Page 49 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION

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, 2003). 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.

Further reading

For essays on the media’s contribution to democratic
processes see Chambers and Costains, eds, Deliberation,
Democracy and the Media (2001). Bennett and Entman’s
edited collection on Mediated Politics (2001) addresses many
of the debates outlined in this chapter. John Street’s Mass
Media, Politics and Democracy (2001) provides a student-
friendly overview of the issues.

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