Media Democracy: How the Media Colonize Politics PDF
Preview Media Democracy: How the Media Colonize Politics
Media Democracy Media Democracy How the Media Colonize Politics THOMAS MEYER witfi Lew Hinchman polity Copyright © Thomas Meyer 2002 The right of Thomas Meyer to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 9 First published in 2002 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishing Ltd Editorial office: Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Marketing and production: Blackwell Publishing Ltd 108 Cowley Road Oxford OX4 1JF, UK Published in the USA by Blackwell Publishing Inc. 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Meyer, Thomas, 1943- Media democracy : how the media colonize politics / Thomas Meyer, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7456-2843-5 - ISBN 0-7456-2844-3 (pbk.) 1. Mass media - Political aspects. I. Title. P95.8 .M493 2002 302.23 -dc21 2002002213 Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed in Great Britain by MPG Books, Bodmin, Cornwall This book is printed on acid-free paper. C o n t e n t s Preface: Media, Culture, and Politics vii 1 The Logic of Politics 1 2 The Logic of Mass Media 27 3 The Process of Colonization 49 4 The Effects of Colonization 73 ~ 5 The Transformation of Representative Democracy 1 □□ G Prospects for Media Democracy 1 18 Conclusion: Democracy in Transition 141 Notes 1 44- Bibliography 1 49 Index 1 58 Preface: Media, Culture, and Politics Mass-media research The mass media, their prospects and effects, their modes of opera tion and social consequences have all become key themes of social science, cultural criticism, and, ironically, of the media themselves within a remarkably short time. There are good reasons for social scientists and culture critics to pay attention: one can hardly think of another phenomenon that has shaped contemporary societies so thoroughly and durably, so profoundly and irreversibly. The increas ing influence of contemporary mass media on modern life, in many areas a quite profound one, has been studied in considerable detail. Investigations have focused not only on communicative behavior itself, but also on its sociological consequences for central domains of life such as childhood, family, leisure-time behavior, and work.1 Social and media scientists have also intensively explored the trans formations wrought by the mass media in the public and political spheres. Thus far three dimensions of the relation between the media and politics have especially preoccupied investigators: First, they have studied the way the public sphere has been trans formed as a result of changes in the mass-media communications, a process that embraces newspapers, television, the internet, and the “masses” themselves; in short, the ways in which public communi cation itself has been reshaped by the influence of the media.2 They have demonstrated that in addition to the explicitly political media formats non-factual media have broadly expanded the terms of public debate.3 The agenda-setting and agenda-building functions of modern mass media have played an especially prominent role here. However, viii Preface: Media, Culture, and Politics in the course of media research it has also become evident that it would be a great mistake to identify the audiences of media products as such with the public. Publics emerge only in much more complex processes of information and discursive interaction of citizens.4 Yet there can be no reasonable doubt of mass media’s centrality in the process of shaping the public sphere.5 Second, concerning the relation between the media and political reality, research has been undertaken to understand the diverse pat terns of the former in constructing the latter.6 These analyses have shown more and more clearly how the mass media do not just mirror political life, but generate a political “reality” that is tailored to their own requirements.7 The construction of reality by the mass media is a complex social process and all reports about political reality are inevitably affected by the criteria the media apply in selecting and presenting material, ones designed to secure maximum public response. Third, research on the impact of the media has focused on the way their characteristic constructions of reality have affected the political orientations of their addressees.8 Detailed studies on the effects of mass media present a wealth of confusing and contradictory data that seem to get fuzzier as the research methodology becomes more precise. In any case one has the impression that media studies are becoming so specialized that they can no longer be readily synthe sized into a coherent picture. Nevertheless, this research has yielded some basic insights that may be useful in developing an empirically supported evaluation of the various assumptions, processes and con sequences that condition the emergence in our time of a new politi cal phenomenon: media democracy.9 Cultural studies The research on the effects of mass media has born fruit in the form of theories concerning “videomalaise” and the “knowledge gap.”10 The former have studied suspected causal connections between fre quent TV consumption and political alienation, but have not reached consensual conclusions. Whereas, e.g., T. Patterson has argued that news media have grown more negative and more cynical and thereby produced growing popular distrust of politicians and government, and even a general disengagement from civic life, P. Norris in a more recent comparative study insists that the general “videomalaise” Preface: Media, Culture, and Politics ix argument has little empirical support.11 The issue remains contro versial. Surprisingly, the “knowledge gap” research has revealed that the spread of television consumption to more and more people involving larger segments of their time does not equalize the stock of politically relevant knowledge among subgroups of society, but instead widens such gaps between them.12 Accordingly, the chances that equal rights to democratic participation can be secured through the spread and intensification of mass-media communication have grown slimmer. Given the current state of the discipline, the one conclusion of media-impact research that appears most solidly grounded and most applicable across diverse fields of inquiry is this: the media do of course initiate the process of dissemination. However, in the last analysis, the individual members of the targeted audience bring with them certain knowledge, habits, interests and criteria of application that have a decisive bearing on the way in which media programming may affect them.1’ The media may thus offer their audience a variety of fare in many different ways, but the content will be only one input among many in shaping the citizens’ powers of judgment. This argument, however, has been driven to its “postmodern” extreme by J. Fiske’s concept of “semiotic democracy” which tends to dissolve the media text into its individual reading, so that the media them selves are not seen as being in a position to exert any real influence on their audiences’ perception of the political sphere.14 In response to this S. Hall and D. Morley have sensitized us to the discovery that the active role of diverse recipients at the demand-side of mass-media communication by no means renders the supply-side structures of the media products irrelevant.1' A vague concept of uses and gratifications in media reception that puts the blame for all kinds of deficiencies and shortcomings in the field of mediated political communication on the recipient’s shoulders alone is not in tune with reality.16 I agree with Corner’s contention that, in the future, researchers should avoid concentrating exclusively on the micro-level processes involved in public reception of media programming. Doing so would mean drawing the wrong conclusions from previous studies.17 Furthermore, a research approach stressing such micro level reception would, by its very design, exempt the potential role of media power from scientific analysis. My study is a contribution to recovering empirically supported insights into the factors that influence the macro-level, i.e., the structural conditions that govern the pre-staging of events in the media theatre. x Preface: Media, Culture, and Politics Depending on their social and individual background for large parts of the audiences the “preferred reading” (S. Hall) that is sug gested by the immanent structure of the media products themselves is dominating their actual reading. And moreover, as will be shown in chapter 3 of this book, what matters most in the context of media democracy is the fact that the key actors of the political system always reckon with the effects of the preferred reading structures of media products on the large majority of the audience, and stage-manage their own performance in accordance with it. Cultural studies and culture-critical analyses have also investigated basic changes in communicative behavior and orientation occasioned by modern mass media.18 Authors such as N. Postman and B. Barber have pushed the critique of video culture toward a new and - for democratic theory - worrisome conclusion: that the citizens of television societies may be rapidly losing their faculties of politi cal judgement as a result of the hegemony of stage-managed, entertainment-oriented presentations of events.19 With much plausi bility it has been argued that mass-media communication as a whole, by way of its modes of picking out or ignoring societal and political issues, has caused the aquiescence of the large majority of its audiences.20 Political science has furthermore analyzed the extent to which the modern media may offer politicians and their staffs un precedented opportunities to stage symbolic political events capable of winning citizens’ adherence, and thereby may indirectly redis tribute roles among the different actors in the political system.21 Researchers have particularly directed attention to the symbiotic rela tionships that flow from the common interest political and media actors have in generating maximum publicity.22 Although Postman may be right that one basic reality of today’s mass-media communications in the field of politics is the increasing tendency towards blurring the boundaries between journalism, enter tainment, public relations, and advertising, it would, however, as Dahlgren argues, be both illusory and counter-productive to restrict the analysis to the condemnation of this new reality as such by striv ing for the rationalistic model of a public “uncontaminated by media culture”.23 Consequently, the interest underlying the concept of this book is rather to understand the empirical conditions under which these new mixed types of media discourses still contribute to appro priate political information and understanding, and those conditions under which they don’t.
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