DUMBING DOWN: CREATING A MEDIA FOR THE
With ownership and news values of proprietors and major shareholders permeating the media, and the increasing role of government patronage again supplying material to overworked, information-hungry journalists, the communication revolution has not produced the much vaunted infor- mation society; rather it is dominated by a media within which independent journalism is increasingly quashed by the vested interests of the ruling elites, through a vocabulary dictated by the state, political and financial authority.
The ‘satellite slush’ (Keane 1991, p. 82), dished out by companies from Disney’s ABC News to Rupert Murdoch’s Star TV, is further denuded when the expanding transnational entertainment companies find themselves faced by restrictive market practices laid down by authoritarian local elites.
Their position is clear: when serious news threatens to muddy otherwise clear commercial waters, the pursuit of profit always takes first place.
Murdoch once hailed the globalized media as sounding the death knell for dictators worldwide, and leading Internet company, Google, the motto of which is ‘Don’t do Evil’, censored its search services in order to gain greater access to China’s fast-growing market (BBC 25 January 2006).
Leading media analyst James Curran, in an Internet debate in 2002, maintained that the pattern of domination in the media industry must be a source of concern to supporters of democratic pluralism. He suggested that the private concentration of symbolic power potentially distorts the demo- cratic process:
the power potentially at the disposal of media moguls tends to be exerted in a one-sided way . . . it is power that can stifle competition . . . and while the abuse of state power over the media has us on a constant alert, we do not seem to be as vigilant against the abuse of shareholder power over the media. (Curran 2002) When these media moguls look to increase market share, their fiduciary duties are not hostage to political scruples. Shareholder returns come first.
This was particularly obvious in the competition for access to the vitally important China market, where all international companies were expected to have a growth strategy. Yet the authoritarian state maintained a tight control over both entry to the market and over the media industry. The cor- porate media enthusiasm for this massive market ‘locked in by a police state’ has seen global media giants like News Corporation, Disney, Viacom and Google:
trade in their scruples for a crack at the jackpot . . . [using] their market power to advance their interests and the wealth of their shareholders, and to preclude any public involvement in democratic media policy making. It is a poison pill for democracy. (McChesney 2001a)
The companies like News Corp’s Star TV, that have made headway into markets like The People’s Republic of China, provide a bland diet of docu- dramas (TV Court), reality TV (Wanted! In China), and quiz shows (Extreme Intelligence). President of Star China, Jamie Davis, explained its new Chinese language station offered ‘cool, hip, fun entertainment’, others suggest it is ‘mass market spice’ (Lee 2002, p. 22).
This is a global trend. The 2001 overhaul of CNN was a classic case in point. The relaunch in August 2001 of a revamped CNN Headline News came as a reaction to falling audience numbers. 2001 second quarter numbers saw CNN’s audience down 2 per cent from the same period in 2000, while Fox News saw its audience grow 62 per cent and MSNBC, up 25 per cent. The competition had become racier, and CNN, led by Jamie Kellner, an import from Hollywood, and anchored by actress and former prime time drama face, Andrea Thompson, had been forced to move
‘unapologetically down market, broadcasting high-decibel talk shows and dressing up gossip and entertainment as news’ (The Economist 4 August 2001, p. 54).
When one looks at the trends in the US, the mainstream media are
‘invading the tabloid’s territory with gossipy entertainment channels and endless chat shows that blur the distinction between speculation and news’
(The Economist7 July 2001, p. 37). This has resulted in falling circulation and forced further consolidation of the industry. For the media giants, it has meant ‘news without facts, fame without achievement and glamour without substance . . . socially disengaged, culturally uninterested, intel- lectually under stretched. In short, tragically flippant’ (Schofield 2002, p. 113).
Dwindling resources are contributing to a change in the perspective of news coverage. Huge amounts of manpower and huge costs are involved in making of news programming. This has led to a focus on particular events that are deemed particularly newsworthy. Reuters sent more people to Iraq than to cover the US elections – some 70 staff, with more than that again in the neighbouring countries (total 150). Reuters sent 160 to the Olympics in Athens in 2004. The BBC sent 200 staffto Iraq and 400 to the Olympics (Burt 2004, p. 8).
Serious current affairs is also seen as facing its demise. Large media com- panies are not prepared to commit the resources necessary, and there are very few independent producers who commit to current affairs. This is because these are programmes unlikely to be sold on, they are not formats which make series and, sometimes, the investigations have to be scrapped.
In short, it is not an attractive commercial genre, which is why for compa- nies like the BBC, it has been a public service core commitment. So, whether due to dwindling institutional will or dwindling public interest, this type of
programming is being replaced from Sydney to Stockport by shows like Australian Channel Nine’s A Current Affairs or the ‘£100 and your name on air’ story push from Channel 5 News in the UK; tabloid fare which, like newspapers, have agendas of their own and an interest in exaggeration and shock to drive up viewer numbers.
Of course there are no reasons why news and current affairs should be immune from the general trends within the industry. Even in the once hal- lowed halls of British television, producers say they are under pressure to create exciting, controversial or entertaining programmes, even if that means distorting the truth or misrepresenting views (Humphrys 1999, p. 190). Yet, in a mediated world, the news media gains particular impor- tance as the ‘pivot between the rulers and the ruled’ (Tiffin 1981, p. 28).
After all, ‘to make sense of the world is to exert power over it, and to cir- culate that sense socially is to exert power over those who use that sense as a way of coping with their daily lives’ (Fiske 1994, p. 3).
With diminishing checks and balances on content, the communications media might entertain, but it increasingly does little to educate or inform.
As a result, audiences looking for information on which to make consid- ered decisions, those who might use it as a channel to register their dissent, and even the elites who could use the communications media to monitor the pulse of their community, all find themselves poorly served.
Editor-at-large and former CEO of United Press International, Arnaud de Borchgrave, suggests that the US media’s taste for domestic melodramas has blinded Americans to the new forces shaping the rest of the world. A post-9/11 poll of opinion leaders conducted by the International Herald Tribuneand the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press high- lighted the large gap between the way Americans believe they were seen abroad and the way others saw the United States (Knowlton 2001, p. 12).
De Borchgrave pointed to the lack of international coverage in the domestic American media, driven out by the slavish pursuit of profit which leaves any idea of the public good as a ‘quaint concept relegated to acade- mic debates . . . the dumbing down of the media was the slippery slope that led to the dumbing down of America’ (de Borchgrave, 2001, p. 31).
With little scope for complex ideas, Asian countries are also portrayed in simple, often negative, stories, conforming to stereotypes and using inter- national television clips that distort reality. Asia is seen in the US as a ‘risky place, the common explanation was television news images of anti-US protests and Islamic extremists with guns’ (Pesek 2003, p. B2). This is some- thing Asian governments are aware of, and are often critical of foreign reporters for providing a poor image of their country, particularly as they compete for foreign direct investment and look to international ‘hot’ money to drive the local stock markets.
Today, the combination of these factors, concentration, commodific- ation and globalization, means that the products of giant transnational media and entertainment companies instantaneously traverse the globe, knowing no boundaries, penetrating every realm of life in every region of the world (Cvetkovich and Kellner 1995, p. 3).
There is little evidence, then, that the new wave of mediaflowing over the global information superhighway is to be celebrated for its liberaliz- ing, even democratizing, influence.9 As culture becomes an increasingly commodified product and the industry increasingly dominated by Western, in particular American, exports, the global media is, instead, perceived to be a steamroller, laying a path for the juggernaut of cultural imperialism. Warnings abound of ‘the destruction of traditional culture and values (under the code of modernization), and [the imposition of] a new kind of transnational, global consumer culture’ (Kellner 1990, p. 88).
What has changed in today’s profit-driven media industry is that even
‘quality’ products are moving downmarket, trying to build an audience.
This move has been given a helping hand by the relaxation of regulatory regimes which once laid down strict criteria for the balance of program- ming on commercial channels, the increasing power of advertisers to deter- mine the nature of editorial content and the extension of commercial or corporate values onto the media, partly through the influence of public relations.
Historically, tabloid journalism had a long and reasonably honourable history of making the complicated accessible. Today, however, the content decisions are clearly being made on the basis that ‘more emphasis is placed on entertainment, show business, scandal and prurience at the expense of more serious, challenging material like current affairs, policy issues, or foreign affairs’ (Barnett 1998, p. 76).Barnett recognizes that it is difficult to define and measure the process, but suggests that while the shift downmar- ket is linked to competition for audiences, there are other contributing factors. These, he suggests, include a relaxation of regulatory regimes which once laid down strict criteria for balance of programming on commercial channels; the increasing power of advertisers to determine content; and the extension of commercial or corporate values (including the influence of public relations) into the media.
As even the serious media falls to the drive for profit, there is an obses- sion with stars, with ratings and an ‘adoration of the on-screen talent’
(Morris 2002). This is celebrity news. Technological change and the prolif- eration of media outlets, transforming deadlines and changing the logistics of media products means journalists have to work much faster and with greater productivity (another reason why they become so reliant on PR).
This has changed the way in which journalists work, the way stories are covered, and the way they evolve.
Those who believe a plural media is central to the functioning of democ- racy maintain that issues of integrity rather than commercial imperatives should provide the foundations for any journalistic professional code of practice, while the unfettered pursuit of profit in the cultural industries is
‘unlikely to produce the opportunities for knowledge and understanding that an informed, effective, participatory democracy requires’ (Barnett 1998, p. 89). This seems a vain hope given the importance placed on corporate revenues.