different kind of external influence and instrumentalization of the media in Lithuania: entering wedges have been found by private powers and market laws to influence media’s content and the transformation of notions of journalistic professionalism. The media, having successfully avoided political parallelism is now facing a peril of market parallelism: both cases endanger media’s independence from external influences. If we would refer to the so-called Liberal model defined by D. Hallin and P. Mancini, the model characterizing the U.S. media system – in that case trends of commercialization would not pose such a fundamental difficulty: in this case media functioning in public interest is secured to a certain extent by a counter-balance of deeply ingrained values and standards of journalistic professionalism. In Lithuania, however, these values did not have a chance to be internalized: the emancipation from monolithic political censorship left behind and unavoidable ethical vacuum within the newly reestablishing Lithuanian media landscape. The vacuum, needing a set of ethical motivations, started absorbing the neoliberal ethos spreading from the West, which was essentially marked by incredulity towards any notion of public interest. And unlike in the countries of the “old West”, Lithuanian media landscape had no deeply ingrained values of professionalism and professional ethics to soften the new trend. A possible outcome: media positioning itself as just another private business and thus constructing its content purely by market logic – in this way market parallelism is replacing the political one – and this would also inevitably mean a transformation in standard practices of professional journalism.
5
INTRODUCTION
When asked about greatest perils facing the media and journalism nowadays or, for that matter, any time, most professional journalists would respond without blinking: the unholy patronage of the government. Traditionally, in most countries and their media systems, this has been exactly the case: the public sphere was restricted from an outright censorship to narrow political partisanship shaped by various degrees of political parallelism, both internal and external. Within the framework of media systems of D. Hallin and P. Mancini, the North-Atlantic or the so- called Liberal model was probably the first major breakthrough of the paradigm: the media finally becoming an end in itself, a truly independent watchdog, rather than a mean by which political ends are pursued. Though the developments in recent decades in the Western world have increasingly rendered the geographical boundaries of the media systems obsolete: Hallin and Mancini would refer to this as convergence towards the Liberal model – a model which has always been more profoundly marked by commercialization - however, we think that the process in action is more complex than a simple convergence towards one traditional media system of the modern age rather than another. The commercialization of the media within the “classical” North-Atlantic model was a decisive factor which allowed the media to break free of the government patronage, by becoming viable and prosperous without being dependant on political factors, however, a newly professionalized field of journalism had a strong sense of mission in serving a public interest: it was the “Liberal model”, after all, which generated the ideas ultimately expressed by, for example, the Hutchins commission. Media, essentially being a private enterprise, was at the same time never “just another private enterprise” – it was, after all, the essential manifestation of the public sphere, the watchdog, the mediator, the agenda-setter, the entertainer – and almost never just a mean by which commercial interest is pursued. That was the ultimate strength of this system: while the media in the systems in which the ties with the political class were too tight became essentially a lip-service platform of partisan politics, the commercial model found the balance between financial viability and the standards of quality and serving the public interest, rather than becoming a mean solely to reach commercial ends. Recently, however, a different sentiment started spreading: „Anxiety about the news responds to the sense that a system once governed by professionalism and conscientious news values is being corrupted by an entertainment complex. This trend is all the more alarming because of the sense that it is happening at a time when the media are more and more central to the way we
6 govern ourselves“1. If this might be the case, then the most fundamental question is – is this still the „Liberal model“ we are talking about, is this still the „Liberal model“ that the media systems of the Western world are converging towards? Within these questions also lies the relevance of the main topic of this paper: to question if the commercial factor in the media is still the guardian of its independence from the government, compatible with media being an end in itself, or rather, is this commercial factor becoming a liability and overshadowing “the public mission” of an independent media? More specifically, we will be operating within a specific context of Lithuanian media landscape – but in order to identify the main problems facing it, first we will have to take a more holistic approach and briefly look at the recent socio-economical and political transformations in the Western world. We will argue that the developments in the recent Lithuanian media system and the media market cannot be understood without taking these factors into account. After all, when the Iron Curtain fell and Lithuania started reintegrating itself within the new extension of the Free World, the social, political and moral vacuum that started opening up as rapid as the ghosts of the failed Soviet system were evaporating had to be refilled with new ethical propositions and new motivations. Since largely overlapping layers of the society in Central- Eastern Europe felt almost intrinsically that the Soviet system has failed them so much, hence all of it had to be shaken off – hence the dramatic vacuum, hence the receptiveness to the latest „Western trends“, the most profound of which was the neoliberal ethics forming the base set of new ethical motivations, which in its own turn influenced both the media policy and the media itself to frame itself as just another private enterprise and a mean for the commercial interest, rather than its own end, as we will argue. The endeavor to grasp this process makes up, essentially, both the relevance of the topic and the object of theory and research of this paper. The scientific problem of the paper could be formed by asking this – if the bundle of ethical standards traditionally forming the essence of the notion of journalistic professionalism and the sense of “mission” of the media are either changing or even eroding, then what are the most important reasons and processes causing this shift? It is important to note, however, that the task of this paper is not to over-generalize or to invent a deterministic theory claiming that all media are moving towards a certain direction, and to position this direction against some normative ideal of how media “ought to” function. We are not claiming that all media are converging towards a certain point of gravity, rather, we are trying to identify the reasons for media moving towards a certain direction given that it is moving there – as, for example, towards the end of this paper we will try to understand whether the Lithuanian outlet “DELFI” does, that is, whether it’s been affected by the
1 Schudson, Michael, The Sociology of News, W. W. Norton & Company, 2003, p. 91 7 neoliberal ethics and the erosion of standards of journalistic professionalism. But before we can explore this particular case, we have to explore and try to identify the wider background, theory, and intrinsic logic behind such processes – that will form a major part of this thesis.
The aim of the thesis – to analyze the main factors influencing both media policy and standards of journalism in Lithuania.
Objectives: 1. To identify the said factors; 2. To analyze their impact on media policy in Lithuania; 3. To analyze their impact on standards of journalism in Lithuania; 4. To identify the manifestations of said factors and their effects in “DELFI”.
Methods implemented in writing the thesis: analytical and descriptive.
Structure of the thesis: The first, the theoretical part, of this paper will discuss the dichotomy between the notions of the positive and negative freedom, their part in the development and definition of the neoliberal ethics, and how those specific factors relate to the convergence of the Western media systems, and, more importantly – the convergence towards what? The second, the research part, will try, on the other hand, to identify how a sensitive reception of these trends and underlying set of ethical motivations – discussed in the first part - impacted the Lithuanian media policy, and in its own turn the state of media market, and, finally, the notion of journalistic professionalism itself. One of the most important concepts of this part is the market parallelism – we will try to argue that just as political parallelism damages the media’s ability both to act in public interest and to maintain high standards of journalistic professionalism, which in that case are undermined by media’s dependence on the factors of partisan politics. Market parallelism, essentially, has the same eroding effect, except the damage is brought about by an overdependence on market factors – and this specific “overdependence” is enabled only by means of neoliberal set of ethical motivations, which influences both the media policy as the structure and media’s self- reflection as the agency. Finally, the context of the theory and the developments will be put against the background of the new media, and, more specifically, the online media, to explore the possible additional paradigms such as interactivity brought about by this new medium and its implications, if any, to the notion of journalistic professionalism and its liquidity – are online media outlets more 8 receptive to the processes discussed in this paper? This question was necessary to ask due to the fact that “DELFI” is an online outlet, thus having intrinsic, characteristic differences compared to, for example, printed press. After that, the sum effects of the discussed components and processes on the notion of the journalistic professionalism will be evaluated in the chapter “The Incredulity towards Journalistic Professionalism”, and then, in the last chapter of the research part, the specific case of “DELFI” will be approached, where a particular narrative will be explored qualitatively against the background of theory formed in the course of this paper. The reason for having chose “DELFI” is quite simple: it is often perceived to be the most influential, and is the most widely read media outlet in Lithuania. Meanwhile, the main research question, namely: „what factors and processes are shaping and influencing the Lithuanian media landscape, what impact are these factors making on the media policy and such media culture components as journalistic professionalism in Lithuania?”, has been split into these sub-questions:
1. What characterizes media policy in Lithuania? 2. What are the sources of the media policy in Lithuania? 3. How does media policy impact the media market in Lithuania? 4. How do these processes impact the content of Lithuanian online media and the perception of journalism‘s professional standards?
9
1. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
1.1 Methodology
The methodological tools used in this paper are primarily the research of scientific literature, thus constructing a wide theoretical framework on the basis of which it is possible to operate, putting the current trends in Lithuanian media market and the development of its journalistic standards into a systematic context of meaning. That is, the method of deduction will be used to link theory to observation. In certain cases, the method of abduction will also be used, specifically when we will try to explain the causes of certain observations. Also, the concepts of input versus output will be taken up in analyzing policies: as in, does the output correspond to the input – are the policies being complied with? If not, what has gone wrong between the input and the output? Qualitative analysis of some of the content of the Lithuanian media will be applied, picking out the units of content for this via non-probability sampling, together with analysis and the descriptive method. What about such methods as the comparative research? Of course, during the second half of the last century many approaches have emerged in communication science for seeking out causal links and explaining different media systems as they are, and making sense of the factors shaping the differences. Or, to put it as Hallin and Mancini did and to quote Four Theories of the Press: “why is the press as it is? Why does it apparently serve different purposes and appear in widely different forms in different countries?”2 From the 1980s onwards, as the strongest trends of globalization the world has so far witnessed fully blossomed, the Western media in its own turn has went through yet unseen scale of convergence and trans-nationalization – thus making comparative research approach much more feasible and sensible, and in its own turn preparing the soil for the eventual stardom of D. Hallin and P. Mancini with Comparing Media Systems (2004), which presented three generalized and recognizable groups or models of the Western media: the Mediterranean Polarized Pluralist, The North/Central European Democratic Corporatist, and the North Atlantic Liberal one. Although a step into a right direction – most previous ambitious comparative approaches have naively interpreted media independence and performance solely within the context of political variables, usually discarding the economic ones - this methodological
2 Hallin, Daniel; Mancini, Paolo, Comparing Media Systems. Three Models of Media and Politics, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 1 10 framework, which to its credit expanded the context and included more economic variables, has still, however, attracted as much fierce criticism as universal recognition. Hallin and Mancini have indeed contributed greatly to the comparative approach of different media systems: instead of treating political and economical factors separately, or excluding one of these categories altogether, they smelted them to recognize such important variables as the degree and nature of state intervention, the development of professional bodies of journalism overseeing its standards, development of media markets themselves and the acceptable degree of political parallelism ingrained into the national context the media is operating in. To that we’d have to add the role of interest groups and their influence on the political structure, whether the rule of law prevails over clientelism, and we would get a basic picture of the building blocks out of which the famous three models have been structured. Despite these important additions and expanded framework for tools of comparative research, many important, sometimes even decisive variables are still missing. For example, Hallin and Mancini do not consider such things as the national market size and concentration of media ownership or – perhaps even more importantly – the interplay between them, nor are they very concerned with temporality – these models, while indeed quite reasonable and distinguishable up to 1980s, are now arguably all more or less converging towards a quasi-Liberal model – a fact which, to a certain extent, they recognize themselves3 - wouldn’t it, however, mean that by now (indeed, by 2004) the three models require new differentiations altogether, since one of the arguments justifying the particular choice of models were previous, rather than contemporary, historical developments? What if diachronic approach was taken up and only recent developments and characteristics would be considered: wouldn’t that require revising the three models significantly? That is why in the first part of this paper we will take up the diachronic approach – in order to make sense of the so-called Liberal model and identify its mutations, and possibly factors behind them. We also cannot forget such organic peculiarities as the state of cultural industries and the relation between the “popular” and the “elite” cultures in a given national context overall, rather than treat the degree of this differentiation as an isolated case of the media system itself.4 Last but not least, Hallin and Mancini haven’t avoided making some normative statements: such as favoring journalistic “neutrality” as an universal desirability – thus indirectly favoring the Liberal model and comparing all other media systems against it,5 the main professional standard of which is exactly “neutrality”; although many Mediterranian journalists would state that “neutrality” is just another
3 Hallin, Daniel; Mancini, Paolo, Comparing Media Systems. Three Models of Media and Politics, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 25 4 Ibid., p. 76 5 Ibid., p. 38 11 political position, while their Scandinavian counterparts would add that it’s the autonomy that truly matters – “neutral” positions can also be a political statement, stemming from dependence. The only true “neutral” position can be an autonomous one – it can autonomously take up a certain stance or position and thus while formally losing the “neutrality”, at the same time remain neutral in its purest, professional sense. Autonomy could therefore be stated to be more important than formal neutrality – the former, it could be also argued, is merely a functional and formal discursive norm developed from such factors as early news agencies sending same wires to broad array of newspaper with various news policies and the need for newspapers to reach more mass audiences.6 Hallin and Mancini have themselves warned against using their three models “as a shortcut to comparative analysis <…>, labeling a case using the 3 models”,7 and have rather recommended to pick out and apply the relevant variables in each particular case used for comparative research. However, this short scrutiny of the Three Models, although superficial, has argued essentially for one thing: the convergence of all the media systems ascribed to the three models by Hallin and Mancini towards a quasi-Liberal model renders ineffective and unnecessary a fundamental differentiation of the Western media systems into a couple fundamentally different models: there are still differences to be observed, most notably, for example, the degree government intervention, but the convergence trends towards the commercialization and de-differentiation ensuing from this calls for the examination of this emerging new “Liberal model” and its implications for such variables as journalistic professionalism, rather than seeking out to create new models and the differences emerging from picking out particular variables when constructing them. If we take up this theory of de-differentiation, first endorsed by Jürgen Habermas in his examinations of the public sphere, that „the nascent sphere of „collective will-formation“ - in which public issues could be discussed and an autonomous public opinion created - emerged in the early days of the development of liberal institutions, but later collapsed into the market as the commercial mass media developed;8 and if we assume that in the context of decades of strong globalization the nation-state or even a small group of nation-states lose its usefulness as a meaningful unit of comparison of media systems, then it is justified that we will refrain for comparative nation-to-nation analysis in this paper, for we think it is not meaningful in this case. We will later pick one country – Lithuania – and examine it in the framework of de-differentiation and convergence towards this new “Liberal model”, which is itself to be reexamined and its main characteristics, features and logic behind it is to be reconsidered here in the following chapters. But
6 Chalaby, Jean K., The Invention of Journalism, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, p. 133 7 The Handbook of Comparative Communication Research, Edited by Esser, Frank; Hanitzsch, Thomas; Routledge, 2012 8 Hallin, Daniel; Mancini, Paolo, Comparing Media Systems. Three Models of Media and Politics, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 81 12 first we have to examine the different normative roles the media is considered to be playing or ought to be playing in a given society.
1.2 The Dialectic between the “Social” and the “Commercial” role of the Media
Manuel Castells shares an important feature with Comparing Media Systems: the holistic approach, which solidifies the links between the media, the Political, the Economical and the Professional in reflecting on the question “why is a media as it is?” As already discussed, Hallin and Mancini demonstrated that it would be senseless to examine just one category of the variables when trying to consider this question. Also, recently Džina Donauskaitė of Vilnius University has further expanded on this basis in her doctoral dissertation titled “Žiniasklaidos vaidmuo skurdo mažinimo politikoje: Lietuvos interneto dienraščių 2008 m. ekonominės krizės metu atvejis“(„The Role of Media in Poverty Reduction Policies: the Case of Lithuanian Online Media during the Economic Crisis of 2008”). This very notion is explored in the paper: the government, the market and the level of journalistic professionalism, to put it quite bluntly, are inseperable. They are, in fact, components much more tightly tied to each other than usually represented by „independent watchdog“ viewpoint, which usually tends to be normative and idealistic rather than a simple positivist truism statement even in a Western democracy. Džina Donauskaitė has made it quite specific: “The components establishing the role of the media are interconnected in the methodological construction: a change in one affects the expression of the other and this is due to the fact that a discourse of the media not only frames an object of a public policy, but it is also a tool meant to satisfy the seeking of the media to strengthen or at least to keep intact its position in the network of power as an interested party of public politics”9. According to D. Donauskaitė, this self-evident ambition leads to a natural emergence of a particular “compensation mechanism” which in turn hands a last resort lever to the media by which it is able to maintain its position of power: if government meets a financial crisis by, for example, cutting tax reliefs to the media, among other means, then the media self-reflects and possibly takes up the trends of commercializing and commodifying its content – which also might require the revision of the traditional notions of the journalistic professionalism standards. That often turns out to be last means to maintain a profitability or at least financial stability of a media outlet: attract more mass audience by promoting and giving up more space to “mass” oriented, “dumbed-down” content such as purely human-interest stories, spicy details from the lives of pseudo-elite stars
9 Donauskaitė, Džina, Žiniasklaidos vaidmuo skurdo mažinimo politikoje: Lietuvos interneto dienraščių 2008 m. ekonominės krizės metu atvejis, Vilniaus universitetas, 2015, p. 161 13 and/or by such means as the so-called clickbaiting among others. This however, cannot be a rapid snap-process: much more profound transformations of the socio-political background are required for such media policy to emerge in the first place. So here we are considering a wider framework, the framework which itself shapes the sum of components which establish the role of the media in a society: those are the trends of convergence towards the Liberal model, as Hallin and Mancini would put it, or, as we will argue, the convergence towards the Neoliberal fueled by the neoliberal ethos. In order for neoliberalism to lay a claim as a functioning and practical economic system, it has to precede democracy as the most fundamental building block of the society: preceding it, in turn it gives a certain form to the democracy itself, which is a secondary component in a neoliberal context; and only then can the role of the media be characterized and rationalized, shaped by this particular kind of „neoliberal democracy“, to which such authors as C. Crouch would even refer to as „post-democracy“, as it will be discussed later. However: what factors have most notably shaped the attitudes towards the social role of the media or lack of thereof? In 1947, the Hutchins Commission, most notably discussed in the Four Theories of the Press, published its report A Free and Responsible Press (1956), and although denounced by such organizations as American Newspaper Publishers Association (ANPA), the main notion of the “social responsibility” paradigm of the media was generally widely appealing. So much so, that “most of the specific recommendations of the Commission have become mainstays of the workplace culture of journalists, who after all have long had an interest in upgrading their public image and professional status”10. The title of the report itself is again a reflection of the predominant socio-political paradigm of the day, where “free” and “socially responsible” were not contradictive notions. That is, the dominant perception of freedom was “positive”, meaning liberty to exercise the right to have an access to media fulfilling community’s expectations of quality and depth of inquiry (from the readership perspective), rather than “liberty from such external accountability” (from the publisher’s perspective). These two concepts were rendered famous in the same period of late 1950s by Isaiah Berlin (the essay “Two Concepts of Liberty”, based on a speech in Oxford University in 1958). In the essence, though, this was just an updated form of the classical opposition between the ideas of John Locke and J. J. Rousseau.11 However, the Western world participating in the Bretton-Woods financial system was notably pervaded by the concept of “positive” liberty or freedom, and so an economic paradigm
10 Neron, J, Social Responsibility Theory, in Last Rights: Revisiting Four Theories of the Press, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1995, p. 78 11 Ibid., p. 84 14 roughly to be colloquially known as “Keynesian” – which sought to find a compromise between private and public interests - has shaped the components of the role of media as well, by presupposing and pervading “the components establishing the role of the media”, in a similar way that a paradigm shift towards neoliberalism and “negative liberty” will do the same few decades later. Already as early as 1935 an American philosopher and a member of the previously mentioned Hutchins Commission, William Ernest Hocking, has considered the practical notions of a society guided by the notion of negative freedom. His question was: on what grounds can defenders of negative liberty motivate citizens to take long term goals seriously? His argument was that the concept of negative freedom does not inspire any durable vision of the future, and only provides basis for short term day-to-day actions.12 His point of reference, and indeed the underlying point of reference of the whole Hutchins Commission report, was that freedom for a human being – a social creature – cannot be unconditional, but rather it includes a necessity of performing duties extending beyond self-interest. Ever since, the main point for criticism of the social-responsibility theory as outlined by the Hutchins Commission has been apparently the pretentious assumption underlying it: namely, that this is the only “socially responsible” theory. The critics could argue that all positions, including the liberal, neoclassical (or neoliberal) and libertarian perspectives look to maximize the capacity of public-interest as well. The only difference: they seek to keep the government – the chief “foe of liberty” in these schools of thought – out, and seek the “public welfare” via the will of private individuals, meaning that the report of Hutchins Commission provides a convenient “entering wedge” for government’s corrupting patronage. If one of the main tasks of the media is to check the government, then, logically, government regulation and/or subsidizing of the media would negate the check13 and render it a useless lip-service platform. However, the Commission itself has repeatedly stated that it is wary of the government’s influence, and sees it only as a last resort in case an outlet of mass communication fail to live up to its potential,14 and thus if the principles of either pure negative liberty or self- regulation have failed. In fact, in this case, it could be argued, the government’s failure to intervene via well-rounded, concrete media policy can in fact mean not the preserving of negative liberty, but, rather, a denial of the public’s right to the positive one.15 That is, the right to have quality media,
12 Neron, J, Social Responsibility Theory, in Last Rights: Revisiting Four Theories of the Press, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1995, p. 86 13 Ibid., p. 93 14 Ibid., p. 93 15 Ibid., p. 94 15 which lives up to the highest professional standards. There have been countless counter-arguments raised against the normative recommendations of the Hutchins commission, especially after the “public service media policy” phase, as Jonathan Hardy named it.16 During the 1970s and especially the 1980s, while the Western paradigm of freedom was shifting in favor of the “negative” one, and the neoliberal ethos, to be discussed further, came to dominate, an influential normative argument for deregulation was made by libertarian democrats Peacock and Pilkington. 1986 the Peacock report argued that the flourishing broadcasting market “will emancipate viewers and listeners from the choices hitherto imposed on them by broadcasters (and the state) and will enable a range of voices, formerly silenced in consequence of their exclusion from the system, to be heard”.17 In any case, it cannot be overseen that this argument was constructed as novel means to achieve greater freedom of speech, access to larger variety of sources and variety of opinion in the interest of consumer via greater, fiercer competition in the media market. It was essentially conceived as classically-liberal means to achieve greater benefit for the public interest. The main task of this paper, however, is not to argue for objective supremacy of any normative media theory. Rather, it is to identify the main problem of the present Lithuanian media landscape and to look for its underlying cause, a cause which in its own turn rationalizes the problem and presents it as an advantage. The underlying cause is the previously mentioned neoliberal ethics and its inseparability from the negative concept of freedom. The case the defenders of “negative freedom” make for “public good” is a utilitarian argument which states that public good is maximized when each individual pursues his own best interest. In an ideal world, the case of media “pursuing its own best interest” would be adhering to highest standards of journalistic quality, professionalism and honest endeavor for deep inquiry, thus appealing to the mass audience, thus also rendering itself commercially profitable. But here we run into a fundamental problem: what if the goals of appealing to the public (thus being profitable) and adhering to professionalism and quality start to diverge? What is “pursuing one’s own best interest” in this case: keeping the quality bar high or being profitable? In ideal combination of market and social conditions – the way Peacock and Pilkington conceived it - this conflict wouldn’t arise, however, in Lithuania, as in many other young democracies emerging from post-communist rubble, it does seem to arise. The ultimate failure of the neoliberal media policy (or self-denying non-policy) framework is forcing the media to choose, rather than to try to
16 Hardy, Jonathan, Western Media Systems, Routledge, 2008, p. 140 17 Collins, Richard, Media and Identity in Contemporary Europe: Consequences of Global Convergence, Intellect Books, 2002, p. 83 16 make professionalism and profitability to converge again by intervening and healthily distorting the mass media market. Though in the neoliberal thinking, “healthy distortion” simply does not exist. What has happened in the Lithuanian media landscape is rather this: the neoliberal framework has quite naturally forced the government to consider the media as essentially just another private business, driven by market logic of demand – this is reflected in the media policy of the past 20 years to be discussed in more detail later – and in turn the media itself has started to position itself as just another private business, driven by market logic and insisting on its persuasive power not in order to check the government, but to keep its appeal for the advertisement industry intact.
1.3 Convergence towards the Neoliberal?
As already discussed, Hallin and Mancini have admitted the convergence of the Western media towards what they constructed as the “Liberal model”, and they have themselves explicitly stated that this model has more pronounced commercialization trends than the other two constructs in their Comparing Media Systems. Though what they describe as “commercialization” is rather meant as an isolated phenomenon driven by its own logic quasi exclusive and unique to the field of media, as if the Central-Eastern European, Southern European, etc. countries were merely absorbing a standstill model of the U.S. media system - as if this U.S. “Liberal model” hadn’t been itself mutating significantly in the United States themselves. What we argue here is that this convergence, on one hand, cannot be treated as an isolated phenomena disconnected from the socio- economic paradigm shifts in the given countries themselves, and on the other hand, is a much more profound process, having much more broad implications (to journalistic professionalism, for example) than a mere functional “commercialization”. The media was already commercialized more than half a century ago under the “Liberal model” in Hallin and Mancini’s framework if you will, but it was “commercialized” under the paradigm of the Hutchins Commission and under the ethical guidance of “positive liberty”, which made the notions of the “commercial” and the “social” not mutually exclusive – they were compatible. Why today we cannot speak of the convergence towards the “Liberal model”, as Hallin and Mancini suggest, is because the convergence is toward the sharp conflict between the two notions, they are becoming mutually exclusive, and thus we cannot talk about the “Liberal model” anymore as Hallin and Mancini meant it. Therefore, naturally, this liquidification or neoliberalization of media is only a certain symptom, not to be treated separately from the Economical and the Political. Those two spheres of “the Public” are inevitably going through the same processes and similar implications: not only the 17 media, but the democracy itself is being reshaped. In his work Post-Democracy, the main problem and the starting point for British political scientist Colin Crouch is an often overlooked paradox, that despite the dramatic increase of countries in the world officially boasting democracy to be their form of governance since the end of the Cold War – from 145 in 1988 to 191 in 1999 – the quality of democracies in the Western world, the cradle of the idea of popular representation, has dramatically dropped in the same period. One of the reasons for this that C. Crouch is giving is that the democratic ideal of massive, conscious citizen participation and organization has been dismissed as unachievable; but rather than keeping it as a theoretical bar to which we can measure ourselves and thus try to improve, the ideal of democracy has been lowered to correlate with the current situation in the Western countries – in this way both justifying and concealing the flaws of the current state of our democracies and at the same time erasing the perceived “room for improvement”. This manufactured consent of satisfaction with non ambitious democratic goals is what Colin Crouch calls post-democracy. Colin Crouch quotes the conclusions of a Trilateral Commission, consisting of scholars from the US, Western Europe and Japan, stating that “all was not well with democracy in these countries”.18 However, this study of the Trilateral Commission dates back already to the year 2000, and the trends of the public opinion seem to worsen: in 2015 one of the most influential German newspapers “Die Zeit” published results of a study conducted by the Freie Universität Berlin, claiming that “more than 60% question democracy in Germany” and “more than a quarter even imagine the country to drift towards a dictatorship”.19 How can an emergence of such radical moods be explained? The rise of such feelings in the “bottom” layers of the German society could not be easily written off to the repercussions of the Euro crisis, since Germany was arguably the most resistant economy to the crippling financial waves of the crisis, to this day negatively impacting the Southern peripheries of the Euro zone. Out of all major Euro zone economies, the German one was the fastest one to come back on the track of growth, and its unemployment numbers never rose sharply. So rather than looking for reasons of this increasingly visible negative paradigm shift of the public opinion towards the “health of democracy” purely in the economic factors, following the argumentation of C. Crouch, we should also look at the increasing divergence of perceptions of what a “democracy” is between the “bottom” and “top” layers of the society. C. Crouch recalls “the writings of US political scientists in the 1950s and early 1960s, who would adapt their definition of democracy so that it corresponded to the actual practice in the
18 Crouch, Colin, Post-Democracy, Polity Press, 2004, p. 2 19 Merh als 60 Prozent bezweifeln Demokratie in Deutschland, retrieved from: http://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2015-02/studie-fu-berlin-linksextremismus-demokratie-skepsis, last access 02.03.2015 18
USA and Britain rather than accept any defects in the political arrangements of those two countries. This was Cold War ideology rather than scientific analysis.” According to him, “a similar approach is dominating in the contemporary thinking”.20 Here lies the essence of the concept and term “post- democracy” that he has coined: satisfaction with the “unambitious” democratic ideals, preferring self-congratulation over self-examination and scrutiny. “Under this model, while elections certainly exist and can change governments <…> the mass of citizens play a passive, quiescent, even apathetic part, responding only to signals given them”. By raising this point, which C. Crouch calls out “the fundamental naïveté of neoliberal thought” - failing to recognize that the more the state withdraws from the concerns of quality of life of the citizens, in this way also making them more apathetic about politics, the more easily governments become mere tools for private interests of big business – C. Crouch also provides some theoretical basis for the topic of this paper. Namely, how does this climate, if indeed present, influence the mass-media landscape and maybe even its content in a given country? Indeed, it seems that the abrupt conclusion of the Cold War, which resulted in a before unseen quantitative victory for democracy on the global scale, expanding the democratic Western world further into the East, has brought about an euphoria glittering so bright that, sometimes it seems, it exempted the West of a self-critical obligation. While during the Cold War the West has exempted itself from such obligation because of a need to feel more stable in a fragile and tense bipolar world order, then after that – because it has simply proven to be superior. In any case, the shift has been impressive: the Freedom House press release from December 1999 offered a remarkable perspective – the millennium is concluding with 120 of 196 world countries being electoral democracies, constituting 62.5% of the world’s population.21 Back in 1900, the countries where all citizens were equal to vote constituted a round zero – therefore the press release summed up the developments of the 20th century and its results under the title “Democracy’s Century”. Though perhaps the most famous symbol of this euphoria was Francis Fukuyama’s work The End of History and the Last Man (1992). His main argument, that despite some likely setbacks and temporary difficulties in the future the world by now has settled on an automatic course where Western liberal democracy is programmed to become the final, omnipresent and undisputed peak of humanity’s political and ideological evolution, has faced fierce criticism and sometimes even sheer mockery ever since.
20 Crouch, Colin, Post-Democracy, Polity Press, 2004, p. 3 21 Retrieved from: http://web.archive.org/web/20050307102714/http://www.freedomhouse.org/reports/century.html, last access 04.03.2015 19
By the onset of 2008 financial crisis we could very likely count more books quoting Fukuyama’s “End of History” as a spectacularly naïve, prematurely optimistic failure of a theory, criticizing him in a spirit of “haven’t I told you?” rather than those quoting him in any kind of support. Radical Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has even come as far as stating that “Fukuyama’s utopia” has collapsed twice: once on September 11, 2001, and during the financial crash of 2008 for the second time – in the first case it’s collapsed as an utopia of liberal democracy, and then as an utopia of a successful global free-market capitalism.22 Elsewhere, though, he has acknowledged: “It is easy to make fun of Fukuyama’s notion of the End of History, but the dominant ethos today is “Fukuyamaian”: liberal-democratic capitalism is accepted as the finally found formula of the best possible society, all that one can do is render it more just, tolerant, and so forth”23. Here, of course, Žižek is essentialy making a case for radically alternative economical and socio-political model, but here we are going to apply this criticism of non-critical ideological naturalization not for capitalism in itself, but rather solely for neoliberal capitalism and its implication for the systems of media. Therefore, when right up next he asks “The only true question today is: do we endorse this “naturalization” of capitalism, or does contemporary global capitalism contain antagonisms which are sufficiently strong to prevent its indefinite reproduction?” we will rephrase this question as follows: do we endorse this “naturalization” of neoliberal ethics, or do they contain antagonisms which might be sufficiently strong to undermine and damage the media as we know it? The truly interesting thing here is that F. Fukuyama himself has backed away from his outdated notion of The End of History which indirectly praised neoliberalism and by now does not support it as the final, most successful or most promising stage of humanity’s development anymore. The change of his attitude towards the prospects of the current Western socio-economic system is mainly constituted by direct implications of the ever growing economic inequality towards the field of politics: “liberal democracy is almost universally associated with market economies, which tend to produce winners and losers <…>. This type of economic inequality is not in itself a bad thing, insofar as it stimulates innovation and growth <…>. It becomes highly problematic, however, when the economic winners seek to convert their wealth into unequal political influence”, as he himself argues in his recent article published in Foreign Affairs.24 F. Fukuyama here even goes one step further and besides drawing a wide picture of U.S. institutional
22 Žižek, Slavoj, Iš pradžių kaip tragedija, po to kaip farsas, Kitos knygos, 2013, p. 13 23 Žižek, Slavoj, In Defense of Lost Causes, Verso, 2008, p. 421 24 Fukuyama, Francis, America in Decay. Sources of Political Dysfunction, 2014, retrieved from: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141729/francis-fukuyama/america-in-decay, last access 15.03.2015
20 decay, largely evoked by these side-effects of soaring economic inequality unacknowledged in main neoliberal discourses, he also starts demolishing the argumentation of the neoliberal camp itself, part of which he was widely considered to be merely a decade or two ago. That is, where neoliberals would argue that buying “unequal political influence” by rich individuals or corporations is simply natural, since they are giving more to the society as well – creating jobs, etc. – F. Fukuyama answers that this is simply a question of proportion: the effects of political influence bought by e.g. certain cases of lobbying usually far exceed the actual place in society of the “buyer”, and the result is distorted both government spending and taxes; they also “undermine quality of public administration through the multiple mandates they induce Congress to support”, and thus undermine the public trust in governmental institutions as a whole. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: such distrust in government brings about popular demand on further reducing administrative powers of the government, which in turn makes the government even less effective. All in all, F. Fukuyama of 2014 seems to be as pessimistic as he was optimistic in 1992. His new argumentation goes directly against neoliberalism, since the main point distinguishing neoliberalism from other manifestations and modes of free-market capitalism is stressing the importance of decentralizing powers of the government and delegating them on to interested private actors. On the contrary, Fukuyama now argues, a strong parliamentary system is required, with as less American style checks and handicaps as possible: that brings an important feature of being able to “balance the need for a strong state action with law and accountability” and helps level and equalize the playing field, narrowing the gaps for influence of big money which distorts a representative democracy. “Germany, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries, in particular, have been able to sustain higher levels of trust in government, which makes public administration less adversarial, more consensual, and better able to adapt to changing conditions of globalization.“ – he sums up, thus dismissing the effectiveness of ideal American non- interventionist „small government“ model, which perfectly corresponds with neoliberalism. In fact, at this point it is reasonable to say, that F. Fukuyama, instead of fully abandoning his End of History, has simply rolled it one step back: towards the End of History as suggested by the famous Hegelian philosopher, Alexandre Kojève, by whom he was arguably also inspired.25 Kojève has coined this concept by rephrasing Hegel and before Fukuyama, also not the least much earlier than mainstream spread of neoliberal thought, for that matter. Since Kojève was Hegelian and Fukuyama is much rather not – a one sided final „resolution“ of history was acceptable to the latter: in his The End of History, Fukuyama offers no anthitesis to the thesis of
25 Bobbio, Norberto, Kairė ir dešinė, Atviros Lietuvos fondas, 2004, p. 171 21 neoliberalism. All Fukuyama did, in essence, was stating that the ideal of equality itself as a desirable state of the final human condition was the fundamental misconception of the historic Left: the positivist notion of inequality is much more „just“ and natural, and therefore it is also just that history should end accepting inequalities of the society at face value.26 In Hegelian thinking such one sided approach is impossible, though. That‘s why for Kojève and his End of History only a synthesis of two sides is possible: „if the opposition of „thesis“ and “antithesis” is meaningful only in the context of their reconciliation by “synthesis”, if history (in a full sense of word) has a final term, if man who becomes must culminate in man who has become <…> - the interaction of Master and Slave must finally end in the “dialectical overcoming” of both of them”.27 What Kojève has arguably added to the equation in practical terms is the antithesis of government action to the thesis of private initiative, the synthesis we get is a welfare state in the framework of e.g. Keynesian social market which functioned in the Western world of Bretton Woods system, the implications of which we will discuss further; this is also the antithesis that Fukuyama adds in his 2014 position, in contrast to his thesis of 1992, thus finalizing it and turning against purely implemented neoliberalism. That is, the notion of “equality” still did not become as something desirable to Fukuyama, it would be misleading to thank that he has turned to the Left, but his recent position does indeed seem to reject the notions of self-rectifying markets, deregulation and “small government”, thus also automatically rejecting neoliberalism, since these concepts are at the core of its basic ideology policy-wise. Here we have to gradually approach the case of the Second republic of Lithuania, which regained its independence in 1990 and, obviously, to mind the context of what the ideological consensus of the “free world” was like when Eastern Europe broke off the chains of the collapsing USSR. The predominant idea of freedom from which Eastern Europe was sealed off by the Iron curtain in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War was quite different from the one to which the region was reconnected to by the time the Berlin Wall fell. For example, in the famous Bretton Woods conference of 1944, where the future post- war financial system of the Western world was agreed, the system where the U.S. dollar was to be pegged to gold and other participating currencies were to be pegged to the U.S. dollar conversely, thus establishing fixed exchange rates and adjourning the need to manage inflation in the global markets for decades – the United Kingdom was represented by John Maynard Keynes. That is, the popular hero of contemporary moderate “Left”, whose ideas symbolized rather not anything
26 Bobbio, Norberto, Kairė ir dešinė, Atviros Lietuvos fondas, 2004, p. 172 27 Introduction to the Reading of Hegel by Alexandre Kojeve. Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, edited by Allan Bloom, Cornell University Press, 1969 22
“leftist” at all, but the broad consensus of economic thought throughout the Western world: state interventionism into the market is justified by the need to soften the negative side-effects of the private competition on the weakest layers of the society, and this interventionism does not contradict the ideals of the free-market and free-trade. To claim otherwise in the 1940s, 50s and 60s and to demand “pure” free-market was to position oneself as a radical. Even in the early 1970s, when Bretton Woods system started collapsing because of excessive supply of U.S. dollars in the world market, and thus Richard Nixon had to abolish the gold standard in favor of free floating fiat currency system in 1971, he still, despite being a Republican President, famously remarked “we are all keynesians” and signed a number of laws passed by the Democratic Party controlled Congress “governing everything from environmental protection to occupational safety and health, civil rights and consumer protection”28. What in today’s predominantly neoliberal spirit of the Western world is considered “socialist”, right up till the presidency of Ronald Reagan was held as a bipartisan consensus about a set of economic and social ideas, pervading whole map of political orientation. Now, of course, it would be a grave oversimplification to start retracing the subsequent emergence of neoliberalism as a coherent phenomena spreading in symmetrical unison over the Western world, neither is it a task of this thesis. The way Keynesian school of thought started emerging and gaining in popularity in the U.S. as a way to manage unemployment brought about by the Great Depression in the 1930s, but only became the dominant paradigm in the post- war West with the Bretton Woods system and via practical promotion by such newly established institutions as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank - in the same way Neoliberalism – or Monetarism – started emerging as a way to manage inflation in the “stagflation” crisis of the 1970s. The first true, full-scale experiment of neoliberal economic policies took place in Chile under the Pinochet regime, and by the late 1980s both the governments of U.S. and U.K. and the bodies of IMF and the World Bank have been dominated by the figures following the economic doctrines of monetarism, most prominently promoted by Milton Friedman, the key economist of the so-called Chicago school. The way Richard Nixon could’ve said “we are all keynesians now” in the early 1970s, in the 1990s a legitimate statement for both Clinton and Blair would’ve have been “we are all neoliberals now”.29 This was the new Western paradigm, which came to be known as the “Washington consensus”, and thus when the developments in the Eastern Europe in late 1980s and early 1990s broke the Iron Curtain, as previously mentioned, the subsequent development and rebuilding of the
28 Harvey, D, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 13 29 Ibid., p. 13 23
CEE economies were predominantly in the neoliberal spirit of “free from”, rather than “free to”. That is not to say here, however, that CEE countries have developed as neoliberal economies ever since – “pure” forms of neoliberalism have arguably never been implemented, not even in the U.S. under Ronald Reagan, the only exceptions and “pure” examples of neoliberalism would arguably be Pinochet’s Chile of the late 1970s, independent Singapore or post-2003 Iraq under the interim government, albeit all these aren’t perfect examples neither.30 Hence, essentially the term “neoliberalism” itself is rather vague and has no practical, fully manifested examples in political reality to be discussed, therefore the only more concrete notion one can operate with is neoliberal ethos - the driving force behind the endeavor and aspiration of achieving what is imagined the goals and beliefs meant by the term “neoliberalism”.
1.4 The Neoliberal Ethos
Saying that today’s convergence is simply fueled by “negative liberty” is also not enough. While in fact it is one of the factors, it doesn’t fully explain the trends – there are more components at play. We could stack them under the concept of neoliberal ethos, or to put it in Zygmunt Bauman’s terms – “business-inspired rules of action and business-shaped criteria of rationality”.31 Within the framework of his concept of Liquid Modernity, the previous balance of interaction between politics and economics has liquidified and “the melting of solids led to the progressive untying of economy from its traditional political, ethical and cultural entanglements”. This settles a new order of components, where the Economical precedes all others and thus passes on its own features to all of them, “defining them primarily in economical terms” – as Bauman puts it – thus also redefining the role of the media, once again referring to D. Donauskaitė‘s theoretical framework. The most important effect of this process for media systems is that it frames the media purely as just another business, thus elevating a chosen business model to the primary position, subduing professionalism and journalism’s standards and ethics to the second rank of importance and reshaping them also. As Colin Crouch notes in his work The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism, the main neoliberal argument justifying the individual faults of the private sector players, for example, such as poor quality of goods or services, inclinations for unfair competitions, underpaid labor, etc is the following: consumers are free to accept or refuse goods or services. Thus, if governments interfere and set minimal quality standards, they are denying the consumers their choice. Put simply, if they
30 Harvey, D, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 7 31 Bauman, Zygmunt, Liquid Modernity, Polity Press, 2000, p. 4 24 don’t like, they won’t buy it. C. Crouch objects here: “There is therefore a fundamental asymmetry in comparisons between the private and public sector <…>. The public sector, at least in democracies, exists in a world of political debate, where any poor quality is material for criticism, and where criteria of values and moral judgments are applied, that cannot be answered with a retort “well, it sells”. Consequently, if certain quality bars are set for the public broadcaster that cannot be refuted so simply, why can certain online media outlets defend their questionable quality standards with “well, it sells”, if they position themselves as a major, if not dominant force in the national media landscape?” The neoliberal ethos is precisely the factor validating such justification (“well, it sells”) for questionable quality standards in the media. As L. Boltanski and E. Chiapello accurately sum up, the “spirit of capitalism” for Max Weber meant a “set of ethical motivations” since he held that “the emergence of capitalism presupposed the establishment of a new moral relationship between human beings and their work”.32 Without this brand new “set of ethical motivations” a pursuit of personal material gain establishing itself as systematic, acknowledged driver of a society simply wouldn’t have been possible, as prior to 14th or 15th century such seeking was simply deemed to be despicable – and whether a change in this belief had anything to do with a revised, reinterpreted Christian moral system of Protestantism as Max Weber believed remains arguable, and it’s not to the point to discuss this here. However, the notion itself stating the need of a new set of “ethical motivations” presupposing new socio-economic paradigm seems to be exactly right and hardly avoidable. This new ethos rationalizes the actions, practices or public policies previously deemed to be irrational, radical or even damaging up to a point where, to put in the infamous formulation of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, they would be even deemed as alternativlos (“alternative-less”). For Boltanski and Chiapello, the first step towards the domain of alternativlos was the way in which the science of economics emerged in 19th century as a source of arguments which were presented exclusively as objective and non-ideological, not dictated by any moral or ethical notions, while simply presented as “a well-being for the greatest number (of people)”. “This made it possible to impart substance to the belief that the economy is an autonomous sphere, independent of ideology and morality, which obeys positive laws, ignoring the fact that such conviction was itself the product of an ideological endeavor <…>”,33- which is exactly the case with the Neoliberal paradigm, as it was with the Keynesian, Classical or Neo-classical one: all of them can be seen as neutral, purely logical and “alternative-less” courses of action rather than a political tool which is non-implementable without a respective ethos. Without the needed dominant ethos, an economic
32 Boltanski, L., Chiapello, E., The New Spirit of Capitalism, Verso, 2005, p. 9 33 Ten pat, p. 12 25 theory becomes - to put it simply - “outdated”. Here also lies the heart of the argument implemented into the neoliberal thought and briefly discussed previously in this paper: that the notion of neoliberal thinking does not contradict the “public good”, rather on the contrary, it seeks to maximize it by setting free the potential of the “private good” of every individual. It is an argument almost worthy of Jeremy Bentham himself: it could seem to stem directly from classical utilitarianism. Thus again, as Boltanski and Chiapello point out: “this separation between morality and economics, and the incorporation into economics in the same gesture of a consequentialist ethics, based upon the calculation of utilities, made it possible to supply a moral sanction for economic activities solely by dint of the fact that they are profitable”, and thus this union between utilitarianism and economics, as self-evident and natural it would seem on one hand, has rendered it seamlessly self-evident that “whatever served individual, served society”.34 However, arguably, neoclassical utilitarianism was a much more decisive force in eventually shaping the neoliberal ethics than the classical utilitarianism represented by Bentham. Of course, the political/moral discipline of classical utilitarianism as worked out by Bentham was essentially a doctrine most influenced by the Enlightenment: its two core values were the concern for individual rights, and, not least importantly, the great and seemingly hopeless endeavor of creating a neutral, technical, non-political and non-ideological idea of the government – empirically finding a one-size-fits-all key to the organization of society. This gigantically optimistic seeking had its roots, of course, within the early Enlightenment epistemology of John Locke: Locke believed that while man can only know the nominal essence of the natural world and is therefore in this respect inferior to God, who knows the real essence of nature – at the same time man is capable to know the real essence of the social world, since we know what we make. In this sense, man, according to Locke, could actually empirically find the best social order fitting everybody; man could truly measure and grasp it. Jeremy Bentham seems to have fully embraced this idea: his utilitarianism is immensely ambitious as it is comprehensive – Bentham tried to explain every social phenomenon possible by people simply avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. The best government, in this sense, was seen as the one which manages to maximize pleasure for the greatest number of people and does it in the most efficient way. Potentially radical message was encoded within Bentham’s classical doctrine, though: since Bentham was in favor of interpersonal comparisons of utility,35 nothing in his thinking truly opposes redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. And if we are counting utility within the
34 Boltanski, L., Chiapello, E., The New Spirit of Capitalism, Verso, 2005, p. 13 35 Jeremy Bentham, retrieved from: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bentham/, last access 18.04.2015 26 essential framework of diminishing marginal utility – every extra unit of the same good provides less and less utility for the same person – then unlimited redistribution of wealth would’ve seemed almost inevitable in Bentham’s society, since poor people gain much more utility from, let’s say, ten dollars, in comparison to the rich. Bentham surely would’ve said that the wealth has to be redistributed only up to the point where overall wealth of the society doesn’t start shrinking since the wealthy would lose the incentive to work – but how does one recognize this red line other than redistributing wealth up until the point the rich part of the society starts losing incentive to be productive? In short, classical utilitarianism didn’t have any clear bias: neither to the conservative status quo, nor to any kind of social “progressivism”, although even a loose interpretation could have turned it towards the latter, since Bentham was keen of interpersonal comparisons of utility. At best, it was “biased”, of course, towards greatest utility, and however it would be reached was of second importance. This is where the turn to neoclassical utilitarianism came in, which formed the actual basis for neoliberal ethics – it brought about its vital, most essential components. The most fundamental and influential notion for this is of course the one already found in David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nauture (1739), where he famously noted that there is no way to extract ought to from an is. In the wake of 20th Century this observation was combined with the logical positivism, as Alfred J. Ayer in his Language, Truth and Logic (1936) stated that there are only three kinds of assertions: the “mathematical”, the empirical, and the nonsensical. This was the ultimate rejection of the normative or “ought to” way of thinking, by then already incorporated into economics by such economists as Vilfredo Pareto, who rejected Jeremy Bentham’s argument that interpersonal comparisons of utility are desirable: since you cannot derive ought to from an is, and therefore all ought to statements are useless or even nonsensical, as Ayer believed, then there is no reason to compare happiness or utility of individuals – the information derived from such comparison would be pointless. Then Charles Stevenson in his Ethics and Language (1944) took this line of argumentation one step further: ethical statements are merely emotional attitudes aimed at emotional persuasion – there is no real substance to normative claims such as “the wealth ought to be redistributed towards the poor”, or anything similar.36 This was of course, just a more or less natural follow up on the figure which almost single-handedly evoked the neoclassical turn of utilitarianism from Bentham’s classical theory: John Stuart Mill. According to his principle of harm, if someone’s actions do not threaten anyone else direct harm, then a person cannot be
36 Charles Leslie Stevenson, retrieved from: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/stevenson/, last access 19.04.2015 27 compelled to any “moral” action: persuaded – yes - but not compelled.37 The Lockean notion of the early Enlightenment that everybody has a natural right to a minimum “piece” of a common gets obliterated. Arguably, however, the most important building block of neoclassical utilitarianism which formed the basis for neoliberalism was the belief in futility of interpersonal comparison of utility. Thus Stevenson’s notion of ethical emotivism, combined with skepticism towards interpersonal comparisons of utility contributed to the establishment of ethos which removed any teleological sense of a society and potentially turned any notion of public interest into a baseless and naive narrative. To explain how these attitudes flow through a society, we could even take up Pierre Bourdieu’s terms. As he elaborated in the “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste” (1984): the ability to see (voir) is a function of knowledge (savoir). That is, being supportive of neoliberal policies, which are translated from the ethos into an endeavor of minimizing the interference of the “public” with the individual, of universalizing the agency of private interests, can become a mark of a good taste, which is acquired by believing a dogma of knowledge, summarized again by Boltanski and Chiapello as a belief that “competitive private enterprise is always more effective and efficient than non-profit making organizations”.38 Without this key code of ideological knowledge, which requires no empirical proof for it becomes a matter of good taste, neoliberal policy remains as puzzling as a piece of postmodern art, or as Pierre Bourdieu would put it: “a work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded.”39 “Neoliberal” becomes also a cultural and ethical category, which, as summed up by Manuel Castells, increases society’s productivity, creativity and intensifies its communicational potential, and at the same time strips it of all the rights and possibilities to be in control of one’s one life.40 Speaking in terms of Daniel Bell and his notions of postindustrial era and society, it is the neoliberal ethos that rationalizes the competition between the individuals, which is the main mark of the postindustrial era, as opposed to competition to subdue the nature in the industrial era and the competition with the nature in the pre-industrial era.41 It’s this ethos that renders the society fragmented as the only truly functional concept of liberty is the negative one, thus even the notion of Durkheim that society is sui generis,42 it exists as an outside reality and independently of the
37 Mill’s Moral and Political Philosophy, retrieved from: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mill-moral-political/, last access 19.04.2015 38 Boltanski, L., Chiapello, E., The New Spirit of Capitalism, Verso, 2005, p. 13 39 Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, 1984, p. 2 40 Castells, Manuel, Tapatumo galia, Poligrafija ir informatika, 2006, p. 83 41 Bell, Daniel, Kapitalizmo kultūriniai prieštaravimai, Alma Littera, p. 222-223 42 Ibid., p. 225 28 individuals existing in it can become questionable in this case. Without this perceived atomization of the society the competition between individuals as a paradigm is not possible, and the atomization is not possible without the set of ethical motivations, stating that the individual, the agency is the supreme, and its full potential is possible to release through competition: for that, a deregulated market is necessary, while the state, the actor which distorts and obstructs the competition in the market, is undesirable. In terms of Theodor Adorno – “the absolute predominance of the economy”43 – is then what naturally influences also the media policy, its landscape and components such as journalistic professionalism and its standards, since neoliberal ethos becomes the base set of ethical motivations in the socio-political life of the society. According to this set of ethical motivations, or the neoliberal ethos, the media becomes individual agency acting in its own interest – and that interest is whatever it chooses to be, the “public interest” being a free choice, an equal option to that of commercial interest, rather than a categorical moral imperative indispensable from the notion of quality and professionalism in the field of media.
43 Adorno, Theodor, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, Verso, 2005, p. 58 29
2. MEDIA: AGENCY AND STRUCTURE
2.1 The Logic of Lithuanian Media Policy: Self-denying State Action
One thing stands clear: no matter which economic paradigm was dominant in the West – the Keynesian or Neoliberal one - when Lithuania resurfaced as an independent country in 1990, first basic reforms in the media sector had to be the same: abolishing the Soviet heritage of censorship and giving most of the reins of the industry over to the private initiative. This period of emancipation, of transforming over from a centralized, carefully censored in both variety and depth of topics, lip-service paying system of media to the starting point of an emancipated and free system looking for a direction, inevitably opened up a void: “the media immediately discarded all taboos of the past, yet it soon found itself in a moral and normative vacuum”.44 It’s not surprising that this vacuum was eventually filled with neoliberal ethics and the spirit of monetarism, with an intended pun to Max Weber’s controversial work. If, according to Weber, religious ideas unique to Calvinism have helped shaping and spreading early forms of capitalism and its “spirit” across parts of the Western world, in the same way neoliberal ethics, most distinctively characterized by the concept of “negative freedom” or “freedom from” as opposed to “freedom to”, have fueled the practical spreading of the economic ideas of monetarism more successfully than if it could’ve ever spread by itself, just as a set of economic policies, without the set of core ethics accompanying it. This concept of negative freedom, though applied only selectively in such political ideologies as neo-conservatism - the government stands back from meddling itself in business of private enterprises by lowering taxes, expanding tax-breaks, refusing to pass anti-trust laws and abolishing generous welfare systems claiming that dependence from government harms the agency of the individual, but at the same time it strictly enforces moral standards on society such as laws on abortion, prostitution, drugs, strict single concept of family etc. – even this selective, double edged approach leaves deep traces on the fabric of society’s functionality. Thus the new point of reference in the media landscape of the re-established state of Lithuania seemed to be that independence of the private media from the government aid is an end to itself. There seems to be a silent consensus about this up to this day, although the trends of a small Lithuanian market and thus higher risk of monopolization in it should point towards an opposite logic: government media policy aimed at correcting such “market errors” as manipulation or sensationalism and preventing formation of
44 Balčytienė, A, Culture as a Guide in Theoretical Explorations of Baltic Media, in Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World, edited by Hallin D, Mancini, P, Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 57 30 monopolies or oligopolies.45 As for government subsidizing the media – a governmental fund has been created for this purpose already back in 1996 (Spaudos, radijo ir televizijos rėmimo fondas) with funds assigned from the state budget. However, the market share of these is insignificant: back in 2010 all private enterprises in Lithuania under category of “media” (radio, television, magazines, online news portals, newspapers, etc) had a total revenue of 569 million Lt, while government subsidies for media in the same year were 7,5 million Lt, thus 1,3% compared to the total revenue, and so having no possibility of impacting the trends in the market in any perceivable way.46 It also has to be noted that not all of these funds are used in directly subsidizing media outlets: since 2012, for example, fraction of the sum has been subsidizing the national post service “Lietuvos paštas“ as a way to compensate unprofitable delivery of magazines and newspapers in rural regions of Lithuania.47 Keeping all this in mind, this fund exists only as a possible tool to lower market entry barriers for new, tiny media outlets, but makes virtually no impact whatsoever on the large scale of Lithuanian media markets trends. Thus we can see that although Lithuanian media policy is not a neoliberal one in any technical sense – there is, for example, a relatively strong public broadcaster and even a public fund for media subsidies, as just mentioned – but it is being shaped by underlying neoliberal ethics. That is, it is widely perceived that the media market should be left for the invisible market hand to rectify itself, while government regulation and intervention would be dangerous and not least unethical or simply unnecessary. This stems from the main neoliberal dogma of the Chicago school: pretty much all state activity is self-interested and seeking self-aggrandizement of political figures and officials; rather than acting in public interest, government intervention is seen as extending the scope of political patronage.48 This explains the dynamics of Lithuanian media policy since the re- establishment of the independence: sometimes actions are undertaken in the rationale of the media being a field of “public interest”, and thus, for example establishing the above mentioned fund in 1996, but then keeping its funding small and insignificant, since that would raise a red flag of government distorting the market. That is the dialectic of government action driven by neoliberal ethics: an action targeted to distort and shape a particular market, but then making sure that it wouldn’t actually impact the market, as that would be wrong. De facto neoliberalism in practice would require no government involvement, not even a symbolic one, in such markets as the one of
45 Sanchez-Tabernero, A, The European Press at the Beginning of the 21st Century. Defining Characteristic and Future Trends, in Press Subsidies in Europe, edited by Alonso, Moragas, Blasco Gil, Almiron, Generalitat de Catalunya, 2006, p. 22 46 Jastramskis, D, Žiniasklaidos paramos politika Lietuvoje, Informacijos mokslai, 2013, p. 137 47 Ibid., p. 136 48 Crouch, Colin, The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism, Polity Press, 2011, p. 63 31 media whatsoever, but much more often we see this dialectic of neoliberal ethics unfold - a government intervention the aim of which is not to intervene, thus denying itself. The neoliberal ethics, which were successful in “persuading” the society and the politicians themselves about the danger of the government’s active participation in the media market as not to create the “entering wedge” for unholy influence, patronage and dependence, have thus also rendered the media dependent on the market factors. That would be perfectly justifiable if the dependence on the demand driven market logic and advertisement revenues would not impact the content of the media in any significant way: government subsidizing too would be harmful and signal dependence only if that would manifest in perceivable change of media’s content. Similarly, dependence on advertisement revenues would be thoroughly acceptable if the advertising would be clearly separated from the actual journalistic content, and no structural and qualitative changes would be made impacting the rest of the content. As we will argue further, that does not seem to be case: full dependence on market logic has indeed created the feared “entering wedge” to exercise influence over the media’s content, except the actor exercising influence is not the government, and the mechanism of impacting the content is thoroughly different. The result of being overly dependent from the market has turned out to be exactly the same as being overly dependent from the government: the decrease of both variety and quality of the media’s content. In fact, in the immediate aftermath of Lithuania’s declaration of independence and the following inevitable and fundamental restructuring of the economy, the first impulse and outcome of the ongoing discussion of the time lead to, in comparison, tight grips of the state on the media. In 1990, according to the Law on the Press and Other Mass Media, all mass media had to be registered at the so-called Department of Media Control within the Ministry of Inner Affairs of the Republic of Lithuania (2 years later reorganized into a department at the Ministry of Justice),49 and thus by default all the new emerging media had to get registered under the direct supervision of the state. The Department, among other things, also regulated whether the media met the requirements of the law50 and it quite strictly regulated the media ownership: a foreign citizen, under that legal framework of control, couldn’t establish any media outlet in Lithuania whatsoever. This system, of course, was extremely out-of-place and undesirable: if any state and private media cooperation is to be advocated, then not the one where the state actually erects entry barriers thus restricting emergence of new players and diversification, competitiveness of the media market. These policies, introduced in 1990, were the perfect exemplification of an opening of the feared gap for the “entering wedge” of unholy political influence. Rather than providing synergetic
49 Balčytienė, Auksė, Mass Media in Lithuania – Development, Changes and Journalism Culture, Vistas, 2006, p. 96 50 Ibid., p. 97 32 possibility of supportive action without questionable future liabilities, the state justified the fears of the journalists and gave them an impulse for more assertive negative liberty, rather than asserting the positive liberties of the media. In any case, the push for negative liberty was justified in these given conditions. Thus in 1996 a new law has grown out the dissatisfaction with the initial tight regulatory initiative from the part of the state: in that year the state control towards the entry of the media market was lifted, and the self-regulation of the media in the style of the Swedish Press Ombudsman was introduced by establishing the Ethics Commission of Journalists and Publishers,51 which from then on is an independent body meant to oversee the standards of journalistic practices in Lithuania. Thus the government has been justifiably removed from the equation of “judging” the content produced by the so-called Fourth Estate. However, this hasn’t constituted all the changes brought about by the law of 1996. Arguably the most substantial conceptual change was that the provision of information was framed as a purely commercial activity, and thus private media actors – the disseminators of information – had to be registered in the Register of Enterprises (with the exception of the public broadcaster LRT, of course). This would be natural and self-explanatory if the status of the media would be further clarified on the same legislative level as having a purpose of serving the public-interest at least to some extent, this, however, has not happened in 1996: the media was positioned as an ordinary private business, the only exception being that its practices had to be now overseen by a certain independent body. Otherwise, it was fully legally devoted to the pure logic of the market, thus also removing a rationale for any supportive government action (as opposed to a restrictive one, such as per the law of 1990), such as subsidizing by a partial or even complete exemption from the Value Added Tax (VAT), as it is the practice in, for example, Denmark.52 Thus Scandinavian style self-regulation model of the media has been introduced, while at the same time establishing the logic by which the media had to put in as much effort in the market competition as any other private actors, making the ethical self-regulatory concerns secondary to their possible future existential problems arising from market failures. The same logic applies for the national public broadcaster LRT: while existing, and thus formally distancing Lithuania from the Liberal model of Halin and Mancini for example, the budget of LRT when split per capita is the lowest among the member states of the European Union.53 Even more remarkably, for example, the legislators obliged the media to provide information about their owners and shareholders by March 30th of every year,54 thus in a way again
51 Balčytienė, Auksė, Mass Media in Lithuania – Development, Changes and Journalism Culture, Vistas, 2006, p. 97 52 Rasmus H., Sondergaard, H., Toft, I., Does Media Policy Promote Media Freedom and Independence? The Case of Denmark, Case study report, University of Copenhagen, 2011, p. 28 53 Jastramskis, Deimantas, Lietuvos žiniasklaidos sistemos modelio bruožai, Informacijos mokslai, 2011, p. 64 54 Balčytienė, Auksė, Mass Media in Lithuania – Development, Changes and Journalism Culture, Vistas, 2006, p. 105 33 asserting the public interest to a certain extent, but at the same time the legislators failed to suggest any concrete sanctions of failing to provide this information, and thus only minority of Lithuanian media outlets do, de facto disregarding this regulation. Self-denying state action once again, at its purest. In Norway, for example, a failure to publicize the data of ownership may result in financial sanctions for companies in question or even imprisoning for responsible persons.55 However, in case of Lithuania, this discrepancy between the input of legislation and the output of the policy not being complied with, in its underlying essence shines through with unmistakable neoliberal ethos, that “set of ethical motivations” under a moderate, non-neoliberal façade: the legislative input signalizes a notion and a concept of “public good” and “social responsibility” (the media is accountable to public in making itself transparent), while the output is already in the domain of the Neoliberal. This opposite end of the policy-making, the output, or how the policy is complied with by the target group or the subject of the given policy, is in this case the media which constructed its ethos exclusively as a private business, and thus in the Neoliberal “set of ethical motivations” its aspirations are superior to those of the “public”, here represented by the government, and that’s why it de facto becomes the superior, defining end in this policy making process. The government formally makes it accountable to public via the “duty” of transparency, but, since in Zygmunt Bauman’s terms Neoliberal ethos is “business-inspired rules of action and business-shaped criteria of rationality”, it cannot truly expect any “public-inspired” and “public-shaped criteria of rationality” output results, and expresses this on the surface by not even proposing any sanctions for not observing such law. Thus again, via such paradoxical, yet under Neoliberal ethics logical discrepancy between input and output, we get a self-denying government/state action.
2.2 Media as just another Private Enterprise
In order to locate the position of the media in the neoliberal framework and consequently to get the implications of this position for its functions or the role itself, we need to look at the notion of the media policy, and, for example, the attitude towards subsidizing the media. Few things can more clearly signal the media being positioned (and then conversely positioning itself in the same way) as just another private business, if not the government’s attitude towards making exceptions such as tax exemptions to the media in contrast to other private business enterprises. Before analyzing the policy, however, we need to understand the relationship between structure and agency in the framework of neoliberal ethos. Here we refer to “the structure” as to the
55 Balčytienė, Auksė, Mass Media in Lithuania – Development, Changes and Journalism Culture, Vistas, 2006, p. 108 34 sum fusion of the Economic and the Cultural, or as Anthony Giddens elaborated, a “virtual order” possible to characterize both as some kind of “patterning” of social phenomena and as an “intersection of presence and absence”, as underlying codes that have to be inferred from surface manifestations.56 In this framework, it’s possible to describe media policy as a part of the Structure as an extension of patterns of cultural and social phenomena influenced by neoliberal thought. The Agency, or Agent, as the Individual in this case – which is the media - not only acts as the medium of transmitting the message but also an actor “maintaining a continuing ‘theoretical understanding’ of the grounds of their activity”.57 The Medium is the Message, as Marshall McLuhan would put it, but of course in this case not because of different passive characteristic of “hot” and “cold” as he meant it, but because of, in D. Donauskaitė‘s theoretical terms „<...> discourse of the media not only frames an object of a public policy, but it is also a tool meant to satisfy the seeking of the media to strengthen or at least to keep intact its position in the network of power as an interested party of public politics”. That is, the Agency, in a certain sense, acts and reacts in relation to the Structure. In this sense it seems useful to take up the notion of the “duality of structure” here, as a concept offered by Anthony Giddens to transcend the classical sociological duality and opposition of Structure versus Agency. For Giddens, they are reflexive of each other, and the Agent consciously relocates itself within the Structure according to the transformations in its social, cultural and economic phenomena – the domain which neoliberal ethos pervades. Hence if we should ask why do the media start positioning itself as just another private enterprise, we indirectly find the answer in Anthony Giddens: because the media policy frames it as just another private enterprise. Structure and Agency reflect each other. This framing of all media as a mere private business was not gradual nor systematic in the Lithuania of 1990s. When in 1994 the universal VAT of 18% was introduced in Lithuania, the print media such as newspaper and magazines was fully exempt from it, thus indirectly subsidizing it from the national budget, thus at the same time admitting it indirectly as serving the “public good”. However, in 1997 the Ministry of Finance of Lithuania has advised the Parliament to narrow down the partial VAT exemptions to the print media such as books and magazines by exempting only books approved by Ministry of Education and Science; to which Parliament replied at first by giving the full VAT burden only to print media under category of “adult” and “violence” and leaving the rest exempted, but by 2003 all print media was liable to pay a lowered tax rate of 5%,
56 Giddens, Anthony, The Constitution of Society. Outline of the Theory of Structuration, University of California Press, 1984, p. 17 57 Ibid., p. 5 35 again, with the exception of outlets more or less marked as “immoral”, which had to pay the full 18%.58 According to D. Jastramskis, this tax amendment in 2003 was taken up in order to calibrate the Lithuanian VAT laws with the ones of the European Union, as Lithuania was to officially join the common European market the next year. In any case, D. Jastramskis immediately points out that Lithuania hasn’t specifically negotiated for exceptions and privileges for the media to be exempted from the VAT, and has rather in a way chosen to tax the media by its own free will: there is no reason to believe that EU wouldn’t have agreed to allow such exemption, as it for example exists in the United Kingdom, and, as already mentioned, so it does in Denmark to the majority of newspapers.59 Here it is again important to note an obvious discrepancy between the neoliberal policies and neoliberal ethos. The neoliberal policies are difficult to implement at their purest due to the democratic friction of different viewpoints of e.g. left versus right wing politics in a parliament and the government, but it becomes more and more feasible when the center itself becomes liquid and flows towards the neoliberal, thus shifting the left and the right as one unit towards one direction. Then, in its own turn, this friction of left versus right itself falls under that set of ethical motivations which holds the agency to be superior to the structure, the Private automatically and in all cases superior to the Public. The case of pure implementation of neoliberalism would not be to exempt the media from the VAT “because they serve to the public”, but rather to drastically lower the VAT altogether for all private subjects of taxation because the idea of high taxes is wrong in itself and contrary to neoclassical utilitarian economic thinking. In the case of compromise evoked in conditions of parliamentary democracy though, the policy only rarely can go into the “neoliberal” domain, but it can act in the domain of neoliberal ethics, where the media is taxed because all other private businesses are being taxed, and the logical conclusion of this reform of 2003 would be that the media should be taxed as much as all other private businesses are. This happens due to the fact that neoliberal ethics presuppose and shape democracy, narrowing down the field of political discussion by, as already mentioned, establishing the Left, Right and the Center as a one unit pervaded by the same ethical motivations and in this way moving it into the same direction of economic and socio-political thinking, anchoring the point of political friction of Left versus Right already in the domain functioning predominantly under neoliberal ethics. Since, once again, it is not yet the domain of a pure neoliberal policy, the notion of “high” taxes is able to persist in the legislative input, but then significant exemptions towards the media become unjustified.
58 Jastramskis, D., Žiniasklaidos paramos politika Lietuvoje, Informacijos mokslai, 2013, p. 131-132 59 Ibid., p. 132 36
It is only logical then that the media were eventually to lose its privilege of 5% VAT. The external justification for it came in 2009, when the global financial crisis and a dramatic recession has hit Lithuania with full force. In 2009 the VAT for magazines and newspapers was raised to a full 19% and up to 21% in 2010,60 temporarily making Lithuania one of the three countries in the EU, alongside Slovakia and Bulgaria, where mass media are granted no VAT privileges whatsoever.61 This also seems to have contributed to the onset of deep financial problems for number of newspapers, for example of those owned by the media group “Diena Media News”, which owns some of the largest regional outlets in Lithuania, such as Kauno Diena. The revenue of the company fell as much as by 30% in 2009.62 However, in 2013, when the growth of the GDP of the Baltic States came back on a steady enough positive track, the VAT of newspaper, magazines and other periodicals (again, except the “immoral” ones) was set back to 9%, “back”, however, not meaning “back” to its pre- crisis level. In the big picture, excluding the momentary earthquake of recession of 2009-2010, the VAT for the print media was 5% in 2003, and 9% in 2013, a trend of closing the exemptions. The conservative-liberal right wing government of 2009-2012 has raised the media VAT because it’s just another private business and so there’s no reason to exempt it, and the socialdemocratic government incumbent from 2012 lowered the VAT in 2013, lowering it in a way in which it became higher than before the financial crisis. That is, ultimately also framing it as quasi on the track of just becoming another private business, naturalizing the process.
2.3 Market Parallelism
At the same time, the regulation on ownership of mass media in Lithuania and other Baltic states, for that matter, is as liberal as it gets: there are no restrictions on mass media concentration, nor restrictions on foreign capital investment. The only present restrictions are those regulating political advertising in the mass media.63 It is a logical regulation to have, however, as it signals that the only real concern from the side of structure of Lithuanian media policy is political parallelism, which has been declining in Lithuania since the regaining of independence as a part of the necessary process of desovietization, evoked as a reaction to crippling censorship during the Soviet era and factual highest degree of strictly enforced monolithic political parallelism. Indeed,
60 Jastramskis, D., Žiniasklaidos paramos politika Lietuvoje, Informacijos mokslai, 2013, p. 132 61 Jastramskis, D., Lietuvos žiniasklaidos sistemos modelio bruožai, Informacijos mokslai, 2011, p. 53 62 „Diena Media News“ iškelta restruktūrizavimo byla, retrieved from: http://www.delfi.lt/verslas/media/diena-media- news-iskelta-restrukturizavimo-byla.d?id=67338888, last access 14.04.2015 63 Balčytienė, A., Mass Media in Lithuania – Development, Changes and Journalism Culture, Vistas, 2006, p. 109 37 influential Lithuanian mass media has been shaking off Southern European type political parallelism: the presence of journalists and writers, for example, in the Lithuanian parliament has declined from 10,5% in 1990 to 3,5% in 2008,64 marking, among other things, an ever growing functional separation of politics and journalism. Also taking into account self-regulation of the media and that press subsidies, amounting to only 1,3% of total media revenue in 2010 (as already discussed previously), are not only tiny but also not assigned to media outlets directly by the government but rather by a separate funding body, we get the outlines of the present situation: political parallelism in its classical sense (in a sense that it usually comes from the public sector) is not only not the most significant problem in Lithuanian media, but there are also not too many tools left for political parties to exercise real influence on the most influential mass media outlets in Lithuania. On the other hand, there is still a significant loophole: while political parties are forbidden to own mass-media outlets, such ownership is still feasible and legal for individual politicians.65 At the same time, certain editors of certain media outlets can be active in politics, formally receive money from a political party and both directly promote a particular party in his/her outlet and abstain from ever criticizing it. Both cases – a politician owning a media outlet or an editor actively participating in politics and financed by a political force can often be a problem, especially in regions and small towns of Lithuania, such as for example Druskininkai66 or Širvintos, where a regional paper „Širvintų kraštas“ is co-owned by a mayor-candidate and a Labor party member recently accused of vote fraud.67 Yet remarkably, these are also problems of under-regulated media ownership laws and loose transparency enforcing, so what we have here is a form of political parallelism brought about by corrupt private capital: under-regulated ownership and unenforced transparency, as in the cases of Druskininkai and Širvintos. Thus, in fact, what we get here from the side of the structure is a remarkable imbalance in the outcome of liberal media policy: an effort to tame trends of political parallelism coming directly from the public sector, but an understated approach in addressing the problems arising from private capital, such as media concentration or political ties of an individual owner and lack of enforced strict transparency about it, which opens yet another entering wedge for political
64 Matonytė, Irmina, From Liberal to Predatory Mass Media in Post-Communist Lithuania, Science Journal Communication and Information, No. 2, 2009, p. 160 65 Jastramskis, Deimantas, Lietuvos žiniasklaidos sistemos modelio bruožai, Informacijos mokslai, 2011, p. 59 66 Teismo nuosprendis: Druskininkų mero Ričardo Malinausko laikraštis – neteisėtas. Retrieved from: http://www.15min.lt/naujiena/aktualu/lietuva/teismas-nusprendis-druskininku-mero-ricardo-malinausko-laikrastis- neteisetas-56-439822, last access 14.04.2015 67 Širvintų laikraštyje konservatorius agituoja už balsų pirkimo skandale minimą „darbietę“ Živilę Pinskuvienę, retrieved from: http://www.15min.lt/naujiena/rinkimai-2012/kandidatai/sirvintu-laikrastyje-konservatorius-agituoja-uz- balsu-pirkimo-skandale-minima-darbiete-zivile-pinskuviene-632-267969, last access 14.04.2015 38 patronage as well, this time stemming from private capital instead of public sector, as it would be traditionally expected. And yet a new entering wedge for political patronage and political parallelism via private capital is not the only problem arising from a neoliberal media policy where media does not transcend the position of a private enterprise competing in the market. The other problem is that of a danger of market parallelism, a phenomenon no less dangerous than political parallelism: in both cases mass media is prone to third party manipulation shaping and influencing its content in various ways. They are qualitatively equal: proneness to private manipulation, in its essence, is not qualitatively different from the media failures arising from political parallelism, they are both as damaging. Quite paradoxically, however, this clear imbalance in present Lithuanian media system, where backdoors for political parallelism are relatively subdued while the “entering wedge”, a term classically used to warn us about the possible corrupting patronage of the government is now de facto reserved for the overreach of a concentrated private capital, to which small media markets, like the Lithuanian one, are even more sensible, in a way signals a reverse political influence. That is, a political establishment, a Left versus Right center of friction of which is functioning in the neoliberal ethos, paves the way not for independent media, but a media fully dependent on the peculiarities, logic and failures of a small open market. Unbalanced liberal media policy, instead of closing the wedges for both political and market parallelism, in some cases closes it for the former while encouraging the latter by framing a media outlet as “just another private enterprise” via shaky, unsteady tax policy, the recognizable trend of which is, however, the flow towards universal “no exceptions” frame, where media is just another market producer of commodities, and therefore is dependent on logic of the market. So, the way Hallin and Mancini introduced the concept of political parallelism as a concept to describe phenomena by which the media aligns itself with a certain political stance and a political force by reflecting that particular point of view in its content, thus shaping the content to a varying extent, in the same way market parallelism makes media responsive to outside influence by making it more vulnerable than ever to the peculiarities of a given market – especially more so in a small one. Usually a true negative effect of high political parallelism case in a media system is a “biased” content or parts of content (in case of internal pluralism) not in a sense of refusing to accept the notion “objectivity” promoted in the Liberal North-Atlantic model of Halin and Mancini by favoring a certain political idea over the other, but rather in a sense of systematic withholding of criticism towards a political force.
39
In the case of market parallelism, when all the safety nets softening the need to respond to the sheer demand and logic inherent in a small market are removed from the foundations of a media system and the media succumbs to the forcing logic of market commodity competition, likely much more so than Jürgen Habermas ever anticipated, the possible effects are an increased portion of the headlines becoming easy to digest human-interest stories and entertainment, all packed into catchy and misleading click-baiting titles (in case of online media), aimed to generate more advertising revenues. In this way market demand is reflected in the content the same way as, in the concept of Halin and Mancini, political power was reflected in media’s content in the case of political parallelism. Furthermore, when politics enter the market, such as in the case of buying advertising during election campaigns, the borders between political parallelism and market parallelism can blur: during the Lithuanian Presidential election of 2004, for example, four out of eight national dailies wrote more favorably about the candidates who bought more advertising space in their outlets than about those who had bought less.68 In most basic terms, market parallelism signifies a simple technocratic notion of economics: when competition increases, that is, when a media fully competes in the free market as a commodity provider, then the pressure to fulfill demand is increased, as it is the only way to be profitable. In the case of most other consumable commodities, this makes sense. What if, however, a “commodity” in question is a vital node shaping the public sphere? Since the media have turned into a message long ago, while the message without the media is “doomed either to be still-born or to die interstate”,69 isn’t it the single best argument that the media is an object of public interest, and that if the medium becomes mere business parallel to market, then the only messages that are able to penetrate through effectively are those that satisfy the demand? The first theorist to stress how “capitalism” commodifies information was Herbert Schiller: he described what we call here market parallelism as market criteria in informational developments. Already back in 1982 he noted: “Information today is being treated as commodity. It is something which, like toothpaste, breakfast cereals and automobiles, is increasingly bought and sold”.70 Frank Webster has nicely summarized Schiller’s notion market criteria in informational developments: “as a rule, information will therefore be produced and made available only where it has the prospect of being sold at a profit, and it will be produced most copiously and/or with greatest quality where the best opportunities for gain are evident. It follows that market pressures
68 Jastramskis, Deimantas, Lietuvos žiniasklaidos sistemos modelio bruožai, Informacijos mokslai, 2011, p. 60 69 Bauman, Zygmunt; Donskis, Leonidas, Moral Blindness. The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity, Polity Press, p. 55 70 Webster, Frank, Theories of the Information Society, 2nd Edition, Routledge, 2002, p. 128 40 are decisive when it comes to determining what sort of information is to be produced, for whom, and on what conditions”.71 Indeed, this new paradigm of profound commodification of content induced by market parallelism or market criteria of rationality in Schiller’s terms – and, if we disconnect from the field of media, in Bauman’s terms as well - is being empirically researched since at least the 1990s. James Curran observes a peculiar thing: during the 1990s the U.S., the bastion and heart of the Liberal model of Halin and Mancini, has become the world’s center for academic criticism towards the “hypercommercialism” of the media, which is “undermining the decision-making power and autonomy of US journalists; weakening professional standards; undermining editorial quality through cost-cutting; and leading to increasingly inadequate journalism that is failing US society”.72 This recent critical tradition is tying this perceived drop in the quality of American journalism with economic dimension of free market, or, to be more specific, “radical” free market which came to being after the collapse of Bretton Woods system. James Curran names most noteworthy examples from this “now extensive literature”: during the 1990s, for example, there was a sharp increase of TV coverage of crime, because it was “cheap and popular”, and by the mid-1990s, “violent crime accounted for two-thirds of all local TV news in fifty-six US cities.73 The effects of this proportional shift are no less straightforward: Curran quotes Patterson (2003), claiming that during the same period there was a spectacular rise of Americans saying that crime was the most serious problem in the U.S., while in fact crime levels were falling at the same time. Here we submerge again into the field of neoliberalism as Colin Crouch meant it in his Post-Democracy, as in democracy obstructing itself due to a set of low, unambitious standards against which it measures itself, and here we get a glimpse how it correlates with a media system shaped by neoliberal ethics – a content distorted by market parallelism, in the same manner as distorted by political parallelism, presents actual problems facing a society in a distorted way. In this case, it is impossible for a society, interacting within such a public sphere, monopolized by neoliberal ethos, to form a set of “ambitious” goals addressing actual structural flaws: much more likely, a piece of commodified content which sells well, such as extensive crime reporting, will be internalized as an actual, relevant problem within such a public sphere. Here it is timely to quote J. Chester: “I’m not talking about media that spews forth ideological perspectives from the Left or the Right. There’s an important place for such commentary. But even in the age of blogs and citizen journalism, it’s still vital to protect the role that many reporters, editors, and producers want to play:
71 Webster, Frank, Theories of the Information Society, 2nd Edition, Routledge, 2002, p. 137 72 Curran, James, Media and cultural theory in the age of market liberalism, in Media and Cultural Theory, edited by James Curran and David Morley, Routledge, 2006, p. 140 73 Ibid., p. 140 41 providing the facts with as much context as possible. That requires having both the time and resources to do so”.74 J. Chester here seems to have a note of optimism for the new media to break free of market parallelism and bring about a new paradigm shift of bringing back the “public interest” to news in saying that “even in the age of blogs of citizen journalism” it is necessary to protect professionalism in the media – by protecting it from over-dependence on politics and the market alike – but in a certain sense, it seems, journalistic professionalism in the context of new media, when left to framework of pure market logic, is even more prone to be undermined and reconstructed into producing content which is aimed at selling first and informing second.
2.4 The New Media and Market Parallelism: Intensification through Interactivity
The concept of the New Media is too broad to be subject to any convenient restrictive summarization, so we are going to agree with the concept presented by L. Manovich: all new media objects, whether created from scratch or converted from analog media sources, are composed of digital code, thus a new media object is a subject to a digital algorithmic manipulation.75 That, in turn, means that the paradigm of the New Media can affect all stages of communication, and transforms all forms of analog media – even, naturally, text – into the New Media. Here we will take up internet media, or online media, as the form of New Media which expresses the set of these principles in the most comprehensive way. Generally, European scholars, in addition to the American ones, as noted towards the end of the last chapter, are also beginning to acknowledge this “hypercommercialization” as a real problem in growing scale. For example, quoting A. Sachnez-Tabernero: “In the 19th Century not many newspapers owners were as concerned with making a profit as they were with supporting a political party, or hiring and excellent writer or journalist, who would improve their publication’s reputation. Nowadays, almost without exception, shareholders reward media directors exclusively in relation to profits made”,76 as usually the predominant way to maximize profits is to commodify the content to something eye and/or emotion-catching. However, this is still often considered to be a problem of the “old”, “traditional” media: during the high time of neoliberal ethos in the closing of 20th Century, and thus at the same time with the decline of journalistic professionalism and
74 Chester, J., Digital Destiny. New Media and the Future of Democracy, New Press, 2007, p. 204 75 Manovich, L., What is new media? In The New Media Theory Reader, edited by Hassan & Thomas, Open University Press, 2006, p. 10 76 Sanchez-Tabernero, A., The European Press at the Beginning of the 21st Century. Defining Characteristic and Future Trends, in Press Subsidies in Europe, edited by Alonso, Moragas, Blasco Gil, Almiron, Generalitat de Catalunya, 2006, p. 34 42 commodification of the content of news media, a new line of thinking has emerged: “the internet will set us free”.77 Even more so, by providing hope that the online media is inherently equipped with “tools” and unique characteristics which will enable it to break free from such “traditional” problems as concentrated ownership and market parallelism, the emergence of the online media has arguably set the stage to remove even more of the remaining public policies that have up to a certain point governed media and communications – “everything from limits on media ownership, to rules governing equal time for political candidates, to requirement that communities receive public- service programming.”78 Robert W. McChesney, however, does not subscribe to this New Media- Optimism: “there is a plus side for internet journalism; people can access news media from across the planet. But sustaining doing good journalism requires resources and institutional support. There is nothing in the technology or the market that provides either of these to internet upstarts”.79 McChesney proceeds to argue that new technologies, which, in his view, are often developed by public subsidy anyway, could be used to diversify more between commercial and non-commercial media – that is, media fully “parallel” to the market from the media which is less dependent on the profits derived from pure competition in the market. Such policy, however, does not correspond with the neoliberal ethos where this ethos is predominant, and according to McChesney the global nature of arguably one predominant online media system (and convergence towards the Liberal model, in words of Halin and Mancini), makes these commercialization trends in Western online made more and more universal. That is, according to McChesney, it is difficult to imagine “globalization” without the emergence of the international commercial media system. This “global media system”, according to him, has so far one feature in common: a preference of profit over public service. So, how does the new media, or online media, to be more specific, influence the trends via the new set of characteristics and paradigms that it is bringing over into this “global media system”? Des Freedman quotes Colin Sparks discussing various ways in which the internet offers both advantages and challenges to traditional media interests by bringing about a new set of features influencing the business models of the media.80 Namely, the internet lowers the cost of production and distribution – this also apparently lowers entry barriers in the media market, making
77 McChesney, R. W.., Policing the thinkable, in The New Media Theory Reader, edited by Hassan & Thomas, Open University Press, 2006, p. 102 78 Chester, J., Digital Destiny. New Media and the Future of Democracy, New Press, 2007, p. 182 79 McChesney, R. W., Policing the thinkable, in The New Media Theory Reader, edited by Hassan & Thomas, Open University Press, 2006, p. 102 80 Freedman, D., Internet transformations: “Old” media resilience in the “new media” revolution, in Media and Cultural Theory, edited by James Curran and David Morley, Routledge, 2006, p. 280 43 it easier for online media outlets to emerge and enter the market compared to “traditional” ones, which generally require larger investments at the start. The internet also “erodes advantages based on physical space” and time for that matter, as they can be constantly updated, as opposed to print media following events on a “scheduled” daily, weekly etc. basis. Most importantly, however, the internet facilitates the “disaggregation of editorial and advertising material”. That is: “for much of the media, editorial content is provided as the means of luring consumers to the newspaper, magazine or broadcast programme where they are then exposed to the advertising that funds the content in the first place.” Thus, according to Sparks, the searchable nature of the internet allows advertisers to reach selected audiences in a much more foolproof manner, without having to resort to “editorial meat” as much, thus at the same time rendering the presence of reputable, highly professional journalists writing analytical editorial pieces a luxurious possibility rather than an essential, vital need. At the same time, there is also a set of unmistakable new media paradigms, as D. Freedman sums them up: interactivity, which provides online media essentially with a dialogic structure, as opposed to monologic, characterizing traditional print mass media, for example. On top of that, in a sense this dialogic paradigm is strengthened by hypertextuality of a network, which also becomes a message in itself, giving a certain character to any content, as it was claimed by M. Castells, who built this notion based on the one of Marshall McLuhan (The Internet Galaxy of Castells (2001) versus The Gutenberg Galaxy of McLuhan (1962)). That is, the media and content traveling through a network supersedes the “traditional one-to-many flow of the broadcast media” of the so-called Gutenberg Galaxy speaking within the old paradigm of McLuhan, and then links connect media elements to one another, creating “a trail of personal association”. What this means in practice is that, as Castells pointed out, we get a general trend in online media towards “demassification and related trends towards individualization, customization, personalization and decentralization”.81 One of the most important and recognizable paradigms of the online media is, however, that of interactivity. To explore it more profoundly, Andrew Barry took up an example of another institution traditionally perceived to be acting in public interest, which, under neoliberal ethos, it is argued, should conceive itself as a private business to increase efficiency. During an annual lecture at the British Museum in London in 1997, it was suggested that museums should “conceive themselves as businesses”,82 and the functional paradigm which would justify such a shift and render museums “efficient” should be that of interactivity: “seen in this context, “interactivity”
81 Freedman, D., Internet transformations: “Old” media resilience in the “new media” revolution, in Media and Cultural Theory, edited by James Curran and David Morley, Routledge, 2006, p. 280 82 Barry, A., On Interactivity, In The New Media Theory Reader, edited by Hassan & Thomas, Open University Press, 2006, p. 166 44 was to have a double function. First, it is one of a range of technical methods – along with cost control, visitor research, quality assurance, marketing and customer relations – which would enable the museum to forge a more “economic” relation both with its visitors and with private industry”. While, on the other hand, on the institutional level, interactivity would assure that the institution would respond to public’s demands, instead of simply telling the public what it “needs” to know.83 In its essence, as A. Barry observes, interactivity paves the way for skepticism towards state action in contemporary political thinking, and empowers both the agent and the structure and allows them to interact. The individual and the institution can then shape each other according to each other’s “wishes”, and there’s no normativity left in these relations. “For advanced liberalism, the task of the public authorities is not to direct or provide for the citizen but to establish the conditions within which the citizen could become an active and responsible agent in his or her government”.84 In this way, the notion of interactivity seems as the one true paradigm fitting both agency and the structure, which rationalizes neoliberalism and renders it a useful tool in de- bureaucratizing societies and thus finally preventing Kafkaesque nightmares many of us are going through on daily, monthly or yearly basis – “interactivity promised, in other words, to turn the museum visitor into a more active self”85 – in the same way interactivity is promising to turn the media audiences to be as conscious as they ever were, actively seeking information rather than passively receiving it. These characteristics, especially the latter one – interactivity – when brought in practice on the platform of online media functioning as private enterprise with no notion of public interest in the neoliberal ethos, makes it more responsive, or prone, to market parallelism than ever conceived possible in any form of the “traditional” media – the “parallelism” becomes pronounced and is intensified virtually to a perfection. In fact, market parallelism in this case starts to be emulated as interactivity: for interactivity per se makes an agent more capable of self-governance, thus in the case of media interactivity it would mean that it’s easier for the audiences to inform themselves on relevant questions; however in the case of market parallelism the audiences respond to a commodity under the principles of supply/demand, since the information units themselves have already become commodified under the neoliberal ethos, since it’s economic framework and the ethos brought about by it shape the rest of the elements. In fact, according to Manuel Castells, in a situation where the traditional notion politics of Left versus Right is experiencing crisis and at the same time the media, especially under
83 Barry, A., On Interactivity, In The New Media Theory Reader, edited by Hassan & Thomas, Open University Press, 2006, p. 168 84 Ibid., 169 85 Ibid., p. 169 45 the paradigms of the new media, is gaining in importance, the result is that political communication get entangled and directly subordinate to the space, or space-time of the media.86 As Castells explains, there is no mysterious conspiracy in here: it is a “free political process”, by the logic of which however, the logic and organization of electronic media frames, structures and thus presupposes the politics. Manuel Castells provides an important structural insight here, namely: when the new media becomes the most influential type of communication linking the public sphere, the most important paradigms for journalism of which, such as interactivity and disaggregation between editorial and advertising material, are interconnected and expressed fully within the platform of online media, then in the level of structure, after the neoliberal ethos, the second element that follows is the online media: it presupposes politics, and the given system of democracy. To Castells, the most important type of electronic media is still the Television: to him, it is the main and most influential type of medium which functions as a source for political information, and, more importantly, political evaluation.87 To prove that he provides data showing that while in the beginning of 1960s the TV and newspapers where perceived to be as reliable by the popular opinion in the U.S., but have steadily diverged ever since: by 1991, almost 60% said to trust TV news the most, while only around 20% said the same about newspapers.88 The same proportion shift happened with advertising industry diverting its investments increasingly towards the TV media. Similar trend seems to be on its course, this time favoring the internet as the most influential type of new media: in Lithuania, in absolute numbers, the advertising market share is growing the fastest in online media: between 2011 and 2012, it grew as much as by 21,4% and had a 9,91% total market share in 2012,89 then a total share of 11,4% in 201390 and 13,4% in 2014.91 The advertising market share made up by advertising in Television is still dominant in Lithuania, although slightly shrinking: from 47,8% in 2012, to 46,2% in 2014, while that of newspapers is diminishing more significantly, already taken over by the internet for the first time in 2014: 12% for the newspaper industry, and 13,4% for the internet in 2014. At the same time on the European scale,
86 Castells, M., Tapatumo galia, Poligrafija ir informatika, 2006, p. 351 87 Ibid., p. 363 88 Ibid., p. 353 89 TNS Žiniasklaidos tyrimų apžvalga 2012, retrieved from: http://www.tns.lt/data/files/Metines_apzvalgos/Ziniasklaidos%20tyrimu%20apzvalga%202012.pdf, last access 11.04.2015 90 TNS Žiniasklaidos tyrimų apžvalga 2013, retrieved from: http://www.tns.lt/data/files/Metines_apzvalgos/Ziniasklaidos%20tyrimu%20apzvalga%202013.pdf, last access 11.04.2015 91 TNS Žiniasklaidos tyrimų apžvalga 2014, retrieved from: http://www.tns.lt/file/repository/%C5%BDiniasklaidos%20tyrim%C5%B3%20ap%C5%BEvalga%202014_LT.pdf, last access 11.04.2015 46 in 2013 Eurobarometer statistics, the internet is the only platform gaining grounds in preference for political news, while the television on the radio, while both still preferred, are slowly showing the trend of losing their position.92 Thus, the assumption could be made that within the next few decades the online media will come dominate both the advertising market and the audience’s trust and attention, gradually overcoming the “old” New Media such as Television, the way the Television came to dominate the newspaper and radio industry in the course of couple of decades starting from the point when it became widespread in households in a given society. Now, if we accept this assumption that the internet, the online media is gradually turning into the most important and influential medium in most of the old Western world, and in Lithuania, due to weakened newspaper industry, even more so to a certain extent, then we cannot underestimate the impact of whatever “message” this medium stands for. Surely, we cannot truly operate in Marshall McLuhan’s terms to operate the concept of the internet, but we do accept, the way Manuel Castells essentially did, that “medium is the message”. If, as McLuhan noted, "they (the media) are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered",93 then it is important to understand this row of consequences that the internet and online media represents. It is probably not enough to synthesize the terms of Marshall McLuhan and classify the internet as a “lukewarm” medium, as Scott Rosenberg did94 - as a synthesis of McLuhans “cool” and “warm” concepts of the medium, since, as Rosenberg argued, the internet incorporates the characteristics of both “cool” and “hot” since it requires an active participation but also requires full engagement of the senses in a submissive way. However, sticking to the terms McLuhan used to describe pre-internet media does not help to explain the dynamics and “psychological, moral, ethical” consequences this medium means within a framework of neoliberal ethos and negative freedom, as at the time when McLuhan coined his theories the positive freedom was much more predominant, as argued in the beginning chapters. Thus the implications and consequences of “hot”, “cool” or even “lukewarm” seem to more or less an anachronism when discussing them in this neoliberal framework presupposing rest of the elements of the Structure. The most important notion here is, that the online media, breaking the paradigm of the traditional one-to-many scheme of the media and replacing it with decentralized horizontal
92 Eurobarometer – Media use. Autumn 2013. Retrieved from: http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/eb/eb80/eb80_media_en.pdf, last access 11.04.2015 93 Sholle, David, Disorganizing the „New Technology“, in Critical Perspectives on the Internet, edited by Greg Elmer, Rowman & Littlefield, 2002 , p. 12, last access 11.04.2015 94 Rosenberg, Scott, Taking the Internet‘s Temperature, 1995, retrieved from: http://www.wordyard.com/dmz/digicult/mcluhan-5-3-95.html, last access 11.04.2015 47 hypertextuality and interactivity, customability and personalization as “a range of technical methods – along with cost control, visitor research, quality assurance, marketing and customer relations”,95 offers so far the most perfect technical manifestation of the postmodern skepticism towards the grand narratives in practice, speaking in terms of Jean-Francois Lyotard. In a sense, the societies within the media systems of polarized pluralistic press were the least “postmodern” within the framework of Lyotard – rather than being skeptical towards grand political and historic narratives and metanarratives, they were engaged by them, gripped by polarized and subjective political discourses offered by Right wing or Left wing media. Meanwhile the more “postmodern”, liberal North-Atlantic societies, not accidentely, idealized “neutral” and “objective” press much more, which might have as well signalized the distrust in grand narratives. You get some facts and you make whatever of them – it is the matter of individual consciousness to make sense of a stream of images, digits and letters. It is highly questionable whether this perceived neutrality and political disengagement actually left more space for the freedom of individual opinion formation: the selective repeating of facts forms the worldview arguably as much – as shown by James Curran, where the data provided by him demonstrated that when due to market parallelism media is saturated by crime reporting, the public opinion shifts towards the perception that the crime is now the most significant problem facing a given society, while the crime rates could be in fact sinking.96 Since the overstated crime reporting was brought about by the fact that it was deemed to be profitable – and the media within the neoliberal framework acting “as just another private enterprise” naturally seeks profit to be able to withstand the competition in the market – we could say that if the media’s content is shaped by the market parallelism, then the public opinion is essentially shaped by the market. This is, however, within the case of a non-interactive, one-to-many type of medium that is Television. What do online media and internet as a medium add or subtract from this? We can take up the classification offered by Andrew Barry, where he places the notion of interactivity in the opposition to Michel Foucault’s concept of discipline:97 whereas in the paradigm of interactivity there is no notion of fixed time and the information flows and is being accessed fluidly, the paradigm of discipline requires disciplinary time, a fixed time table of regularity, where news are being provided in a fixed rhythm and tempo – especially so in the case of print media. This tempo of time disciplines the body rhythmically, whereas the “interactivity
95 Barry, A., On Interactivity, in The New Media Theory Reader, edited by Hassan & Thomas, Open University Press, 2006, p. 166 96 Curran, J., Media and cultural theory in the age of market liberalism, in Media and Cultural Theory, edited by James Curran and David Morley, Routledge, 2006, p. 140 97 Barry, A., On Interactivity, in The New Media Theory Reader, edited by Hassan & Thomas, Open University Press, 2006, p. 179 48 does not depend on discipline but on the potential of the undisciplined body and the unfocused mind”. Body-object articulation of interactivity is signified by brief body-machine interactions – and it’s achieved through guidance rather than rules, as in the disciplinary framework. Interactivity, thus, signifies an intensive, rather than exhaustive use: the value of brief interactions must be maximized. And, most importantly, the paradigm of discipline requires an “authority” – the scientist, the journalist, etc. Interactivity, on the other hand, promotes a concealment of expertise: “the authority of expertise is partially hidden in order to maximize the possibilities for interaction. The imagination and expertise of the ordinary citizen is worked with rather than contradicted by the voice of authority”. Thus we get the injunctions: within the notion of discipline they are “Learn! You must!” while those of interactivity are, rather “Discover! You may!” Thus when positioned against the framework of discipline, the paradigms of which are easily recognizable in the “old” media, we can understand why Lyotard also associated his “Postmodern Condition” with the new information sciences98 – it displaces the centrality of political ideas, for it provides the ability of disengagement from anything and engagement in everything at the same time, opening a tree of mediated choices of so far unseen amplitude. From this point of view, the online media and the medium of the internet is the most perfect, most natural habitat for the realization of the neoliberal ethics – everyone may discover their own narrative, or construct it from the hypertextual horizontal intermingling of parallel minute narratives offered by various online media. In any case, it is the “space of flows”, as opposed to “space of places”, as suggested by M. Castells.99 It’s therefore also natural that the paradigms of the New Media function as emancipatory in the neoliberal sense: it evokes a progressive weakening of the government control, which is seen widely in contemporary communications policy research as largely a consequence of the technological change in particular.100 In the interactive space of flows, Grand Narratives are too robust, too inflexible, rigid, immobile and disciplinary to make an impact – they are a key that does not fit into a keyhole. Something as market parallelism, however - the shaping of the media’s content according to the criteria of the market - might intensify, since it is also a liquid, interactive category which is likely to erode the decisive impact of media policies, passing the media to the pure logic of market further. Political parallelism is predictable, it is either a promotion of certain political agenda or withholding of facts unfavorable towards it – while market parallelism is as dynamic and unpredictable as the
98 Barry, A., On Interactivity, In The New Media Theory Reader, edited by Hassan & Thomas, Open University Press, 2006, p. 180 99 Webster, F., Theories of the Information Society, 2nd Edition, Routledge, 2002, p. 107 100 Collins, R., Media and Identity in Contemporary Europe: Consequences of Global Convergence, Intellect Books, 2002, p.135 49 audiences, advertising industry, and media markets themselves. Being as liquid and as flexible as everything around it, market parallelism becomes identified as part of, in Herbert Marcuse’s terms, “natural order of things”.101 Online media, therefore, with its interactive paradigm as opposed to that of a disciplinary, is more “bendable” by the market, more receptive and shapeable by it, therefore there lies a potential intensification of market parallelism specifically within the interactive, limitlessly horizontal network platform of online media. Here, for example, if we accept the implications of Georg Simmel’s famous theory of Tragedy of Culture, one possible conclusion we can draw in that case is that the interactive space of flows of the online media accelerates the Tragedy immensely: that is, if we would agree to accept the content produced by journalism as a part of Simmel’s objective culture. In Simmel’s theory, objective culture stands for the total sum of man’s creative output, while the subjective culture is man’s capability to internalize and thus “control” the objective culture by grasping it and making sense of it, as well as being able produce one’s own cultural output and thus increasing the pool of objective culture. Now, what happens in modernity, according to Simmel, is that the growth and expansion of objective culture outpaces the extension of man’s subjective culture possibilities, and in this way man increasingly loses control of the world: thus, paradoxically, every great breakthrough in science or art makes an individual less in control, less in mastery of the world, more minute in comparison to ever more immense pool of objective culture. If we accept journalism’s output as a part of objective culture – and there seems to be no obvious reason not to – next step we have to take is to put it into the context of interactive space of flows in which online media operates. This space of flows takes away most of the material restrictions which previously have constrained the mass dissemination of information within the public sphere, such as the need to have a printed outlet or to be within a position to be broadcasted, and in such way the internet and online media, for example, amplify immensely the potential growth of journalistic and quasi-journalistic output within the objective culture, liquidifying the notion of what is “journalism” itself – and, more importantly - what “professional journalism” is. It also becomes less clear for the audiences, as their subjective culture, their internalizing capability becomes overwhelmed with massive amount of creative output which previously could’ve found place only under umbrella of print or broadcast media. In this case, the liquidity of the online media seems to be too liquid for such robust terms as a traditional notion of journalistic professionalism and separation between “serious” and “popular” media outlets. The traditional narrative of journalistic professionalism, with its respective list of standards of quality
101 Marcuse, H., Vienamatis žmogus: brandžiosios industrinės visuomenės ideologijos tyrimai, Lietuvos kultūros taryba, 2014, p. 166 50 and ethics, becomes too broad and robust to be applied to the fluid and dynamic nature of information within the immense interactive space of flows.
2.5 The Incredulity towards Journalistic Professionalism
Hallin and Mancini have explicitly contrasted professionalization in journalism and its instrumentalization, stating the media can be also instrumentalized by commercial factors, such as advertisement industry, although in their Comparing Media Systems they have only chosen to refer to political instrumentalization, in their theory mostly prevalent in media systems with high political parallelism.102 They have described the effects of political parallelism and thus political instrumentalization on journalistic professionalism: “journalists will lack autonomy, political rather than distinctively journalistic criteria will guide the practice of journalism, and media will serve particular interests rather than functioning as a “public trust”.103 However, in our view, what is applicable in contrasting journalistic professionalism with political parallelism, is also essentially applicable to the case of contrasting market parallelism, or in Hallin and Mancini’s terms, commercial instrumentalization with journalistic professionalism. Hallin and Mancini’s commercial instrumentalization is in some ways different from the notion of market parallelism, though. To them, it’s either “more blatant examples” such as product placement in cinema or TV production, or direct commercial power links between advertisers and the media, such as demands or pressure from advertisers to have influence on the editorial content – for example, direct or indirect pressure not to publish any damaging information about a company buying advertisement space in a given media outlet. And while the concept of market parallelism in its essence has the same final effect on journalistic professionalism – journalists and/or editors, in various ways and to a higher or lesser extent, will modify and shape the content in a way which helps to maximize the revenue from advertising, thus lessening the autonomy from external actors – the “process” itself is essentially different. The case which Hallin and Mancini have mentioned implies a personal (as opposed to impersonal) pressure, a function and direct relation between two individual Agencies representing two different industries, one to a certain extent consciously trying to exercise power over the other. These cases might be not systematic as they do not pervade the structure – these are power relations and shadow practices of competition already within the market, the outcome of these relations
102 Hallin, Daniel; Mancini, Paolo, Comparing Media Systems. Three Models of Media and Politics, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 37 103 Ibid., p. 37 51 wholly depend on the two Agencies or Actors, their financial size and strength, the diversity of the advertisement and media market, etc. The notion of market parallelism, on the other hand, suggests a reflexive relation between the structure and the agency, in terms of sociology of Anthony Giddens. When the structure is pervaded by neoliberal ethos, and then in turn media policy starts framing the media as solely a private actor in the market pursuing solely financial interest, the media reflects this positioning and framing as well. The “commercial instrumentalization” is thus naturalized and rationalized – there are no direct, personal power relations involved in this case. Since the media is just another private enterprise, it is only natural that either owners, editors or journalists – or all of them at the same time – favor, create or pack the content in a way which will generate more views, more emotions, outrage or controversy and thus more revenue from advertising. If these “catchy” news correlate with politics, economy or other “public interest” issues – then the public will be more exposed to these “public interest” news, if not, then “interesting” content will be extracted from other fields. Exception is possible as a personal choice – like in the case of Eugene Meyer, a longtime publisher of The Washington Post, who lost millions of dollars every year during his first twenty years of ownership due to the fact that he ran the paper as a public and political statement and platform,104 rather than a private business, the primary task of which would be a financial gain. The implications of this for the notion of journalistic professionalism in itself is complex: it’s not that simply market parallelism means that infotainment becomes a dominant paradigm among the news, headlining such things as private and public life of “stars” and reporting crime combined with car accidents. This would be an oversaturated reductionism: much more often, it reshapes the “serious” content, rather than flooding everything with pure infotainment. In a certain sense, even politics can enter the domain of infotainment. Schudson notes the work of Thomas Patterson, who noted that “journalists see political careers as more oriented to politics as a game than to politics as policy”.105 This means that attention will be diverted to individuals, parties and personal conflicts between them, rather than the implications of policies they form, advocate, legislate and/or oppose, also what these implications are within the social context and what interests have shaped them. Also, instead of balancing between the analysis of the content of politicians’ speeches and possible personal strategic motivations behind them, only the latter will be stressed, often disregarding the analysis of content of speeches or comments. According to Patterson,
104 Schudson, M., The Sociology of News, W. W. Norton & Company, 2003, p. 118 105 Ibid., p. 92 52 between 1960 and 1992, there has been a progressive increase in the proportion of New York Times political stories that emphasizes a “game” framework or schema rather than a “policy” one.106 As Jean K. Chalaby notes, the distinction between “entertaining” and “quality” journalism in England, for example, was already clear-cut in the very beginning of 20th Century: “newspapers in the popular camp would include tit-bits of foreign news, a society column, gossip from the entertainment scene (theatres and opera houses), a good dose of human interest stories, a solid sports page with racing, cricket and football, numerous illustrations and a generous amount of sensational material”.107 According to Chalaby, the “two formats” drifted further and further away from each other throughout the interwar period, until finally in 1947 this distinctive polarization was detected by the Hutchins commission, the report of which noted a “lack of newspapers more serious and better balanced than the popular papers but more varied and easier to read than the quality”.108 Naturally, these two distinct types of outlets treating news differently, and therefore, in a sense, two distinct type of journalism, have contributed to define the concept of journalistic professionalism by defining its opposition. As Chalaby puts it, the journalists working the “popular” type of media tend to emphasize dramatic elements in a story, often excluding contextual evidence, since the contextual facts make a story more complex and therefore less and contrasting, and in turn less emotional.109 Down to its basic elements, this distinction between “popular” and “quality” journalism is a distinction between stressing the interesting (in the popular, crude sense) and the important (in a sense what’s important for a civil society within the framework of participatory democracy). Chalaby notes that when pre-war American journalist and owner of a “popular” type of newspaper William Hearst assumed this same distinction, he stated that what’s interesting is not necessarily important – and vice versa – and claimed readiness “to give readers what is of interest to them, regardless of whatever it is important or not”.110 At this point it is important to note: this kind of chasing of what’s “interesting” over what’s “important”, or even a discursive norm of pure sensationalism, is not a new phenomena even for the 20th Century. Chalaby, for example, describes the emergence of “yellow journalism” in New York in late 19th Century, when the “direct influence of the competitive relations” brought about a struggle between such papers as World, Journal and the Herald, some of them which took to headlines such as “He crucified himself” (1891) or “His wife was a man” (1891) to attract attention
106 Ibid., p. 93 107 Chalaby, Jean K., The Invention of Journalism, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, p. 168 108 Ibid., p. 169 109 Ibid., p. 176 110 Ibid., p. 176 53 of a wider readership.111 During the most of the 20th Century, this more or less clear distinction between journalism of entertainment, manufacturing “interesting but unimportant” stories, and “serious” journalism, providing important, but not always “interesting” material to their audiences, remained outlined and clear. Towards the end of the 20th Century something started changing, though. As Manuel Castells notes, during the 1990s the notion of “political scandal” in the news media became more prevalent than ever before, a wave of “scandals” reported by the media damaged the ratings of politicians or altogether swept them from their offices from the U.S. of Bill Clinton, throughout Germany of Helmut Kohl, all the way to Japan ruled by the Liberal-Democratic party for decades, which lost its hegemony due to media reporting – all this happened while such NGOs as Transparency International haven’t noted any significant increase in political corruption throughout the democratic world.112 The measurements of political corruption remained stable – as high or as low as ever, depending on the perspective – while the narrative of “political scandal” surged in the media. According to Castells, this trend of personalization of politics in the media is increasing, on one hand, due to the convergence and increasing similarity between the Right and Left wing politics and policies – which itself shifts the attention of the voters towards the personalities and their reliability. On the other hand, he claims that this personalization of politics is due to the fact that the media, empowered more than ever before by technologies such as the internet and thus in general more than ever before independent from strict political control, is turning personalization of politics into “politics of scandal” as a way to exercise power over politics.113 Though if at this point we distance ourselves from the notion of power explored further by Castells and come back into the field of journalistic professionalism under the notion of Patterson and Schudson that journalists of the “popular” background of media see political careers as more oriented to politics as a game than to politics as policy,114 in this case Manuel Castells provides a clear trend for us: during the 1990s and onto the 21th Century, there has been a shift from “quality” journalism traditionally treating “politics as policy” towards the treatment of politics predominantly as a game and competition between personalities, a game the ultimate, peak expression of which is “scandal”. In other words, “quality” journalism was increasingly merging with the paradigms of the “popular” journalism, the standards of professionalism traditionally seen as belonging exclusively to the “quality” side of the media were converging and eventually merging
111 Ibid., p. 147 112 Castells, M., Tapatumo Galia, Poligrafija ir Informatika, 2006, p. 374-375 113 Ibid., p. 376 114 Schudson, M., The Sociology of News, W. W. Norton & Company, 2003, p. 92 54 with the methods of “infotainment”, and the distinction between “the important” and “the interesting” became less clear. This works in synergy with Castells’ network of flows and the online media: according to Erja Kolari, a “multiprofessional” journalist is becoming favored in media organizations, a journalist who can make use of different formats and platforms, create text for both web and printed platforms, and is able to “think and plan visually”115 – Kolari summed this up as “weakening of well-contoured professionalism, characteristic of the so-called modern era”.116 The “contours”, according to him, are being erased via “weakening collective ethos younger journalists”, who are more and more relying on freelance jobs rather than on a systematic work in a particular outlet, and “the emerging vacuum seems to be filled with the allround expertise that is more flexible in thoughts (no strict ethical codes) and deeds (altering jobs and working fields is more and more common), and not very well-contoured at all”.117 Kolari goes on to note that at the same time regional newspapers in Finland are trying to maintain their attractiveness in the market by trying to appeal to audiences with “tailored journalistic products”, thus organizing their content “along the so-called A- and B- sections”, the “A- section” meaning national and international news including politics and columns, and “B- section” being “new sort of articles with lifestyle and consumer orientation”. It is important to note that Kolari does not claim this to be a completely novel phenomenon: “we could see the A-section addressing the reader as an active citizen and local inhabitant, whereas the B-section addresses the reader as consumer and pleasure seeker, although a complete dichotomy would be wrong; the readers have always appreciated the pleasure of reading the traditional paper as such“.118 Thus Kolari, in part, rectifies the observation of Schudson who claims the complete dichotomy between „the Important“ and „the Interesting“: rather, according to Kolari, it was always the combination of the two in most outlets, and even the most „serious“ and professional ones have never fully abstained from reporting „human interest“ stories, etc. Kolari then goes on to describe the phenomenon unveiling in the contemporary Finnish media: increasingly, the journalists responsible for creating the „B- section“ content, are being referred to as „producers“, a professional title before used exclusively in TV production, became more and more applied to journalists in Finland since at least 1997.119 One of the main characteristics of this new „journalist-producer“ professional class is that they tend to nourish much
115 Kolari, Erja, Journalistic Professionalism as Contextual Expertise, University of Helsinki, 2007, p. 4, retrieved from: http://www.helsinki.fi/communication/research/publications/papers/WP11.pdf, last access 28.04.2015 116 Ibid., p. 4 117 Ibid., p.5 118 Ibid., p. 9 119 Ibid., p. 9 55 closer ties with the managerial level and the marketing section of the outlet rather than their journalist colleagues, because (and hence) “the logic of the producer’s work separates his/her work from the logic of a traditional journalist’s work, and places him/her into a new discursive realm, where the working language and principles of organizing the work are different. The object of a producer’s work is the new regional journalism concept, where the reader is addressed as a consumer in need of individual counseling, practical lifestyle choice and entertainment. The newspapers’ need to do new sort of journalism legitimizes the new sort of journalistic professionalism, whose practitioners therefore automatically enjoy a secured position in the organizational settings“.120 That is, it is safe to assume that within the framework of neoliberal ethos induced market parallelism within the media, the main problem of traditional notion of journalistic professionalism is not that “the Interesting” is getting more and more space next to “the Important”, but rather that the two are converging towards a new commodity, informational product, which media, as “just another business”, sells. It is only natural that this new kind of product requires new kind of professionalism. Market parallel media is naturally compelled to erase the borders between the “quality” and “entertainment” journalism, making quality entertaining, and entertainment – of seemingly informational nature. By “naturally” here we mean that market parallel media is essentially nothing more than business responding to competition and demand forces within the market, and packaging its product accordingly. In this sense, a journalist working in such outlet is also a producer at the same time: the dissolution of traditional notion of journalistic professionalism essentially means that the definition has become liquid and open to include any useful components required to create a successful product in a given market. In this sense, we can’t easily escape Lyotard’s undertones, when he described postmodern condition as “incredulity towards metanarratives”.121 Taking up this framework, isn’t the state of journalistic professionalism today yet another expression of the postmodern condition, rigid traditional notion of professionalism being one of the main metanarratives of journalism, on top of which the many various sub-narratives of what constitutes a quality professional journalist are stacked? It does seem that the metanarrative of journalistic professionalism is undergoing what Lyotard described as “losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal”.122 There is no new Hutchens Commission forming since the notion journalistic
120 Kolari, Erja, Journalistic Professionalism as Contextual Expertise, University of Helsinki, 2007, p. 10, retrieved from: http://www.helsinki.fi/communication/research/publications/papers/WP11.pdf, last access 28.04.2015 121 Lyotard, Jean F., The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, in The Postmodernism Reader: Foundational Texts, Routledge, 2004, p. 123 122 Ibid., p. 124 56 professionalism has dissipated and liquidified and often journalists themselves have lost credulity towards it. And the question of what to do about it is where Habermas stands in a strong opposition against Lyotard. In the spirit of Lyotard, the most logical follow up question is “where, after the metanarratives, can the legitimacy reside?”123 After all, it is the metanarrative that explicates what is “true” and “valid” – or “professional”, for that matter - as a legitimacy of any statement depends on its attribution to that certain metanarrative – and according to Lyotard, “consensus is only a particular state of discussion, not its end”.124 In this sense, Lyotard would accept today state of journalistic professionalism as somewhat an inevitable state in post-modern society. However, Richard Rorty claims, precisely such posture led Jürgen Habermas to label Lyotard even as a “neoconservative”, since incredulity towards metanarratives offers us no theoretical reason to move into one direction or the other, rather it takes way “the dynamic which liberal social thought has traditionally relied upon”.125 Precisely because of this, Habermas was also critical of Foucault – a thinker who famously tried to shake off the label of a postmodernist, but the image of whom still essentially persists on that label because of his notion that any “truth” is just a product and tool of power, a notion which presents him almost as a stoic in the popular vision and forbids him from using the word “we” in any normative manner of specific social direction. According to Rorty, this was the main moral wedge that separated Habermas from Lyotard and Foucault – the latter two were simply too suspicious not to get caught up in any “metanarrative”, whatever it may be, even the one formulated by Habermas – the “metanarrative of emancipation”. Neither Foucault, nor Lyotard could simply say “We know that there must be a better way of doing things; let us look for it together”; so naturally for them, Habermas’ socialization of subjectivity and philosophy of consensus, or even a notions of “public sphere” or “communicative community” were all meaningless.126 If we take up Habermas’ stance, then we can at least identify an important root of today journalistic professionalism’s “identity crisis” as one stemming from losing the sense of any meaningful direction: in market parallel outlets, there are increasingly no clear professional standards to adhere and live up too, as the standards themselves can waver, dissolve and reshape every time including or excluding certain professional components as expected requirements, and this in turn comes from an unstable, changing environment of competition and demand in the media market.
123 Rorty, Richard, Habermas and Lyotard on Post-Modernity, in Praxis International, April 1984, p. 32 124 Ibid., p. 33 125 Ibid., p. 40 126 Ibid., p. 41 57
2.6 “DELFI”: The Mirror of Trends
In case of Lithuania, the news portal “DELFI” was chosen in order to explore the effects of market parallelism on media’s content: it enjoys the widest audience of any media outlet in Lithuania, online or print. According to online audience research conducted by “Gemius Baltic”, January 2015 was the most successful month in entire history of the website, first established in 2000: that month, the online outlet enjoyed 1,22 million unique visitors.127 In 2007, “DELFI” was acquired by the Estonian media company “Ekspress Grupp”, the three main shareholders of which are an Estonian company “HHL Ruhm OU”, the merger between the Luxembourg based bank
Crédit Européen SA and the bank „ING Luxembourg“ forming the bank „ING Luxembourg S.A.“, and a prominent Estonian businessman Hans Luik.128 „Ekspress Grupp“ enjoys a relatively strong media market position in all three Baltic states – most prominently in Estonia, but has also two subsidiaries in Lithuania, namely „Delfi Holding“, which owns not only „delfi.lt“, but also purely infotainment online outlets targeting specifically female audience „moteris.lt“ and „panele.lt“; and a publishing company „Ekspress leidyba“, which publishes a variety of popular magazines in Lithuanian language. According to Hans Luik, the Estonian „DELFI“ (delfi.ee), also owned by „Ekspress Grupp“, has recently inclined towards a „lighter, entertaining content“, but „as far as he knows“, the Lithuanian „DELFI“ is „more solid, more oriented towards quality news“.129 The Lithuanian „DELFI“ also oficially claims itself to be not only the „the main news portal in Lithuania“, but also states that its „quality“ surpasses most other news portals operating in Lithuania.130 But what is being assessed as “quality” in this case? Is it, as Jean K. Chalaby would argue (as previously discussed), “quality” as opposed to “entertaining”, favoring “the important” as opposed to merely “the interesting” – not only that, but also clearly separating the two? Is it, in case of reporting and analyzing politics in the media, as Michael Schudson and Thomas Patterson would note, treating politics as policy as opposed to “game” of personalities peaking in a narrative of “scandal”? Politics, surely, cannot be reduced exclusively neither to the former nor to the latter: rather, identifying “the important” in each case, and separating it from “the interesting” can be argued for:
127 DELFI kilstelėjo lankomumo kartelę: sausį pasiektas visų laikų rekordas, retrieved from: http://www.delfi.lt/verslas/media/delfi-kilstelejo-lankomumo-kartele-sausi-pasiektas-visu-laiku- rekordas.d?id=67259510, last access 06.05.2015 128 http://stirna.info/media/delfi-lt, last access 06. 05. 2015 129 DELFI akcininkas: diktatoriška propaganda išmokė labiau vertinti spaudos laisvę, retrieved from: http://www.delfi.lt/news/daily/lithuania/delfi-akcininkas-diktatoriska-propaganda-ismoke-labiau-vertinti-spaudos- laisve.d?id=67087474, last access 06. 05. 2015 130 Apie DELFI, retrieved from: http://www.delfi.lt/help/about.php, last access 06. 05. 2015 58
“quality” in the media arguably represents the ability to always separate the two and to report both, but always clearly separated and always favoring “the important” by, for example, assigning it the top and most visible space and spending the most financial and intellectual resources reporting and analyzing it. In case of “DELFI”, there are, for example, occurrences when the outlet chose to disregard “the important” completely: on October 30 of 2014, for example, “DELFI” ignored the press conference “How will “Swedbank” benefit from the introduction of Euro in Lithuania, and how legal and honest is it towards the consumers”131 held by the Confederation of Business Employers of Lithuania – a conference evoked in reaction to litigations between the at the time Financial Adviser to Prime Minister of Lithuania Stasys Jakeliūnas and „Swedbank“. Jakeliūnas claimed that „Swedbank“ was violating the Lithuanian Euro Introduction Law by planning to raise the prime lending rates from 2015. At first the representatives of the bank refused to acknowledge this, resulting in intense legal arguments behind closed doors later published by Jakeliūnas and, publicly, in the mentioned press conference and intense discussion in various Lithuanian media. As Jakeliūnas noted, however, „DELFI“ had completely ignored the press conference,132 and the whole evolving story. About a week later, when “Swedbank” gave in to the public pressure and decided to overturn its decision to raise interest rates, “DELFI” merely reported that “in the course of last three weeks “Swedbank” has decided” not to raise the rates – ignoring the background of such decision, its circumstances and main actors.133 How do we rate this case within the paradigm of „quality“ and journalistic professionalism? This particular case seems to bring out another important point: „quality“ is directly proportional with „accuracy“, „accuracy“ meaning fewer misleading „filters“ between the audience and the reality of facts possible. We have a basic description of this principle in the handbook outlining professional principles, created specifically for and used by the journalists working in the highly acclaimed „Reuters“ news agency: “Accuracy means that our images and stories must reflect reality. It can be tempting for journalists to "hype" or sensationalise material, skewing the reality of the situation or misleading the reader or viewer into assumptions and impressions that are wrong and potentially harmful. A "flood" of immigrants, for example, may in reality be a relatively small number of people just as a
131 http://sc.bns.lt/view/item.php?id=172825, last access 11. 05. 2015 132 Swedbanko byla. Premjero patarėjo užrašai, retrieved from: http://jakeliunas.lt/Swedbanko_byla.pdf, last access 11.05.2015 133 „Swedbank“ persigalvojo dėl būsto paskolų, retrieved from: http://www.delfi.lt/verslas/nekilnojamas- turtas/swedbank-persigalvojo-del-busto-paskolu.d?id=66307448, last access 11.05.2015 59
"surge" in a stock price may be a quite modest rise. Stopping to think, and to discuss, how we use words leads to more precise journalism and also minimises the potential for harm“.134 In the case of Swedank‘s prime lending rates story, it was quite clearly vice versa: the background of the story was ignored and the reality was skewered towards a “simple boring fact”, rather than a potential “scandal”, and it is wholly unclear whether this happened out of sheer overlooking or deliberate withholding, signaling, for example, financial ties with the bank; which is “unprofessional” at best in either case. However, gravitating towards the “scandal” is usually more common. While from the perspective of the journalist this can be „tempting“, in the end it all depends on the outlet: within the framework of market parallelism, the „tempting“ practices which often lead readers into „assumptions and impressions that are wrong and potentially harmful“ can become encouraged, as opposed to discouraged, since, in the case of online media, it quite simply means more clicks and thus more advertising revenue. If we agree that „accuracy“ is an unavoidable component of journalistic professionalism, and if we define accuracy as being in opposition to skewered reality, then we can assume that market parallelism drives media outlets influenced by it to be purposefully inaccurate: they add various skewering filters between the audience and reality, filters that turn a piece of information into a commodity. The “market value” of this commodity, however, is not derived from the actual “importance” (public interest-wise) of this information in socio-political reality, but, rather, is derived from the subjective editorial judgment of how “intriguing”, that is “interesting, it is. As discussed in previous chapter, “the important” and “the interesting” converge, and this is how market parallelism plays a role in this process. “The important” is subjectively judged by how potentially “interesting” it is, making the two clauses almost hierarchically tied to each other. In the case of “DELFI“, the outlet potentially falls within this grey zone of market parallelism: the outlet itself reveals that 100% of its revenue is comprised of advertising.135 Within the framework of business model used by “DELFI”, where each click on the article brings additional few cents of revenue from ads placed around the articles, the headline, a doorstep to the information, can become a shiny package, an advertisement in itself to the commodified piece of information found behind the doorstep. In the traditional notion of journalistic professionalism, the headline is but a precise and accurate representation of the information, conveying its essence, as described, for example, in the handbook of “Reuters” journalists:
134 Reuters Handbook of Journalism, p. 5, retrieved from: http://handbook.reuters.com/extensions/docs/pdf/handbookofjournalism.pdf, last access 06.05.2015 135 Apie DELFI, retrieved from: http://www.delfi.lt/help/about.php, last access 06.05.2015 60
„Headlines are both a presentational and writing issue. Far too many are dull, unclear and uninformative, prompting the reader to switch off, rather than tune in. They must be sharp, clear and informative. In the case of spot stories, they should contain the basic information investors need to make a decision. Use short words instead of long; use the active voice, not passive; use present tense and avoid unfamiliar abbreviations. It is better to convey one idea crisply and clearly rather than cram in two ideas awkwardly“136 It is thus the issue of finding the balance between not being “dull” and still conveying the essential information, that is, representing the essence of the article. The “importance” of information is thus fully represented by the content itself, by either its sheer relevance or depth of analysis, or the combination of both. However, online media influenced by market parallelism tend to resort to the technique of the so-called clickbaiting: blowing the content out of proportion of its relevance by artificially adding a layer of “the interesting”. This can mean intentionally blurring the meaning of the content in the headline by a quote out of context which looks “intriguing” precisely only because it’s been ripped out of context; adding emotional statements or even judgments in the headline, or resorting to sensationalist, hyperbolized and dramatic over-generalization of the content. The potential emotional impact of this towards the audience has been vividly described by the host of the hit satirical news program “The Daily Show”, Jon Stewart, in his interview to the New York Magazine: “<…> when I look at the internet, I feel the same as when I’m walking through Coney island. It’s like carnival barkers, and they all sit out there and go, “Come on in here and see a three-legged man!” So you walk in and it’s a guy with a crutch”137 This humorous allegory is quite accurate: stripped to its basic elements, clickbaiting is essentially an additional, if primary, reality distorting filter between the reader and the reality erected by the logic of market parallel online media. It is being dishonest to the reader by misrepresenting the content via the headline, attracting audiences which maybe wouldn’t have had clicked the article if they were aware of the actual content in the first place: it further disintegrates the borderline between the “quality” and “popular” journalism by mixing their readership, as the audiences simply looking for the infotainment might as well now click the “serious” information under the disguise of illusionary scandalous details cloaked over by the simple technique of clickbaiting. The possible argument that it helps infotainment consumers who are not interested in politics otherwise, for example, immerse in the political information, is not really valid: having clicked the scandalous and intriguing headline, and in turn noticing that this three-legged man is
136 Reuters Handbook of Journalism, p. 65, retrieved from: http://handbook.reuters.com/extensions/docs/pdf/handbookofjournalism.pdf, last access 06.05.2015 137 In Conversation: Jon Stewart, New York Magazine, retrieved from: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/10/jon-stewart-rosewater-in-conversation.html, last access 10.05.2015 61 merely a person holding a crutch, the infotainment consumer, disappointed, most likely does not proceed to read the whole article. And then even if he would, on the sole reason that he was clickbaited, that probably would not be a better case from the view point of journalistic professionalism: the line between “quality” and “popular” would be further disintegrating, as the target readership would now be essentially non-separable. For example, as “DELFI” was reporting the inauguration ceremony of the reelected mayor of Klaipėda in April 2015, they disguised a rather uneventful ceremony under a classic notion of clickbait. The headline dramatically stated: “The first session of Klaipėda city council nearly ended in a coup”138 Upon opening the article, however, the reader would learn that this “coup” was only a small, joking remark by a council member referring to a minute protocol mistake of handing the reelected mayor a wrong oath-taking text – a text attributed to another council member. The “incident” is described in a couple of sentences, and the article is continued without a further, reference to it. This is a perfect example of the clickbaiting case: a rather serious, uneventful, and non-sensational content is skewered and bended via the headline as much as possible; a voluntary inaccuracy is committed in order to gather more views. This also market parallelism in its essence: commercial interest impacting the content by fully merging the “quality” (serious, quite ordinary political content in this case) and the “popular” (sensationalist headline skewering the reality and merging audiences of infotainment and “serious” journalism, thus further liquidifying the metanarrative of journalistic professionalism, disseminating the standards and thus possibly perpetuating the incredulity towards the need of a robust traditional notion of “quality”). We have chosen further to analyze qualitatively the narrative of the 2015 Lithuanian municipal elections in “DELFI” in the case of Kaunas: more precisely, to explore to what extent, if any, the effects of market parallelism are felt in such a classic public-interest type of narrative as elections. The purpose of this analysis is not to try and quantify the effects in any objective way, nor is it to measure, for example, what percentage of “DELFI” content output falls within the “popular” category, as that wouldn’t be to the point of this paper: on the contrary, we try to claim, that within a market parallel outlet the “quality” and “popular” paradigms of journalism have converged. In one of the very first bigger articles aimed to start the pre-election narrative, “DELFI” starts on the personal notes right from the headline: “V. Matijošaitis referred to Mayor of
138 Pirmajame Klaipėdos miesto tarybos posėdyje vos neįvyko perversmas, 2015 04 16, retrieved from: http://www.delfi.lt/news/daily/lithuania/pirmajame-klaipedos-miesto-tarybos-posedyje-vos-neivyko- perversmas.d?id=67718630, last access 12.05.2015 62
Kaunas by the title of Russian Monarch”,139 which is right away misleading and quasi- sensationalist, as later the quotes in the article reveal that Matijošaitis - the most prominent challenger in the election who later proved to be victorious over the conservative mayor A. Kupčinskas, who tried running for his consequent third term – compared him to the Russian Tsar, but haven‘t directly called him such. In any case, a personal attack is stressed in the headline, functioning within the paradigm of Schudson and Patterson where they identify the “popular” type of media portraying politics as a “game” of personalities, rather as an object of policy. In this article, however, there seems to be a balance: policy differences between two running candidates are addressed, as Matijošaitis is quoted stating that he offers to reduce the number of public sector municipality employees by 20%. That is, essentially, a liberal policy. A later article concentrating on the coming municipal elections in Kaunas dived in much more to the “game of personalities” paradigm, fishing out a comment written by Mayor Kupčinskas on “Facebook” and presenting it as a fierce personal attack against Matijošaitis.140 The article includes a screenshot of the said disrespectful comment, however, the emotions behind it are wholly unclear: the context, also visible in the screenshot, would imply more of an attemp at humor than anger. “DELFI”, however, gives the impression of full scale drama for clickbaiting purposes and uses a hyperbolized cliché “pratrūko“, which could be translated as „burst out in anger“ in the headline. Since there is not much of a story here, the „personal attack“ of Matijošaitis from the previous article is brought up, thus fully evoking the „game of personalities“ paradigm, leaving the policy questions behind. To the credit of “DELFI”, they have contacted Kupčinskas for a comment and included in this article, and the mayor, naturally, denied referring specifically to Matijošaitis. That, however, did not influence the headline nor the tone of the article in any way, which opens with the statement that a „fierce“ battle for votes is beginning, and with a remark that „sometimes the feuds between politicians remind of a kindergarden“. The article can therefore be seen as a piece of infotainment with some notion of journalistic professionalism, as the mayor was contacted for further comment. That is thus, essentially, an infotainment commodity with a pretense of quality. The next important piece of Kaunas municipal elections narrative in “DELFI” comes in after the first round of elections, where the non-partisan citizen movement of Matijošaitis “Vieningas Kaunas” claimed the most seats in the council of the municipality. The second round would determine the mayor between the two remaining candidates, so the framing and stressing of
139 V. Matijošaitis Kauno merą pavadino Rusijos monarcho titulu, 2014 10 13, http://www.delfi.lt/news/daily/lithuania/v-matijosaitis-kauno-mera-pavadino-rusijos-monarcho-titulu.d?id=66021216, last access 06.05.2015 140 A. Kupčinskas pratrūko: galėsi – pasirinksi merą krabakiaušį, 2014 10 27, http://www.delfi.lt/news/daily/lithuania/a- kupcinskas-pratruko-galesi-pasirinksi-mera-krabakiausi.d?id=66229524, last access 13.05.2015 63 the “personality battle” was the most favorable at that period of time. The headline at this point used the same cliché as in the case of former article about the “personal attack” from Kupčinskas: “V. Matijošaitis pratrūko”,141 again, via this cliché, implying an intense bursting out of emotions. The critique expressed by Matijošaitis towards the conservative party quoted in the article indeed implies a frustration and even a notion of verbal revenge, but the headline is still nowhere accurate, and tries to combine a dull, overused cliché with an “intrigue”, urging the reader to click the article and to satisfy his curiosity, see the promised mysterious “scandal” packaged within, rather than to read it because the headline promises a valuable information on the elections. The tactic is held up to even within the article itself: Matijošaitis is quoted criticizing the heating industry owners in Kaunas and stating that the public sector has to play a larger role in this market as the owners are maximizing their profits in an unfair way, and thus compared this with “drug business”. This question of policy, as opposed to “game of personalities” which is the main accent of the article, is addressed only in the very end of the article, and its heading reads in a passive voice: “Compared to drug business”, thus trying to extract “the interesting” out of “the important” and stressing the former rather than the latter. The trend of stressing “personal politics” is continued throughout the period before the second round of elections. The next piece of narrative stresses an intense personal feud once again: “Before the decisive round – A. Kupčinskas strikes back to V. Matijošaitis“142 The headline, constructed as if it was meant for a boxing match, referred to very controversial Kupčinskas campaign ads hung in Kaunas, which referred to the mayor as “a patriot”, and tried to position him in direct opposition to Matijošaitis, who was claimed to be “milicininkas”, trying to invoke emotions around his temporary job as Soviet policeman in the former Lithuanian SSR. The whole article consists only of statements from the two candidates, one of which is an older, previously used statement of Matijošaitis, claiming that he doesn’t care about the insulting names by which he is being labeled – thus a continuous narrative of personal feud was being constructed further. The next two articles in the narrative are simply highlighting the debates between the candidates on the radio143 and the television144 of the public broadcaster LRT. The latter piece, the headline of which is decorated with a red sub-headline claiming a clickbait intrigue “V. Matijošaitis revealed what was his job in the Soviet police”, despite the fact that the main headline implies a
141 V. Matijošaitis pratrūko, 2015 03 04, http://www.delfi.lt/news/daily/lithuania/v-matijosaitis- pratruko.d?id=67337946, last access 13.05.2015 142 Prieš lemiamą turą – A. Kupčinsko atkirtis V. Matijošaičiui, 2015 03 06, http://www.delfi.lt/archive/pries-lemiama- tura-a-kupcinsko-atkirtis-v-matijosaiciui.d?id=67362548, last access 13.05.2015 143 Kauno mero rinkimų įkarštis: svarbiausia – kapstytis po praeitį, 2015 03 10, http://www.delfi.lt/archive/kauno-mero- rinkimu-ikarstis-svarbiausia-kapstytis-po-praeiti.d?id=67392742, last access 13.05.2015 144 A. Kupčinskas ir V. Matijošaitis susipliekė, 2015 03 12, http://www.delfi.lt/news/daily/lithuania/a-kupcinskas-ir-v- matijosaitis-susiplieke.d?id=67414882, last access 13.05.2015 64 critical editorial voice towards “digging in the past”: “The heat of Kaunas Mayor elections: the central point – to dig in the past”. The paradox of this particular case might imply that the market parallelism has a potential to undermine or transcend any pretense in critical or moral stance from a media outlet – the premise for this is already coded when trying to amass audiences by purposefully inaccurate representation of a particular situation within a headline. The second article, also consisting merely of describing the debates held by the public broadcaster, resorts to a vague cliché within a headline: “susipliekė”, which could be translated to an effect of simply “fought”, or rather “ripped off at each other”. The headline purposely leaves out any context as to create an intrigue of “what exactly happened this time and where?” The post-election construction of the narrative is also largely based on either clickbaiting in expense of otherwise regular political information145 or a pure case of sensationalism regarding the content itself as well.146 In the latter the information that Matijošaitis, who won the election, is leaving the position of the head-manager of his food company in order to be able to assume the mayor‘s office is wrapped in a scarce headline „V. Matijošaitis is stepping down“, which once again leaves out any additinional information or context, trying to spark the reader‘s curiosity once the the article is opened and the first few sentences are read – the article itself is short, specific and concrete. The next article fitting in the post-election narrative, on the other hand, is a pure case of sensationalism, as already mentioned. The headline itself already tries to convey a sense of scandal and sensation: “The maneuver of fleeing Matijošaitis reminds of a crime-drama”. The article is supposed to inform that the new mayor of Kaunas is stepping down as a president of Lithuanian Cycling Federation, a position to which he was elected in February, just prior to the first round of the election. An artificial intrigue is built up in the heading of the article and is tried to be sustained throughout the whole text. The heading quotes Matijošaitis claiming that it wasn’t his wish to step down and rather was a recommendation from the Central Electoral Commission aimed to avoid potential future conflict of interest, but then the Commission is claimed to deny having provided any recommendations. A short interview with Matijošaitis provided at the end of the articles reveals the journalist’s perception of where the potential “scandal” is hidden in this story: he poses the question whether “cycling was only necessary to you for election campaign purposes”. Matijošaitis then challenges the journalist as to why he assumes that the position helped his campaign in anyway and states that he did not expect to win at all. Journalist then drops the topic
145 V. Matijošaitis traukiasi, 2015 04 02, http://www.delfi.lt/verslas/verslas/v-matijosaitis-traukiasi.d?id=67609398, last access 14.05.2015 146 Į krūmus nėrusio V. Matijošaičio manevras – su detektyvo elementais, 2015 04 10, http://www.delfi.lt/sportas/kitos- sporto-sakos/i-krumus-nerusio-v-matijosaicio-manevras-su-detektyvo-elementais.d?id=67671428, last access 14.05.2015 65 and asks Matijošaitis if he’s also, “as promised”, stepping down from other positions held in the private-sector, which he briefly confirms, and the article ends. Curious “crime-drama” details promised in the headline disappear without having ever appeared, as the sensationalist headline and the tone of the article have no real substance behind them, fully operating, however, within the paradigm of politics as “a game of personalities”. No workable substance was attempted to be extracted from policy problems – most of the attention was diverted towards the said paradigm.
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CONCLUSIONS
1. The main socio-political factor influencing and shaping the media landscape – media policy and standards of journalistic professionalism – in Lithuania in the recent past has been the neoliberal ethos. It is the factor which could provide validation for questionable journalism standards of quality in the media since the ethos justifies the pursuit of commercial interest to be as valid of an option as any notion of acting “in the public interest”.
2. The impact of neoliberal ethos on media policy in Lithuania is twofold: the creation of the self- denying state action paradox and the framing of media as just another private enterprise with no notion of acting in public interest or serving as a public “watchdog”. Self-denying state action implies that the policy is formed as if the media is seen as an institution transcending ordinary agency acting merely in pursuit of commercial interest, but such policies remain unenforced, thus essentially denying their premise. Also, the media tax environment denies any policy formed as if the media was seen as the actor of the public interest and frames it as just another private enterprise pursuing solely commercial interest.
3. The neoliberal ethos combined with liberal media policy, which is marked by an effort to tame trends of political parallelism coming directly from the public sector and an understated approach in addressing the problems arising from private capital - such as media concentration or political ties of an individual owner and a lack of enforced transparency about it - results in a new unexpected entering wedge for outside influence on the media: not only for undesirable political patronage, this time stemming from private capital instead of the public sector, but also for market logic and popular demand shaping and influencing content of the media. The latter outcome can be described as market parallelism: it makes media responsive to outside influence from the private sector the same way political parallelism renders it prone to the influence from the public sector.
4. Market parallelism contributes to the trend in which the journalistic professionalism becomes less well-contoured and its standards converge with the paradigm of “infotainment”: this convergence is logically necessary to produce an informational commodity smelted from the combination of “quality” journalism and infotainment, since such product is necessary to maximize profits from advertising. This renders the old metanarrative of journalistic professionalism outdated: if the media is operating solely in pursuit of a commercial interest, then the reader has to be addressed as a
67 consumer rather than a citizen. The standards of journalism become more flexible and less defined accordingly.
5. One of the manifestations of the dissolving of well-defined notion of “quality” journalism and its convergence towards the commodity of infotainment is evident in the media by the construction of political narratives framing politics as a “game” of personalities rather than an object of policy. This is evident in the “DELFI” coverage of 2015 mayor elections of Kaunas. Rather than observing ad hominem verbal exchanges between the candidates from a distant, critical perspective, “DELFI” embraces the process and presents it as an infotainment commodity by encouraging its consumption via such techniques as clickbaiting and artificial sensationalism.
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LITERATURE AND SOURCES
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