Page 44 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

POLITICS, DEMOCRACY AND THE MEDIA

DEMOCRACY AND THE MEDIA: A CRITIQUE

Since the eighteenth century the media, and the functions listed
above, have grown ever-more important to the smooth workings of
the democratic political process. As we noted at the beginning of
Chapter 1, the achievement of universal suffrage in most advanced
capitalist societies during the twentieth century was paralleled by a
technological revolution in the means of mass communication as
print, then film, radio and television became available to mass
audiences.
Since the 1950s especially, and the expansion of television into
virtually every household in the developed capitalist world, inter-
personal political communication has been relegated to the margins
of the democratic process. Nowadays, as Colin Seymour-Ure puts
it, television has become an ‘integral part of the environment within
which political life takes place’ (1989, p. 308). Surveys show that
for the vast majority of people the media represent the main source
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of their information about politics. How, then, does the reality of
contemporary political discourse as communicated through and by
the media correspond to the ideal described above? To what extent
do the media perform the role allotted to them in liberal democratic
theory?
Answering these questions requires a critical examination of both
democratic structures and the media environment around them.
It would, of course, be naive to expect that these two sets of
institutions should function perfectly. It is important, however, to
acknowledge the ways in which they fall short of the ideal, and the
significance of these shortcomings.

The failure of education
First, it is argued by some observers that the normative assumption
of a ‘rational’ citizenry is not realistic. For Bobbio, one of the great
‘broken promises’ of liberal democracy is the failure of the education
system to produce rational voters, a failure which he sees reflected
in the growing political apathy characteristic of such democratic
exemplars as the US. ‘The most well-established democracies’, he
argues, ‘are impotent before the phenomenon of increasing political
apathy, which has overtaken about half of those with the right to
vote’ (1987, p. 36). When those who have the right to vote decline
to do so, democracy is clearly less than perfect. In the UK general
election of 2001, only 58 per cent of those eligible actually voted.

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