CLOSEDissent / Fall 2007: Comments & Opinions
MEDIA, DEMOCRACY, AND THE LEFT: SEEING THE BIGGER PICTURE
By Jeffrey Scheuer
If you had attended the most recent National Conference for Media Reform, held in Memphis, Tennessee, this past January and sponsored by Free Press (www.freepress.net), you might think that the media reform movement is on a roll. There was a palpable sense of momentum in Memphis, as more than 3,000 attendees— a substantial increase over previous conferences in Madison, Wisconsin, and St. Louis, Missouri—filled the convention center to hear speakers such as Jesse Jackson, Bill Moyers, David Brancaccio, FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Van Jones, Geena Davis, and Jane Fonda preach eloquently to the choir.
There is, indeed, reason for optimism. Thanks to people like the Memphis conferees, a lot of independent media are emerging, especially on the Internet. They run the gamut from independent news services, such as OneWorld and the video-based The Real News, to community broadcasting and a plethora of local, small-scale, and left-leaning media outlets.
But after decades of media concentration and broadcast deregulation, this important and overdue movement, mainly for independent alternatives to commercial media, is still in its infancy. It remains to be seen whether it can eventually transform the media mainstream, rather than merely supplement it.
One lesson of these gatherings is that the left should pay more attention to the media generally and to media reform in particular. This is important on several levels: most obviously, because politics is media-saturated, and failure to focus on the challenges and potentials of the mainstream media (and alternatives to them) means failure politically. This is not the age of Pericles; there is little significant political discourse outside of the (mostly commercial) public media. Blogs are not the answer.
Media savvy is more than just a tactical imperative or a critical pastime. The current regime of concentrated and hypercommercial media—in which Clear Channel alone owns some 1,200 radio stations—is inimical to two fundamental tenets of the left. One is greater economic equality; the other is greater political equality, aka democracy. We want to steer democracy toward a more egalitarian society; we also want to expand democracy. The questions of who controls the media and how they control it are relevant to both goals.
There is a significant literature on the failings of contemporary journalism, and a sagging shelf of books on the interpenetrations of media and politics. Of particular interest are the works on media concentration by Ben Bagdikian and Robert W. McChesney (the founder of Free Press) and studies of right-wing bias, such as those by Eric Alterman and Joe Conason. But we have to go to A.J. Liebling to find the root of the problem. The press, Liebling said, is “the weak slat under the bed of democracy.” We have to ask why it is the weak slat, what it’s doing under that bed that warrants our attention, and how to reconstruct it.
Democracies need quality journalism—just as they need quality education—to promote informed and active citizenship. Commercial news indentures democracy to the marketplace, whereas it ought to be the other way around, with the marketplace governed by democracy. The answer is not state-run or state-controlled media, but nonprofit media, and not just for journals of opinion.
The problem of journalistic excellence is not a common starting point for inquiries on the left. Despite the influence of critical theory and other radical critiques, American progressives have seldom viewed the mainstream media—as opposed to alternative media, muckraking, or investigative journalism— as central to their agenda. The left’s natural alliances have been with labor and minority struggles; its agenda is, by definition, explicitly egalitarian.
Nevertheless, the media deserve greater attention on several levels. Most narrowly and tactically, progressives need to be smarter about using the media and about how the media are used by the right (as George Lakoff and others have urged). There are limits to how far politics can advance by media criticism alone or by better framing one’s message; but we haven’t reached those limits. We need to frame our message—and theirs—with more expedience. We must also address conservative and centrist bias; media concentration and under-regulation; and the paucity of cultural and ideological diversity, seriousness, localism, or vigorous debate—in other words, the shallow mediocrity of mainstream commercial news.
For all of these reasons, the media reform movement should be nurtured by the wider left. Progressive funders tend to support public radio, television, and independent documentaries, and to shy away from small startups and Internet ventures. The right, which is better funded, devotes more of its resources to media. All of that has to change.
But media democracy is not just about promoting media that are left-biased. Reformers must also acknowledge that, even in an age of blogging, talk radio, and declining news readership and viewership, there is—and should be—something called the “mainstream media” that is not just a cacophony of slants and polemics. That mainstream should be broader, deeper, and more “small-d” democratic. We need media that form a stronger and less commercial slat under the bed of democracy. Above all, we need more informed, active, and critical citizens.
How do we get there? Let’s start by recognizing that journalism is part of a wider universe of the image and the spoken and written word. It cannot be transformed overnight or by a single new idea or legislative stroke; it must evolve. Focused activism, over time, can steer that evolutionary process.
We are years or decades away from the most obvious remedies: regulate broadcasting; overturn the infamous Telecommunications Act of 1996, which accelerated the pace of concentration; increase funding for public broadcasting by ten- or twenty-fold, to put America more on a per capita par with other democracies, and make it truly independent of both Congress and Archer Daniels Midland; and tax advertising to pay for it. We need more progressive media criticism, to make the right and the center more honest; but we also need more criticism in general—and citizens who are educated to demand it.
In both education and journalism (and they are more closely connected than commonly supposed) commercialism is inimical to excellence and to the higher levels of citizenship that excellence promotes. Real media reform means more progressive alternatives, as well as a “mainstream” that includes a significant nonprofit sector. Robert McChesney and others have argued for this recently. So did the Hutchins Report (“A Free and Responsible Press”) in one of the most insightful and overlooked media studies, dating to 1947. For the most part, we don’t run our schools and universities for profit; why should our news be any different?
Taking the longer view, democracies are always evolving, and I suspect that even ours will evolve toward nonprofit journalism in the coming years. However, they don’t simply unfold on their own; they are not just formal systems of government, but also social organisms. Particular forms and levels of democratic order are codetermined by their constitutional and legal hardware and the software of cultural forces and institutions: knowledge and public opinion, faith, technology, popular culture, historical traditions, economic production, and so on. Legal structures coevolve along with those cultural influences.
At some point in that evolution, knowl-edge—which is mainly obtained through education and journalism—will come to be recognized as a core democratic value. Education and journalism will be understood to be powerful coefficients of democracy: outside forces that sorely need to be integrated into the system in order for it to function at its best. In other words, information, as an essential source of citizenship, will be rescued from the vagaries and predations of the marketplace.
It is old news to say that a deep vein of libertarian antistatism has retarded that evolution in America. At the same time, compensatory traditions of localism and federalism have advanced it in other ways; for example, through public education, public libraries, advocacy organizations, foundations, and other nonprofit institutions mediating between government, the private sector, and public needs. (We have had public support of the media of a minimal sort since the early days of the republic through postal subsidies, which are now being threatened; and reformist calls for nonprofit news go back more than a century.) Nonprofit enterprise has often been our substi-tute—however inadequate at times—for functions that mature democracies entrust to their governments. But when it comes to journalism, for obvious reasons, the independent sector is the preferred alternative.
Thus, a powerful independent media sector will be a crucial evolutionary step, not just a half-measure or waypoint to something better. To get there, we need to explode the uncritical binary assumption that either the state or the market must provide all of our timely information. Commercial media have created isolated ghettoes of excellence. They have also led to monopoly concentration; the dampening or suppression of minority voices; the narrowing of the range of acceptable opinion and taste; limits on the diversity of coverage and the coverage of diversity; unequal access; isolation of smaller groups and communities from journalistic attention; and, above all, the pervasive degradation of news by entertainment values.
The quality of news is only one side of the problem: the supply side. The demand side is more elusive: educating citizens who will demand great journalism and use it when they get it. Even more than great journalism, we need great education—and higher levels of civic literacy, including computer literacy and media literacy.
Ultimately, it is public consciousness of what a democracy is, and what it promises and requires, that determines the course and pace of change. Such consciousness is both a cause and a result of better knowledge production and dissemination—including the reform agenda that was showcased in Memphis. Without educated and informed citizens, great journalism is of little consequence. With them, it can expand the circle of democratic citizen-ship—and might even benefit the left.
Jeffrey Scheuer, an occasional contributor to Dissent, is the author of The Big Picture: Why Democracies Need Journalistic Excellence (Routledge 2007), from which this article is adapted.
© 1995-2004 Jeffrey Scheuer