Media-State Relations in Emerging Democracies

A. Hadland

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137493491
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The news media and the state are locked in a battle of wills in the world's emerging democratic states. It is a struggle that will determine whether or not democracy flourishes or withers in the 21st century. Using a number of case studies, including South Africa, this book evaluates what is at stake.

Section I

Emerging Democracies

1

Dancing with Democracy

Introduction

In just over ten years between 1990 and 2002, 52 countries moved from authoritarianism to electoral democracy (Freedom House 2013), while 140 of the world’s almost 200 independent nations held multiparty elections (Dyer 2004). This surge of democratisation, which Huntington (1996) termed the “third wave”¹, has exerted a profound impact on media–state relations in the world.

Many of these new, emerging² democracies, from Asia and Africa to Latin America and Eastern Europe, have witnessed a “flowering of the media” (Kruger 2009, 24), from a profusion of community radio and privatised television stations and the soaring growth of tabloid newspapers to the extraordinary development and popularity of social media platforms. But this wave of growth and change has not been without its consequences.

The post-third wave rejuvenation of the mass media in Africa, for instance, has not necessarily resulted in a free press that has advanced the cause of democracy. On the contrary, critics of post-democracy African media have been vociferous, labelling them “irresponsible, self-serving, unaccountable and a threat to the credibility and sustenance of the democratic process” (Tettey 2006, 230). In Latin America, constitutionally protected rights and freedoms have failed to engender much autonomy for the press from powerful political forces, including media owners. Talking about press freedom in Brazil, Roberto Civita, chairman and editor-in-chief of the Abril Group, told a gathering: “We are fortunate, in Brazil, to have this freedom guaranteed by our Constitution, which doesn’t mean, of course, that the attempts to limit, control and even muzzle the press have disappeared … ” (2006, 6).

In all of these new, emerging democratic countries, from Argentina to Zambia, states and their governing elites have had to confront the changing nature, technologies and role of the media and plot how best to manage regulation and access. Generally, elites have taken their experience of the media in the period before they came to power as the lodestone upon which future policy and regulation should be applied. In Latin America, the military believed the media were “a fundamental piece in the architecture of authoritarian governments” (Waisbord 2000, 54). In post-authoritarian Latin American states, the relationship has remained just as close: media owners “exalted liberalism … ceaselessly courted states, supported military interventions and only … criticised government intrusion that affected their own political or economic interests” (ibid.). Among many of Africa’s communist-inspired or communist-led anti-colonial movements, exhortations from Marx and Lenin to assimilate the media and their power into national liberation struggles were taken to heart, even after the formal transfer of power.

Post-authoritarian states have tended to be characterised by two principal factors: weakness in the rule of law and a frail system of public accountability (Schedler et al. 1999). This context, combined with the elite’s historical perceptions of the media’s role, has resulted in a series of contested, dynamic interactions that have not only determined the trajectory of media industry development in emerging democracies but have also exerted a profound impact on the future of the states in which these industries reside.

It has now been almost three decades since the third wave started to gather momentum, and a considerable body of scholarship has developed in the field of media studies. The overwhelming focus of much of this work has nonetheless been concerned with Western states, specifically the UK, the US and parts of Northern Europe. The ongoing emphasis was highlighted in Curran and Park’s (2000) important work De-Westernising Media Studies, which bemoaned the “routine” approach within English-language scholarship for authors to make universalistic observations about the media based on evidence derived from a handful of usually Western countries (2000, 3). In Waisbord and Mellado’s reassessment of the de-Westernisation of communication studies (2014), a call was made for a more fundamental shift in scholars’ “analytical mindset” (p. 365) to consider a much broader, global set of case studies as well as to re-evaluate the applicability of concepts, arguments and theories.

In recent years, a significant number of studies have begun to address this Western-centric bias to media studies scholarship and have started to focus on the countries and media systems of the global South, of under-represented territories from Brazil and Poland to Turkey (De Albuquerque 2012, Dobek-Ostrowska 2012, Yesil 2014). Some of the findings have been surprising, contradicting Western-based precedents, confounding predictions and forcing the re-evaluation of theoretical paradigms.

One of the most striking of these has been work around the process of media commercialisation, an under-theorised but ubiquitous notion describing the increasingly corporate, profit-oriented approach of media producers. The common understanding among theorists from a range of literatures is that the current process of commercialisation will inevitably pull the media away from their traditional, historical association with political groups and political institutions, and shift them toward commerce and trade. This is inherent in the modernisation theorising of Durkheim (1965), Parsons (1971), Alexander (1981) and Luhmann (2000) that traces an evolutionary or, alternatively, functionalist process in which the media, or communication systems, are increasingly differentiated from other systems in society. In this way the media gain autonomy and power. Both Habermas (1989) and Bourdieu (2005) see the media becoming inexorably anchored in the domain or field of the economic system. As Hallin and Mancini (2004) put it, “commercialisation tends to give the media both the independent power base and the incentive to assert their own agenda, often at the expense of politics” (p. 279).

But the experience of many third wave media systems simply does not support this hypothesis, as I will demonstrate in subsequent chapters. The evidence from a range of other states (see chapters 3, 4 and 7) suggests that there is a much more nuanced process underway in which commercialisation actually provides opportunities for the state to intervene more deeply and to strengthen its impact and influence on the media and on their content.

Nor are these the only surprising findings of the emerging corpus on new democracies. Globalisation theory has for several decades now predicted a gradual diminishment of the nation-state, the rise of multilateral organisations and the accelerated decentralisation of social and political power. This has not been the case among the countries of the third wave, where states, often in already weakened circumstances due to the nature of their transitions, have striven to extend and consolidate national state power.

Much democracy theory has heralded the inevitable, linear deepening and consolidation of democratic institutions and processes. This, too, has not been evident in the new, third wave states, where democratic institutions and processes have been prone to recidivism and reformulation at the hands of resurgent elites. In fact, Levitsky and Way (2002) now argue that it might be inappropriate to treat emerging democratic regimes as incomplete or transitional forms of democracies at all, when they may actually have stabilised as non-democracies (cited in Hashim 2005). A number of other theories, such as the modernisation paradigm, have foundered in the shifting sands of nascent democracy, challenged by the experiences and theoretical paradigms developing in the global South (Waisbord & Mellado 2014).

Theory, in other words, and especially media studies theory, has failed to adequately comprehend or predict the new patterns of social and political interaction among the third wave states, or their consequences. Reassessing and expanding the ontological horizons of media studies, expanding the body of evidence to non-Western regions and foregrounding theoretical perspectives original to the global South are, indeed, considered imperatives for the field going forward (Waisbord & Mellado 2014). This book, which is the culmination of research, teaching and practice over a number of decades, and which proposes new theoretical insights into media–state relations in these states, is intended to offer a modest contribution to these demands.

It is to the field’s credit that a body of work has emerged both from individual country studies and from broader, comparative studies that have added a great deal of sophistication to our understanding of media–state relations generally and in emerging democracies specifically. We have learned from Mexico’s experience, for example, that media owners are a particularly important locus of power and that their relationship with the ruling elite is a critical element of media–state relations (Hallin 2000). We have learned, too, that state pressure can be applied to journalists in a multiplicity of ways to influence the news agenda, including through direct measures such as tax cuts and gifts in South Korea (Park et al. 2000, 114) and indirect measures such as self-censorship in Turkey (Yesil 2014).

It is not only media studies that has been struggling to cope with the complexity and surprising patterns of development exhibited by third wave states and with the challenge of characterising the process of democratisation. The notion of democracy itself has never been so much subject to debate and redefinition as it has been in the last two decades. In its various iterations and variants, it has proven itself “surprisingly elastic and adaptable”, according to Voltmer (2013, 14). What country does not want to be known as democratic? What country truly is democratic?

The very term “democracy” is, of course, deeply contested. There are as many definitions of democracy as there are theorists, muses John Street (2001), while Larry Diamond (2002) has designed a typology of democracy that includes no fewer than 550 sub-types, including “pseudo-democracy”. Faced with such versatility, it is little wonder that questions are rightly being posed about democracy’s conceptual validity: “The meaning and practices of democracy are constantly reconstructed and renegotiated in the light of the experiences and beliefs of the people who participate in the democratic enterprise” (Voltmer 2013, 16). Some have concluded that even this fails to grasp the essence of democracy in the 21st century, and that perhaps we already live in a post-democratic age (Colin Crouch 2004, cited in Conversi 2006, 257). This may be premature, as democracy clearly remains a salient and aspirational dimension of contemporary, global affairs.

Raboy’s (1992) observation that democracy is a set of values rather than a particular system is prescient. Democracy’s elusiveness, much like contrasting definitions of the state itself, does not negate democracy’s existence or importance. Democracy, like so many objects of desire, is, instead, a moving target (Schedler et al. 1999, 1). I do not think it necessary here to go into depth into how political philosophy and related disciplines have come to define democracy or track its evolution from the city states of Ancient Greece. There is a substantial literature on the subject, and, while alternate concepts have been mooted (such as the preference for the term “polyarchy” expressed by both Robert Dahl and Guillermo O’Donnell), more consensus than disagreement exists on the broad principles of what democracy means.

A country is democratic, according to Fukuyama (1992), one of democracy’s most ardent supporters, “if it grants its people the right to choose their own government through periodic, secret ballot, multi-party elections on the basis of universal and equal adult suffrage” (p. 43). Few democracy scholars would dispute this broad definition, even if the uniformity of its application is something quite different.

Though there may be as many variations of democracy as there are states that call themselves democratic, it is of more value for this work to focus not so much on the myriad idiosyncrasies of newly democratic states as on their common features. Of special interest are the circumstances and processes by which these new states came into being and the challenges they consequently face to ensure their survival. In describing the patterns of new democracy’s evolution, I argue that a defining characteristic of this phase of its development is the emergence of an intrusive, interventionist tendency on the part of the state that seeks to harness the public discourse and the media industry that shapes it. I suggest that the identification of this development, which I refer to as “the Acquisitive State”, is a key contribution to theorising in the field. I will set this out in more detail in the second part of this book.

As amorphous as democracy may be, there is clearly a democratic project underway in the world at the dawn of the 21st century. And, while it may not be as irresistible and final as Fukuyama believed or hoped, the third wave was not a figment of our collective imagination. Nor has it failed to the extent that these new democracies have retreated back into authoritarianism. The days of total authoritarianism for these states are largely over, though there are notable exceptions. Colonialism has been ended, though dependence lives on. The rights and values enshrined in documents such as the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights (1948) continue to have relevance in the modern world.

Just as democratic states are seemingly infinitely variable, media systems, too, are profoundly heterogeneous, particularly in an era when citizen participation in media production has grown so rapidly. The media certainly do not grow in a vacuum, as Mancini (2000) has pointed out. They must reflect their cultural and political context. But there is more to it than that. The media directly contribute to and shape public debate (Benson 2013). They have a stake in both the market and the state. They have agendas, proclivities and preferences. They do not interact with the state in a simple manner, and this varies enormously from one country and region to another. Nor is it the media’s capacity to communicate that makes them a democratic force, as Voltmer points out, but the particular norms of their institutional structure and the quality of their performance (2013, 23): “The media are not democratic by nature. They serve dictatorships as happily as they flourish in democracies.”

The interface between media and state takes place across a plane that is increasingly riddled with complexity and subject to theoretical and conceptual ambiguity and challenge. Nor is the challenge of making sense of these developments assisted by the inability of the field’s two prevailing theoretical paradigms, traditional liberal theory and neo-Marxist theory, to adequately account for the contradictory particularities that have emerged from the rash of third wave case studies. Liberal theory, for instance, cannot accept the notion that the state has occasionally had a positive impact on media freedom, when clearly there are examples of this. Neo-Marxism, as we will see in Chapter 5, is profoundly divided over the nature and character of the state, while its subordinate paradigms, such as political economy theory, are struggling to contend with the reality of contemporary relations. Political economy, for instance, has trouble digesting the contentions that in some countries the state can serve as a “civic counterface” to market power (Benson 2013, 25) and also that the state may not be a unified agency of the dominant elite but “an arena where competing media interests wage battles” (Waisbord 2000, 54).

Given the lack of a convincing overarching paradigm, and the porous nature of many of the key notions underpinning media–state relations, it is tempting to shy away from grand theoretical hypotheses. Post-modernism has, after all, encouraged a scepticism toward generalisations, while key scholars in the field have warned against “universalistic pretensions” (Waisbord & Mellado 2014, 365). However, in this book I argue that there are patterns that are discernible and significant, particularly in relation to the way the media and the state interact within the context of emerging democratic states. It is the identification of these patterns, the marshalling of a range of relevant literatures and data, and their incorporation into a new theoretical paradigm that take this work beyond recent research in the field of media studies.

The pattern in every third wave country is that enormous power is vested in the institutions, authority and practices of the state. This does not suggest that the third wave state is effective or even fully functioning. Many are unstable, riven and fragile. In these states, the right to determine the national discourse is particularly highly prized. It is assumed that control of the public narrative of political, economic and social life – through broadcast, print and social media – is implicitly tied up with the survival of the state’s elite and their values. If possible, news or discussion of developments that are threatening or potentially undermining to the state is simply removed. Recall how, in late 2014, the Chinese state succeeded in preventing any news or information about the periodically violent campaign for political rights in Hong Kong from reaching the mainland’s news channels or platforms (Tang 2014).

Not every state has such resources at its command. All are, however, aware of the power and influence of the media. In several countries, the media are considered to be part of the state, their officials appointed by the state and their activities monitored and guided by regulatory and other bodies. But even in these countries the media have never been completely absorbed or co-opted, their reporters and editors converted once and for all into mere communication bureaucrats. If this were the case, journalists in those countries would not continue to be imprisoned, killed and intimidated. Since 1992, an estimated 632 journalists have been killed “with complete impunity” (CPJ 2014), most in the emerging democratic states that are the focus of this book. In China, which officially considers the media to be a component not just of the state but of the Communist Party, a tradition of investigative journalism continues to expose the corrupt. Even in China, the state and the media are not the same thing.

In most emerging democracies, the state has been successful in constraining or channelling the ideological and political impact of the media and has used the opportunities of the new globalised, commercialised environment to reinforce the status quo. This shores up the notion that new states, even plausibly democratic ones, are acquisitive by nature and will seek to expand influence into new domains while marshalling the forces of society to serve their purposes.

The main focus of this book is the relationship between the media and the state in emerging democracies. But, as I have begun to suggest, this is far from a simple exchange. It is strange, given both the literal and figurative proximity of media and politics, that the relationship has been so poorly investigated by scholars. The academy, notably in the disciplines of political science, political philosophy, international relations, political theory and even democracy studies, has tended to avoid the media and their role in political life and organisation. As Voltmer (2006) points out, the role of the mass media has been “largely ignored by mainstream democracy studies in spite of the fact that their performance is believed to have ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Section I: Emerging Democracies
• Section II: The Acquisitive State
• Notes
• References
• Index