Media

1
Media Democracy

• Week 4

2
Journeys With George

• Politics and Media
• The Role of the Press
• The Role of Image/Representation
• The Role of Commercial Logics
• The Role of Reporters
• The Role of This Documentary
• Your Role

3
Nicholas Garnham The Media and The Public
Sphere

• Changes in media structure and policy important
  political questions and concerns
• citizens concerned with the health and future of
  democracy neglect media policy at their peril
•  Increased market focus of the media
  profitability ? what defines important public
  information
• public information public good ? public
  information private commodity
• Implications?
• Changes how we communicate (when patterns and
  logics of communication are channeled through
  capitalist dynamics)

4
Capitalism and the Mass Media

• Capitalism provides conditions for development of
  free press
• Creates new class and institutions in civil
  society to create new political force Public
  Opinion
• Protected from undue power interests (in theory)
• Open and equal access to all (in principle)
• Provides rules for rational discourse, political
  views and decisions beyond plays of power (i.e.
  power dispersed)
• Concerned with public good and private interests
• Capitalisms evolution distorts these
  relationships
• Neoliberal /Monopoly capitalism ?uneven
  distribution of wealth and information
• Rise of advertising, PR, and costs of access to
  media
• Flow of public information ? manipulation
• State as Public Provider/Defender against Private
  Power ? State/Market interests merge
• What Information is for the public good?

5
Government for Sale

• How Lobbyists Shape Policy and Law
• /Campaigns
• Power Elite/ Experts
• Revolving Doors
• http//www.opensecrets.org/news/2010/08/track-indu
  stries-revolving-door-lob.html
• Alternative Voices

6
Public Service Media Model

• How to address people as citizens (rational
  political beings) rather than consumers
• Problem
• Fundamental contradiction between seeing people
  as citizens or consumers (at the level of their
  value systems and social relations)
• Political Realm
• The individual is defined as a citizen exercising
  public rights of debate, voting, etc. within a
  communally agreed structure of rules and towards
  communally defined ends
• The value system is essentially social and the
  legitimate end of social action is the PUBLIC
  GOOD
• Economic Realm
• The individual is defined as a producer and
  consumer exercising private rights through
  purchasing power on the market in pursuit of
  PRIVATE INTERESTS
• Outcome for government/media relationship and
  serving the public good?
• political communication commercial
  communication
• public communication politics of consumerism
• politicians advertise for your (irrational) vote
• citizens are addressed as private individuals
  rather than as members of a public within a
  privatized domestic sphere rather than within
  public life
• Information framed/debate curtailed to a
  point where ones inclusion is dependent upon
  ones belief in a media frame
• it is in the interests of the controllers of
  multinational capital to keep citizens in a state
  of disunity and dysfunctional ignorance unified
  only by market structures within which capital
  and power can flow freely which at the same time
  assists in the development of their capital and
  power