Page 46 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 25

POLITICS, DEMOCRACY AND THE MEDIA
towards the making of pseudo-events became ever stronger. Newsgathering
turned into news making’ (1962, p. 14).
An important source of pseudo-events for the media has of course been
the political process – interviews with government leaders, news leaks and
press conferences all provide reportable material (McNair, 2000). Thus,
argues Boorstin, the twentieth century has seen a relationship of mutual
convenience and interdependence evolve between the politician and the
media professional, as one strives to satisfy the other’s hunger for news while
at the same time maximising his or her favourable public exposure. For
Boorstin in 1962, the trend was not welcome.

In a democratic society . . . freedom of speech and of the press and of
broadcasting includes freedom to create pseudo-events. Competing
politicians, newsmen and news media contest in this creation. They
vie with each other in offering attractive, ‘informative’ accounts and
images of the world. They are free to speculate on the facts, to bring
new facts into being, to demand answers to their own contrived
questions. Our ‘free market of ideas’ is a place where people are
confronted by competing pseudo-events and are allowed to judge
among them. When we speak of ‘informing’ the people this is what
we really mean.
(Ibid., p. 35)

For Boorstin there is something illusory and artificial about the rationalist
notion of public information and its contribution to democracy. The political
reportage received by the citizen has become dominated by empty spectacle.

The limitations of objectivity

A further criticism of the media’s democratic role focuses on the professional
journalistic ethic of objectivity. This ethic developed with the mass media in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and has been assailed ever
since as fundamentally unattainable (McNair, 2009c). For a variety of
reasons, it is argued, the media’s political reportage is biased and flawed –
subjective, as opposed to objective; partisan, rather than impartial. As
Lippmann put it in 1922, ‘every newspaper when it reaches the reader is the
result of a whole series of selections as to what items shall be printed, in what
position they shall be printed, how much space each shall occupy, what
emphasis each should have. There are no objective standards here. There are
conventions’ (1954, p. 354).
The nature of these conventions, and their implications for the objectivity
of the media, will be examined in Chapter 4.

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