Media and Politics in a Globalizing World

Alexa Robertson

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780745689456
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Scienze della comunicazione

Globalization and technological advances have had a dramatic impact on the relationship between media and politics. How can we understand the connection between the two in the present day? Alexa Robertson argues that we cannot understand the power of the one without taking the other into account. This exciting and accessible book provides fresh insight into our contemporary media landscape, adopting a truly comparative global approach. In Media and Politics in a Globalizing World, Robertson encourages the reader to explore the relationship from different perspectives – those of the politician, the journalist, the activist and the ordinary citizen – and how the relationship between media and politics varies across cultures. Illustrated with contemporary examples throughout, the book weighs up arguments for seeing new developments in terms of change or continuity, as empowering or debilitating, and as promoting or undermining democracy. Suitable for undergraduates and postgraduates studying politics, media and sociology, it also will be of interest to the general reader wishing to understand the complex role of the media in political life the world over. For additional support and information visit this book's companion website at http://mediapolitics.net/

PART ONE

1
Introduction

Five weeks had passed since Tunisian fruitseller Mohamed Bouazizi set fire not only to his own body, but also to the tinder of frustration and democratic yearning smouldering on the streets of the Arab world. Tunisia was observing the first of three days of national mourning for the people who had died in the 2011 uprising that resulted in the hasty exit of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. The veteran BBC World reporter Lyse Doucet walked her viewers down ‘the Fleet Street of Tunis’ and into the premises of the country’s oldest state-run newspaper, where staff had just divested themselves of their editor-in-chief. The excitement in the reporter’s voice was unmistakable. ‘What a difference a week makes in Tunisia’, she said, and grinned; ‘You can hear the sound of protest wafting through the windows.’ All the people discussing politics so heatedly would have been arrested a week before; overnight, journalists had found themselves free to think when they wrote. ‘You can’t underestimate how extraordinary all of this is’, she told her global audience, and promised that ‘from this, a new Tunisia will emerge’ (BBC World News, 21 January 2011, 9 p.m. CET).

As it turned out, considerably more than a week would be needed to achieve a stable democracy in Tunisia and the neighbouring countries to which the revolution spread, and journalistic freedom was in many places shortlived. But few would disagree that people had found themselves acting in a radically changed political landscape. They were not alone. The social and political upheaval that came to be known as the ‘Arab Spring’ threw into sharp relief the impact of technological developments that were equally radical, which posed challenges to the journalists covering the revolutions, and to the scholars who study the work of those journalists.

The Arab Spring is a portkey that opens on the key concerns of this book: political and media change in a world of transcended borders, challenged elites and difficult publics.

The Arab Spring is a good example of how political change and developments in media technology go hand-in-hand. There is continuity in such change: the Protestant Reformation went together with the invention of printing, and the French Revolution and Revolutions of 1848 were accompanied by the rise of journalism and the mass press. But this portkey also places the person grasping it before a vista of change, showing how political developments can only be contained within national settings with difficulty, and how local events, like a fruitseller dousing himself with petrol and striking a match, can become global issues. It shows how journalists are being challenged by the need to cover processes that are unprecedented in their significance and scope, and in the speed with which they unfold, and to do so under conditions of information blockage and physical danger. And it is an instance of how people have become accustomed to witnessing the live coverage of history, present in time if not space. As Silverstone so elegantly put it, media technologies ‘both connect and disconnect, but above all act as bridges or doors, both open and closed, to the world’ (Silverstone 2007: 18).

Scannell (2004) notes that news coverage is usually retrospective in nature. The original event has already taken place, and the work to be done is that of sense-making. If that applies to journalism, it is particularly true of scholarship. Where journalists have cultural narratives to fall back on, however, the scholar has theoretical frameworks (which are of course also narratives, of sorts) to help make sense of new data. In such a context, we would be well advised to follow the advice of Hoskins and O’Loughlin (2010: 187) and ‘think imaginatively about how we can represent the phenomena we are interested in’.

The first task is to specify what that is. What is globalization and where does politics take place in a globalizing world? What is – or rather are – ‘the media’? How should we approach the task of comparing mediated political interactions in different settings? How should we go about making sense of what is happening to that interaction in the face of technological and other sorts of changes? There is, finally, the matter of how such large questions can be related to specific instances like the Arab Spring. Put another way, how can the general be related to the particular?

Globalization and politics

‘Globalization’ is the word most often used to describe how the world has become increasingly interconnected at all levels in recent decades. Since the mid-1980s, scholars have studied how such driving forces as economics, technology, politics and cultural change have contributed to the globalization process, and they have argued about how it is best understood. Some differences of opinion stem from which of those driving forces scholars have been most interested in. Others can be traced back to the various theoretical perspectives which have informed the work of those scholars. More than a matter of theory, globalization is something that can be observed in the world around us – in the financial crises that result in people losing their jobs and homes; in the spread of epidemics; in the trafficking of drugs and people that spills across borders; in the activities of the multinational corporations whose products we buy; and not least in the media products we consume. It is a process that has consequences for citizens, for society, for states and for the world community.

Globalization is the process whereby polities, economies, institutions and actors at all levels of society become increasingly connected across national borders. The word first found its way into a dictionary in 1961, but the process that word describes was not established as an object of scholarly enquiry until the mid-1980s. Up to that point, academics tended instead to talk about internationalization or international relations, until it became apparent (to some at least) that the post-cold-war world differed in distinctive ways from earlier periods. Whereas internationalization refers to how the activities of states become increasingly intertwined while remaining attached to the national territory, globalization refers to a qualitative change in social relations that are played out in the world as a single place. What makes globalization different from international relations is that the actors involved in these relations are no longer exclusively states.

One way of understanding this is to pose the question: what does it mean to say that something is globalized? Football can serve as a heuristic here. Fans in Thailand, for example, commune with fans on the other side of the world in real time when they all watch Liverpool play Champions League matches. When the Thai government bid for 30 per cent ownership of the team in 2004, it had strong popular backing. Although it did not end up being owned by Thailand, Liverpool could nevertheless be considered a global team (and is indeed acknowledged as a global brand): of the forty-nine players on its 2011 squad, only fourteen were English nationals. Other players came from places as far-flung as Australia, Spain, Denmark, Slovakia, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. The world’s most international activity is also the most local, with strong feelings of attachment to neighbourhood and nation living on, despite the fact that football players and trainers work in a borderless global market (Ahlin 2004).

Football is a good heuristic because it incorporates several of the key dimensions of globalization. It is as much about big business as it is about sport, entertainment and current affairs: the economic is one dimension. Football also has to do with institutions and transnational organizations. On another level, it has to do with identities – pulling, ironically, away from the global to the national, ethnic and local. And communications technology is an essential part of the contemporary football phenomenon, as people on every continent can, and do, follow regional and world championships simultaneously, leaping from their couches or mats in glee or brandishing their fists in the air in frustration over a goal experienced throughout the planet simultaneously. This is a banal example of what is referred to in the globalization literature as ‘time–space compression’. And the everyday nature of football is also part of what makes it a useful metaphor when seeking to understand globalization, because the phenomenon is something that concerns ordinary people and everyday life as well as political elites and world affairs.

Looking for politics in a globalizing world

Politics and the political are understood as broad, generalized phenomena in this book. Following Mouffe (1997), they are not seen as having to do with a certain sort of institution (like parliament or the national congress), or a specific sphere (such as the public one), or level of society (the national, for example). The political is instead conceived as ‘a dimension’ that ‘determines our very ontological position’ (Mouffe 1997: 3).

When they claimed that ‘politics is everywhere’, Charles & Smith (2010) meant that it is to be found in global, national, local and domestic settings. Boundaries that seem permanent and inevitable, if not natural, ‘turn out to be subject to contestation and, sometimes displacement’ (Charles & Smith 2010: 527). This is not new to the global era, however.

Government policies, and particularly neoliberal ones, are among the driving forces of globalization. Aided and abetted by the IMF, the WTO and the World Bank, political decisionmakers at the end of the last century facilitated the deregulation of capital that is a prerequisite of economic globalization. Two decades later, their successors, struggling to manage the global financial crisis, imposed new regulations to staunch the haemorrhaging of economies that were more intertwined than ever. Political actors have sought to both re- and de-regulate media as well as financial flows, as will be seen in chapter 3.

Politics in a globalizing world: Rajendra Pachauri, head of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) speaks to the press at the Copenhagen Climate Conference on 17 December 2009. Photograph: Trevor Snapp / Corbis.

The stretching and deepening of the connections within networks of NGOs and civil society actors such as the Red Cross, UNICEF, Amnesty International, environmental movements, digital action networks (and, on a murkier level, terrorist organizations and drug and prostitution cartels) is politics.

Politics can also be found in the development of universal values and norms and the spread of democracy to places it has not previously existed, or from which it disappeared for a while. Scholars interested in this dimension of politics have written about the spread of a cosmopolitan culture that is based on a liberal notion of people’s equal worth, regardless of where they live, and a growing awareness of the world as a single place, with a globally shared collective future. This is not necessarily, or at least not always, an altruistic reflex. Rather, it stems from the insight that the main risks and problems facing us in the global era defy national borders; that we share these problems with people elsewhere; and that we must find common solutions to them.

There is a scholarly problem here too, given that there are many versions of democracy in a globalizing world and that its political systems are many and hybrid. While it is useful to revisit political theory to recall ideals and classic incarnations (be they direct, representative or liberal democracy), it is equally important to keep an empiricist’s eye on the realities of the political systems that prevail throughout the world IRL. Under globalization, these have morphed, so that fewer and fewer can be unproblematically labelled ‘democratic’ or ‘authoritarian’, and more and more are ‘messy mixtures’ of these political forms (Chadwick 2011). It has thus become increasingly common, in the field of comparative politics, to refer to ‘pseudodemocratic’ or ‘hybrid’ regimes. In some countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, free and fair elections, while enshrined in the constitution, take place in settings in which there is also widespread corruption or coercion by religious or military elites, or where those in power simply ignore the rules. This was spectacularly illustrated by the 2010 presidential elections in Côte d’Ivoire, where incumbent Laurent Gbagbo refused to honour the outcome and to cede power, with months of violent conflict as the result.

While citizens might be free to vote for the candidate they prefer, an election could nevertheless be considered unfair if journalists cannot report on the issues at stake without risking their jobs or their physical safety, as is the case in what have been called ‘repressitarian’ regimes (such as Iran, Singapore and the Caucasus). But even in states universally considered to be democracies, the ‘war on terror decade’ provided ample evidence of how contested the notion of ‘undue intrusion’ can be, with even more coming to light in the subsequent Orwellian decade of the Snowden revelations that the US government was spying on its own citizens and those of other states. In multicultural societies characterized by conflict between people of different ethnic origins and religious persuasions, the legal limits on freedom of expression are also often sorely tested. The media–politics relationship is riddled with tensions related to these problems. As Sklar points out, what we are talking about is an increasingly complex form of political organization, and democracy in any one country is ‘at best, a composite fragment. Everywhere, democracy is under construction’ (Sklar 1987: 714). Chadwic...