I’m feeling so busy these days I frequently think my head will fall off, or explode, or possibly both. Unfortunately this is taking its toll on my blogging efforts, for which many apologies. This blog has never been exactly a daily affair, as some are, but I hope what I can sporadically post has been useful, enjoyable, informative, and all the rest. Assiduous readers will have noticed in particular the glaring absence of commentary on the horrific conditions currently being imposed on Gaza – fortunately being given continual, outstanding coverage by Jamie at The Heathlander, a blog which seems increasingly to have become a one-man powerhouse of crucially important information on the conflict, among other issues. This is citizen journalism at its best – sharp, insightful, well-written, well-researched, well-argued, and completely ignored by the mainstream. In more ways than one, Jamie’s blogging efforts consistently put most of the British media to shame.
Anyway, that’s quite enough gushing on that score. As people may have noticed, the release of a book by journalist Nick Davies, Flat Earth News, has heralded a fair amount of praise and vitriol in the British press, much of it touching on the continuing credibility (or lack of it) of journalism as a profession. Most recently, Media Lens have put Davies through his paces with a critique founded on Herman and Chomsky’s “propaganda model” of the mass media, which is worth reading. Overall, they argue that Davies’ insider status (along with the information gleaned from other insiders) makes some of his lines of defence of these institutions lacking in credibility. Moreover, while much of Davies’ critique is complementary with the features of the propaganda model, as Chomsky argues, it fails adequately to explain the systematic patterns of bias documented by Herman and Chomsky, and many, many other media analysts over the years.
This critique, I think, is basically correct. Nevertheless, the good features of Davies’ book, which is a courageous and defiant piece of muckraking, bringing many shocking features of contemporary journalism to the light of day, also need to be emphasised. Praise for the book on these grounds is entirely justified, in my view. Davies has also been instrumental in helping facilitate an important study of the proliferation of P.R. in the British press by leading researchers in the field at Cardiff University – a very valuable piece of work which comes to some quite startling conclusions.
But since Davies has helped provoke some critical reflection on the state of British journalism – even if (a) much of it has been in the form of fierce criticism of Davies himself, and (b) he is somewhat wide of the mark in any case – I’d like to weigh in with my own contribution. The post below is a (very minutely tweaked) version of an essay I wrote recently for my MA course. It’s basically an attempt to both examine the media in the light of its “fourth estate” role – the normative requirements of the media in a functioning democracy – and to assess the continuing utility of the propaganda model. As I aim to suggest (with reference to a few examples cited previously on this blog), reports of the model’s demise are very greatly exaggerated.
Largely for reasons of space, but partly on account of my own oversight, there are areas which I fail to cover in this essay. It is very much a Western-centric piece of work – this reflects my own bias as a citizen of a Western country concerned about the state of its media and political system, and those of its principal ally. There are a fair few “countervailing influences” which I skirt over – most notably the possibilities of state intervention in supporting a more open and pluralist press. There is thus a bit of an emphasis on the potential constraints imposed by state institutions – again reflecting my situational bias – without enough on their potential enabling role. The best examples of this role being pursued in reality are in the Scandinavian countries, though their (sadly somewhat limited) achievements are increasingly being eroded by market forces and political and ideological pressures.
Other omissions are also worth noting, in passing. The idea of the media as “tool” referred to in the title has connotations of a kind of reductively functionalist theory of the media that the essay fails to address (though in fact such a conception is not actually part of the propaganda model in any case, unceasing references to “conspiracy theories” from its critics notwithstanding). As James Curran points out in Media and Power, critical accounts of the media deriving from the traditions of cultural studies, critical political economy and liberal pluralism have largely converged of late, favouring a conception of the media as a realm of conflict and contestation – but in a relatively “weighted” environment, according unequal patterns of access and influence to different actors. This helps clarify and account for those instances when relatively “oppositional” voices do manage to gain coverage, without losing sight of the vast inequalities in access, definitional power, ability to frame issues and set agendas that are the predominant features of the contemporary media environment. Indeed the (much-misunderstood) propaganda model does incorporate these features – but, as Ed Herman writes in a more recent retrospective on the model, “[m]aybe we should have spelled out in more detail the contesting forces both within and outside the media and the conditions under which these are likely to be influential.” Nonetheless, as he notes:
“It is … untrue that the propaganda model implies no constraints on media owners and managers; we recognized and spelled out the circumstances under which the media will be relatively open – mainly, when there are elite disagreements and when other groups in society are interested in, informed about, and organized to fight about issues. But the propaganda model does start from the premise that a critical political economy will put front and center the analysis of the locus of media control and the mechanisms by which the powerful are able to dominate the flow of messages and limit the space of contesting parties. The limits on their power are certainly important, but why should these get first place, except as a means of minimizing the power of the dominant interests, inflating the elements of contestation, and pretending that the marginalized have more strength than they really possess?”
Anyway, bearing some of these caveats in mind, here is my contribution to this ongoing debate. I hope it’s of some use.
Thanks for the kind words, Tim - much appreciated. Excellent essay, by the way. The hagiographical coverage of Ford's death was astonishing - we saw a similar whitewash more recently when Suharto died. I do see real democratising potential in the internet but, as you say, it remains an essentially elite project and for most people, the traditional media remains the main source of news. Will you be uploading this to the Watch?