Media and Democracy

James Curran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781134372225
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Media and Democracy addresses key topics and themes in relation to democratic theory, media and technology, comparative media studies, media and history, and the evolution of media research. For example:

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• How does TV entertainment contribute to the democratic life of society?

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• Why are Americans less informed about politics and international affairs than Europeans?

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• How should new communications technology and globalisation change our understanding of the democratic role of the media?

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• What does the rise of international ezines reveal about the limits of the internet?

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• What is the future of journalism?

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• Does advertising influence the media?

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• Is American media independence from government a myth?

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• How have the media influenced the development of modern society?

Professor Curran's response to these questions provides both a clear introduction to media research, written for university undergraduates studying in different countries, and an innovative analysis written by one of the field's leading scholars.

Part I

Comparing media

1	Shining city on a hill

The United States is the principal originator and exporter of a great media experiment. Its starting point is that the media should be organised as a free-market system on the grounds that any form of public ownership or legal regulation (beyond the barest minimum) endangers media freedom. However, this approach differs from neo-liberalism in that it also argues that the free market can have debilitating effects on the media. Its solution to this double bind – the need to have a free market and to negate its adverse effects without involving the state – is to develop a tradition of professionalism among journalists. In this way, the media can remain free, yet serve the people.

This general thesis is set out in the Hutchins Commission report, still perhaps the most cogent and elegant report on media policy ever published in the English language.¹ The report directly confronts First Amendment fundamentalism by arguing that the aim of public media policy should not be confined to securing media freedom from government control. The media have also a duty, it argues, to serve the public good – something that cannot be fulfilled automatically through the free play of the market. This is because the effort to attract the largest audience can sometimes undermine accuracy and encourage a preoccupation with the exceptional rather than the representative, the sensational rather than the significant. Free-market processes have also given rise to plutocratic ownership of newspapers and their concentration into chains, creating the potential for abuse.

Yet, the report recoils from the idea of advocating ‘more laws and government action’² since this poses a threat to media freedom. What, then, should be done? The answer, according to the report, is to promote an overriding commitment to the common good among media controllers and staff, foster ‘professional ideals and attitudes’³ and a tradition of ‘competence, independence and effectiveness’.⁴ In short, the media can be best improved not through laws but through leadership and the entrenchment of a public-interest culture in its staff.

The Hutchins report was written by leading American public intellectuals and published in 1947. It came out of a reform movement that had not only public support but perhaps more importantly the backing of major media controllers,⁵ leading journalists and also journalism educators.⁶ This movement had also a long history extending back to the nineteenth century. And its championship of journalistic autonomy, standards and public service was anchored by adherence to the codes and procedures of ‘objective’ reporting. This demanded ‘detachment, nonpartisanship, inverted pyramid writing, reverence for facts and balance’.⁷

This reformist tradition was also nurtured by the oligopolistic structure of the American media. During the reformist ‘golden age’, in the third quarter of the twentieth century, just three networks dominated television, two news magazines loomed large in the underdeveloped national printed press and most metropolitan dailies enjoyed a local monopoly. It was much easier to be high-minded when competition was limited and profitability was assured by a rising volume of advertising.

This high tide of professional media reformism is memorialised in Herbert Gans’ classic ethnography of the three commercial TV networks and the two principal news magazines during the 1960s and 1970s. The growth of conglomerate media ownership had resulted, he argued, in the devolution of shareholder power to managers, who delegated, in turn, considerable decision-making authority to journalists. This was, he argued, partly an operational consequence of the specialisation of function within news organisations, but it was also a response to the high degree of professional consciousness among journalists. ‘Delegation of power’, Herbert Gans writes, ‘also takes place because the news organisation consists of professionals who insist on individual autonomy’.⁸ Thus while large business corporations were ‘nominal managers’ of leading media, the people working in them were effectively in control and did not shrink from carrying news detrimental to their parent companies’ interests.⁹ Managerial pressure to make profits was also offset by journalists’ commitment to professional goals. This could result in journalists deliberately shunning information about audience preferences, particularly if they feared that viewers and readers are ‘not particularly interested in the news they now receive’.¹⁰

Gans’ overall conclusion was thus that America’s flagship media were strongly influenced by the professional values of their staff and their desire for autonomy. It now reads as an elegiac rendering of how America’s top media used to be.

Responsible media capitalism

This influential account acknowledged that news media were influenced by the underlying belief systems of society and recognised the subtle ways in which journalistic autonomy was in fact constrained. The book is far from being uncritical. Yet, it failed to engage fully with the way in which the underlying conservatism of American society left a gelatinous imprint on American journalism. This is something to which we shall return in the next chapter.

American iconoclasts have also pointed to the limitations of the professional reformist tradition. Thus, some media historians argue that the development of a commitment to objectivity masked a pragmatic, marketing concern to appeal to readers with different politics; the growing stress on factuality reflected the naïve empiricism of high modernism; and the high-mindedness of this reformist tradition perhaps cloaked, at some level, an accommodation to power.¹¹ Similarly, a number of media sociologists argue that the procedures of ‘objective reporting’ privileged the powerful in sourcing and framing the news; and that balancing authorities’ truth claims became a sorry substitute for truth-seeking. These limitations were a response, it is argued, to deadline pressure, lack of relevant expertise and sometimes concern to avoid a running battle with authority.¹²

While all these criticisms have some validity, they should not obscure the enormous achievements of the American experiment. In particular, the standard leftwing accusation that American journalism reproduces a news script written by established authority fails to register the multiple conditions in which this is not true.¹³ When powerful actors have transgressed shared norms, when elite groups have strongly differed with each other or when there has been an effectively organised popular mobilisation of dissent (as in the civil rights movement), the American media have hosted or expressed strong criticism of established power.

The classic illustration of this is the 1972–4 Watergate scandal.¹⁴ In this often-narrated saga, a group of men linked to the re-election campaign for President Nixon illegally broke into the National Democratic headquarters in the Watergate complex, and were caught in the act. Subsequent investigations revealed the high-level connections of those involved, and the attempt of President Nixon and his closest advisers to cover this up. Leading media, most notably the Washington Post, played a significant part in this disclosure. The ensuing outcry generated pressure for President Nixon’s forced resignation in 1974 and paved the way for the prosecution and imprisonment of a number of his senior aides.

Of course, press revelations did not occur in a vacuum. They were fuelled by leaks, press releases, official investigations and public protests from a variety of powerful actors – a judge, a Deputy Director of the FBI, federal prosecutors, a powerful Senate committee, an Attorney and Deputy Attorney General, among others. Political insiders within the American establishment were especially important in signifying Watergate as being part of a bigger problem – the systematic abuse of government authority – in the immediate aftermath of Nixon’s landslide 1972 re-election, when the press seemed ready to downgrade Watergate as a ‘sour grapes’ Democratic Party issue. But none of this should detract from the record of professionally orientated journalists in tenaciously seeking and publishing revelations about Watergate, contributing to the downfall of the most powerful man in the world.

American local television could also mount exemplary investigations during this reformist professional era. This is perhaps best illustrated by a remarkable series of reports, under the title ‘Beating Justice’, broadcast by the NBC affiliate in Chicago, Channel 5, in 1983.¹⁵ Their origin lay in a conversation between a recently arrived reporter, Peter Karl, and a local lawyer who complained that the police had thrust an electric cattle rod down his client’s throat and applied it to his genitals. Shocked, the reporter dug further and discovered, with his colleagues (and, crucially, with the help of concerned lawyers and hospital staff) a pattern of systematic abuse in which the same police officers were repeatedly involved in beating up people, most of whom were black. The series reported extreme levels of violence, including the transformation of a once healthy 21-year-old man into a quadriplegic following a short ride in a police ‘paddy’ wagon. Nothing effective was being done, the TV series suggested, to supervise an out-of-control group of Chicago police officers, even though the City of Chicago had been forced to pay out, over five years, some $5 million to settle (and hush up) police brutality complaints.

Perhaps the most admirable thing about this series is how much investment the local TV station was then willing to commit to serious, investigative journalism. It assigned a producer, assistant producer, a reporter (also working on other stories) and a group of three (changing) student interns to investigate police brutality for six months. The names of police officers repeatedly accused of brutality, as well as relevant witnesses, were identified by painstakingly combing federal and county court records and even arrest logs. The editorial budget was generous, with a camera crew spending no less than fifteen evenings in an unmarked van in a vain attempt to capture ‘live’ a police beating.

Chicago’s Channel 5 also backed the investigation with its most precious resource – airtime. It ran the ‘Beating Justice’ series of news reports on five consecutive evenings on its ten o’clock local news, and repeated an expanded version of each item the next day on the late afternoon local newscast. This enabled a detailed and fully documented presentation of its evidence of wrongdoing. The prominence given to the news reports also helped to ensure that they influenced the political process. Congressman Harold Washington capitalised on their impact in his 1983 mayoral election campaign, promising police reform and mounting a sensational press conference in which he featured fifty alleged victims of police brutality. Washington was elected as the first black Mayor of Chicago. Under his short-lived regime (cut short by his early death), the police superintendent, Richard Brzeczek, was forced to resign, and internal supervision and control of the police was tightened. However, the police commander of the notorious ‘midnight crew’ was not fired until 1993.¹⁶

Even when the professional power of journalists was weakened during the subsequent period, for reasons that we will come to, an impressive legacy lingered on. A professional culture had been created; talented people had been recruited to journalism and, in the upper reaches, American news media had enormous staffs and budgets. This could still result in remarkable journalism, something that will be illustrated by an unsung series of articles that appeared in the New York Times in 2005. Unlike the exceptional ‘Beating Justice’ series that garnered numerous awards, or the Watergate revelations that were immortalised in a celebrated film,¹⁷ this series attracted little acclaim. But it nevertheless exemplifies the industry, intelligence and public purpose of well-resourced American journalism, even during its period of decline.

In February and March 2005, the New York Times published three articles, written by Paul von Zielbauer, under the general title ‘Harsh Health’.¹⁸ The first of these presented a Dickensian chronicle of poor medical care in New York State prisons, leading to avoidable deaths. The second article centred on neglect of mentally ill prisoners leading to a spike of suicides, and the third concentrated on failures of care in juvenile detention centres.

The articles were memorable partly because they provided dramatic human-interest cameos. One inmate, Brian Tetrault, had his medication drastically reduced on admission to prison. Over the next ten days, he slid into a stupor, soaked in his own sweat and urine. Dismissed as a fake (one prison nurse noted tartly that Tetrault ‘continues to be manipulative’), he died on the tenth day. His records were then doctored to make it appear that he had been released before dying.

Another inmate, Carina Montes, was admitted to gaol after a long history of mental illness and a suicide attempt as early as thirteen years old. Her records went missing, and she never saw a psychiatrist in her five months in gaol. Despite clear warning signals that were ignored, she hanged herself – joining what inmates call, with black humour, the other ‘hang-ups’.

Tiffany S., aged fourteen, was another troubled inmate. She had been removed from her drug-addicted parents at the age of three, and moved again when her sister was sexually molested by her brother. She had a long history of suicide threats and psychological disorder, and had been given powerful medication by her hospital. When she was admitted to a detention centre after a minor infringement, this medication was stopped by the doctor and replaced by a drug for...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Communication and Society
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Comparing media
• PART II Media and democratic theory
• PART III Media and new technology
• PART IV Media and history
• PART V Media and culture
• Notes
• Index