Media: Fourth Estate or Fifth Column of Democracy?
The Day began to work with Project Syndicate in March 1999. At that time the syndicate was working with approximately 50 European newspapers. In recent years, despite the fact that the leaders of all countries have begun using the term globalization more and more, while public discussion of this process focuses on IMF loan policy or genetically modified agricultural produce, there is seldom enough global consideration of its consequences. Project Syndicate, an international association of serious newspapers, was created to fill this gap. Today it includes 115 newspapers in 72 countries with a total readership of over fifteen million and tries to disseminate the perspectives of recognized world authorities on issues of economics, politics, science, scholarship, and culture to readers where they live, thus contributing to press freedom in the developing countries and those in transition. The syndicate’s main efforts are directed at publishing the best available commentary and analysis in member periodicals and in encouraging cooperation among such members. Taking part in the project are such prestigious newspapers as France’s Le Figaro, Germany’s Die Welt and Handelsblatt, Italy’s Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica, Russia’s Nezavisimaya gazeta, Poland’s Rzeczpospolita, Spain’s El Pais, Austria’s Der Standard, Hungary’s Nepszabadsag, Israel’s Ha’aretz, Latvia’s Diena and Lietuvos Aidas, Norway’s Dagbladet, Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter, and others. Ivor Stodolsky’s article was written to mark the fifth anniversary of our publication in order to enable the Ukrainian newspaper reader in general and ours in particular come to their own understanding of the trends toward globalization in the mass media. Of course, the most important and most painful problems concern the degree to which the press can maintain its independence within the triangle of the state, business, and the media. Obviously, the specifics of the degree to which the press is dependent or independent is governed above all by the quality of the state and business it has to deal with.
With the events of September 11, despicable terror has become a global force. How? Not through the destruction of countless innocent lives, not through demolishing famous buildings. No, the attacks on New York and Washington have not undermined America’s overwhelming militarily power; they have not challenged its financial predominance. What has truly changed is the image of Western invulnerability. It has been achieved through a fear-inspiring spectacle — the destruction of symbols — a spectacle whose vehicle is the mass media.
These extreme circumstances bring a new clarity to the issues faced by journalists around the world on a daily basis. The media, whose profession lies in communicating to a mass audience the much-vaunted currencies of the new century — information and knowledge — goes well beyond that. It shapes thoughts and opinions with a blade that can cut both ways: acting as a forum for reasoned argument to guide prudent action, or a tool in the service of other, sometimes sinister forces. As the media has expanded to encompass a global audience for global problems, so that its responsibility has grown to withstand the pressures and provide the balance in this new, perhaps hostile, but certainly volatile environment.
The notion of the media as an institution comparable to branches of government runs deep in modern democracy. Indeed, Carlyle’s Fourth Estate is one of the pillars of any democratic society. Historically, the mass media arose during a time in which it faced an overwhelmingly powerful unitary state. Over time it has achieved a balance between cooperation and criticism of the state through subjecting its powers to rigorous scrutiny and correction at the hands of independent thought and public opinion. The rights of individuals, including the freedom of expression, were not attained simply by passing laws, but fought for in the public sphere through the exposure of malpractice and indictment of censorship, as they still are.
This watchdog function is at the heart of what Western advisors regularly recommend to newly established democracies fighting the battle between a strong state and a weak civil society today. Yet the balance between cooperation and criticism with the institutions of state power has undergone an important shift in the older democracies.
In advanced high-tech capitalism, the competition between TV, satellite-TV, cable-TV, the Internet, radio, and print media is severe. The battle is fought over a new, fickle ‘consumer’ of knowledge and entertainment, 24 hours a day seven days a week. For companies to survive in the world of multimedia convergence and the 24-hour newspaper they need vast resources and as a consequence are often driven into the arms of enormous conglomerates. In America, at the vanguard of such developments, mergers have seen NBC News swallowed by General Electric, ABC News absorbed by Disney, CBS News subsumed into Viacom, Time Inc. wedded to Warner Brothers, CNN ingested by Time Warner, and recently Time Warner fused with AOL. Similar trends are visible around the world.
These changes raise several questions. As the world integrates through trade — in images and text as much as other goods and services — corporations, whose power and interests increasingly match those of states, have also gained extraordinary influence over the very institution whose task is to criticize the abuse of power.
As a result, it may be difficult for the media to fulfill its essential watchdog function. It is troubling when Michael Eisner, head of the Disney Corporation says, “I would prefer ABC not cover Disney. I think it’s inappropriate for Disney to cover Disney.” Indeed claims such as, “I think we’re actually pretty good now at being critical of ourselves. We’re sort of past that,” from a top executive in the US industry are reminiscent of the Soviet Politburo, not democratic politics.
Competition, not only in business but politics lies at the core of capitalist democracy. It is the essence of a multiparty political system in which independent media makes the pretense of a monopoly on the truth impossible. Ironically, the fierce competition for the viewer’s mind also has its disadvantages. In a highly competitive market — especially where there is not much money as in political reportage — profit-oriented institutions drive the quality down-market. Media organizations find themselves locked in the proverbial race to the bottom in the hope of drawing the largest proportion of consumers. What results is an often impoverished media landscape filled with easily digestible stories and images — a situation that does not serve the substantive debate so often recommended to developing and transition countries as a road to resolving their societal problems.
The dawn of the twenty-first century for the developed world, just as for the rest, is not as rosy as one could have hoped, to put it mildly. With the world economy teetering on the brink of recession, long term environmental and scientific uncertainties in the making, globalization’s discontents and ethnic strife rising to the surface in the form of economic migrants and refugees, and now a drawn out conflict with an irrational fundamentalist terrorism that holds the potential to destabilize a changing geopolitical order, the problems can no longer be confined to any geographical region or country. It was a terrible way to learn the lesson, but it certainly hit home: we are all vulnerable.
If there is any one antidote to the poisonous divisions that are opening up along the fault lines of society, it is open and independent, vigorous but level-headed debate. The media — sharing in equal responsibility as the political and economic leaders — compromise this standard at their peril. They risk deposing the fourth estate of democracy in which they thrive, and joining the sedition of its fifth column.
