Chapter One - Knowledge is Power: The Role of the Media in Democracy

Though the media has changed and evolved drastically throughout history, a consistent theme holds true information is power. As a democratic government derives its power from its citizens, and the media is an essential tool in determining and expressing the public will, it is, therefore, impossible to maximize democracy without a free and independent press. In order to effectively promote democracy, the media must fulfill several important purposes. It must hold institutions accountable to the public, it must public attention to important issues, it must educate the citizens so they can make informed political decisions, and it must strengthen the bonds of civil society via interconnection (Hume 3). In order to fulfill these purposes, media institutions must perform three main functions: First, they must provide equal access to the means and ends of political communication. Second, they must connect citizens with one another, so that citizens may collectively exercise their rights to free expression and free association. Third, they must promote state and corporate transparency by acting as an external watchdog of and increasing public awareness of democratic processes, so as to ensure that institutional activity aligns with the public will.

Before we delve deeper into the roles the media plays in the operation of a democracy, we must clarify what our conception of democracy entails. Although there is no universally accepted definition of democracy, most political scholars agree that democracy include two basic principles: first, that all members of a society enjoy universally recognized freedoms and liberties, and second, that these members have equal access to power (Schumpeter 8). These principles are based on the concept of popular sovereignty, which holds that the legitimacy of the state and its laws is based on the will of the people; as citizens are the source of all political power, they must be able to play a role in shaping the political decisions that affect their lives (Rousseau 5).

The ways in which equal access to power is realized vary with different forms of democracy, and occur through both institutional and extrainstitutional structures. Since most nations are too large to logistically sustain direct democracy, a system wherein citizens personally participate in deliberation and decision-making, most governments employ a system of representation in which citizens elect government officials to act on their behalf (Lutz 38). In order for this system to be democratic, however, the government, its officials, and its policies must reflect the will of the people. Political scientist Donald S. Lutz notes the variety of institutional mechanisms designed to promote this congruity:

To speak of popular sovereignty is to place ultimate authority in the people. There are a variety of ways in which sovereignty may be expressed. It may be… mediated through representatives who are subject to election and recall; it may be ultimate in the sense that the people have a negative or veto over legislation, or it may be something much less dramatic… In each case, however, popular sovereignty assumes the existence of some form of popular consent (Lutz 38).

Though these institutional mechanisms support democracy, they cannot adequately promote it on their own. When the formal methods of the democratic process fail to realize the will of the people, citizens must seek alternative ways to exercise their political agency. They must have access to and utilize the tools and resources to act individually or collectively to promote their interest and to hold the government accountable for its actions. These extra-institutional supplement and ensure the efficacy of institutional methods.

The ideal role of the media in a democracy is to promote the institutional and extrainstitutional realization of citizens’ power in the democratic process. The media seeks to fulfill this purpose by means of three main functions. First, it must provide equal access to both the means and ends of political communications. If a democracy is to be responsive to the ideas and values of people generally, individuals must have access to adequate information to form their own ideas as well as access to the means of expression of those ideas:
Freedom of public opinion… should be considered “the substantive and effective foundation” of democracy because it constitutes “the element which gives substance and effect to popular sovereignty. (Santori as quoted in Zolo 145-6)
The duties of this role are thus twofold; the media must responsibly promote public knowledge to ensure informed political decision-making as well as serve as a conduit for public opinion in the political realm.

The former enhances the institutional processes by which citizens promote their interests, such as voting, by increasing the amount of available information about public issues – the basis upon which political decisions are made. The more knowledge a citizen has, the more effective his or her public reasoning will be; George Krimsky, the former head of news for the Associated Press’ World Services, explains that “a self-governing society, by definition, needs to make its own decisions. It cannot do that without hard information, leavened with an open exchange of views” (Krimsky). The latter plays an essential part in maximizing and diversifying this information base. Communications media connects citizens with government services and enhances their dialogue and cooperation by giving citizens an opportunity to express their will to government officials as well as one another. The media provides a forum in which a wide range of individual perspectives can be voiced and shared with others. This public access to political expression not only supplements public reasoning by providing more facts and perspectives, but is itself a prerequisite for democratic representation:

In a democracy, all citizens should be free to participate in the political competition, either as candidates or as voters, and should be able to give public expression to their opinions… for political competition can call itself democratic only when it is free competition for a free vote. (Zolo 145)

A diverse media sector with competing services allows multiple perspectives to be voiced, maximizing the public’s ability to make responsible and rational political decisions. It serves as a forum in which public reasoning occurs as well as the means by which the conclusions of public reasoning are communicated from the people to the government. There is a broad consensus that to maintain the essence of democracy, “communication should be open so that all political interests enjoy an opportunity to advance their causes, regardless of the popularity of their views” (Graber, McQuail and Norris 3). In order to best fulfill this role, the press must be free and independent from external influences, such as state or corporate coercion; otherwise, the media runs the risk of withholding important public information in lieu of protecting the interests of these powerful institutions (Hume 4). Mediated visibility makes it more difficult for states to carry out activities in secret, potentially rendering exercise of political power more accessible and accountable to the public (Thompson 147).

The second function the media serves in a democracy is to connect citizens with one another, increasing the solidarity of their social bonds within civil society. When formal institutional democratic processes fail to yield access to equal political power, people must be able to find one another and organize extrainstitutional activity to promote their interests. Media technologies strengthen the bonds of civil society via interconnection; they allow individuals to learn about and communicate with people in distant locales, and concordantly organize collective action even if they are not geographically proximate to one another. This mediated civic engagement is “the fuel of democracy” (Hume 5), as it enhances the execution of the public’s right to assembly and provides an alternate method for citizens to exercise political power.

Finally, the media functions as a watchdog of institutional and extrainstitutional democratic processes, ensuring that the structures deciding issues that affect people’s lives are held accountable for their actions and that “the troublesome aspects of society and the behavior of the holders of power are under constant supervision (Patterson 26). It is clear that governments historically have not always been willing to be transparent in fear of the consequences of public scrutiny. However, as the Habermasian “public” and other media pioneers realized, if a nation is to be governed by the will of the people, its institutions must be open to scrutiny by the people. A democracy cannot flourish unless there are mechanisms in place to ensure that its processes of reflecting and implementing the will of the people are carried out without corruption. A main purpose of the media, therefore, is to reveal to both political leaders and citizens the strengths and weaknesses of institutional activity:

The unwritten rules of democratic political culture – which do assign a public service role to news media – command that they devote time and space to the public policy agenda in order to reveal to political leaders and citizens the strengths and weaknesses of various policy proposals. Information should be available about the performance of politicians and the qualifications of new aspirants to political office. Corruption, abuses of power, and other misconduct in the handling of public affairs should be reported, irrespective of the parties involved. (Graber, McQuail, and Norris 3)

Free and independent news media are the means by which criticisms and questions of as well as public responses to political activity can be posed, and are essential tools in holding a government accountable to the people; a government’s accountability, after all, is the ultimate source of its legitimacy.