Introduction
The media has a tremendous impact on the way individuals in society construct its political and economical relations. It directly influences the process of democratic participation of the public in various policies.
During the last three to four decades there has been an ongoing debate regarding the role of the media in society. Four decades ago during the ‘Cold War’ it was seen as a debate concerning the role of free press and state directed press. Most of the attention in the West was directed toward the status and position that the media had in communist societies and its role on suppressing individual rights and freedoms and serving the dictatorship regimes. It was taken for granted that the model of free press and media of the ‘western world’ was the only model which served best society.
Nevertheless, concerns regarding the potential effects this media could have on the individual view of events rose up during the Vietnam War. Authors like Chomsky pointed out that the media helped governments present their policies in a certain way in order to avoid negative public perception. The same could be done to hide undesired consequences that these public policies can have on society.
Other authors argued the contrary. They viewed this model of media as the best possible and that empowers citizens instead of manipulating them. This empowerment comes through the model of free market participation where citizens as customers chose themselves which media to ‘consume’ and which not. This process makes possible that the media is loyal to the citizen, consumer, that to government or other forces. In this short essay we will present both views and explain shortly their arguments. Finally we will conclude the paper by revealing which side we stand on this debate.
The effect of media on democratic societies
As mentioned above there are very different approaches to this issue. We will start by assessing the ‘critical’ voices of the current relationship that the media have with society. The authors supporting this view argue that the media serves as a ‘manipulative tool’ in the hands of governments and big corporations. The first issue they raise is the fact that most of the biggest media conglomerates are owned by only a few corporations. These corporations have the core of their revenues and profits from other sources, businesses, than the media, but still they use these media channels to further expand their profits. The media and free press were born in society with the noble status of informing the people. Yet, these approach argues, it has turned into a manipulative force which is used by the owners to increase their profits. Thus the focus has diverted from informing the public so that it can benefit from this information, into informing the public so that we can make an ever increasing profit from it. The processes of ‘framing’ and ‘agenda setting’ are the basic tools that the media uses to transform the information, the news, into a consumable, selling product which would ultimately benefit the corporation owning that media (Chomsky & Herman, 44).
But what is more concerning is the use that governments make of the media in order to further their agendas by making them popular or depicting them in a certain way so that they do not become unpopular public policies.
Generally, governments are some of the biggest providers of information and news for the media, especially with big media. This is why they have developed through the years a strong relationship where the government uses the big media to launch and depict as it wishes certain public policies. Let’s take the war on terror as an example. It is the major foreign policy (which of course is part of the public policies) that the United States government has undertaken during the last decade. Since its beginnings governmental institutions and officials have been using all the media channels to transmit their views and build up support for the governmental agenda. But the media has been using this agenda as well. Sensationalist news bloomed after 2001 up until they began to become a concern for politicians also (Kleemans & Vettehen, 228).
The media used the policies enacted by government to bring sensationalist reporting to the public in an attempt to attract public attention to the channels. This way the media would benefit from increasing audiences mainly by selling advertising space. Nevertheless, even within this approach there are voices which differ from what written above. These authors argue that the role of the media in transmitting public policies to the public is essential, yet it has no influence on the designing and implementation process of these policies. It is governmental institutions which design and implement these public policies. The media does have an influence on reporting them, but not on their content or their implementation. Nevertheless, these authors agree upon the fact that the media has the potential to influence the perception public opinion forms on certain polices.
For example, during the last decade there has been the rising of a myth that young people are increasingly getting the political news not from the news media but from the entertainment media, the late night shows in particular (Jones, 131). This category of public prefers to get the information related to political events, including public policies, from entertainment shows like the Daily Show. The problem is that in the news media you have certain standards of reporting where the journalist is limited from certain professional constraints not to draw conclusions from the news, just assess the facts. In entertainment shows we do not find this limitation. Thus, they not only give the facts but also draw conclusions. Here is the moment where they influence the audience according the conclusions they make. Thus they negatively affect democracy in society by taking from the people the right to chose and evaluate for themselves.
On the other hand we have the approach which is totally different from the one stated above. The authors of this approach pretend that this model we have is the best possible for the media and its role in society. for these authors the media companies should be treated as any other company which becomes part of a market and tries to establish a position in it. In simpler words, the media is a market like any other and should be let alone to become a free market like any other (Horn, 29). Like in every market we have two parts: the business, which in our case is represented from the media companies and the consumers, which is the audience the media has. The two should be let free to interact with each other without any third party interference. Thus, the government has no right to interfere in this relationship and, in fact, traditionally, in the United States freedom of press has been understood to be in three dimensions: “The government may not license the press. The government may not differentially tax the press. And the government may not restrict what the press may say.” (Stone, 8)
So in the case of public policies the media serves as a intermediate between the government and the public. The market constricts the media to report adequately to its ‘consumers’ what the public policies are and make the government accountable for the designing and implementation of these policies. So the market will serve as a regulator and not allow the media to become part with another party at the expenses of the public as the authors of the first approach argue. Thus, it enhances democratic values inside a society.
Conclusions
The latest view seems to be in the logic of capitalism. Capitalism and democracy have become synonyms during the last thirty years. According to this logic, since it is a relationship between business and client than if the consumer accepts the sort of reporting of the media it is something democratic in essence. We cannot, and should not, interfere into this relation. But still in my opinion these arguments are not satisfactory enough. For a business it is easier to profit from framing the public according to its interest rather than serving it. Furthermore, in today’s business media world the values of entrepreneurship and competition have been dramatically declining. As Ted Turner himself accepted it is more difficult for a young entrepreneur to start a media business today than ten years ago due to the big media corporations and increasing governmental regulations (Turner, 3).
Works Cited
Chomsky, N. & Herman, E. Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media, Cambridge, MA: Pantheon Publishing, 2002.
Horn, Karen. “A market like any other”, The Independent Review, vol. 12, issue 1, 2007.
Jones, Jeffrey. “Fake news versus real news as sources of political information”. In Riegert, Kristina (ed.), “Politicotainment”, New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2007.
Kleemans, Mariska. & Vettehen, Paul. Sensationalism in television news, Nijgmen, The Netherlands: Tandem Felix, 2009.
Stone, Geoffrey. “The responsibilities of a free press”, Bulleting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. 40, no. 5, 1987.
Turner, Ted. “My beef with big media”. The Washington Monthly, 2004. Web.