The mass media and democracy: between the modern and the postmodern.

• Author: Carey, James W.
• Position: Power of the Media in the Global System

John Chancellor was upset. Impeccably groomed and spoken, this visual icon of virtually the entire history of television journalism could hardly contain his distress. Beneath his characteristically genial manner, his anger showed, as he lectured at Columbia University's Du Pont Forum on what went wrong in the 1992 U.S. presidential election.(1) The catalog took more than 30 minutes: The election was the worst in history, worse even than the monumentally smarmy campaign of 1988; one no longer needed to belong to a political party to run for president; talk show hosts displaced journalists; the public filled the air with silly questions on ersatz television debates and call-in radio programs; faxes, "800-numbers," computer bulletin boards, private satellite hook-ups and electronic mail had conspired with talk-show hosts Arsenio Hall and Rush Limbaugh, and interviewers Larry King and Tabitha Soren to evacuate the role of journalism from presidential politics. In sum, Chancellor asserted that network journalism had declined, and the new news of endlessly chattering masses cluttered the electronic highway with trivia.

All good stories have a villain at the center, and this one was no exception: It had Ross Perot. Perot's electronic campaign circumvented party organization, presidential primaries and a national convention, as volunteers placed him on the ballot in state after state. Perot ignored local newspapers, radio and television and, in effect, told the national press that he could win without them -- or by running against them. Perot demonstrated it was possible to run with one's own money and avoid restrictions on federal matching funds.(2) He laid down new rules for presidential politics: Avoid specifics; stay away from journalists; hold as few press conferences as possible; stay away from the serious interview programs; and cultivate electronic populism by exploiting call-in radio. Who, after all, needs Sam Donaldson? Worse yet, who needs John Chancellor?

Chancellor most of all mourned -- and who can blame him -- his own irrelevance and that of journalists like him. In his view, there was no one left to challenge the candidates, to hold their feet to the fire. The quality of campaigning was in decline because politicians had direct access to the public through media that offered neither threat nor intimidation. All this gave rise to the worst fear of the generation of journalists who had been affected by the Second World War: The new media had greased the highway of modern politics for demagogues and demagoguery. Chancellor had encountered the vampire of postmodern politics and found himself without a crucifix.

This episode serves to remind the reader that the following consideration of the mass media and democracy -- which are always intertwined -- occurs at a particularly opaque historical juncture. Something is afoot in modem societies that seems peculiarly tied to the decline of certain media that have defined the context of communications and democracy since at least the end of the Second World War. The media have changed decisively in the last 20 years, both as technologies and institutions. Yet democracy has changed also; the ends of political life have been reconceived in recent years. There is a widespread demand for less pro forma political representation, whether by the press or elected officials, and for more real participation.

Yet these changes only signal that the meanings of democracy and communication are historically variable. The meaning of democracy changes over time because forms of communication with which to conduct politics change. The meaning of communication also changes over time depending on the central impulses and aspirations of democratic politics. Neither communication nor democracy is a transcendent concept; they do not exist outside history. The meaning of these terms varies with available media and with whatever concrete notions of democracy happen to be popular at any particular time.

The journalistic side of the twentieth century can be defined as the struggle for democracy and an independent media against propaganda and subservience to the state. That struggle culminated during the first half of this century in the seizure of the means of communication by the demagogues of the 1930s and 1940s -- Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin -- and their Cold War reincarnation of the 1950s, Joseph McCarthy -- the ghost that still haunts U.S. journalism.(3)

While this struggle was imprinted upon the generation of the time, the fear of demagoguery seemed a curious hangover of a forgotten age for those in the post-McCarthy generations. Similarly, the quest for so-called objectivity seemed to a younger generation a curious absence of passion and commitment: a deliberate sitting out of history.

This historical, generational divide is what the hyperbolic phrase in the title "between the modem and the postmodern" is designed to catch. For John Chancellor was right -- if only by implication -- about one thing: A medium implies and constitutes a way of life. Whatever democracy as a way of life may be, it is constituted by particular media of communication and institutional arrangements through which politics is conducted, whether speech in the agora, the colonial newspaper and the pamphlet in the taverns of Philadelphia, the omnibus daily in the commercial city or the television network in an industrialized nation. Similarly, a medium of communication is defined by the democratic aspirations of those involved in politics: a conversation among equals, the organ of a political ideology, a watchdog on the state, an instrument of dialogue on public issues, a device for transmitting information or an arena for the struggle of interest groups. Modern journalism began around 1890 with the advent of a national system of communication and has had a pretty long run.(4) Its time now seems to be about up. Yet, there was democracy before modern journalism; and there will be democracy after it, despite difficult and dangerous transitions to be negotiated. The sections that follow contrast two historically specific forms of the relationship between journalism and democracy: journalism in a public society and journalism in a national society. The first form constitutes the original understanding of the press and the First Amendment in the United States.(5) The second form, in which the media acts more as a watchdog on the state, has been typical of the modern period that now seems to be coming to an end. These distinctions are important because it appears that the struggle today to recreate public life through new forms of communication such as cable television and talk radio are heavily inspired by images of democracy and public life from the colonial and early national periods. This article then discusses the potential for journalism and democracy in the years ahead.

This last discussion focuses primarily on U.S. experience. Nonetheless it can be instructive in a more international context for several reasons. New forms of communication rarely meet resistance in the United States: They are allowed to diffuse rapidly and penetrate deeply into the social fabric. Developments in the United States frequently foreshadow, though they never duplicate, changes that will occur in other countries. Second, the globalization of communication, and the creation of transnational audiences and markets -- which are features of the contemporary period -- have introduced similar problematic elements into the political life of all democracies, not just the United States. The press may everywhere be part of the apparatus by which the accountability of the governors to the governed is achieved. Yet, just as the meaning of democracy and communication varies historically, it varies across nations as well. Thus, ultimately, the precise terms of accountability and the role of the press in each society must be examined on a country-by-country basis.

EVOLUTION OF THE PUBLIC

The original understanding of journalism, politics and democracy in the United States emerged in the public houses and taverns of the colonial era. Pubs were presided over by publicans who were often publishers. Publicans picked up information from conversations in the pub and from travellers who often recorded what they had seen and heard on their journeys in log books stationed at the end of the bar. Publishers then recorded such conversation and gossip and printed it, in order that it might be preserved and circulated. They also printed speeches, orations, sermons, offers of goods for sale and political opinions of those who gathered in public places, largely merchants and traders. Newspapers, which were circulated in public houses, animated conversation and discussion. Consequently, journalism -- reflected speech -- was the ongoing flow of conversation, not in the halls of the legislatures, but in the public houses.

This context provides the original understanding of the public: a group of merchants, traders, citizens and political activists -- often strangers -- who gathered to discuss the news. Describing Philadelphia on the eve of the Revolutionary War, Sam Bass Warner observed that

gossip in the taverns provided Philadelphia's basic cells of community

life .... Every ward of the city had its inns and taverns and

the London Coffee House served as central communication node

of the entire city .... Out of the meetings at the neighborhood tavern

came much of the commonplace community development

... essential to the governance of the city ... and made it possible

... to form effective committees of correspondence.(6)

Today in the United States, the...