Q.1) Describe and analyse how certain [you can select] theories, concepts or authors introduced in this course help to broaden or deepen your understanding of key features of ‘media and power’.
In this essay I will discuss my understanding of ‘media and power’ thanks to three theories introduced from my CM278 course.
I will compare and contrast these three theories and in my conclusion discuss my understanding of ‘media and power’ and who holds the power to control the media.
In our week 5 lecture we discussed the role of the journalist on media and the concept of ‘gatekeeping’.
Gatekeeping is a concept which shows journalists as controlling exactly what is seen within the media.
According to Bruns “McQuail defines gatekeeping as ‘the process by which selections are made in media work, especially decisions whether or not to admit a particular news story to pass through the ‘gates’ of a news medium into the news channels”.
In his article “The ‘Gatekeeper’: A case study in the Selection of News” David Manning White talks about Gatekeeping and how journalists have to ‘make the initial judgement as to whether a story is important or not’.
White compares the news from two different newspapers and explains how with different gatekeepers come different news. Different gate keepers decide which events are worth being reported on and therefore which news the public reads and or is told about.
This means that journalists hold a lot of power towards the media in the sense that not only do they decide which news gets reported but also which news does not.
White also discusses how the amount of crime shown in the newspaper is a lot despite crime rates staying consistent and not peaking or decreasing. This leads us to believe that gatekeepers report on what sells, statistics show that crime sells and this may be the reason that crime reporting is incredibly high despite the low rates of crime in Ireland.
However, the concept of Gatekeeping has been recently challenged by Bruns.
In his book ‘Gatewatching, Not Gatekeeping: Collaborative online news’; [2005] Bruns discusses how gatekeeping is being challenged.
Bruns states that due to new online social media and other types of online media gatekeeping may be outdated and in need of an upgrade. Bruns refers to a new way of gatekeeping altogether called gatewatching. He defines gatewatchers as sources which ‘publicise news (by pointing out sources) rather than publish it ( by compiling an apparently complete report from the available sources).
My understanding of gatewatching is as online journalist type reporting that can be done by anyone not just journalists. If someone is standing in the middle of a catastrophe they can Tweet about it Snapchat it and even live stream it on facebook there for making anyone with a smartphone a journalist and therefore we need gatewatchers to monitor the information these smartphone journalists are distributing.
Two authors I would also like to discuss are Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky who in their work ‘Manufacturing Consent’ [1988], discussed ‘The Propaganda Model’.
This was their theory on how political elites can control the media.
In their book Herman and Chomsky discuss the power politicians and other social elites can have on social media, they could be seen as gatekeepers.
Chomsky and Herman find the link between journalists and media owners through the ‘propaganda model’ which is why I say they are like gatekeepers. With their money and ownership over the media these political and social elites can determine exactly what is to be reported on and the information distributed to the public.
The definition of propaganda by the Oxford English Dictionary is ‘information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view’. This is exactly the point that Herman and Chomsky make with their propaganda model.
In ‘Manufacturing Consent’ Chomsky and Herman state how the media has become a money making market and subsequently media is bought and controlled by people with money and power. This makes censorship and bias produce in countries who’s media is controlled by dictators like South Korea.
This brings me to the mediatization and mediated politics. Mediated politics is defined as “a situation in which the media have become the most important source of information and vehicle of communication between the governors and the governed” [Jesper Stromback; Four phases of Mediatization: An analysis of the mediatization of Politics; 2008]. In this sense, politics is nothing without the media anymore.
Some have wondered if this is better than before the media became involved with politics and people blindly followed political parties without being properly informed.
Stromback discusses four stages of Mediatization which help us to understand the process:
Stage one of mediatization he describes as when the media becomes the primary source of information for the public. Stromback discusses how this is the most important phase of mediatization. We know that politics is in the first stage of mediatization when the people start to solely rely on the media for their information and so the media becomes a communication platform for politicians and the public.
In the second phase of mediatization the media begins to become independent of politics and begins to mediate itself the information that is shared with the public. Stromback states the media “largely controls their own content” and are able to stop those “attempting to influence the news”. This can stop propaganda within the news.
The third phase the media is gaining even more independence and starts to become “the dominant force of information”. Politics now has to keep up with the ever changing media and the media is gaining more and more control. There can be a lot of tension between the media and politics in this phase as the media gets more dominant it also now decides what information is and is not worth being seen in the media. As political actors try to keep up with this phase and adapt they lose control and therefore think the new importance of the media is “illegitimate”.
The fourth and final stage of mediatization is again about political actors adapting to the media. In doing this they give in to the idea of “newsworthiness”. Cook [2005] talks about how this may work in the short term for the political actors however if the “newsworthiness” of their actions become the only reason they do something they’re actions may become of less importance in situations like political debates and other issues.
This is why Cook describes the political actors who constantly feature in the media as “winning the daily battle but losing the war”
Essentially the four stages of media shows the media gaining power from politics rather than politics having the power over the media.