Page 242 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

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Media and CitizenshiP

In today’s large-scale societies, most communication about politics takes
place through mass media. This places unique responsibilities in the hands
of media organizations and journalists. The successes and failures of media
in making citizenship possible have been and continue to be hotly debated.
In particular, since the 1960s, there has been a decrease in political engage-
ment and participation, and the media coverage of politics is often blamed for
causing cynicism. Though today we have an unprecedented access to political
information and participation, there is only limited evidence that the rise in
new technologies and new forms of participation has truly transformed citi-
zenship.
In historical terms, the idea of citizenship is a relatively new arrival. Though
the ancient Greeks famously whiled their hours away talking about politics
and making political decisions in the Assembly, their political arrangement—
democracy through direct participation—was an anomaly that was viewed with
equal measures of contempt and ridicule by their contemporaries. The idea of
citizenship has only really gained strength since the mid-1700s, even if the roots
of democratic thought have been around for much longer.
Many observers tie the rise in notions of democracy and citizenship to the
emergence of the printing press—the first true mass medium. Benedict Ander-
son argued that newspapers contributed to the formation of the nation-state
through the creation of “imagined communities” of readers within geographical
and linguistic boundaries. To Anderson, “The members of even the smallest na-
tion will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of
them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (1983, p. 6).

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