Page 123 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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The Fourth Information Revolution
as interest groups and issue groups who on occasion undertake mass
media campaigns, new information abundance does little to reduce such
costs.
On the other hand, information abundance weakens the gate-keeping
function of the traditional mass media. Mass media institutions are less
able to exert editorial and strategic control over the stories to which the
public attends in the new information environment. Bruce Williams and
Michael Delli Carpini identify several mechanisms by which traditional
gate-keeping functions are being eroded to the point of elimination,
including multiplication and expansion of media outlets, which creates
competitionforgatekeeping;growthofthetwenty-four-hournewscycle,
which provides fewer opportunities for editors to control which stories
are covered and which are not; and the interactivity and multiplication of
noninstitutionalized means for citizens to share information. The result
is a multiplication in the number of gates, and the consequent collapse of
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control over gate keeping. By similar mechanisms, other chief political
functions of media – agenda setting and priming – may also erode. The
endpoint of this transition is hardly a utopia of alternative media. The
traditional dynamics of the mass audience and political attention will
remain in place, but the extent to which a few businesses can dominate
political communication is clearly changing.
Issue-based politics and political fragmentation as a consequence of
information abundance hardly precludes the focusing of mass attention
on particular events. Clearly, mass media – especially broadcast media –
possess an enormous capacity to direct the attention of large numbers
of citizens to individual events, from O. J. Simpson to the vote count
in Florida to the “war” against terrorism. The dynamics of mass atten-
tion and the politics of majoritarianism remain a potentially powerful
counterbalance to group politics.
Another powerful constraint on postbureaucratic pluralism is the
structure of the state apparatus itself. Formal political institutions do not
reconfigure themselves in response to changes in information and trans-
actioncosts.Onereasonisthattheirstructuresarerootedinthepoliticsof
legislation and the Constitution. Another is that, unlike collective action
organizations, many formal institutions perform functions that are dis-
tributive or redistributive rather than informational in nature, Hamilton
and Madison’s characterization of the state as a center of information
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Bruce A. Williams and Michael X. Delli Carpini, “Unchained Reaction: The Collapse
of Media Gatekeeping and the Lewinsky-Clinton Scandal,” Journalism: Theory,
Practice and Criticism 1, no. 1 (2001): 61–85.

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