Table Of ContentMedia Democracy
Media
Democracy
How the Media
Colonize Politics
THOMAS MEYER
witfi
Lew Hinchman
polity
Copyright © Thomas Meyer 2002
The right of Thomas Meyer to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
9
First published in 2002 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Meyer, Thomas, 1943-
Media democracy : how the media colonize politics / Thomas Meyer,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7456-2843-5 - ISBN 0-7456-2844-3 (pbk.)
1. Mass media - Political aspects. I. Title.
P95.8 .M493 2002
302.23 -dc21
2002002213
Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon
by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong
Printed in Great Britain by MPG Books, Bodmin, Cornwall
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
C o n t e n t s
Preface: Media, Culture, and Politics vii
1 The Logic of Politics 1
2 The Logic of Mass Media 27
3 The Process of Colonization 49
4 The Effects of Colonization 73
~
5 The Transformation of
Representative Democracy 1 □□
G Prospects for Media Democracy 1 18
Conclusion: Democracy in Transition 141
Notes 1 44-
Bibliography 1 49
Index 1 58
Preface:
Media, Culture,
and Politics
Mass-media research
The mass media, their prospects and effects, their modes of opera
tion and social consequences have all become key themes of social
science, cultural criticism, and, ironically, of the media themselves
within a remarkably short time. There are good reasons for social
scientists and culture critics to pay attention: one can hardly think of
another phenomenon that has shaped contemporary societies so
thoroughly and durably, so profoundly and irreversibly. The increas
ing influence of contemporary mass media on modern life, in many
areas a quite profound one, has been studied in considerable detail.
Investigations have focused not only on communicative behavior
itself, but also on its sociological consequences for central domains
of life such as childhood, family, leisure-time behavior, and work.1
Social and media scientists have also intensively explored the trans
formations wrought by the mass media in the public and political
spheres. Thus far three dimensions of the relation between the media
and politics have especially preoccupied investigators:
First, they have studied the way the public sphere has been trans
formed as a result of changes in the mass-media communications, a
process that embraces newspapers, television, the internet, and the
“masses” themselves; in short, the ways in which public communi
cation itself has been reshaped by the influence of the media.2 They
have demonstrated that in addition to the explicitly political media
formats non-factual media have broadly expanded the terms of public
debate.3 The agenda-setting and agenda-building functions of modern
mass media have played an especially prominent role here. However,
viii Preface: Media, Culture, and Politics
in the course of media research it has also become evident that it
would be a great mistake to identify the audiences of media products
as such with the public. Publics emerge only in much more complex
processes of information and discursive interaction of citizens.4 Yet
there can be no reasonable doubt of mass media’s centrality in the
process of shaping the public sphere.5
Second, concerning the relation between the media and political
reality, research has been undertaken to understand the diverse pat
terns of the former in constructing the latter.6 These analyses have
shown more and more clearly how the mass media do not just mirror
political life, but generate a political “reality” that is tailored to their
own requirements.7 The construction of reality by the mass media
is a complex social process and all reports about political reality
are inevitably affected by the criteria the media apply in selecting
and presenting material, ones designed to secure maximum public
response.
Third, research on the impact of the media has focused on the way
their characteristic constructions of reality have affected the political
orientations of their addressees.8 Detailed studies on the effects of
mass media present a wealth of confusing and contradictory data
that seem to get fuzzier as the research methodology becomes more
precise. In any case one has the impression that media studies are
becoming so specialized that they can no longer be readily synthe
sized into a coherent picture. Nevertheless, this research has yielded
some basic insights that may be useful in developing an empirically
supported evaluation of the various assumptions, processes and con
sequences that condition the emergence in our time of a new politi
cal phenomenon: media democracy.9
Cultural studies
The research on the effects of mass media has born fruit in the form
of theories concerning “videomalaise” and the “knowledge gap.”10
The former have studied suspected causal connections between fre
quent TV consumption and political alienation, but have not reached
consensual conclusions. Whereas, e.g., T. Patterson has argued that
news media have grown more negative and more cynical and thereby
produced growing popular distrust of politicians and government,
and even a general disengagement from civic life, P. Norris in a
more recent comparative study insists that the general “videomalaise”
Preface: Media, Culture, and Politics ix
argument has little empirical support.11 The issue remains contro
versial. Surprisingly, the “knowledge gap” research has revealed
that the spread of television consumption to more and more people
involving larger segments of their time does not equalize the stock
of politically relevant knowledge among subgroups of society, but
instead widens such gaps between them.12 Accordingly, the chances
that equal rights to democratic participation can be secured through
the spread and intensification of mass-media communication have
grown slimmer.
Given the current state of the discipline, the one conclusion of
media-impact research that appears most solidly grounded and most
applicable across diverse fields of inquiry is this: the media do of
course initiate the process of dissemination. However, in the last
analysis, the individual members of the targeted audience bring with
them certain knowledge, habits, interests and criteria of application
that have a decisive bearing on the way in which media programming
may affect them.1’ The media may thus offer their audience a variety
of fare in many different ways, but the content will be only one input
among many in shaping the citizens’ powers of judgment. This
argument, however, has been driven to its “postmodern” extreme by
J. Fiske’s concept of “semiotic democracy” which tends to dissolve
the media text into its individual reading, so that the media them
selves are not seen as being in a position to exert any real influence
on their audiences’ perception of the political sphere.14
In response to this S. Hall and D. Morley have sensitized us to the
discovery that the active role of diverse recipients at the demand-side
of mass-media communication by no means renders the supply-side
structures of the media products irrelevant.1' A vague concept of uses
and gratifications in media reception that puts the blame for all kinds
of deficiencies and shortcomings in the field of mediated political
communication on the recipient’s shoulders alone is not in tune
with reality.16 I agree with Corner’s contention that, in the future,
researchers should avoid concentrating exclusively on the micro-level
processes involved in public reception of media programming. Doing
so would mean drawing the wrong conclusions from previous
studies.17 Furthermore, a research approach stressing such micro
level reception would, by its very design, exempt the potential role
of media power from scientific analysis. My study is a contribution
to recovering empirically supported insights into the factors that
influence the macro-level, i.e., the structural conditions that govern
the pre-staging of events in the media theatre.
x Preface: Media, Culture, and Politics
Depending on their social and individual background for large
parts of the audiences the “preferred reading” (S. Hall) that is sug
gested by the immanent structure of the media products themselves
is dominating their actual reading. And moreover, as will be shown
in chapter 3 of this book, what matters most in the context of media
democracy is the fact that the key actors of the political system always
reckon with the effects of the preferred reading structures of media
products on the large majority of the audience, and stage-manage
their own performance in accordance with it.
Cultural studies and culture-critical analyses have also investigated
basic changes in communicative behavior and orientation occasioned
by modern mass media.18 Authors such as N. Postman and B. Barber
have pushed the critique of video culture toward a new and - for
democratic theory - worrisome conclusion: that the citizens of
television societies may be rapidly losing their faculties of politi
cal judgement as a result of the hegemony of stage-managed,
entertainment-oriented presentations of events.19 With much plausi
bility it has been argued that mass-media communication as a whole,
by way of its modes of picking out or ignoring societal and political
issues, has caused the aquiescence of the large majority of its
audiences.20 Political science has furthermore analyzed the extent to
which the modern media may offer politicians and their staffs un
precedented opportunities to stage symbolic political events capable
of winning citizens’ adherence, and thereby may indirectly redis
tribute roles among the different actors in the political system.21
Researchers have particularly directed attention to the symbiotic rela
tionships that flow from the common interest political and media
actors have in generating maximum publicity.22
Although Postman may be right that one basic reality of today’s
mass-media communications in the field of politics is the increasing
tendency towards blurring the boundaries between journalism, enter
tainment, public relations, and advertising, it would, however, as
Dahlgren argues, be both illusory and counter-productive to restrict
the analysis to the condemnation of this new reality as such by striv
ing for the rationalistic model of a public “uncontaminated by media
culture”.23 Consequently, the interest underlying the concept of this
book is rather to understand the empirical conditions under which
these new mixed types of media discourses still contribute to appro
priate political information and understanding, and those conditions
under which they don’t.
