The Temporary Downside of Having A More Diverse Media
Posted on December 5, 2006
Filed Under For Argument's Sake |
I’m sure the end will justify the means and democracy will flower once again when the media world restructures itself but is anyone out there getting the same sneaky feeling I am getting that having less powerful media organizations isn’t doing us a whole lot of good right now?
Would, for example, the American Executive have gone as far as it did at Guantanamo Bay if the power of the New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post et all was in its prime? Would it have attempted rendition and if so would it have been unscarred by it? Would newspapers have decided prior to the Iraqi invasion that much as they wanted to support the President, over-riding the United Nations presented bigger issues?
A similar moral paralysis is affecting newspapers in Europe. In Ireland for the past five years the rate of inflation has probably been in double figures yet the Government has been allowed to call it at 3%. Nobody in Ireland raises prices by 3%. House prices have been increasing by at least 14% year on year. Where I park my car they just raised prices by 20% and they did the same two years ago. I can’t think of a price rise I’ve witnessed that has not been at least 10%, and 20% seems to be a favorite for price rise pickers. Nobody has stuck it to the Government by saying look - reality. You’re wrong.
Over in the UK Tony Blair is about to renew the British nuclear deterrent. Folks marched in the street against nuclear weapons in Britain. For thirty years they did it. Hundreds of thousands of people. Ban the Bomb marches were ways for two generations of people to express a common moral purpose. The protest today barely merits a headline.
Both Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern in Ireland are mired in financial controversy but the press has been powerless to make their impropriety tell. Blair has faced down the BBC and Sky, Ahern improved his standings in the opinion polls.
Now I know websites like the Daily Kos are great for democracy but of late what’s been the head count for bloggers, apart from Dan Rather?
If I was a politician right now I’d bemoan the cost of trying to get positive attention from a million bloggers only for as long as it took me to realize that a more diversified media landscape weakens everybody who might want to wield a poisoned pen.
Until the media landscape reformulates into a structure where politicians are again accountable I’d say we currently should be adding up the cost of blogging and Web 2.0.
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2 Responses to “The Temporary Downside of Having A More Diverse Media”
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taking the uk as an example, i think you’re in error to look back to a golden day when the media was more democaratic. look first at newspaper ownership. i don’t have a copy of roy greenslade’s book to hand, but from memory, most of the newspapers were controlled by peers of the realm - the rothermeres, the astors etc. they believed they were the fourth estate, and acted as if they really were an extension of parliament. many of the media moguls of today still act and think the same - it’s obvious with murdoch and it’s about the only reason you can over as to why tony o’reilly should be running a loss making newspaper like the indy in the uk.
the bbc was always pretty much a toothless tiger, unwilling to take too many risks for fear of losing its funding. itv was always hamstrung by fears over licence renewals (yes, both broadcasters did ocassionally bite, and draw blood, but the truth is those ocassions were the exceptions, not the norm). broadcast media, because it is licensed, has limits placed on how far it can go in terms of stirring things up. like hyenas, it’s allowed to feast on fresh kill, but it’s not often lion-like in actually making that kill.
yes, democracy has diminished. it has been turned more and more into a spectator sport in which only a few marginal constitutencies actually count for anything. parliament, certainly in the uk and increasingly in ireland, is ignored, with our leaders today hardly bothering to even turn up and frequently saying things outside of parliament which ought to have been first said inside.
but much of what is happening is happening from the bottom up, and i think you need to look at society first and foremost. we have become more atomised. we have become more individual. we are less collective. collectivism - from unions to organisations like cnd - is just not something we do.
the internet is only adding to the atomisation of society, taking us further and further out of our local and national community and immersing us more and more in virtual networks. in due course, perhaps someone will notice this. but right now, it’s all so shiney and bright, i think the glare from it is blinding us to all of this.
I agree with Frank. Compare the aggregate media reaction to the invasion of Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, the Chilean coup of 1973, or any other less than honest military intervention in the pre-internet days with the reaction to the Iraq war. The impression is, if anything, that the existence of multiple diverse sources of information has forced the big traditional players to at least pretend to be critical. Chomsky provides a whole heap of evidence to support his contention that the traditional role of the traditional media was to cheer-lead whatever the state was doing. Their ability to do this, while pretending to provide objective and accurate reporting, has been diminished by the fact that there are now alternatives, even though these alternatives are tiny and poorly resourced by comparison.
I also think it’s easy to underestimate the audience of alternative news sources. Some user-generated content sites are hugely popular. Wikipedia is in or around the number one site in the world. Although it’s not a news site, it is an alternative source of information that makes it hard to suppress unpalatable truths. In Ireland sites like boards.ie , politics.ie and indymedia.ie all have huge audiences. I don’t know what the exact traffic figures are for the others, but indymedia gets about 550,000 hits a day or 5 million page impressions a month.