The International Political Economy of Communication

Media and Power in South America

C. Martens, E. Vivares, R. McChesney, C. Martens, E. Vivares, R. McChesney

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137434685
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Policy
• Index: Economics

This collection reflects on the international political economy of media and the valuable lessons to be learned from the media reforms currently taking place across South America. The contributors present a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives on the ongoing battle for media space in South America, and the volume includes a foreword by Ernesto Laclau.

Part I

Media, Power and Democracy in the International Political Economy

1

The Struggle for Democratic Media: Lessons from the North and from the Left¹

Robert W. McChesney

Over the past decade, the eyes of the world have been on Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia and other Latin American nations as their elected governments attempt to achieve fundamental social reform through their respective constitutional systems. In every nation with an elected government that traditional elites regard as dangerous to their interests, the core battle has turned to questions of media. The news media in these nations are generally owned, sometimes effectively monopolized, by a handful of the wealthiest families. These news media have traditionally advocated a politics that represents their interests, and are not known for being especially sympathetic to the plight of the poor and working class. In some cases, they have been singularly hostile to popular reforms and democratization. This has created a problem for the effective functioning of a democratic political system – one based on political equality – which is predicated upon there being a wide range of effective and credible sources of information.

‘Lies had destroyed Latin America. People lie too much, from the press, the politicians, and on the street,’ Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa said in 2013 (Real News Network). ‘I think one of the main problems around the world is that there are private networks in the communication business, for-profit business providing public information, which is very important for society. It is a fundamental contradiction.’ Consequently, the battle to establish a media system that serves democratic values has been a defining issue in each of these nations. As nations in other parts of the world turn to similarly popular governments, the issue of media is likely to emerge there as well. To Correa, one solution is clear: ‘I think there should be more public and community media, organizations that don’t have that conflict between profits and social communication’ (ibid).

In certain respects, the nations of Latin America are taking media debates and prospective policies to places they have never gone before. The outcome will go a long way towards determining the nature of these societies; this is an existential issue for popular governance. Western observers who showed little interest in the state of Latin American democracy or press issues when those governments were popular with Washington suddenly regard any challenge to the dominance of the wealthy over Latin American news media as a grave threat to human freedom demanding the world’s attention. In its vulgar adaption, this argument boils down to ‘freedom of the press means rich people should be allowed to own all the media, and they should be able to do whatever the hell they want to do with their private property. That’s quintessential freedom and democracy’.

At the same time, this is not purely a black-and-white, good guys–bad guys issue. Constructing a free and democratic media system – especially in a dynamic and explosive political environment – is a complex undertaking. The elected governments have their own agendas and their own relationships with their voting base, and there are serious issues of censorship that need to be addressed.

In this chapter, I put these contemporary media battles in context. I look at traditional democratic theory and how news media has been regarded in the advanced capitalist nations, especially the United States. Professional journalism was the North American solution 100 years ago to the problem posed by having the news media concentrated in the hands of mostly right-wing millionaires. As the US model of professional journalism is often held up as the democratic ideal, it is imperative to have a sense of its history, and its weaknesses. In my view, the evidence suggests that US-style professional journalism under capitalist management offers no hope for the people of the United States, let alone anywhere else on the planet.

More important, I provide an accounting of the current free-fall of commercially based journalism in the United States, which is happening simultaneously to varying degrees worldwide. Every nation faces the same existential dilemma: whether to allocate resources to journalism as commercial interests abandon the field. This is an issue that will only grow more severe until it is addressed. It is time for nations to be thinking big about how to construct a credible popular independent news media for the digital age. The old system, whatever its merits, is dying.

In the second part of the chapter, I argue that media democratization has been a neglected area on the left, and that the legacy of the Communist era has retarded progress in this area. At the same time, and more important, there is a radical democratic media tradition on the left from which the people of Latin America and worldwide can profitably draw. In the end, I argue that creating a genuinely independent and competitive non-profit and non-commercial media system is the foundation not just for democracy, but for any system worthy of the name socialism. As the Latin American experience demonstrates, it is an idea whose time has come.

Journalism and democracy

There is considerable consensus in democratic theory and among journalism scholars about what a healthy journalism should entail (e.g. Christians et al. 2009):

1. It must provide a rigorous accounting of people who are in power, or who wish to be in power, in the government, corporate and non-profit sectors.

2. It must have a plausible method to separate truth from lies, or at least to prevent liars from being unaccountable and leading nations into catastrophes.

3. It must regard the information needs of all people as legitimate; if there is a bias in the amount and tenor of coverage, it should be towards those with the least amount of economic and political power, as they are the ones who most need information to participate effectively. Those atop the system generally get the information they need to maintain control.

4. It must produce a wide range of informed opinions on the most important issues of our times – both the transitory concerns of the moment and the challenges that loom on the horizon. It also must accurately translate important scientific issues into lay language. These issues cannot be determined primarily by what people in power are talking about. Journalism must provide the nation’s early warning system, so problems can be anticipated, studied, debated and addressed before they develop into crises.

Not every media outlet can or should provide all these services; that would be impractical. It is necessary, however, for the media system as a whole to make such journalism a realistic expectation for the citizenry. There should be a basic understanding of the commons – the social world – that all people share, so that all people can effectively participate in the political and electoral processes of self-governance. The measure of a free press is how well it gives citizens the information they need to keep their freedoms and rights.

There is more. Great journalism, as Ben Bagdikian put it, requires great institutions. As with any complex undertaking, a division of labour is required to achieve success. Copyeditors, fact-checkers and proofreaders are needed, in addition to reporters and assigning editors. There must be institutional muscle that can stand up to governments and corporate power – institutions that people in power not only respect, but fear. Effective journalism requires competition, so that if a story is missed by one newsroom, it is exposed by another. It requires people covering stories that they would not cover if they were doing journalism on a voluntary basis. In short, in order to have democratic journalism, material resources must come from somewhere, and they need to be organized on an institutional basis. It also must be an open system, allowing anyone to engage in the practice without needing a licence, credentials or approval from someone high.

Of course, journalism is not the sole provider of political information or the only stimulant for informed debate and participation. Political information can also come from schools, art, academic research, entertainment media and conversations with friends and family. But such avenues are much more effective and valuable when they rest atop, and inform, a strong journalism.

In the United States, it has long been assumed that democratic journalism will naturally emerge from a market system where the news media is owned by profit-maximizing firms in largely semi-monopolistic markets. As long as any person has the formal right to launch a news medium without government interference, the society has a free press. At worst, the conventional wisdom goes, the commercial system may have flaws, but it will always be superior to any possible alternative, so there is no point in even thinking about an alternative. But professional journalism is a recent invention in the United States and, under close inspection, has severe limitations, at least as it has been practised.

In the first century of the republic, US journalism was marked by a ubiquitous and highly partisan press that represented a wide range of viewpoints, including a crucial abolitionist press. A little-known fact is that this system was based on extraordinarily large public subsidies, primarily through the post office, which delivered most newspapers at a fraction of the real cost; it was anything but a testament to the free market. As advertising increased and publishing became a source of growing profitability, the subsidies decreased in importance. For much of the final third of the nineteenth century, the news media system tended to be quite competitive in economic terms. Large cities often had over a dozen daily newspapers; papers came and went, and nearly all newspapers were owned by a single publisher who also was the editor, or had a strong say in the editorial direction.²

But capitalism proceeded apace. In some cases, profit-hungry publishers found that sensationalism, what came to be called ‘yellow journalism’, was a lucrative course. Bribery of journalists, showing favouritism towards advertisers, and assorted unethical practices were common. Most important, by the 1890s, newspaper markets were becoming more oligopolistic, even monopolistic. Although revenues and population continued to increase sharply, the overall number of newspapers began to stagnate and then fall. ‘The stronger papers are becoming stronger and the weaker papers are having a hard time to exist,’ one newspaper executive observed in 1902 (Kaplan 2002: 123–124). Newspapers began to serve a larger and larger portion of their community’s population – with much less fear of new competition than had been the case – and had considerable power as a result.

The great national chains of Pulitzer, Hearst and Scripps were formed almost overnight. The new publishing giants no longer needed to be closely tied to political parties; in fact, as local newspapers grew more monopolistic, partisanship could antagonize part of the market and undermine their commercial prospects. Yet, many publishers continued to use their nowmonopolistic power to advocate for their political viewpoints, which were generally conservative, pro-business and anti-labour.³ In this sense, a century ago, US news media was not unlike Latin American news media of recent years. The great progressive Robert La Follette (1920) devoted a chapter of his book on political philosophy to the crisis of the press. ‘Money power . . . ’, he wrote, ‘controls the newspaper press. . . . wherever news items bear in any way upon the control of government by business, the news is colored’ (345).

By the first two decades of the twentieth century, this had become a major crisis for US journalism. The news was under constant attack for venality and duplicity. As even the publisher of the Scripps-owned Detroit News privately acknowledged in 1913, the corrosive influence of commercial ownership and the pursuit of profit were such that the rational democratic solution would be to have municipal ownership of newspapers, with popular election of the editors (Kaplan 2002: 166). In view of the explicitly political nature of newspapers in US history, this was not as absurd a notion as it may appear today. Scripps, always the most working class oriented of the major chains, even launched an ad-less daily newspaper in the 1910s, because it saw how commercialism undermined the integrity of the news (see Stoltzfus 2007).

Is professional journalism under commercial control the solution?

Reconciling a monopolistic commercial news media with the journalism requirements of a political democracy is a difficult challenge. In some wealthier European nations, the solution, such as it has been, has taken the form of strong partisan and occasionally public subsidies to support journalism oriented to working-class and labour interests, and the creation of independent public broadcasting. In the United States, the problem was solved through self-regulation by the newspaper industry, in the form of professional journalism. This was a revolutionary idea: The owner and the editor could now be separated, and the owner’s (and advertisers’) political views would not be reflected in the nature of the journalism, except on the editorial page. It was a 180-degree shift from the earlier history of US journalism, which was founded on the notion of an explicitly partisan and highly competitive press.

Under professionalism, trained journalists would determine and produce the news, and it would be objective, non-partisan, factually accurate and unbiased. Whether there were ten newspapers in a community or only one or two would be mostly irrelevant, because professional journalists – like mathematicians addressing an algebra problem – would all come up with the same reports. As press magnate Edward Scripps explained, at one time readers ‘did not care what the editor’s views were; . . . when it came to news one paper was as good as a dozen’ (Kaplan 2002: 126). There were no schools of journalism in the United States (or the world, for that matter) in 1900. By the 1920s, all the major journalism schools had been established, and by 1923, the American Society of Newspaper Editors had formalized a professional code for editors and reporters to follow.

There is nothing inevitable or ‘natural’ about the type of professional journalism that emerged in the United States in the last century. The values that came to dominate it were contested; the journalists’ union, the Newspaper Guild, in the 1930s, unsuccessfully attempted to have a non-partisan journalism that was far more critical of everyone in power, and viewed itself as the agent of people outside of power – to ‘afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted’, as the saying goes. It regarded journalism as a third force independent of both government and big business, and wanted to prohibit publishers from having any control over the content of the news. According to the leading history of the association, ‘The idea that the Guild could rebalance the power struggle between public and publisher through a new kind of stewardship of the freedom of the press became a core tenet of their mission as an organization’ (Scott 2009: 260). This remains a compelling vision, worthy of being part of a good news system, and is still practised today by some of our best journalists.

This practice of journalism was anathema to most publishers, who wanted no part of aggressive reporting on their fellow business owners or the politicians they routinely worked with and relied upon for their businesses to be successful. They were also never going to relinquish direct control over the newsroom; editors and reporters had their autonomy strictly at the owners’ discretion. The resulting professionalism was to the owners’ liking, for the most part, and more conducive to their commercial and political needs. It was also porous, such that commercial factors could influence the values that led to story selection, and advertising could still influence the nature and content of news coverage (see Collins 1992).

The core problem with professional journalism as it crystallized was that it relied far too heavily upon official sources – people in power – as the appropriate agenda setters for news and as the ‘deciders’ with regard to the range of legitimate debate in US political culture. There is considerable irony in this development. In two brilliant essays written in 1919 and 1920, Walter Lippmann – generally regarded as the leading advocate of professionalism and a ferocious critic of the bankrupt quality of journalism in 1910s’ United States – argued that the main justification for professionalism in journalism was that a trained group of independent non-partisan reporters would systematically and rigorously debunk government (and, implicitly, corporate) spin, and not regurgitate it (Lippmann 2008; Lippmann and Merz 1920).

This reliance upon official sources removed some of the controversy from the news, and it made it less expensive to produce. It didn’t cost as much to put reporters where people in political power congregate. This gave the news an ‘establishment’ tone. It made reporters careful about antagonizing those upon whom they depended for ‘access’ to their stories (see Nichols and McChesney 2005). ‘It is a dirty quid pro quo’, wrote Chris Hedges (2009), the former New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter. ‘The media get access to the elite as long as the media faithfully report what the elite wants reported. The moment that quid pro quo breaks down, reporters – real reporters – are cast into the wilderness and denied access’ (170).

This fundamental limitation of professional journalism does not manifest itself in coverage of those issues where there is rich and pronounced debate between or within leading elements of the dominant political parties. Then journalists have a good deal of room to maneuver, and professional standards can ensure a measure of factual accuracy, balance and credibility. There tend to be slightly fewer problems in robust political eras, like the 1960s, when mass movements demand the attention, respect and fear of the powerful.

The real problem becomes evident when political elites march in virtual lockstep. Then professional journalism is at best ineffectual, and at worst propagandistic. This has often been the case in US foreign policy, where both parties are beholden to an enormous global military complex, and accept the right of the United States, and the United States alone, to invade countries when it suits US interests (Friel and Falk 2004; Herman and Chomsky 1989; Mermin 1999). In matters of war and foreign policy, journalists who question the basic assumptions and policy objectives and who attempt to raise issues that no one in the leadership of either party wishes to debate are considered ‘ideological’ and ‘unprofessional’. This has a powerful disciplinary effect.⁴

So it was that even in the glory days of 1960s’ journalism, the news media helped lead the United States into the Vietnam war, despite the fact that dubious claims from the government – for example, the Gulf of Tonkin hoax – could in many cases have easily been challenged and exposed. ‘The process of brain-washing the public starts with off-the-record briefings for newspapermen’, I. F. Stone (1964: 4) wrote at the time. Two great dissident Democratic senators, Alaska’s Ernest Gruening and Oregon’s Wayne Morse, broke with both their own par...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Media, Power and Democracy in the International Political Economy
• Part II The Politics and Cultural Practices of Media and Power in South America
• Part III Regionalism and the International Political Economy of Communication
• Bibliography
• Index