Normative Theories of the Media

Journalism in Democratic Societies

Clifford G Christians, Theodore Glasser, Denis McQuail, Kaarle Nordenstreng, Robert A. White

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780252090837
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In this book, five leading scholars of media and communication take on the difficult but important task of explicating the role of journalism in democratic societies. Using Fred S. Siebert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm's classic Four Theories of the Press as their point of departure, the authors explore the philosophical underpinnings and the political realities that inform a normative approach to questions about the relationship between journalism and democracy, investigating not just what journalism is but what it ought to be. The authors identify four distinct yet overlapping roles for the media: the monitorial role of a vigilant informer collecting and publishing information of potential interest to the public; the facilitative role that not only reports on but also seeks to support and strengthen civil society; the radical role that challenges authority and voices support for reform; and the collaborative role that creates partnerships between journalists and centers of power in society, notably the state, to advance mutually acceptable interests. Demonstrating the value of a reconsideration of media roles, Normative Theories of the Media provides a sturdy foundation for subsequent discussions of the changing media landscape and what it portends for democratic ideals.

PART ONE

Theory

2

Evolution of Normative Traditions

Where does a history of normative theory of public communication begin? Some historically based typologies of normative thinking about the media such as Four Theories are widely recognized as flawed in part because these typologies locate the beginning of contemporary normative theory in the rise of the libertarian ideal and ignore or judge negatively the historical origins of Western normative theory in classical thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle (Nerone 1995, 21–28). The founders of the libertarian and social responsibility traditions themselves recognized their indebtedness to a long history of normative reflections on public communication. John Milton, for instance, took the title of his libertarian declaration in 1644 from the name of the Athenian public judicial forum, the Areopagus. Words such as “democracy,” “ethics,” and “public” originated as ideas in the Greco-Roman world. The Athenian writings about rhetoric, public debate, and politics in the work of Plato, Aristotle, and others were a point of reference for a thousand years in that world. The Islamic and European medieval revivals of institutions of public discourse were based on the thought of classical Greece.

The thesis of this chapter is that contemporary norms of public communication are the result of a continuing conversation that has been evolving for more than twenty-five hundred years. Each major historical era has been based on earlier phases of the debate, and each has contributed something to the current normative traditions. This chapter organizes the relevant history in terms of four historical periods, each with its dominant concern and tradition:

1. The classical period, from 500 BC to 1500 AD, in which the major concern of theorists was the truthfulness of public discourse within a corporatist order
2. The early modern period, from roughly 1500 to 1800, in which the major concern was the freedom of participants in the public sphere within a libertarian order
3. The period of modern populist democracies, from 1800 to 1970, in which the major concern has been the social responsibility of participants
4. The contemporary “postmodern” period, since the 1970s, in which a major concern is citizen participation in the public sphere

Pooling the normative elements of public communication into such historically wide—even huge—aggregates might seem to experts on each period a conflation of major differences. While recognizing this difficulty, we want to highlight what can be seen as core elements in the worldview of each period.

Several factors influence the emergence of a new phase or tradition of normative theory. One is the tendency to appeal to a fundamentally different philosophical worldview in order to define a particular form of public discourse as good or true. In the classical period something was considered true, good, or just if it corresponded with the organic unity of existence, a unity generally seen as resting on the mind of a creator. This dominant worldview of organic unity can best be summarized as a corporatist view of existence and society. After 1500, this supposed unity of the universe seemed less tenable, and social philosophers such as Locke, Rousseau, and Kant argued that sociopolitical harmony and well-being should be constructed not by philosopher-kings but by ordinary citizens acting on inborn reason and the desire for the good. In the nineteenth century, however, the individualism of the libertarian tradition seemed less a universally acceptable foundation of what is true or good, and the ethical commitments of social responsibility in the organic interdependence of society as summed up by Marx or Durkheim seemed to be a more solid foundation. Today the grounds of the normative appear to lie in intersubjective dialogue between persons and cultures, as explained by Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, Charles Taylor, or Emmanuel Levinas. The emergence of a new tradition is complex, but usually involves a combination of this worldview factor and many others as described below.

Corporatist Tradition: 500 BC–1500 AD

One of the premises of the present book is that normative theory of public discourse is about communication in a democratic society, and chapter 4 attempts to establish at least the basic parameters of democracy. It is important to recognize that this democratic orientation is in part a coincidence of the historical, cultural context in which the evolution of normative theory began; in other words, the beginnings influenced the subsequent evolution. Four sets of cultural values regarding public discourse emerged in the period termed “corporatist” that played an important role in pointing the evolution of normative theory toward the democratic framework we find today: (1) that collective decisions are best arrived at by participatory debate among all in the community; (2) that deliberation should be oriented toward the common good; (3) that deliberation should be based on a rational, reality-based criterion of truthfulness; and (4) that cultural practices should be rooted in a literate, reflexive culture of theoretical justification.

PARTICIPATORY DEBATE

For participatory democracy to work, a criterion for the right to participate had to be found; that criterion was citizenship. Riesenberg notes, “it is clear why the Greek city-state world created the peculiar Western institution of citizenship” (1992, 3). Most of these city-states had rejected monarchical forms of government, and public communication concerned the common welfare of the people (though limited to male citizens), not the welfare of a royal house. It was the genius of leaders such as Solon and Cleisthenes to see that granting the right to participate, and guaranteeing personal rights, not only motivated people to contribute to the wars and works of the community, but passed a sense of responsibility to those who argued for the decision (Ober 1989, 60–73). Athens, with 125,000–150,000 inhabitants, found the services of different classes and subcultures sufficiently important for economic survival or armed protection of the state to guarantee participation of free men in all decision making in an open assembly (Cartledge 2000, 17; Riesenberg 1992, 3–6). The simple criterion of permanent residence had a democratizing influence because it removed the exclusionary standards of divine choice, noble breeding, education, and achieved wealth. Once the institution of citizenship was introduced into a city, as in Rome or later in the Middle Ages, there were continual pressures to expand citizen rights (Sherwin-White 1996). Plato, Aristotle, and other authors of ideal republics in antiquity were quick to theorize citizenship, and this made it an integral part of the tradition of normative theory of public discourse (Nichols 1992, 53–56).

Few city-states in antiquity had the freedom of expression and citizen-based participation of Athens, but this ideal was followed in various degrees in many Greek colonies around the Mediterranean (Ober 1989, 127–55). Romans maintained the tradition that major public decisions were made by the debates of the patrician-based senate and the public voting assemblies of the people (Senatus Populusque Romanus—SPQR) (Wood 1988, 22–37). The Hellenistic and Roman empires absorbed the city-states but incorporated many of the principles of citizenship, leaving the cities much cultural and deliberative autonomy (Fowler 1893, 317–20). When commerce and education reawakened in the Middle Ages, it was usually in terms of small city-states that obtained charters of independence, especially in the Mediterranean basin (Jones 1997).

A further foundation of decisions by participatory debate was to reinforce political equality with communicative equality. In Athens and other Mediterranean city-states, the recognition of the right of ordinary citizens to voice opinions in a public assembly introduced an important institution. The assembly in Athens met forty times a year with an average of some six thousand persons present (Ober 1989, 132–33). The assembly’s agenda was prepared by the Council of Five Hundred, in which all citizens could participate at least once in a lifetime. The members of the council who determined the agenda were selected annually by lot, implying that any person at random was considered politically competent. Major offices were also filled by lot. Athenians did not believe in the election of officials or in delegating deliberation to elected officials. The state paid citizens a normal day’s salary when they participated in the deliberations of governmental bodies (Ober 1989, 127–55).

However, the right to voice proposals in public assembly would not, in itself, have meant communicative equality if the institution of education for public participation had not become widely available. The systematic teaching of public speaking in the courts and in public assemblies is said to have originated in Sicily and to have been brought to Athens about 450 BC. Throughout the Mediterranean, the Sophists taught not only rhetorical speaking itself but the knowledge of science, culture, and philosophy that enabled these men to impress crowds with their capacity for systematic, rational argument (Kennedy 1994, 7–8, 17–21; Schiappa 1991, 54–58). The sophistic teachers of civic participation were a major factor in bringing political equality to the level of communicative equality (Swartz 1998, 65–70). They fashioned rules of persuasive rhetoric based on the ability to aggregate interests into proposals for decision making that all could agree with or at least tolerate (Schiappa 1991, 157–73). Not the least of the sophistic rhetorical skills was pleasing and cleverly holding the attention of an audience; as Ober notes, the moment a crowd of six thousand became the least bit bored, they began to shout down the speaker (1989, 138).

Aristotle in his Rhetoric argues that personal character is one of the major qualifications for being a good participant in public debate (Garver 1994, 172–96) and being a person of balanced virtue is essential for influence in the political regime. Rhetoric, along with dialectic, became the foundation of educational systems in the Hellenistic and Roman cultures and in medieval Europe.

A third important foundation of the use of participatory debate for making public decisions was the commitment to resolving conflict not by force but by persuasive rhetoric based on good reasons. Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BC was a society of great cultural diversity (Reed 2003), continual litigation in the courts, political debates, and love of philosophical discussion (Schiappa 1991, 145). The Mediterranean city-states were proud of their enormously diverse skills, trades, and professions, and they carefully protected the agonistic, competitive pluralism of their societies (Ober 1996, 172). What emerged is what Ober calls the “regime of truth” rather than a regime of economic power, bullying, vendetta, and other forms of violence (106). Underlying this regime was the citizen’s right to take action in the face of injustice and the acceptance of the political equality of all citizens even in the face of economic inequality (Ober 1989, 293). Ober (304–11) argues that the great achievement of the Athenian constitution was that it balanced the economic power (and indirectly military power) of elites with the political power of the poor in the assembly.

Cicero, who dedicated a lifetime to studying rhetoric, argued desperately against the passing of the Roman republic and the onset of imperial government by military commanders, even if no viable democratic form of administering an empire presented itself. His ideal statesman was one who resisted the lust for domination, respected the deliberation of the people, found peaceful solutions, and was himself a persuasive speaker (Wood 1988, 176–205). This deep distrust of the “lust for domination” is found in Augustine’s City of God argument that the downfall of the Roman Empire came from forgetting its respect for liberty, and from its admiration of brute power (von Heyking 2001, 22–23). Augustine, himself a teacher of rhetoric, thought that great world empires were built on the exercise of domination and preferred a political order of small nations linked in relations of continual accord (108–9).

With the rebirth of public deliberation through the formation of parliaments in the 1200s, education in rhetoric became important again (Graves 2001). Around 1200, trials of the accused by ordeal and by bloody battle were replaced with deliberative juries, and the practice of persuasion before judges and lawyers was revived. As a result, some training in rhetoric became part of the education of lawyers in the late Middle Ages (Levy 1999). The logic of using persuasive discourse instead of military or economic power to create a narrative of future action that had truth value for decision makers continued to be an ideal of public discourse.

Still another dimension of decisions by participatory debate that entered into the normative tradition was the trust in the participation of even the unlettered. When participation of all citizens was introduced, the question quickly emerged whether the unlettered masses could produce good public decisions or not. Aristocrats, including Plato and especially Cicero, had grave doubts; nonetheless, Cicero’s and other model republics featured a “mixed constitution” providing for some combination of monarchy, aristocracy, and popular participation, on the premise that this provided a protection against the tyranny of any one group. Aristotle in his Politics expressed the view that the common sense of the majority of ordinary citizens was less likely to misrepresent the common good than a few well-educated experts (Ober 1989, 163–66). Underlying the acceptance of mass participation was the tradition that the masses had a better grasp of the people’s values than did the elites.

EVERYONE MUST CONTRIBUTE TO THE COMMON GOOD

Aristotle rested his theory of ethics and politics on the widely accepted assumption that the person is, by nature, political. The people of the small city-state, who shared a common history, culture, language, and religious ritual, simply took it for granted that a person could not exist outside the community’s history. Early modern Europe, faced with the challenge of building large nations out of city communities, emphasized the free contractual nature of national solidarity. But in a context of small city-states it seemed obvious that persons were by nature social, that persons became human in a sociopolitical context, and that human welfare depended on how strongly one’s social interdependence was articulated.

In the corporatist worldview, especially under the influence of the Stoics, the social harmony and prosperity of the political community was seen to faithfully reproduce the rational, teleological order of the universe in the social order of human life. Cicero is a point of reference because he provided the first major formulation of this concept of law (Wood 1988, 70). People have the rational capacity to understand the harmony of the universe, as this is built into the nature of everything. By understanding this law-like structure of existence, it is possible to have good laws in the human community. Initially, this community might be thought of as a city-state, but under Stoic and later Christian influence, the community came to be understood as a universalistic, cosmic one. Knowledge of the logic of the universe (wisdom) could be gained by human study, but Platonism, Stoicism, and Christianity believed that ultimately only divine wisdom understood the rationality of the universe. True wisdom could be gained by philosophers who had mystical insight into the mind of divine reason.

From the Stoics came the sense of duty, especially as that was refracted through Roman leaders such as Cicero. Cicero linked to governance roles the Stoic emphasis on duty for duty’s sake, forsaking the quest for personal wealth and committing oneself to principle even to the point of sacrificing one’s life. The concept of duty as outlined by Cicero emphasized loyal service to the community and nation, absolute honesty in all dealings, and subordination to the deliberations of the Roman senate. Cicero battled corruption among officials of the empire, fought the development of imperial government based on the brutal military dictatorships of the Caesars, and paid for this campaign with his life.

This understanding of public discourse sustained the corpus of Roman law. One of the major legacies of the Greco-Roman culture to Western civilization is a legal tradition. Greek public culture stressed that good laws had to be based on public debate, weighing verifiable evidence for and against alternatives. In Aristotle’s summary, the person is a reasoning animal (Johnstone 2002, 22–23).

Cicero incorporated ideas of Aristotle in his work On the Orator, and Cicero’s ideal of education for public discourse was fundamental for Quintilian and for the Western tradition of public communication (Kennedy 1999, 113–18). Christianity, which did not have an elaborate theory of public life in the New Testament, took over much of this view. For example, De Officiis, the treatise of Ambrose, bishop of Milan, on the duties of the clergy, written in the late 380s, explicitly followed Cicero’s template and became one of the major influences on professionalism among the clergy. It was cited by virtually all writers from Isidore of Seville in the early 600s to Thomas Aquinas, with repeated editions and printings up to the nineteenth century (Davidson 2001, 1–112). One can argue that the institution of such professions as the clergy, law, and medicine, centered in the medieval universities, goes back to the definition of professional duty in antiquity.

Although the political philosophers of antiquity proposed the relative merit of different constitutional organizations of government, they put far more faith in educating citizens and rulers as the basis of good public discourse and good government than in, for example, careful organization of the balance of powers (Kennedy 1994, 115–18). Greco-Roman society did not have an elaborate system of public security or social services such as one finds today. There was little to stop unbridled greed or power. The well-being of the community depended much more on the internal, disciplined goodness and magnanimity of citizens. In a culture with a harmonious corporatist worldview, having a balanced, temperate character was viewed as the source of other virtues such as courage, justice, wisdom, and above all, practical wisdom or prudence. A person with these virtues was much more likely to orient public discussion toward reasonable debate, emphasis on the common good, and the reconciliation of conflicts (see Tessitore 1996, 28–37). Good governance depended on the goodness of whomever was governing.

Gradually the various training programs for civic leadership became the universal system of education in the Roman Empire, which continued through the Middle Ages into early modern Europe. Virtually every significant contributor to the Western tradition of public communication—from Cicero to Augustine, Machiavelli, John Locke, and down to John Dewey—wrote treatises on how education for participating in the public sphere should be carried out. In China, India, and all other civilizations, there is also the general belief that the best guarantee of good governance is the character formation of future governors.

CRITERION OF TRUTHFULNESS

From the beginning of citizen participation in decision making in Athens, many questioned whether this babel of partisan, self-interested voices could produce wise, prudent public decisions. This doubt came to a head in the lifetime of Plato.

In 450 BC, Athens was at the height of its sociopolitical and cultural influence, but the humiliating loss of the Peloponnesian War (431–404) with Sparta and internal civil war set in motion soul-searching as to what had gone wrong. Among those accused of causing the problem were the sophistic teachers. Plato, Isocrates...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One: Theory
• Part Two: Democracy
• Part Three: Roles
• Prospects
• References
• Index