Introduction:
The Media / Democracy Paradox
excerpted from the book
Rich Media, Poor Democracy
by Robert McChesney
The New Press, 1999
Our era rests upon a massive paradox. On the one hand, it
is an age of dazzling breakthroughs in communication and information
technologies. Communication is so intertwined with the economy
and culture that our times have been dubbed the Information Age.
Sitting high atop this golden web are a handful of enormous media
firms-exceeding by a factor of I0 the size of the largest media
firms of just fifteen years earlier-that have established global
empires and generated massive riches providing news and entertainment
to the peoples of the world. Independent of government control,
this commercial media juggernaut provides a bounty of choices
unimaginable a generation or two ago. And it is finding a welcoming
audience. According to one study, the average American consumed
a whopping I I.8 hours of media per day in I998, Up over I3 percent
in just three years. As the survey director noted, "the sheer
amount of media products and messages consumed by the average
American adult is staggering and growing." The rise of the
Internet has only accentuated the trend. Although some research
suggests that the Internet is replacing some of the time people
have spent with other media, other research suggests its more
important effect is simply to expand the role of media in people's
lives. "People are simply spending more time with media,"
one media executive stated. "They don't appear to have dropped
one medium to have picked up another."
On the other hand, our era is increasingly depoliticized;
traditional notions of civic and political involvement have shriveled.
Elementary understanding of social and political affairs has declined.
Turnout for U.S. elections-admittedly not a perfect barometer-has
plummeted over the past thirty years. The I998 congressional elections
had one of the lowest turnouts of eligible voters in national
elections in U.S. history, as just over one-third of the eligible
voters turned out on election day. It is, to employ a phrase coined
by Robert Entman, "democracy without citizens."
By conventional reasoning, this is nonsensical. A flowering
commercial marketplace of ideas, unencumbered by government censorship
or regulation, should generate the most stimulating democratic
political culture possible. The response comes that the problem
lies elsewhere, that "the people" obviously are not
interested in politics or civic issues, because, if they were,
it would be in the interests of the wealthy media giants to provide
them with such fare. There is an element of truth to that reply,
but it is hardly a satisfactory response. Virtually all defenses
of the commercial media system for the privileges they receive-typically
made by the media owners themselves -are based on the notion that
the media play an important, perhaps a central, role in providing
the institutional basis for having an informed and participating
citizenry. If this is, indeed, a democracy without citizens, the
media system has much to answer for.
... the media have become a significant antidemocratic force
in the United States and, to varying degrees, worldwide. The wealthier
and more powerful the corporate media giants have become, the
poorer the prospects for participatory democracy. I am not arguing
that all media are getting wealthier, of course. Some media firms
and sectors are faltering and will falter during this turbulent
era. But, on balance, the dominant media firms are larger and
more influential than ever before, and the media writ large are
more important in our social life than ever before. Nor do I believe
the media are the sole or primary cause of the decline of democracy,
but they are a part of the problem and closely linked to many
of the other factors. Behind the lustrous glow of new technologies
and electronic jargon, the media system has become increasingly
concentrated and conglomerated into a relative handful of corporate
hands. This concentration accentuates the core tendencies of a
profit-driven, advertising-supported media system: hypercommercialism
and denigration of journalism and public service. It is a poison
pill for democracy.
Nor is the decline of democracy in the face of this boom in
media wealth a contradiction. The media system is linked ever
more closely to the capitalist system, both through ownership
and through its reliance upon advertising, a function dominated
by the largest firms in the economy. Capitalism benefits from
having a formally democratic system, but capitalism works best
when elites make most fundamental decisions and the bulk of the
population is depoliticized. For a variety of reasons, the media
have come to be expert at generating the type of fare that suits,
and perpetuates, the status quo. ... if we value democracy, it
is imperative that we restructure the media system so that it
reconnects with the mass of citizens who in fact comprise "democracy."
... media reform ... can take place only if it is part of a broader
political movement to shift power from the few to the many. Conversely,
any meaningful attempt ... to democratize the United States, or
any other society, must make media reform a part (though by no
means all) of its agenda. Such has not been the case heretofore.
This book, then, is about the corporate media explosion and
the corresponding implosion of public life, the rich media/poor
democracy paradox. Its purpose is to analyze the existing situation
by drawing upon history and pointing toward democratic change
in the future. As such, this book goes directly counter to the
prevailing wisdom of our times: The ultimate trump card of conservatism
and reaction, after all their other arguments have been discredited,
is that there is no possibility of social change for the better,
so it is a notion not even worth pondering, let alone pursuing.
This card has been played by ruling elites since the dawn of civilization,
but never has it been waved more ferociously than at the close
of the twentieth century. It has deadened social thought and has
demoralized social movements and public life. And it is a lie,
the biggest lie of them all. The world is changing rapidly and
is doing so because of decisions made by actors working within
a specific social system. If anything, humans now possess greater
ability to alter their destiny than ever before. Those who benefit
by the status quo know this well. They want to ensure that they
are the ones holding the reins; they want everyone else to accept
their privileges as "natural" and immutable.
... the duty of the democrat, and especially of the democratic
intellectual, is to rip the veil off this power, and to work so
that social decision making and power may be made as enlightened
and as egalitarian as possible.
... the term democracy. One of the heartening features of
our age is that the term is embraced by nearly all but a handful
of bigots, fanatics, and xenophobes. This is a relatively recent
development, and its newfound popularity is a reminder of how
far humanity has traveled over the past few centuries. But the
term is employed so widely that it has lost much of its specificity
and meaning. Hence a product that is consumed widely is termed
a "democratic" product, as opposed to a product consumed
by the few. Indeed, the term "democratic" is seemingly
applied to describe anything or any behavior that is good, while
words like "fascist" or "Hitler-like" are
used to describe negative behavior, regardless of any actual relationship
to the Third Reich or fascist politics, or politics at all.
So it is that when the United States is characterized as a
democratic society, what is meant varies considerably with the
assumptions and values of the person making the claim. If we may
generalize, however, when the United States is characterized as
a democracy, this is meant to suggest that in the United States
the citizens enjoy individual rights and freedoms, including the
right to vote in elections, and that arbitrary government power
is held in check by a constitution and laws and a legal system
that enforces them. What is conspicuously absent from notions
of the United States as a democracy is anything that has much
to do with democracy, the idea that the many should and do make
the core political decisions. In fact, very few people would argue
that the United States is remotely close to a democratic society
in that sense of the term. Many key decisions are the province
of the corporate sector and most decisions made by the government
are influenced by powerful special interests with little public
awareness or input.
As Ellen Meiksins Wood has pointed out in brilliant fashion,
what is called democracy in the United States and, increasingly,
around the world is better thought of as liberalism. As Wood notes,
liberalism developed in Europe in the movement to protect the
rights of feudal lords from monarchs. Later, with the rise of
capitalism, liberalism became an important set of principles to
protect, among other things, private property from the state,
especially a state that might be controlled by the propertyless
majority. In the United States today, therefore, some go so far
as to present democracy as being defined first and foremost by
individual freedoms to buy and sell property and the right to
invest for profit. That there is any distinction between these
liberties and the democratic rights to free speech, free press,
and free assembly is dismissed categorically. The absurdity of
this equation of market rights with political freedom, of capitalism
with democracy, should be self-evident; in this century scores
of nations have protected market rights while being political
dictatorships and having little respect for any other civil liberties
for that matter.
There is very much that is commendable in liberalism-and it
is impossible to imagine a democratic society without core liberal
freedoms-but the fact remains that it is different from democracy.
When democracy is defined as liberalism, the notion of popular
rule, rather than being the heart and soul of democracy, drifts
to the margins. In contemporary U.S. society, citizens have precious
little control over political decisions. In strict terms, what
distinguishes the United States from a political oligarchy is
that citizens do retain the right to vote in elections and thereby
remove politicians from office, even if they have little control
over what politicians actually do while in office. Since the elections
are rather dubious enterprises-they are more like auctions favoring
those with great sums of money, the campaign debate almost always
avoids wide-ranging debate on the core issues, and the choices
on the ballot are mostly inconsequential to the important decisions
to be made after the election-even this democratic right to vote
seems trivial. Yet in dominant thinking the existence of this
right to vote is what qualifies the United States as a democracy.
It is an awfully, awfully thin reed.
When I invoke the term democracy, then, I mean it in the classical
sense, as the rule of the many. The democratic aspects of the
liberal tradition are to be preserved and expanded-such as individual
civil liberties and checks on state power-but the needs of the
minuscule investor class can never be equated with the needs of
the citizenry or with the foundations of a democracy. A society
like the United States which has rampant inequality, minimal popular
involvement in decision making, and widespread depoliticization
can never be regarded as democratic in an honest use of the term.
When I talk about "democratizing" our society, I mean
that we should create mechanisms that make the rule of the many
possible. This means among other things ... reducing social inequality
and establishing a media system that serves the entire population
and that promotes democratic rule. In structural terms, that means
a media system that has a significant nonprofit and noncommercial
component.
... the rise of neoliberalism is a main factor that accounts
for the corporate media boom, on the one hand, and the collapse
of democratic political life on the other hand. Neoliberalism
refers to the policies that maximize the role of markets and profit-making
and minimize the role of nonmarket institutions. It is the deregulation
provided by neoliberalism that has been instrumental in allowing
the wealthy media corporations to grow and prosper as they have.
Likewise, neoliberalism is a political theory; it posits that
society works best when business runs things and there is as little
possibility of government "interference" with business
as possible. In short, neoliberal democracy is one where the political
sector controls little and debates even less. In such a world
political apathy and indifference are a quite rational choice
for the bulk of the citizenry, especially for those who reside
below the upper and upper-middle classes.
Neoliberalism is associated with the rise of Reagan and Thatcher
in the early I980s, and it has boomed as a global phenomenon throughout
the past two decades. But it would be misleading to present neoliberalism
as an entirely new phenomenon. In fact the desire by the wealthy-few
to limit democracy predates capitalism, and has been present throughout
U.S. history. At the time of the American Revolution, Tom Paine
and Benjamin Franklin advocated universal adult male suffrage.
Their opponents, John Adams, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton,
fought to see suffrage limited to property holders and the government
structured in such a manner as to reduce the possibility of popular
rule. Jay and Adams counted as one of their favorite expressions
"those who own this country ought to govern it." During
the constitutional debates James Madison argued that the goal
of government must be "to protect the minority of the opulent
against the majority." In short, the nature and quality of
democracy is always the result of conflict and struggle between
contending groups in unequal societies. Neoliberalism mostly reflects
that the few are dominant politically and ideologically and able
therefore to inflict their will on the subdued and unorganized
population.
The media/democracy paradox ... has two components. First,
it is a political crisis. I mean this in two senses. On the one
hand, the nature of our corporate commercial media system has
dire implications for our politics and broader culture. On the
other hand, the very issue of who controls the media system and
for what purposes is not a part of contemporary political debate.
Instead, there is the presupposition that a profit-seeking, commercial
media system is fundamentally sound, and that most problems can
be resolved for the most part through less state interference
or regulation, which (theoretically) will produce the magic elixir
of competition. In view of the extraordinary importance of media
and communication in our society, I believe that the subject of
how the media are controlled, structured, and subsidized should
be at the center of democratic debate. Instead, this subject is
nowhere to be found. This is not an accident; it reflects above
all the economic, political, and ideological power of the media
corporations and their allies. And it has made the prospect of
challenging corporate media power, and of democratizing communication,
all the more daunting.
The second component of the media/democracy paradox concerns
media ideology, in particular the flawed and self-serving manner
in which corporate media officers and their supporters use history.
The nature of our corporate media system and the lack of democratic
debate over the nature of our media system are often defended
on the following grounds: that communication markets force media
firms to "give the people what they want"; that commercial
media are the innate democratic and "American" system;
that professionalism in journalism is democratic and protects
the public from nefarious influences on the news; that new communication
technologies are inherently democratic since they undermine the
existing power of commercial media; and, perhaps most important,
that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution authorizes that
corporations and advertisers rule U.S. media without public interference.
These are generally presented as truisms, and nearly always history
is invoked to provide evidence for each of these claims. In combination
these claims have considerable sway in the United States, even
among those who are critical of the social order otherwise. ...
these myths, which are either lies or half-truths, ... [can] strip
citizens of their ability to comprehend their own situation and
govern their own lives ...
Rich
Media, Poor Democracy
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