Jason Diceman – December 2000
Within our large and dispersed liberal democratic society, the media is supposed to play an important communications role: facilitating public discourse, informing the public, representing the public and acting as a watchdog of the power structures that effect public’s well being[1]. Traditionally, this role was taken up be the newspaper industry. But in Canada, as in many other Western nations, TV has surpassed the newspaper as the popular source for news and information[2].
This paper will examine how the dominant medium of TV fulfills its democratic role as a tool for public discourse, public representation and social unity. Using theoretical discussion and common ideas concerning media and the public sphere, it will be shown that the nature of television and its current sustaining structure make it incapable of supporting a true democratic society.
In order for the people of a state to partake in self-government, they require a communications system to distribute and exchange ideas and messages among the people. A large and complex society such as our own requires a complex and expansive communications system to facilitate this need. We have come to call this system “the media”. The media are the instruments of communication (such as books, newspapers, TV, film and the Internet) and also the people and organizations that support the production and distribution of the messages.
The following roles for the media are an interpretation of some of the main ideas presented by James Curran in the essay Mass Media and Democracy Revisited.[3]
An essential part of democracy is the freedom of speech. With the extremely large number of voices in our society, and the historical scarcity of mass media space, we have given only a very small number of people the opportunity to be apart of the media. These privileged communicators are supposed to represent the rest the rest of us, much like how our elected officials are supposed to represent their constituents. It would be impractical to represent every individual, instead, it is more productive to represent communities, demographics and organizations.
This representation is not that of the average, but of the diverse groups of all sizes. The media should give a voice to all those groups that wish to be heard.
With this privilege of mass communications power comes a responsibility of the media to protect the people it represents. The people support and look to the media as a system for keeping the power structures of their society in check. The media must represent the people’s interests and notify them of any issues the public may want to act on.
In a democracy, the citizens are responsible for making collective decisions to benefit the whole. In order for a democratic community to flourish, its members must share the knowledge they gain. This sharing of knowledge is a form of education that insures intelligent and informed decision-making by all the members of the community for the benefit of the individuals and the community as a whole.
In our society this sharing of knowledge is carried out by both the education system and the media. The schools are designed to teach skills and long-term knowledge. The media’s function is to inform the public about contemporary issues. The media gives the citizens an understanding of what is currently happening in their world, and the schools give them the skills to deal with these issues.
If a society is to remain united, its members must have a common culture. In a large society, media helps to distribute culture by giving the mass population shared experience. The more we feel we have in common, the greater bond we will have to each other and the greater chance we will be able to make decisions for the common good.
In order for any medium to accomplish the above functions, it must maintain certain criteria. This section will describe some of the main criteria a mass medium must realize to successfully sustain its role in a democracy.
The first three criteria are based on the work concerning the “Public Sphere” by the German intellectual and great contributor to the Frankfurt school, Jürgen Habermas. He describes that a space for public discourse must have universal access, rational debate and a disregard of rank[4]. The later three are loose interpretations of James Curran’s work.
Our society is filled with a very diverse collection of groups with different cultures, ideologies, goals, needs and backgrounds. In order to represent all these groups the media needs to present a diversity of perspectives. To best achieve this diversity, members of all groups need to have access to contribute to the media. This does not mean that ever group will have a member in the media, but that each group can communicate with the media so that their most important messages reach the masses.
There must also be universal access to media reception. The media is only valuable in its ability to communicate to the citizens. The more people the media can reach, the more successful it will be at fulfilling its role in a democracy. No citizens should be excluded from the public discourse that is facilitated by the media. Location, class, finances, disability and other personal, social or physical factors should not present barriers to media reception.
As well, each citizen should be educated with basic media literacy so they may understand and be critical of the media and feel confident in communicating with members of the media. This will insure the greatest amount of intelligent participation.
Before citizens can make an effective decision, they need to understand all the important arguments presented. Each argument must have the opportunity to state its case and defend itself against counter arguments. This debating will flush out the strongest arguments and make obvious ideas that lack a foundation in reason and logic.
Effective debating requires a structure that isolates and rewards logic, reason and factual research, and provides a reasonable amount of time to explain and carryout discourse that may be complex in nature.
Although the reputation and authority of a person may be a helpful heuristic for judging the value of a person’s message, it may not be accurate. Sometimes intelligent people say stupid things, and simple people, profound things. The essential logic of this criteria is that each message should be judged on its own merit, not that of the message maker. Ideas should be presented in such a way that viewers are encouraged to be critical of the ideas and not the person presenting them.
The media’s role as a watchdog requires that it be critical of the main power structures in our society. In order to be openly critical of a structure, one must be independent of it. To extend the watchdog metaphor: the dog will not bark at its owner or bite the hand that feeds it. The three main power structures in our society are: the government, corporations and elite wealthy families. Parties in each of these structures have the power to affect large amounts of the population without public consultation. The media can help keep these powerful structures inline by making the public aware of their actions and the effects they may have.
To serve a democratic society, the media must represent and inform the public. As discussed earlier, part of this process of representation is achieved through contributive access. Representation can also be achieved through close response to public interest. Even if parts of society do not always communicate with the media, the media should be able to always realize the different concerns and interests of the public and attempt to represent and inform those interests. The priorities of importance presented by the media should be the priorities held by the public. As public views and interests change, so should the media’s. Although it may be contested whether the media follows or creates public interest, its proper role in a democracy is to facilitate an exchange of ideas, not to determine what should be of interest.
Communication can only be considered useful to the democratic process if it is accurate. Inaccurate messages will not inform, represent or protect a community (although it can still bond them). Not only should the messages be accurate, they should also be balanced to best represent the true state of affairs. People will make better decisions if they are accurately informed and understand all legitimate perspectives related to the issue. The activity of researching and writing accurate information concerning the public is often referred to as professional journalism.
TV is not independent of power structures; in fact, TV is often an essential part of them. The expense of creating and maintaining a TV station has restricted ownership almost exclusively to large corporations, wealthy families or the government. TVs dependence on powerful structures handicaps its ability to be critical of them, and thus reduces is effectiveness as a public watchdog.
One could attempt to defend this current situation by saying that if a market is served by different stations supported by different structures, they will be critical of each other, and thus have an over all effect of independent media. This does not hold true because: a) people may only get their information from one source, and thus miss the counter balancing forces of the other media sources, and b) in many communities there is a large imbalance of media support. While social states tend to lean heavily on government-controlled media, capitalist societies watch mostly privately owned stations. In both cases, those structures that are in the majority will often use their power to handicap any opposing forces through regulation, lobbying and/or institutionalized practices. To simplify, the media supported by different structures are often competing on an uneven playing field with largely disproportionate teams. In practice, a variety of dependent TV broadcasters do not function the same as a true independent broadcaster.
The commercial structure of private TV forces broadcasters to compete for an audience to sell to advertisers. This market competition causes programmers to choose content that is enticing, entertaining, seductive and appealing to the lowest common denominator and/or wealthy consumers. Decisions are based not on public benefit, but advertising potential. This arrangement means that commercial TV does not aim to meet the criteria for effectively supporting democracy. News programs are designed to be entertaining, not critical of the powerful structures in society or of great informative value (ie. the Action News phenomena). Access is denied to groups whose messages do not fit the criteria for maximized profits. Responsiveness is also hindered by commercial goals, but this requires further explanation...
Media responsiveness was traditionally thought to be administered best by the free market. If the public was presented with a full gamut of potential discussions, they would choose the ones that most reflect their own interests, and so the market would respond favorably to those media that represent the public best. But as TV demonstrates, this model does not function in a commercial marketplace where communication space is limited, expensive and success is dictated not by interest, but by profit. Even if there are consumers interested in a certain issue, if they are not profitable audience, they will be ignored. One could argue that this is why there are little to no Canadian TV programs about unemployment, poverty or material simplification, even though such issues would probably be of interest to the 17% of Canadians who have low incomes[5]. Such topics do not attract sponsors, and so they do not get coverage in the commercial medium. Commercial TV responds to the interests of advertisers, not people.
In general, information presented on TV comes through two languages: the verbal and visual. While the verbal is constructed to contain the most useful information, the visual tends to have greater impact. The field of journalism lost great amounts of credibility once it entered into TV. In print the journalist is only restricted by research and words in their ability to create a balanced report. In TV the words lose power to the visuals. Ideas that lack visuals are overpowered by the emotional impact and “realness” of those that do. In effect, no matter how balanced the script is written, the perspective that is supported with the most compelling visuals has the advantage.
Visuals reduce the viewers tendency to be critical of the information content. For example, the appearance of debaters can often distract viewers from being critical of the arguments they present. Audiences are invited to respect rank through such devices as the podium, suite and uniform. The use of camera work, lighting, music and make-up can each affect the perception of a viewer even though the arguments may remain the same. The look of reporters, anchorpersons, interviewers and interviewees each play an important role in a viewers perception of the content, even though they have almost no informational value. The subjective nature of television visuals degrades its potential for facilitating objective and critical information analysis.
Even if TV producers intended to create television that meets all the democratic criteria, they would still be restricted by TVs nature as a time based medium. Unlike print or online media where more space can always be created, prime time on TV is a finite amount of space for airing the day’s daily news. Each complete or even incomplete message requires time. The choice of messages must always be prioritized and edited to fit the limited time slot. This is most apparent on days when multiple important events take place, yet the TV broadcast only communicates a small portion of them. TV must restrict inclusion to fit the demands of a limited time slot. For this reason it will always fail at representing a full range of groups for this requires more time then is always available.
No only does the time slot restrict the variety of message communicated, it also restricts the messages themselves. As made painfully apparent during popular government debates, TV time restrictions cannot support a useful debate. The limited time available to TV programs forces a high degree of concision, thus restricting arguments to short exchanges of simple and rhetorical ideas. TV does not provide enough time to fully explain and debate important complex issues necessary for informed democratic decision-making.
TV is one of the best mediums for popular access to reception. Terrestrial television broadcasts are free to be received by anyone with a TV in their expansive broadcast range, and other forms of transmission, such as cable and satellite, are relatively affordable (although subscription services do restrict some financial minorities). The verbal and visual nature of the programming, along with closed captioning, makes the content highly accessible to almost all citizens. The popular reception of Television helps unify our large community and is definitely one of TVs strengths.
The popularity of TV makes it very scrutinized and open to attack by many parties. Broadcasters who wish to maintain a positive journalistic reputation and a favorable relationship with large sectors of society have a vested interest in only using accurate information. Although the choice of content, the style and the writing may be biased, it is usually accurate. Unfortunately this accuracy is of little democratic value when if it is not representative of the public interest and shallow in its informative significance.
Much of the criticism against TV is aimed specifically at commercial broadcasters. Publicly funded stations are often much closer to the democratic ideal because they are commonly mandated to serve the public needs much more then commercial stations. As well, they are not restricted by commercial competition and so they may represent a wider variety of public groups and present programming that is not as popular but has greater informative significance. The main draw backs of public TV is that they sometimes lack funding to do higher quality productions, they may be forced to compete with more seductive commercial programming to prove their value in ratings, and they can be influenced by their supporting government bodies and thus act less independently.
Contemporary TV is effective at reaching the high majority of our society and thus it facilitates a unification of the culture and is open to scrutiny. But because of its nature as a visual broadcast medium and its competitive commercial structure, it is not effective as an in-depth information medium, responsive and representative of the diverse communities that make up our society. Contemporary television is a poor medium for supporting the kinds of communication that are necessary for a successful democratic community.
[1] Curran, James. “Mass Media & Democracy Revisited” Mass media and Society. Curran, James and Gurevitch, Michael, eds. New York. St Martin's Press, 1997.
[2] Gallup Poll, Feb. 24, 1998
http://www.media-awareness.ca/eng/issues/stats/usegen.htm#How Canadians Get their News
[3] Curran 1997
[4] O Baoill, Andrew. "Slashdot and the Public Sphere" First Monday 2000.
[5] Statistics Canada. People with low incomes before Tax, 1998
http://www.statcan.ca/english/Pgdb/People/Families/famil41a.htm