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Accountability of Media to Society: Principles and Means 93

and complexity of the process of production and distribution tends to increase
the distance in every sense between the originators of communication and the
receivers, making it difficult for a sense of personal or moral responsibility for
publication to develop or a response to be made.
As we have seen, accountability follows on from responsibility and I leave the
content of media responsibilities behind (the specific issues which arise and the
values involved) and concentrate on the means by which they might be ‘enforced’.
A more precise definition of accountability (Brummer, 1991: 14) has been worded
as follows: ‘being accountable [refers to] the capacity, willingness, need or
requirement to render an account of one’s actions or inactions’. Moreover, it has
four facets: being accountable to someone, for something (a task or consequence),
on the basis of some criterion and with a varying degree of strictness. I return later
to the question of to whom the media may have to render account and deal with
the question of degree of obligation.
There are always alternative ways of seeking to enforce obligations, whatever
their strength. In general, these ways can range from a more or less coercive
mode, in which the emphasis is on potential material liability for the consequences
of publication, to a non-confrontational mode in which accountability is equated
with answerability (Blatz, 1972; Christians, 1989).
The liability mode is characterized by an adversarial relationship, while
answerability refers to a readiness for debate, negotiation and interaction
designed to achieve some reconciliation and resolution of differences. The
emphasis in the first instance is likely to be on issues of harm caused by the
media, in the second on issues of mass media quality.
There is a range of possibilities in between these alternative models, between
the extreme cases of punitive enforcement and reliance on purely verbal and
interactional forms of accounting. Each may have its place, but the second has a
wider potential range of application and seems more consistent with publication
freedom. Reliance on voluntary cooperation with non-coercive forms of
accountability for publication is less likely to have a ‘chilling’ effect on media,
fearful of economic penalties, and is more conducive to a reasoned liberation
defence of publication which goes against majority norms or private right and
interests.
Other arguments for preferring this ‘softer’ mode of accountability include:
the frequent difficulty of proving liability for consequences of publication (think
of the low success rate of mass media effects research); the problem of enforcing
judgements concerning harm caused; the relative lack of clear criteria of good or
bad media performance; the considerable doubt as to whether ‘speech acts’ can
properly be treated in the same category as other acts (Bracken, 1994); the
difficulty of balancing costs of private harm against potential public benefits
from publication.
Nevertheless, while the preferred mode of accountability seems clear enough,
it may not be consistent with current media trends. Modern mass media are less
inclined to make voluntary commitments to society, less able to have any
meaningful relationship with their audiences and those whom they affect, less
ready to enter into dialogue. In practice, they may only respond to formal
controls backed up by the threat of coercion which touches their material