The Power Of American Media - Essay Example

The Power Of American Media “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman” (Brandeis 67). In his series of essays on the incestuous relationship between bankers and politicians in the early 20th century, Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis highlighted the merits of publicity and the duty of the press to help expose corruption and sleaze in government and business as a way to help preserve our democracy. Since then, it has been a duty American mass media have taken seriously, perhaps to excess, as noted by contemporary commentators (Kinsley 1-2) and critics (Sutter 431-451) who see our media as a biased, irresponsible, liberal, hypocritical, and destabilizing social threat. Are the American media doing their job of shining a bright light on events for our benefit, thus helping preserve our democracy? Or, on the contrary, are they casting a fire that is slowly burning our nation to the ground? What lessons must we learn and never forget, and what ought we to do? Media as the Fourth Estate Even before America gained her independence in the late 18th century, Europe’s tabloid presses were already having a field day exposing sensational events that would put today’s reality media to shame. Stories like the gruesome attack on a businessman and the “deflouring” of his two daughters appeared in a Dutch pamphlet in 1601 and led to a crackdown on banditry. Tabloid reports on the adulterous escapades of England’s popular Queen almost sparked a revolt in the early 19th century (Economist 107). So powerful were newspapermen that Burke (1729-1797) coined the term “Fourth Estate” to describe them as a new and powerful social class in England. It was Burke who pointed out the duty of the press as guardians of public interest and watchdogs of government. He believed that newspapermen had a power all their own in government: the power to speak and the power to make others listen through the printed word, and to act as a check and balance to the other social classes (Lords, Clergy, and People) by upholding democracy and defending public interests (“A Vindication…”). But it was Carlyle (1795-1881), quoting Burke, who extended the description as to include the “Able Editors” and printers (“Heroes”), widening the Fourth Estate as to include the whole mass media. Carlyle, an individualist who vehemently distrusted democracy and legislators and hated industrialists, had in mind William Cobbett, England’s great newspaperman who denounced the political system as nepotistic, corrupt, and elitist and had to flee to America in 1818 to escape trial. Returning in 1820, Cobbett reported juicy tidbits of the King’s private life, in the process gaining popular support and acquittal for the embattled Queen. Such a lengthy background helps us understand why our Constitution in the First Amendment guarantees the freedom of speech and of the press. As Kann (2006) recounted: Thomas Jefferson, a better president than we’ve had in a very long time, penned a line back in 1787: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I would not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” By 1807, in his seventh year as president and after seven years of being subjected to severe press criticism, he wrote: “I deplore the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity and the mendacious spirit of those who write them. [However], [t]he press,” Jefferson concluded, “is an evil for which there is no remedy. Liberty depends upon freedom of the press and that cannot be limited without being lost.” He was right then, and we are right now, to prefer a free press, however flawed, to any controlled alternative. With the benefit of hindsight, the lessons of history and the words from a Supreme Court Justice and from an American President ringing in our ears, how do we assess media’s influence in the way that politics and government is carried out in America? How effective is the media in keeping us informed while keeping our government in check? We can answer these questions by looking at the power structure of American society and media’s role in it. Power and the Media “Power” is the ability to compel another to do something that s/he would otherwise not do (Dahl 201-15; Lukes 19-24). Preservation of democracy in America depends on the balance of power at all levels: in government, business, the people, and media, which can be seen as the Four Estates of modern American society. Creating that balance of power within and among these four components of our nation is the challenge of democracy. By dividing the powers to legislate, administer, and enforce laws, our government rulers are divided and set against each other based on the principle that the people and their businesses can remain free to pursue progress and prosperity if their rulers are divided. This complex structure of government serves to limit the power of its leaders and was designed to serve not one but many and conflicting purposes (Ranney 85-86). This became the foundation of the pluralistic, liberal, and democratic nation that is America, where political, religious, and economic freedoms are guaranteed under the rule of law. Since independence, America developed a political system that is a naturally progressive development of liberalism and the exercise of power by people averse to absolutism, an economic system almost perfectly capitalistic and based on the power of free markets, and a meritocratic social system that recognizes human dignity and the value of individual effort (Ryan et al.). It is therefore a good sign that America is characterized by a constructive “conflict” among the different centers of power that created the nation: business, government, and the people whose collective and individual desires to exercise power unavoidably and continually destabilize the status quo. It is the job of the media to shine a strong light into these power struggles, help in shaping public opinions, and disinfect these struggles of their destructive tendencies. And it is our job as the public whether to allow the media to engage in this creative destruction process to make America dynamic, youthful, and moving forward. As the sun’s heat beats down on us all, no one too is exempt from the light that the mass media casts on our nation: from the private lives of celebrities and the corruption of corporate CEOs to the sexual shenanigans of legislators and Presidents, the American public has been treated to varying forms of Prime Time entertainment. All these contribute to the constantly changing landscape of our democracy, influencing the way we look at our leaders, helping us shift our perceptions of events, and shaping our individual views and characters. This to some extent is good and, in essence, is the media’s role. The moment America ceases to be a liberal, pluralist nation – where different peoples of different and even opposite backgrounds learn to live together in freedom – then that is the time we collectively sign our death warrant as a democratic nation (Peterson et al. 25). Look at the experience of nations that used totalitarianism as the tool for achieving a misguided state of equality (Russia, China, India and most of Eastern Europe come to mind) and where the media were stifled and turned into a tool of political propaganda. Western press freedom became the key that liberated the oppressed masses from their slavery. Having a free press and a government, business sector, and public that respect the freedom of speech and of the press is good, but if too much of a good thing can be bad, is there such a thing as too much press freedom being bad for our democracy? This ultimately depends on how far we, the Third Estate or the public, allow the media to exercise its power. Power and the Media Elite In 1986, political scientists Rothman and Lichter published a litany of descriptions for the Media Elite: upper-middle-class, white, mostly male college graduates unsympathetic for small-town America, non-church or synagogue goers loaded with regional and class prejudices, liberal, pro-environment, anti-nuclear energy and anti-Big Oil, and who use their work to subconsciously structure social reality and search for and find abuses of power. The American media elites are different from the Media Moguls, business families of mostly Jewish origin (“Who Rules America?”) who own or manage giant media companies that dominate the worlds of music (Time Warner), entertainment (Disney and MGM), broadcasting (ABC, CBS, and NBC), and the publishing of newspapers (Washington Post and New York Times), books (Simon and Schuster), and magazines (Time Warner). Are these so-called moguls the ideological soul mates of the elite who exercise considerable influence in the way news and entertainment are crafted and presented to the public? The answer depends on finding evidence that the American media is liberal and biased in general, and if media professionals really have the power to influence the way the news is reported to the public. Media: Liberal, Biased, and Politically Influential Two political scientists, Groseclose (Stanford) and Milyo (Chicago) published empirical evidence (2005) that American media is liberal and biased. They looked at the more popular articles and broadcasts from media outlets over a ten-year period from January 1, 1993 to December 31, 2002 and compared these with the public pronouncements of the U.S. Congress and the fifty most cited U.S. think-tanks. By counting the frequency that a media outlet cites various think tanks and other policy groups, they compared this with the number of times that members of Congress cited the same think tanks in their speeches to construct an ADA (Americans for Democratic Action) score for each media outlet, using as their basis an earlier research paper (Groseclose et al. 1999) where the ADA scores for members of the U.S. Congress were estimated. Groseclose and Milyo concluded that their results showed a strong liberal bias in comparison with the Republican Congress. Consistent with claims made by conservative critics, CBS Evening News and the New York Times received scores far to the left of the center. They found that the most centrist media outlets were PBS NewsHour, CNN’s NewsNight, and ABC’s Good Morning America. Among print outlets, USA Today was the most centrist. Considered rightist in their views were Fox News Special Report and the Washington Times. A graph of their findings is attached as Figure 1. These findings also confirmed several previous research studies showing that an almost overwhelming fraction of journalists are liberal. Prominent among these are two books by an insider at CBS, Bernard Goldberg, whose two books Bias (2001) and Arrogance (2003) seem like appropriate descriptions for the media elite. And do the beliefs and ideologies of the supposedly objective and truthful journalists and media professionals who write and broadcast the news affect in any way at all the manner by which the news is presented? One book powerfully sums up the answer. In 1972, a young journalist joined a group of mostly male veteran reporters who followed that year’s U.S. Presidential candidates. His best-selling Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicle (Crouse 1973) painted an unflattering picture of how the media elite operated. Using the campaign bus as a mere metaphor for the closed, cozy, and clubby bunch of immature, eccentric, and hyperactive newsmen, Crouse shed a theatrical light on the dramatic aspects of U.S. history-in-the-making as he exposed the minds and characters of those who tell the stories to America and the whole world. The journalists moved around like wolves, giving rise to the term pack journalism that marks much of the craft’s contemporary practice. It was their behavior to stay within the pack and rise above it which showed that survival and domination in the pack do not depend on stating facts as one sees them, as “true” journalism must do for an information-hungry public, but rather on the view that articles be consistent with what others in the pack are writing. Crouse cited several instances of editors questioning why facts in other newspapers were not covered by a journalist, or why one’s analysis of the same event was different and inconsistent. Journalists “fed off the same pool report, the same daily handout, the same speech by the candidate; the whole pack was isolated in the same mobile village. After a while, they began to believe the same rumors, subscribe to the same theories, and write the same stories (p. 8).” When packs replaced facts, truth and the public become the victims. Crouse’s accounts gave the alarming impression that history, rather than being the result of different viewpoints and perceptions, becomes what a cabal of eyewitnesses engaged in a contest for the power to break the news and shape the thinking of a worldwide audience is pressured to report. The battles among the media elite (pp. 152-153) and their growing self-importance (p. 341) reflected the primal energy burning inside the journalists, their editors, paper owners, and the public, offering an inside look into mob behavior. The public would certainly benefit from knowing how our news gets written, with a bonus glimpse of the inner workings of how democracy works and how leaders get elected. Crouse’s overwhelming message is that the recording and telling of our national history is determined by personalities who write about events as they take place, and that the men and women who write history inevitably leave a part of their souls in what they write. As he argued (p. 208), nobody thirty years after the events would remember the news articles of the time and the people who wrote them, but the public perception of those events of long ago would have undeniably shaped public opinion, perhaps even the outcome of the election, and therefore the course of history. The media elite that are biased in the way they cast a light on government and politics is nothing that would cause much concern. After all, the bias comes in multiple flavors across the whole political spectrum, and in a country where free speech is guaranteed, the public have a choice whom to listen to, watch, and support. Diversity and pluralism are welcome in a healthy democracy; what is frightening would be the public’s indifference. Conclusion Is our media casting a light that helps build our democracy or burn it down? Based on evidence, the answer is in line with the words of Brandeis and Jefferson: by remaining free, our media helps the public by casting a bright light on the activities of the government, business, and the public. Biased, perhaps, but this is inevitable as every being is affected by one’s principles and opinions. What is alarming, though, is the possibility that our media is becoming more liberal because the public is growing more indifferent. After decades of being bombarded with news that are consistently critical or with biased information that seem unbelievable, the public may have become gullible or cynical. Either way, this is dangerous for our democracy. It is up to the public to help control the American media, not by calling for greater press control or lesser freedom of the press. That would be contrary to the insights of Brandeis and Jefferson and Burke and Carlyle before them. The media is a necessary “evil” we have to learn to live with, and the way to “control” it is for us to exercise our power to learn and think independently and objectively, not allowing ourselves to be influenced by the media that we know is biased, and for us to form judgments that help us speak up and be heard. This is neither rocket science nor deep psychology, but a call for the public to be more critical and discerning towards what we watch, hear, or read. It falls on us to know who are writing the news, much as we would like to know the doctor who writes out our prescriptions. It is up to us, the people, to make sure that the sunlight and the electric light cast by the media do not burn so brightly that it burns us down. We are the Third Estate, and we have the power to decide what to watch and read and to whom we listen. Taking on the challenge in this Internet age of abundant information is not easy, but the survival of America depends on how we, the people, use our power. Works Cited Brandeis, Louis D. “Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It”, 1933. Louis D. Brandeis Law Library, 28 March 2007. Burke, Edmund. “A Vindication of Natural Society”, 1750. In Quesinberry, Donna L. The Fourth Estate (Suite101.com e-book). North46.com. 27 March 2007. Carlyle, Thomas. “Heroes and Hero Worship in History”, 1841. In Quesinberry, Donna L. The Fourth Estate (Suite101.com e-book). North46.com. 27 March 2007. Crouse, Timothy. Boys on the Bus. New York: Ballantine, 1973. Dahl, Robert A. “The Concept of Power.” Behavioral Science 2 (1957): 201-15. Economist, The. “A right royal scandal.” The Economist, 23 December 2006: 107-109. Goldberg, Bernard. Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite. New York: Warner, 2003. Goldberg, Bernard. Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News. New York: Regnery, 2001. Groseclose, Timothy J. and Jeffrey D. Milyo. “A Measure of Media Bias.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 120.4 (2005): 1191-1237. Groseclose, Timothy J., Steven D. Levitt and James M. Snyder, Jr. “Comparing Interest Group Scores across Time and Chambers: Adjusted ADA Scores for the U.S. Congress.” American Political Science Review 93 (1999): 33-50. Kann, Peter R. “The Power of the Press”. The Wall Street Journal, 13 December 2006. Opinion Journal. 27 March 2007 Kinsley, Michael. “America’s Fourth Estate.” Microsoft Encarta 2007 (DVD). Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corporation, 2006. Lichter, S. Robert, Stanley Rothman and Linda S. Lichter. The Media Elite. Bethesda, MD: Adler and Adler, 1986. Lukes, Steven. Power: A Radical View. London: Macmillan, 1974. Peterson, Theodore, Jay W. Jensen and William L. Rivers. The Mass Media and Modern Society. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965. Ranney, Austin. Governing: An Introduction to Political Science (8th Ed.). Upper Saddle, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2001. Ryan, Neal, Rachel Parker, and Kerry Brown. Government, Business and Society (2nd Ed): Upper Saddle, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003. Strom, Kevin Alfred. Who Rules America? Hillsboro, WV: National Vanguard, 2004. Sutter, Daniel. 2001. “Can the Media Be So Liberal? The Economics of Media Bias.” The Cato Journal 20 (Winter): 431-51. Figure 1: Adjusted ADA Scores of Politicians and Media Outlets (Source: Groseclose and Milyo 2005: 42) Read More