Now showing: Matt Spurr's Book Review.
Matt Spurr's Book Review.
The book introduces itself with a section talking about how focus was drawn to certain actions, certain politicians performed during their political campaigns rather than what policies they ran with, for example, ‘on stage at the democratic convention Al Gore kissed his wife passionately. The picture of this moment appeared everywhere’. This is an interesting introduction to a book which focuses on the mass media’s view to politics and democracy.
The book is split into three parts. Part one ‘considers the ways in which politics is represented in the mass media and the debate about how this content affects thought and action’. The first chapter of part one focuses on political bias and the four different types of inherent bias. Of particular interest to me was the bias referred to as ‘unwitting bias’ which ‘is the product of ingrained routines about what is ‘news’ and a stories ‘newsworthiness’…though this bias is explicit it is not conscious or deliberate’. This flows into the next chapter which puts news reporting along side storytelling by saying, ‘News is a distilled form of multiple ‘events’ taking place in the world. The media not only selects particular events it also has to make sense of them. It has to make them matter to the readers and viewers, and this entails setting them within a narrative, a story of social change.’ This therefore puts the reader in a diminished light stating we are ‘there to be amused rather than informed (the readers) are expected to laugh and mock’.
Part two ‘deals with the institutional interests which organize mass media and impose their politics upon them’ and starts off quoting Herman and Chomsky’s notion that ‘all news in the U.S.A (and by implication, elsewhere) is primarily propaganda’. Propaganda links into a chapter about media moguls such as Silvio Berlusconi and specifically Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch is considered by many as powerful not only in the sense that he owns a multimillion pound corporation but that he also has the power to influence politics with his papers. As one biography says of him ‘his main titles have rarely strayed far from the right wing fundamentalism in which he now so passionately believes’. The book then goes on to suggest that with the need to influence comes political motive. In the chapter ‘the politics of journalism’ it suggests that journalists ‘are the lapdogs of partial interests, not the watchdogs of the public interest’. It is referring to journalisms constant submission to spin doctors and multimedia corporations at the sacrifice of true democratic reporting and ends the chapter stating ‘journalism’s ability to serve democracy depends on the allocation of resources and the organization of its practices’. In the chapter about globalization it states ‘globalization represents the idea that traditional borders are being superseded by a system which operates at a supranational level’. It goes on to conclude, however, that ‘globalisation has established new forms of media power brokers, who pose fundamental problems for the regulation of mass media by nation states. The need for regulation stems from the fact that the impact of globalization is felt economically and culturally’.
The third part of this book looks towards the future of mass media and politics and the relationship between the two, it questions ‘why else are people interested in media bias or corporate ownership, if not because of the worry of systematic distortion or monopoly control thwarts or denies the capacity of citizens to judge and respond to the exercise of power?’. The first chapter of part three looks into the packaging of politics. Packaging refers to ‘the idea that public representations of politics are increasingly being managed and controlled by parties and politicians, through such people as spin doctors’. The chapter then moves on to discuss the three different types of media power; discursive, access and resource power. If the first two refer to the way in which popular common sense is created and to the way in which particular interests or identities are acknowledged or excluded resource power refers to ‘the way in which media conglomerates can affect the actions of governments and states’.
The final chapter of the book starts off with a very bold statement saying that ‘no state, whatever its constitution, tolerates complete freedom of expression’. The book then goes on to conclude itself by saying that although our press may not be free and that our political life ‘is being damaged by a media obsessed with ratings and politicians desperate for votes’ it does not mean that politics is dead, ‘it has just moved on, and our job is to follow it, arguing as we go’.
Tags: media-confict-power