6. Political Freedom Part 1: The Trouble with Mass Media

Summary of the chapter

Overview

The concept of public sphere can be narrowed down to the “set of practices members of a society use to communicate about matters they understand to be of public concern and that potentially require collective action or recognition” (177). Chapter 6 argues that the way mass media now structures these practices is limited: first, mass media offers no return loop from the edges to the core (feedback is local or one-to-one); second, it relies on a passive consumer culture rather than one of public communication. The Internet and the emerging networked information economy provide a better public platform.

Communication in the public sphere is structured not only by technical infrastructures, but also by modes of organization, economic models of production, culture (literacy, social egalitarianism, etc.), and institutions (legal frameworks, subsidies). For example, equivalent technical platforms were available in France, the UK and the US a century ago and later in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Yet active public spheres did not always emerge (although repressive regimes may have one, if political opinions spread through networks) and when they did they varied in relative elitism (UK) or populism (US). There was also variation in who supported production hubs, whether it be the state (most countries), advertisers (CNN), combinations of both (BBC, CBC), civil society (party presses in Europe) or nonprofits (the Consumer Report in the US).

Design Characteristics of A Communications Platform For a Liberal Public Platform or a Liberal Public Sphere

There are several basic characteristics of the public sphere necessary, in a wide range of democracies, to communicate private opinion and convert it into public, political opinion and later into formal state action:

• Universal intake. This does not mean that every voice is heard and every concern debated and answered, but rather that in principle anyone's situation can be considered when someone believes it requires public attention.
• Filtering for potential political relevance. This is necessary so that the public can focus on important issues.
• Filtering for accreditation. This ensures that the information communicated is credible.
• Synthesis of public opinion. What counts as public opinion varies between and among deliberative conceptions and pluralist conceptions of democracy, but some combination of clusters of individual opinion is essential.
• Independence from governmental control. Though the government can participate in explicit conversations and the administration receives instructions from their output, neither controls the platform itself.

The first and last requirements are the most controversial, for they raise the issue of so-called authoritarian public spheres. Benkler beings this section with Harbermas' descriptive definition of a public sphere and asserts that it can be liberal or authoritarian. The difference is that people in the idealized Athenian agora or New England town halls express, listen to and evaluate proposals, facts, concerns and opinions with complete freedom, while in authoritarian regimes “communications are regimented and controlled by the government in order to achieve acquiescence and to mobilize support” (181). In both cases at least some private opinions are communicated and converted into state action.

Yet when Benkler sets out to define the above criteria (182), he is only concerned with liberal democratic public spheres – not with partially independent platforms and theoretical universal intake. Such a normative notion of the public sphere suggests that it makes little sense to speak of authoritarian public spheres, for regimes that allow a political, public opinion to form and to influence or “convert into” state action are usually considered democratic. (This is of course difficult to assess, since sophisticated executives in any regime both listen to public opinion and retain their own agenda. See Case Studies below).

Basic Critiques of Mass Media

Independence from political parties, government and the upper-class as well as professionalism and near-universal visibility have allowed concentrated mass media to express, accredit and filter important issues in the public sphere. That these three functions are combined in the hands of the same few operators, however, has led to three primary critiques.

Mass Media as a Platform for the Public Sphere

First, intake is too limited. Few-to-many communication means information loss because there are too few entry points. Concentrated media is also likely to be less representative than distributed media, because reporters are embedded in elite social segments.

Media Concentration: The Power of Ownership and Money

Second, media owners have too much power - to exercise or sell – over public perceptions and public debate. The reason is the lack of competition (concentration in the anti-trust sense) and the majority “mindshare” that a few media firms hold in politically relevant units (concentration in terms of channels to and from an audience). Eli Noam measured this concentration from 1984 to 2001-2002 and found that local media concentration increased except for local television. Yet in 2003 the Sinclair Broadcast Group owned and operated 62 local stations [59 today], deserving roughly ¼ of American households. (Sinclair was accused of misinformation and involved in controversies for its 8-station ban of an ABC Nightline tribute to 721 soldiers killed in Iraq in 2003 and before it ordered its stations to air a documentary criticizing John Kerry's anti-Vietnam War activism, during prime time just two weeks before the 2004 elections)

Commercialism, Journalism, and Political Inertness

Third, advertisement-supported media uses lowest-common-denominator programming. In addition to business interests, it favors majority tastes, titillating or soothing topics, spectacle and entertainment in order to attract large audiences. Celebrities and local crime take precedence over distant famines, while challenging and politically important questions, controversial views, and disturbing images are served to “political junkies” in niche markets (208). Debate is communicated as a performance, that is as “an already presynthesized portrayal of an argument among avatars of relatively large segments of opinion as perceived by the journalists and stagers of the debate” (209). Talk radio and call-in shows are “the pornography and violence of political discourse” (209).

Benkler illustrates this common-denominator problem using Jack Beebe's refinement of “program diversity” analysis, introduced by Peter Steiner in 1952. A graph based on a hypothetical channel distribution (Table 6.1) illustrates what Beebe established. According to his model, “media monopolists would show nothing but common-denominator programs” (207) - i.e. when there is only one channel (smallest circle on the graph), all viewers are watching the same sitcom. Competition “begin[s] to serve the smaller preference clusters only if a large enough number of channels” is available – here, more than 250 channels. (Unlike Table 6.1, the present graph assumes 3 million viewers to highlight the fact that many are not tuning in during the considered programming time slot and that the total number of people expected to watch a category of channels does not decrease as the number of channels increases.)

Fox News is a powerful counter-example which “likely represents a composite of the Berlusconi effect, the high market segmentation made possible by high-capacity cable systems, the very large market segment of Republicans, and the relatively polarized tone of American political culture since the early 1990s” (208).