Topic: 2 Democracy and Media

The concept of liberal democracy grew out of the bourgeois critique of autocracy in early
modern Europe, beginning in the sixteenth century and culminating in the French Revolution
of 1789, with its slogan of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’. In the political structures of
autocratic societies, power resided in the king or queen, whose right to rule was divinely
ordained by God. Subordinate classes – the peasantry and artisans – were subject to divine
order, lacking political rights of any kind. Even the aristocracy, ‘lording’ it over the lower
classes in society, owed unquestioning allegiance to the monarch. The institutions of state
were directed primarily to the maintenance of this hierarchical system, and to the suppression
of dissent, from wherever it came.
The emergence of the bourgeoisie (or capitalist class) as the dominant economic force in
Europe and America led to the overthrow of autocracy and its monopolisation of political
power. For capitalism to develop freely there had to be freedom of thought and action for
those with entrepreneurial skills and the wealth to use them. There had, therefore, to be
freedom from the arbitrariness of absolute power, an end to the ideology of divine right, and
recognition of the status of capital, earned in the marketplace rather than inherited.
Consequently, bourgeois philosophers such as Locke and Milton worked out a critique of
autocratic power, replacing it with a theory of representative democracy and individual, or
citizenship rights, which reflected in the ideological sphere the realities of bourgeois
economic and political power. This was the beginning of Liberal Democracy. The main
concern of liberal democratic theory was thus ‘to grant individuals civil liberties
against the incursion of the state’ (Bobbio, 1987, p. 10).

we can identify the defining characteristics of a democratic regime in the following terms:
Constitutionality
First, there must be an agreed set of procedures and rules governing the conduct of elections,
the behaviour of those who win them and the legitimate activities of dissenters. Such rules
will typically take the form of a constitution (although some countries, like Britain, do not
have a ‘written’ constitution) or a bill of rights.
Participation
Second, those who participate in the democratic process must comprise what Bobbio terms a
‘substantial’ proportion of the people. In the early democratic period, as we have noted,
citizenship rights were restricted to a small minority of the population – men with property
and/or formal education. For John Stuart Mill, one of the great early theorists of liberal
democracy, only this guaranteed the rational, informed electorate demanded by democracy.1
In reality, of course, this restriction merely demonstrated the close relationship between
democracy and the rise of the bourgeoisie. Gradually, voting rights were extended to the
lower classes and, by the early twentieth century, to women. In the US, only in the 1950s
were blacks able to vote. Conversely, societies which deprived the majority of their people of
voting rights, such as South Africa until the elections of April 1994, have
rightly been viewed as ‘undemocratic’.

Rational choice
A third condition of democracy, as already noted, is the availability of choice
(Democrat versus Republican, Labour versus Conservative (Constitutional
mornarchy)nChristian
Democrat versus Social Democrat), while a fourth is the ability of citizens to
exercise that choice rationally. This in turn presupposes a knowledgeable,
educated citizenry.

It assigned following functions to emerging mass media:

 First, they must inform citizens of what is happening around them (what we may call
the ‘surveillance’ or ‘monitoring’ functions of the media).
 Second, they must educate as to the meaning and significance of the ‘facts’ (the
importance of this function explains the seriousness with which journalists protect
their objectivity, since their value as educators presumes a professional detachment
from the issues being analysed).
 Third, the media must provide a platform for public political discourse, facilitating the
formation of ‘public opinion’, and feeding that opinion back to the public from
where it came. This must include the provision of space for the expression of dissent,
without which the notion of democratic consensus would be meaningless.
 The media’s fourth function is to give publicity to governmental and political
institutions – the ‘watchdog’ role of journalism, exemplified by the performance of
the US media during the Watergate episode and, more recently, the British
Guardian’s coverage of the cash-for-questions scandal, in which investigative
journalists exposed the practice of members of parliament accepting payment for the
asking of parliamentary questions. The post-1997 Labour government of Tony Blair
also saw its relationship with lobbyists and financial backers subjected to critical
scrutiny. ‘Public opinion’ can only matter – i.e. have an influence on ‘objective’
political reality – to the extent that ‘the acts of whoever holds supreme power are
made available for public scrutiny, meaning how far they are visible, ascertainable,
accessible, and hence accountable’ (Bobbio, 1987, p. 83). There must be, to use
Mikhail Gorbachev’s famous formulation, a degree of ‘openness’ surrounding the
activities of the political class if the ‘public opinions’ of the people are to have any
bearing on decision-making.
• Finally, the media in democratic societies serve as a channel for the advocacy of
political viewpoints. Parties require an outlet for the articulation of their policies and
programmes to a mass audience, and thus the media must be open to them.
Furthermore, some media, mainly in the print sector, will actively endorse one or other
of the parties at sensitive times such as elections. In this latter sense, the media’s
advocacy function may also be viewed as one of persuasion.

Inter-relationship Between Democracy and Media- A Perspective

Since the 1950s, with the expansion of television into virtually every household in the
developed capitalist world, interpersonal political communication has been relegated to the
margins of the democratic process. Nowadays, television has become an ‘integral part of the
environment within which political life takes place’. Surveys show that for the vast majority
of people the media, including now the internet, which grows in importance with every year,
represent the main source of their information about politics. Does the reality of
contemporary political discourse as communicated through and by the media correspond to
the ideal role allotted to them in liberal democratic theory? Answer is in No. Let us discuss
the shortcomings.

The Failure of Education

When democracy was getting roots in Europe, it was assumed that the citizens will become
rational voters. But it did not happen that way. The failure is quite conspicuous from the
political apathy demonstrated by leading democratic countries in general elections. Almost
half the eligible voters do not turn up to vote. In the UK general election of 2001, only 58 per
cent of those eligible actually voted. Turnout was 65 per cent in the general election of 2010.
Looking at the phenomenon of low voter turnout from another angle, it may be argued that
political apathy is an entirely rational, if slightly cynical response to a political process in
which it may appear to the individual citizen that his or her vote does not matter. While
democratic procedures must include regular elections, it may be felt that voting once every
four or five years for one of two or at most three rather similar parties is ineffective and
pointless, particularly when, as is routinely the case in Britain, one party retains power with
substantially less than 50 per cent of the eligible electorate’s support. In the 2005 UK general
election, New Labour won only 35.2 per cent of the votes cast, securing with that number an
absolute majority of 67 seats in parliament. In 2010, the Conservatives won 36 per cent of
votes, to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. For Jean Baudrillard, the guru of post-
modern nihilism, voter apathy is viewed as a kind of resistance to the system and lack of
confidence by working class in the democracy as nurtured by bourgeois power.

Absence of Choice

A further limitation on democracy is often argued to be the absence of genuine choice, or

pluralism. One could reasonably argue that there are more similarities in the policies and
ideologies of the US Democratic and Republican parties than there are differences. In Britain,
where the Labour and Conservative parties have traditionally been distinct ideologically, the
1990s saw a coming together of agendas and policies on many social, economic and foreign
policy matters. In the 1997 general election, ‘New Labour’ unashamedly adopted many of
Conservative policies, such as privatisation of the air traffic control system. In
doing so, New Labour proclaimed itself at the ‘radical centre’ of British Politics. In his
campaign to win the 2010 election in the UK, Tory leader David Cameron was marketed as
the ‘new’ Tony Blair. In such circumstances the voter may reasonably feel that a vote for one
party or another will have little or no impact on the conditions and quality of life.

Capitalism and Power

Socialist and Marxist critiques of liberal democracy are more fundamental, arguing that the
real loci of power in capitalist societies are hidden behind formal political procedures: in the
boardrooms of big business; in the higher reaches of the civil service and security apparatus;
in a host of secretive, non-elected institutions. The people may elect a Labour government,
the argument goes, but any attempt to implement a genuinely socialist programme (even if
the government wanted to do so) inevitably meets with resistance in the form of bureaucratic
obstruction, flights of capital abroad, the use of the Royal prerogative, and dirty tricks . From
this perspective, the democratic process as pursued in Britain and most other developed
capitalist societies is merely a facade, behind which the real levers of political and economic
power are wielded by those for whom the citizenry never has an opportunity to vote. Some of
these criticisms are accepted even by the most ardent defenders of liberal democracy.

The Manufacture of Consent

The concept of ‘Manufacturing of Consent’ was brought to limelight by Walter Lippmann in

1922 and was vigorously discussed by Chomsky. It is the process which is contrived by
politicians by combining the techniques of social psychology and the immense reach of mass
media. It is adopted to manufacture the consent of the people on an issue through
manipulation rather than exposing them to information. By doing so, the democracy loses its
authenticity and people are befooled. Politicians, also seek to conceal information from
citizens, sometimes for reasons of what is called ‘national security’, and sometimes to avoid
political embarrassment and to ensure survival. As a result what citizen receives as political
information in the public sphere is often an incomplete and partial picture of reality.

Manipulation of opinion and concealment (or suppression) of inconvenient information are

strategies emanating from political actors themselves, pursued through media institutions. In
some cases, journalists will attempt to publicise and expose what is hidden. On the other
hand, the media may be complicit in the politicians ‘concealment of sensitive information (if,
for example, a news organisation is strongly committed to a government it may choose to
ignore or downplay an otherwise newsworthy story which could damage that Govt). More
generally, there are many aspects of the process of media production which in themselves
make media organisations vulnerable to strategies of political manipulation.

In 1962 Daniel Boorstin coined the term ‘pseudo-event’ in response to what he saw as the
increasing tendency of news and journalistic media to cover ‘unreal’, unauthentic
‘happenings’. This tendency, was associated with the rise from the nineteenth century
onwards of the popular press and a correspondingly dramatic increase in the demand for news
material. Pressures towards the making of pseudo-events became ever stronger.
Newsgathering turned into news making’

An important source of pseudo-events for the media has of course been the political
process – interviews with government leaders, news leaks and press conferences all provide
reportable material (McNair, 2000). Thus, argues Boorstin, the twentieth century has seen a
relationship of mutual convenience and interdependence evolve between the politician and
the media professional, as one strives to satisfy the other’s hunger for news while at the same
time maximising his or her favourable public exposure. Boorstin wrote in 1962, that the
trend was not welcome. In a democratic society . . . freedom of speech and of the press and of
broadcasting includes freedom to create pseudo-events. Competing politicians, newsmen and
news media contest in this creation. They vie with each other in offering attractive,
‘informative’ accounts and images of the world. As a result the political reportage received
by the citizen has become dominated by empty spectacle.

The Limitations of Objectivity

A further criticism of the media’s democratic role focuses on the professional

journalistic ethic of objectivity. This ethic developed with the mass media in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and has been assailed ever
since as fundamentally unattainable (McNair, 2009c). For a variety of
Reasons, it is argued, the media’s political reportage is biased and flawed –
subjective, as opposed to objective; partisan, rather than impartial. As
Lippmann put it in 1922, ‘every newspaper when it reaches the reader is the
result of a whole series of selections as to what items shall be printed, in what
position they shall be printed, how much space each shall occupy, what
emphasis each should have. There are no objective standards here. There are
conventions’