In all technologically advanced countries, the media have become a central political arena. Their most obvious importance lies in the huge audiences they reach, and the way these audiences transcend and cut across other social divisions and political constituencies. Just as importantly, the massive presence of the media acts as a force for disclosure from official institutions, and so has transformed political processes and created tensions surrounding the control of information and impressions.
The development of the media has always been intertwined with aspirations for democracy and struggles for political control (Keane 1991). The press had a deeply ambiguous history, chequered with political patronage, official subservience and expedient compromises. The news was reported with both fear and favour, as independent journalistic functions emerged uncertainly and erratically within what were primarily political instruments. But whether under state despotism, party patronage or under more solidly commercial bases, with the growth of the press barons in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, newspapers never manifested any golden age of journalistic purity (Smith 1979). There have always been charges that the press appealed to ‘baser’ instincts, just as earlier forms of personal information exchange centred on salacious gossip (Stephens 1988) and that it indulged in sensationalism and wilful distortion.
The outcome from all these idiosyncrasies and expediencies was the invention of a qualitatively new institution, one devoted to disclosure and dependent on audience acceptance with its own priorities, incentives and constraints, whose growth was fanned by the competition for market share and/or political influence. One institutional dynamic was towards an ever increasing conception of what it could and should make public (Roshco 1975) and to do so in ways that had the greatest audience appeal. Such imperatives made the media’s route to their current political centrality inevitable.
Access to the media is now a key political resource. Efforts to influence media content and to counteract the attempts at media manipulation by opponents are an important battleground in many political conflicts. While media analysts have hesitated in pronouncing upon the political impacts of media, political participants certainly act as if the media have great power. From the time, when in their very different ways, Franklin Roosevelt and the German Nazis recognized the importance of radio, political leaders and activists from all parts of the spectrum have devoted great energy to influencing or controlling the media. Some terrorist groups have demanded media access among their demands, while others have planned their actions to achieve maximum international media exposure. Coup leaders typically commandeer broadcasting stations as one of their early targets, based upon an appreciation of establishing the appearance of control and the elimination of opportunities for counter-mobilization. Leaders in liberal democracies have sizeable staffs and resources devoted to achieving the most favourable media coverage.
The grievances of disaffected groups with a political system typically now include dissatisfaction with the media and its treatment of them. Disadvantaged groups and embattled leaders commonly blame the media as one key reason for their problems. However, discontents with the media are not limited to the politically disadvantaged. The performance of the media has attracted a variety of powerful but contrasting critiques. Dissatisfactions cross the political spectrum, provoking ideological critiques from both left and right. More embracingly, broadcasting, in particular, has been blamed for a cheapening of political discourse (Postman 1986); for the dominance of entertainment over political priorities; for the sale of political influence through advertising; and for being cognitively disabling and increasing popular political alienation.
However, the views of the critics are as contentious and problematic as the performance of the media. The power of the media to control public thinking has proved more limited than some feared. Many of the claims about media influence confuse visibility with power. Reassuringly, efforts at media manipulation by political leaders have met with mixed success. The collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe demonstrated that not even a generation of media control could secure them legitimacy from the populace.
The problems with claims about unidirectional ideological effects of the media go beyond the frequent difficulties of demarcating criteria and the transparent biases of the observers. Solely textual approaches to news, casting it in terms of myth or ideology, fail to capture its impact as a central institution, whose functioning affects the actions and relationships of key political participants. The media have been the focus of new complexes of political activity, including the growth of ‘spin doctors’ and other ‘minders’. An institution devoted to disclosure sets up tensions, and is ripe for unintended consequences, even when politically constrained.
Especially but not only in liberal democracies, the media’s impact upon the processes of policy making and the operation of other political institutions has been many-sided (Tiffen 1989). It has increased the government’s speed of response. Prominence in the news has often influenced the priorities of political decision making, media attention imparting ‘heat as well as light’ (Sigal 1973) upon issue agendas. When media attention changes the timing of decisions, their content and effectiveness may also change. Most fundamentally, news has enlarged the scope of information available to the public. It has broadened the geographic range of the world with which they are regularly acquainted and deepened their knowledge of their own societies and politics. An often overlooked consequence is that policy making, or at the least the presentation of policies, is more constrained towards options which are publicly acceptable.
In these ways, the political significance of the media is far more profound and pervasive than the occasional deliberate exercise of power by those who occupy strategic positions in it—proprietors, editors, journalists or advertisers. Moreover the attribution of manipulative manoeuvres to such media figures, when based solely upon external readings of content, often lack any grasp of the internal constraints and motivations.
Each new advent in media has been greeted by great hopes and fears. These are often to do with aspects of the quality of cultural and political life, not easily subjected to measurement. Nevertheless false forecasts have clearly abounded. Moreover, despite the importance of political influences on media developments, they typically unfold in ways not foreseen by media policy makers or would-be controllers. Media history bears ample testimony to the limited prescience of both policy makers and their critics. Despite the difficulties of predicting future developments, two current trends promise to be of increasing political importance the multiplicity of media outlets and trends towards inter nationalization.
The enormously increased technological capacity to deliver numerous channels to households, via satellites, cable and terrestial services, has coincided with a trend, through most western countries and in newly democratized polities, towards deregulation as a general policy stance. This has been particularly manifested in media and telecommunications policies, even though market rhetoric, centring on the consumer sovereignty brought by open competition, has rarely fitted media developments very well. The huge start-up costs, the desirable economies of scale in supply, production and distribution, and the logic of advertising strategies, all seem to lend themselves to oligopoly.
Many countries have allowed new commercial broadcasters to enter, at the same time as the finance available for public-service broadcasters has been squeezed. Most obviously the increased outlets will increase consumer choice, but the end of the process and its political implications are hard to foresee. Some say broadcasting will give way, at least in niche markets, to narrowcasting. The traditional democratic concern with massification is already being replaced by a concern with fragmentation.
The second and partly related trend is an increase in media capacities to transmit information around the globe instantaneously. This is a central part of the growing political importance of transnational forces, and the increasing influence of international influences upon domestic politics. The media were one element, for example, in the international opinion which helped to buttress domestically reformist leaders like Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and one thread in the way international actions and support contributed to the success of the African National Congress and the relatively peaceful transition from apartheid in South Africa.
Increasingly, the audiences for news are becoming international, with consequences for the conduct of foreign policy and the control strategies of national regimes. The massive presence of the western media probably prevented a bloodier regime crackdown during the fall of the Marcos regime in the Philippines in 1986. Chinese protesters deliberately appealed to the western media in attempting to change domestic power balances during the protests which culminated in the 1989 Tiananmien Square massacres. The availability of satellite news services, copied on to videotapes and widely distributed among activists, was an ingredient in the victory of the ‘mobile phone mob’ in Bangkok’s 1992 demonstrations. At the same time, such trends have made the international flow of news and information even more unbalanced, the control of technology and commercial capacity has become more concentrated, the forces for international integration have in some important ways eroded national sovereignty, and the presence of western advertising and programming will have unknown cultural effects upon new audiences.
The safest prediction is that the history of the media will continue to be ambiguous, with double-edged implications for many political ideals, and in an equally complicated and contentious but dynamic future, politics and the media will continue to develop inextricably bound to each other.
Rodney Tiffen
University of Sydney
References
Keane, J. (1991) The Media and Democracy, London.
Postman, N. (1986) Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Entertainment, London.
Roshco, B. (1975) Newsmaking, Chicago.
Sigal, L. (1973) Reporters and Officials, Lexington, MA.
Smith, A. (1979) The Newspaper: An International History, London.
Stephens, M. (1988) A History of News: From the Drum to the Satellite, New York.
Tiffen, R. (1989) News and Power, Sydney.
Further reading
Dyson, K. and Humphreys, P. with Negrine, R. and Simon, J. -P (1988) Broadcasting and New Media Policies in Western Europe, London.
Cans, H. (1979) Deciding What’s News, New York.
Head, S. (1985) World Broadcasting Systems: A Comparative Analysis, Belmont, CA.
McQuail, D. (1992) Media Performance: Mass Communication and the Public Interest, London.
Seymour-Ure, C. (1974) The Political Impact of Mass Media, London.
