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Democratization and the Dilemmas of Media Independence
âNo one can be good for long if goodness is not in demand.â â Bertolt Brecht
Since about the mid-1970s, democratic transitions in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe have occurred with important contributions from the civil society sector, including a broad array of media, not just news organizations but also entertainment and public relations media. The questions still confronting many of these countries is whether their transitions are permanent or passing, and if the former what obstacles lie in the way of democratic consolidation. Perhaps the largest obstacle, writes Samuel Huntington, is the recognition that âdemocracy is a solution to the problem of tyranny, but not necessarily to anything else.â1
Poverty, ethnic and racial conflict, inadequate economic development, chronic inflation with substantial external debt, and political leaders âmany of them former dissidents âwho are not fully committed to the democratic ideal of lawful and peaceful transitions of power, all militate against successful consolidation. In transition countries as varied in their political, economic and cultural experience as Russia, Indonesia and Guatemala, democracyâs hold has been irresolute.
Media assistance is intended in some way to address these problems. For journalists, the idea behind media aid is both obvious and non-controversial â if a people are to be sovereign, they must be able to receive a wide variety of ideas, to criticize the government and, more generally, to circulate information related to public affairs. âFree electionsâ do not mean much if the governmentâs opponents have been gagged and their platform banned from public discussion. News media make sovereignty meaningful by acting literally as the medium through which actions taken in civil society find their expression in political and economic society and, eventually, their manifestation in public policy. Official assistance providersâsuch as, in the case of the United States, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) â also endorse the idea that press freedom is a âfundamentalâ democratic goal,2 but in practice view media assistance as a more instrumental good. Historically it has been associated with efforts to organize and hold free elections, in which the role of media is to provide voters with information about parties, candidates, polling places and times, and so on. More broadly, the purpose of media assistance, as with other forms of democracy assistance, is to ensure that other, more traditional forms of development aid are used productively and not siphoned off by corrupt or incompetent governments. Official democracy aid, in other words, is supposed to provide at least some measure of transparency and accountability in international economic development. Private providers of media assistance â for example, nongovernmental organizations like the Open Society Institute (OSI) or the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) â will often work to advance these goals as contractors with government aid agencies, but they will also emphasize goals of their own, for example, promoting civil society, advancing womenâs rights, or securing the rights of free expression and a free press.
The recipients of media assistance âjournalists in developing and democratizing countriesâtypically describe âdemocraticâ media as serving two broad goals. The first is âbuilding a culture of free expression,â to which end journalists will talk about a range of issues associated with the âwatchdogâ role of the press and the need to provide citizens with access to news and information. This conception will often compete with another, quite different one that emphasizes providing citizens access to the instruments of communication, perhaps even against the prerogatives of those who own them, and especially where ownership is concentrated in the state or in private centers of economic power. This conception links media firmly to civil society promotion â âenhancing the bonds of community, building citizenship and promoting individuality,â as one Filipino journalist and educator explained it to me.3 These conceptions are not mutually exclusive, and they are joined in a common inquiry: How does a society create and sustain media that engage the public in democratically centered discourse? From this follows several related questions: What is the role of the state in creating and sustaining an independent and diverse press? What about the seemingly intractable problem of inhospitable environmentsâfrom coercive governments, antiquated press laws and marginalized populations on the one hand to public apathy and unfavorable markets on the other? What strategies can journalists in developing societies realistically employ to circumvent, if not overcome, these obstacles free press development?
Unfortunately for the would-be media system architect, there are no good answers to these questions. There exists great disagreement even in established Western democracies about what âfreeâ and âindependentâ media look like, what purposes they serve, to whom they are held accountable and how.4 Despite this, it is easy to find in even the academic literature breezy proclamations about the global âtriumphâ of âWesternâ journalistic standards.5 This makes no more sense than it does to talk about âWestern-styleâ democracy. The United States and the United Kingdom, for example, have both very different media systems and quite different ideas of what makes a democracy work. Thomas Carothers has written that âthe principles of democracy are quite clear,â6 but the principles of democracy are also breathtakingly few. âDemocracy has no theory to export,â Jacques Barzun wrote in 1989, in advance of the democracy aid soon to flow to Central and Eastern Europe, âbecause it is not an ideology but a wayward historical development.â7 At best, he said, democracy has a theorem: that for people to be free they must also be sovereign, and the necessary conditions for sovereignty are political and social equality. How they exercise that sovereignty, what mechanisms they use to ensure equality and to distribute freedoms, is left to them to decide. As a result, institutional forms of democracy vary significantly. Americans, for instance, would find the social regulatory regimes in Switzerland or Sweden oppressive, the coalition governments of Germany, France, or Italy a hindrance to effective decision-making, and Hollandâs non-majoritarian, proportional system of party representation incomprehensible. One might seek to copy any of these as a device for the expression of popular will, or invent something completely different.
So while it is fine to talk in broad terms about rule of law, respect for human rights (including free expression), and civil society formation, it is not a theory that makes a democracy so much as it is how the wheels turn. And at the level of machinery, theories about democracy can obscure more than they reveal. Consider, for example, the idea that cultural or religious values are the main impediments to democratization in Asia and the Islamic world.8 Maybe the problem stems from the way scholarly work gets reduced to television sound-bites by journalists and aid providers, but the effect is the same: to make simplistic what are complex challenges. For example, in Indonesia â an Asian country and the worldâs largest Muslim nation â the operative values that pose the critical problem for democratization are not Asian âcultureâ or Islamic âcultureâ but the many juxtaposed and overlapping âculturesâ that coexist within the same political boundaries: tribal communities in Kalimantan and New Guinea; agrarian, semi-feudal communities in the provinces; a growing middle class; and the technology-adept capitalist elite in Jakarta. Add to this that Indonesia stretches across one-eighth of the worldâs circumference in an archipelago of 17,000 islands containing more than 300 ethnic groups that speak as many or more different languages, and democracy promotion starts to look tricky. If a goal of a public-service media system is, at least in part, to link these many pieces into a coherent whole, how best to do that?
For our would-be architect of free and independent media, there is the additional challenge that media, unlike most other democratic institutions, are rooted not in political or civil society, but in economic society. As an industry, democracy promotion has tended (and still tends) to see media primarily as a component of civil society promotion, which is understandable and fine until aid is exhausted or withdrawn. Then it comes time to pay the bills â for salaries, newsprint, ink, transmitters, videotape, delivery trucks, telephones, computer software, presses and all the rest. Other institutions of governance also have to pay their costs, of course, but many of those have the power of taxation. It is certainly not unheard of for media to rely on tax support â the license fee that sustains many European public broadcasters is exactly that â but as a revenue source it is always troublesome, and in editorial terms its effects can be restrictive rather than liberating. Absent multiple layers of statutory and bureaucratic insulation, media that rely on government support will always be susceptible to government meddling, or worse. Rarely can even the most benign governments be expected to favor any interests but their own. More generally, the idea of government support for media, and thus entanglement with them, can be offensive to the idea of a speech market in which individual actors (and their ideas) are supposed to compete without unfair advantage. In real life, of course, some members of the speech market are hugely advantaged, usually by their economic power. Whether such a system is just or not, it is a principled question to ask whether that power should derive from the government purse. As a practical matter, too, the concept of government media is anathema to people in many democratizing countries, where past experience suggests a bad result, and by no means a âdemocraticâ one.
The business of media assistance, now at least twenty years old, has thus come to recognize a number of dilemmas that are the subject of this book. The central dilemma is economic, between the need to find adequate and diverse sources of revenue while also providing a high-quality editorial product, one that contributes to democratic consolidation and maturity. The argument here is that the problems typically identified in virtually all democratic media systems â the lack of professionalism and even corruption among journalists, the tendency to favor sex, scandal and trivia in print and broadcast â are best understood as economic problems. Public affairs media are, or at least have many of the characteristics of, public goods, and as well media are experience goods. The cost of preparing a television news program, for instance, is the same whether it is broadcast to one person or one million, and no rational person will produce such a program if he cannot recover his average cost of production, that is, the cost of making the program, not the much smaller marginal costs associated with distribution. (The irrational or altruistic person may do this, but not for long.) Recouping those costs becomes more difficult because consumers cannot evaluate a media product without first consuming it. Consequently their decisions about what media to consume are likely to be poorly informed.
A third economic problem for our architect is that the production of this consumption good is an inherently inefficient activity: News is not like automobiles, computers or blue jeans, businesses where in which many fewer workers can now produce more product in less time than they could ten, twenty, or a hundred years ago. Put another way, good journalism is like good music, and is inefficient in the same way. Two hundred years ago, for example, it took four musicians to play Beethovenâs String Quartet, Opus 18, No. 4, and it took them about twenty minutes to play it. Today the piece still requires four people and twenty minutes to play. There are some products, and news is one of them, where productivity remains flat or nearly so, notwithstanding the addition of new technologies or other innovations to the production line.9 Quality journalism â the kind that involves reporters who investigate and report, editors who edit and rewrite â works very much the same way. Good journalism is a hand-made product, and the only way to wring efficiencies out of it is, unfortunately, to eliminate reporters or avoid serious newsgathering, neither of which is apt to improve democracyâs chances.
The fourth problem for our architect is that the consumption of public affairs media is also an inherently inefficient activity. As Anthony Downsâ posited long ago, the theory of ârational ignoranceâ suggests that for most people their time and money is more productively spent doing something other than becoming well-informed citizens.10 For this reason, economist James Hamilton has written, most media engage in ârational omissionâ with respect to public affairs and investigative journalism, which in addition to being unattractive to audiences is much more costly to produce than sex, scandal, and trivia, and brings lower returns.11
It is for these reasons that quality public-affairs media everywhere find it difficult to support themselves financially (a problem discussed in greater detail in chapter 5). In developing democracies, consequently, training programs for reporters and editors, funding to support particular types of coverage, and other well-intended and potentially valuable assistance activities are apt to have little or no enduring value in and of themselves. Someone must pay a news organizationâs operating costs. Government or private subsidy for those costs, of course, is one solution. So, too, is the market, where media can compete for audiences and revenues. Neither solution is perfect; media under either scenario can be excellent, or they can lose their public good character altogether and even become a drag on the democratic project. As an economic proposition, all that can safely be said is that the availability or unavailability of any revenue source will have implications for editorial mission. And editorial mission matters. As a larger popular and academic literature argues, there are in both developing and developed countries many media that are not only financially self-supporting but hugely profitable, but which add little or nothing to democratic decision-making, and in some cases may even undermine it.12
The problem for media assistance, then, is to identify worthy editorial missions and then to figure out how to build self-sustaining businesses around them. Unfortunately, this kind of long-term approach is not the norm in democracy assistance, which is often criticized for the attention-deficit disorder of donors. Here also lies second part of the dilemma for our democracy architect. What is a âworthyâ editorial mission? Again, economic theory about t...