ABSTRACT
The media environment within which political actors must operate has been in a state of constant evolution ever since the invention of the printing press and the first newspapers. As democratic polities developed in early modern Europe, political media played a key role in the articulation of public opinion and debate. They emerged not just as reporters of information, but as watchdogs and scrutineers over power, partisan advocates of competing political positions and ideologies, and representatives of the citizen
before elites. They did so in contexts such as providing a platform for the publication of readers’ letters, phone-in contributions to a radio talk show, or a TV studio debate. Whether one examines the origins and outcomes of the English Civil War, the French Revolution, or the American War of Independence, the media emerge as important actors in the evolution of democratic politics (Hartley, 1996; Conboy, 2004; Starr, 2004). These aspects of the media’s democratic role remain valued today, cited as guiding principles by the
journalists and editors of Al Jazeera as much as those of the BBC or the Wall Street Journal. As Vladimir Putin, George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and his successor Gordon Brown have all discovered, politicians in societies that aspire to be democratic must pursue their activities against the backdrop of media, which, in theory, should be free from and independent of state authority and commercial pressure (private media pursue private interests, of course, but it is generally acknowledged that in a pluralist democracy there should be ideological diversity of news outlets, and no overwhelming “bias” towards one view or another). Democratic politicians must seek legitimacy at the ballot box, by communicating with their potential voters through the media. Not only do the media provide channels of communication from aspiring governors to those in whose name they will govern, they should hold governors to account by critical scrutiny of their performance, including the representation and championing of citizens before elite power. The media that performed these
democratic functions and that formed the first public spheres were, from the seventeenth century, newspapers and periodicals. In the 1600s coffee house cultures emerged in the capital cities of Europe, where men of property and education would debate the issues of the day. As democratic institutions developed in the course of the seventeenth century and into the next, the importance of the existence of a common communicative space, within which citizens could be informed, advised, and exhorted to think and act politically, came to be a key element of what we would today call deliberative democracy-a democracy of informed citizens, acting rationally on the basis of information received from political media, then tested in debate. More than two hundred years after the
launch of the first daily newspaper in
England in 1702, the print media were joined in an expanding public sphere by radio in the early twentieth century, and television broadcasting in the late twentieth. By then, democracy had also expanded, with universal suffrage having been achieved in most advanced capitalist societies by the outbreak of World War II. Universal education had encouraged the growth of literate mass publics, served by popular “tabloid” media (Engel, 1996). By the end of the twentieth century, and the end of the cold war, which brought with it the end of authoritarian power in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, the world was by most objective standards a more democratic place than it had ever been. Where in 1900 there were on the planet precisely no fully democratic countries (meaning those in which every adult had a vote, and was free to choose which, if any party, they wished to support), by the end of the century nearly two thirds of the world’s population, living in 121 out of 190 recognized nation states, enjoyed “free” or “partly free” democratic politics. “Partly free,” as the U.S.-based thinktank Freedom House puts it, recognizes that many of these democracies were imperfect, characterized by “some restrictions on political rights and civil liberties, often in a context of corruption, weak rule of law, ethnic strife, or civil war” (Freedom House, 2007). Putin’s Russia, one might observe, is a “partly free” democracy, in sometimes painful transition from the authoritarianism of the Soviet era, and not yet free of that regime’s censorial and intimidatory habits (not least in respect of political journalism). Iran is a democracy, but again only partly free, in so far as religious theocracy continually clashes with competing demands for liberalism and pluralism. Democracy has expanded globally, then, in recent decades, but is not yet a completed project. On the contrary, democratization at the global level, and
within nation states, is an ongoing process subject to blockages and reversals. One can also say that the process of
democratization has been paralleled by the expansion of the media and the public sphere. That there is a precise, measureable causal relationship between the rise of mass media and the spread of universal suffrage is difficult to prove in the conventional sense (as are all media-effects hypotheses), but there is clearly a correlation between the two trends. And why should there not be? The media have fueled political debate and democratic participation since the seventeenth century, expanding their audiences and enabling their engagement with expanded democratic structures. The two sets of institutions are inherently linked. Without a free and independent media, accessible to the people who rely upon it as their main source of political information, there can be no democracy worthy of the name. But mass media, like political institu-
tions, are imperfect vehicles for democracy. Print and broadcast media of the traditional type have been and remain centralized, vertically hierarchical, topdown channels of communication, allowing only limited opportunities for public feedback, and then in circumstances closely controlled by media professionals. Readers’ letters and callers to phone-in shows are screened, with only a small minority of contributions making it through, according to the criteria of the medium in question (political viewpoint, level of articulacy of the contributor, willingness or ability to adopt the communicative etiquette required, such as no racist abuse on the BBC). This was a necessary and inevitable gatekeeping exercise, given the limited availability of column inches and airtime, designed to ensure that those voices that made it though the various filtering processes in operation were at one and the same time representative of the public as a whole,
relevant to the issues under debate at any given time, and sufficiently well-formulated to engage the rest of the audience. Opportunities for access to, and participation in, the public spheres of the nation state were, for the three-and-a-half centuries or so that separated the English Civil War from the outbreak of the “war on terror,” strictly limited, and awarded by the media, reasonably perhaps, only to those deemed to have something worthwhile to say. Members of the public were in this respect structurally subordinate to the professionals of the media, dependent on them for access to the public sphere. Access was also restricted by the fact
that media have traditionally been expensive to set up and maintain; highly capital-intensive, and thus almost entirely restricted to big business. There have been independent, radical media in existence throughout the history of most democracies, but usually existing on the margins, financed by political donations or other non-commercial means. Otherwise, and with the exception of publicly funded organizations such as the BBC, the vast majority of the media of capitalist societies have taken the form of business enterprises, owned by corporations and wealthy entrepreneurs. This top-down, centralized, industrially
organized media apparatus was relatively easy for political elites and other actors to manage, manipulate, and control. What Walter Lippmann called in his 1922 book Public Opinion “the art of creating consent among the governed” (quoted in McNair, 2007), and the “control of affairs” by “persuasion” was relatively easy in a media environment of few outlets where the possibilities of feedback and rapid public response were limited. No politician could ever guarantee a good press, of course, and rulers from Charles II employed what we would today call spin doctors to try to ensure the best possible coverage in the media of
their times (Charles II had the diarist Samuel Pepys to look after his image). As soon as there were democratic elections in place, and public opinions that mattered, political elites were obliged to pursue persuasive communication strategies. The lavishly resourced public relations apparatuses of today’s political parties, governments, and campaigning groups have their roots in the early twentieth century recognition that in mass-mediated democracies the management of public opinion and, dare one say it, the manufacture of consent, could not be left to chance, but should henceforth be the province of a recognized category of communication professional (McNair, 2007). In the days where the political media
comprised only print and analog broadcasting, however, there were fewer channels to manage, and information flowed more slowly, determined by the level of communication technology deployed. Politicians had days, weeks, months, and even years to react to stories that might be damaging. They could preserve confidentiality, censor, cover up bad news, not only because there were fewer media outlets to control, but because they inhabited a culture of public deference towards elites in general, based on the authoritarian traditions of absolute monarchy and church, further elaborated by the class and status distinctions that emerged in bourgeois society as a means of maintaining social hierarchy. Thus, if a prime minister or a president refused to give an interview to a journalist-the first such interviews took place in the late nineteenth century (Silvester, ed., 1993)— this was accepted as a reasonable exercise of executive detachment, necessary to preserve the dignity and authority of power. Journalists, like citizens in general, routinely deferred to the presumed authority of political elites, and rarely challenged their prerogative to dictate the style and content of political communication.
