Comparing Mass Media in Established Democracies

Patterns of Media Performance

L. Müller

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137391384
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the contribution of mass media to modern democracies, in comparative perspective. Part I deals with the conceptualization and implementation of a systematic framework to assess democratic media performance, both in terms of media systems and content. Part II studies media effects on the quality of democracy.

1

Introduction

Mass media are an omnipresent element of our everyday life, and the modern world cannot be imagined without them. Watching television, listening to the radio, reading newspapers or magazines and surfing on the Internet are part of the daily routine for most citizens, at least in industrialized countries. Hence, there seems to be a widespread consensus that media are important for democracy, and increasingly so in today’s complex, highly differentiated societies. Media have moved to the center of the social, economic and political life, and they constitute the key carriers of democratic public spheres. Therefore, contemporary democracies are often dubbed ‘media societies’ (Habermas 2006: 419). The cause of this phenomenon is the fact that modern democracies are to a greater or lesser degree based on the principle of representation because they are too big for a large proportion of the citizens to always directly participate in all democratic decisions (Von Rautenfeld 2005: 184). Manin (1995) argues that modern representative democracies have gone through two major phases of transformation since their foundation. First, in the middle of the 19th century, with the ongoing industrialization and the extension of universal suffrage, parliamentarianism was replaced by the party democracy. Parliamentarianism was characterized by a political elite that was mainly elected on the basis of prestige or social status (260). Thus, political representatives stood out from the crowd, while at the same time their relationship with their voters was personal, direct and apolitical. Accordingly, the elected were highly independent of their constituents’ wishes, and political debates took place only within the secluded parliamentary arena. In party democracies, by contrast, society was split into solid social milieus represented by their respective parties in the political sphere and by party organs in the public sphere (267f.). Members of parliament no longer belonged to a superior elite but rather acted as party delegates or bureaucrats who had to promote their party’s program. Blumler and Kavanagh (1999: 211) call this ‘the golden age of parties’. The second transformation took place in the middle of the 20th century. In the wake of modernization, a change from the party to the so-called audience democracy became evident (Manin 1995: 279). As the strongly separated social milieus slowly dissolved, mass parties lost their stable constituencies whom they could directly influence. This dealignment process is a consequence of various trends associated with modernization such as secularization, growing levels of education and prosperity, rise of the tertiary sector, commercialization and individualization (Dalton et al. 1984). Accordingly, and similar to the former days of parliamentarianism, the distance between elites and citizens is growing,¹ and elections focus more on more on the personal characteristics of individual candidates. These candidates act increasingly independently from their parties’ programs and communicate and present themselves to the voters more directly in the public sphere (Manin 1995: 280f.). This means that today the communication of political affairs takes place primarily via the mass media, which have mostly freed themselves from direct partisan ties and to which the vast majority of the fluid and fragmented electorate turns to receive political news (Bennett and Entman 2001; De Vreese and Semetko 2004: 14; Froehlich 2001: 21). To put it simply, ‘It is not possible to advance even the most limited and formal definitions of democracy which do not recognise the integral role of the media to the actual functioning of all its elements’ (Sparks 1995: 45). Chan (2001) is even more to the point. He notes that a ‘democracy in the contemporary society is by definition a mediated democracy, with the media serving as a means of information and as a means of expression’ (115). This short excerpt already gets to the heart of what the role of mass media in a democracy consists of according to normative thinking. As is argued in the course of this book, there are two central functions of media for democracy: information and expression, or diversity, as it is referred to here. These two media functions are of key importance throughout this book.

Following a research tradition and strategy famously specified by McQuail (1992), this volume deals with the democratic requirements that mass media are supposed to fulfill. It examines (a) by what standards the democratic performance of mass media can be assessed in a systematic, comparative framework; (b) to what degree media actually live up to these standards in a cross-national perspective; and (c) how that affects different aspects of the democratic process. So far, the literature is somewhat vague concerning the first question and highly controversial with regard to the second and third questions.

On the one hand, the media’s actual democratic performance is very often criticized as flawed and even seen as a threat to democracy. One of the first and most prominent representatives of this perspective is Habermas (1962), and he has been followed by numerous scholars (see, e.g., Champlin and Knoedler 2006; Curtis 2004; Jackson and Stanfield 2004). Gunther and Mughan (2000), for example, call it a paradox that media have been crucial in promoting democratization processes in many transition countries but that, at the same time, they do not play their part in enhancing the quality of democracy in more mature democratic societies. The reasons for such opinions are twofold. First, in terms of media structures, media systems are increasingly controlled by a few large and private media conglomerates, and it is feared that this reduces the diversity of viewpoints in the public sphere or the independence of media from political or economic players (Champlin and Knoedler 2006; Habermas 2006; Petley 2004; Woods 2007). Second, in terms of media content, mass media adapt their political news coverage to criteria which seem to attract the maximum attention of a wide public, namely, the so-called news values (Galtung and Ruge 1965; Lippman 1922). Consequently, as plenty of studies have shown, political news focuses more and more on personalization, privatization, scandals and sensational events as well as on the conflict and competition between political actors and their strategies (game framing), instead of on substantive political issues (Bennett 2003; Gerhards 1994; Gulati et al. 2004; Habermas 2006; Imhof 2002; Jarren 1998; Gunther and Mughan 2000; Rhee 1997). And even if substantive issues are covered, they are presented in an episodic style, for example, by reporting about individual stories or fates detached from the wider social context (Iyengar 1991). All of this is taken as evidence that the mass media fail to meet their democratic duties, and – even worse – it is supposed that political news coverage fosters the citizen’s disengagement, mistrust and a crisis of political legitimacy (Cappella and Jamieson 1997; Gunther and Mughan 2000: 427; Kleinnijenhuis et al. 2006; De Vreese and Semetko 2004: 16). Norris (2000) gives a good overview of all of these supposed trends and summarizes them under the term ‘videomalaise’. These tendencies are sometimes more generally referred to as ‘commercialization’ or ‘mediatization’. For another comprehensive review of the respective literature, see Esser and Matthes (2013).

On the other hand, some authors argue against judging media by highly normative and unrealistic expectations that media have neither the capacities nor the motivations to fulfill. Graber (2003) articulates this most clearly:

Rather than being a venue for teaching civic knowledge, the media, as currently structured, are for-profit enterprises that must be concerned about their financial bottom line. [ ... ] Under these circumstances, the surprise is not that media have failed to perform the functions that are deemed so essential for [ ... ] democracy, but that they have retained a public-service orientation at all. (148)

Taking the same line of argument, it is claimed that the democratic ideal of the well-informed and eagerly participating citizen is not accurate to capture how politics works in advanced, industrialized societies (Graber 2004: 561). Only a very small part of the population is actually interested in receiving substantive and detailed political information. Most citizens, by contrast, base their political decisions on very limited and selective knowledge and heuristics (Ettema 2007; Graber 2004; Lupia 1994). Accordingly, a realistic model of democratic citizenship in today’s social context would be that of the so-called monitorial citizen (Schudson 1998).² Monitorial citizens do not need to pay close attention to politics all the time. They only have to follow the news often enough to notice when their interests are in danger and when political action is required (Schudson 1998: 310f.). And this, as Schudson (2008: 2) holds, is actually more likely when the news is presented in an interesting way. Sensationalist media coverage of drastic events, such as natural disasters or political scandals, may be more successful in engaging people and changing their minds than the best in-depth political analysis. Following up on Schudson (1998), Zaller (2003) calls for a ‘Burglar Alarm news standard’ instead of a ‘Full News standard’. ‘The key idea is that news should provide information in the manner of attention-catching “burglar alarms” about acute problems, rather than “police patrols” over vast areas that pose no immediate problems’ (110). In light of these assumptions, high-quality journalism does not only seem to be unprofitable for media organizations but not even really necessary either.

Nevertheless, Graber (2004) actually outlines for the US context – which is mostly thought of as the worst case – that the amount of substantive political news in the mass media is not as low as usually expected and that there is a wide range of different channels of communication through which citizens can receive political information and observe government actions. Furthermore, studies rate only one-third of the political news coverage as qualitatively poor while another third is judged to be mediocre or excellent, respectively (554). This means that for monitorial citizens, the media news digest might be adequate enough. Norris (2000) supports this. In her comparative study, she follows the claims of the so-called mobilization theory (Newton 1999) and finds that contrary to the conventional wisdom, media news consumption is positively related to political knowledge and mobilization (Norris 2000: 17). Further empirical studies also seem to contradict the rather pessimistic conclusions of proponents of the videomalaise perspective (see, e.g., Kriesi 2012; Tworzecki and Semetko 2012).

Rather than adopting one or the other perspective in this important controversy, however, the starting point of this book is the observation that verdicts of the media’s compliance with democratic requirements – no matter whether positive or negative – mostly lack comprehensive empirical support. In other words, many studies deal with media and democracy more or less explicitly, but they are mostly limited to the analysis of a single or a few countries, or only selected aspects of this complex field. Thorough, comparative studies are largely missing. As a consequence, it seems that for every study finding something – say an increasing negativity of news media coverage or a positive impact of soft news consumption on individuals’ level of political interest – there is at least another study finding the opposite, maybe in a different context, at a different time (see Esser and Matthes 2013).

One reason for the lack of large-scale cross-national studies is the limited availability of reliable comparative media data (Hallin and Mancini 2004: 16; Leckner and Facht 2010: 7; Puddephatt 2010: 43), which is something the present study admittedly struggles with as well.³ Nevertheless, it at least attempts to provide an empirical basis for the discussion of democratic media performance. More precisely, it is guided by the following two research questions:

1.How can the performance of media and media systems for democracy be measured systematically and how does it compare across democracies worldwide?

2.How do differences in media performance actually affect the functioning of various aspects of democracy?

These two questions imply a division of the book into two parts. The first part is concerned with the first question here. Accordingly, the already mentioned aim of this book is to develop a framework that allows assessing the extent to which mass media’s compliance with their supposed role in a democracy varies between more or less established democracies. At this point, two specifications are necessary. First, when speaking of mass media, I refer to the traditional mass media, namely, the press, television and – to a lesser degree – radio. This is mainly because democratic requirements are usually defined for traditional mass media (Christians et al. 2009: 29f.). Thus, the Internet is included only where this seems possible and appropriate. Second, by focusing on established democracies, this study deliberately excludes authoritarian states or countries in transition from autocratic to democratic regimes because there seems to be a broad consensus about the role of mass media in these political systems (see Gunther and Mughan 2000; Norris and Inglehart 2010).⁴

Probably more in line with representatives of the pessimistic videomalaise position, I rely on normative democratic standards for media performance because they serve ‘well as an ideal type – that is, as a construct against which different real-world approximations can be evaluated’ (Bennett and Entman 2001: 3; see also McQuail 1992: 17; or Norris and Odugbemi 2010: 12). In this sense, two key functions of media for democracy are derived from normative theory. They are referred to as the vertical and the horizontal function. While the vertical function asks for the widespread access to and provision of political information, the horizontal function requires that the diversity of different political viewpoints held in society be adequately reflected in the public sphere. The operationalization of these two functions, however, possibly follows the considerations of those who advocate the monitorial citizen model. Because of the comparative approach, the specific factors included to evaluate media performance are somewhat rough indicators which do not necessarily make very high demands on mass media and media systems. They could also be regarded as minimal standards. Thus, the conceptualization of media performance proposed in this book might be considered as building a bridge between the two opposing camps of the controversy outlined earlier or, to use McQuail’s (1992: 17) terms, between normative standards and objective research.

The next part of the book relates to the second research question. Once democratic media performance is measured and compared, how that actually impacts different elements of democracy is analyzed. There is not a lot of empirical research actually linking features of mass media to democratic outcomes across different countries. Most often, positive or negative consequences of media’s failure of or compliance with democratic requirements are simply assumed without a systematic test of such claims. Moreover, democracy is a complex, multidimensional phenomenon (Bühlmann et al. 2012a,b). Neither might media performance affect all of these democratic dimensions equally, nor can the two media functions be expected to have the same influence on the same aspects of democracy. Sweeping generalizations of the relationship between media and democracy might therefore be inappropriate. Hence, the objective of the second part of the book is to provide evidence that gives more insights into the effective importance of media for various aspects of democracy, being aware that the difficulty of keeping the two concepts apart makes this a challenging endeavor. Nevertheless, the results will hopefully allow drawing conclusions about whether the controversy between video- or media malaise and mobilization theorists about what to make of the current state of media in established democracies is actually worthwhile. That said, however, it is not the intention of this book to take sides and assert which perspective is right. Its goal is to contribute to the debate by offering it a more solid empirical grounding.

To conclude this introductory chapter, I would like to give a brief overview of the following eight chapters. Chapter 2 positions this book in the current field of comparative media research and provides a review of existing studies which focus on media and democracy in a cross-national perspective. In the first part of this chapter, the discussion shows that previous empirical assessments of democratic media performance have either been purely qualitative or have had a limited conceptual scope. In this context, the distinction between analyses on the structural and on the content level is introduced. While the former refers to features of the media system (media landscape and infrastructure), the latter comprises the output of media outlets, that is, their news coverage. The distinction between these two levels is crucial in the present study and is maintained continuously. The second part of Chapter 2 summarizes different strands of research which link media-specific variables to democratic outcomes. Again, it is argued that even though giving interesting insights, these contributions do not provide a comprehensive picture of the relationship between media and democracy. While the first part of Chapter 2 is important for the first research question guiding this book, the second part relates to the focal point of the second research question outlined earlier.

The subsequent four chapters form the first part of this book, which includes the definition, measurement and comparison of democratic media performance. Chapter 3 develops the conceptual framework of the volume. In a first step, drawing on the normati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Comparative Research on Media and Democracy
• Part I  Assessing Democratic Media Performance
• Part II  The Effects of Differences in Media Performance
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index