Why The Public Doesn’t Deserve The News

It depends on the habit of attend­ing to and look­ing into pub­lic trans­ac­tions, and on the degree of inform­a­tion and solid judg­ment respect­ing them that exists in the com­munity, whether the con­duct of the nation as a nation, both within itself and towards oth­ers, shall be selfish, cor­rupt and tyr­an­nical, or rational and enlightened, just and noble.
John Stu­art Mill

Every­one has a pur­pose in life. Per­haps yours is watch­ing tele­vi­sion.
David Let­ter­man

The pub­lic doesn’t deserve tele­vi­sion journ­al­ism as cur­rently man­dated by Brit­ish pub­lic ser­vice broad­cast­ing, because Britain’s polit­ical sys­tem provides no incent­ive for an informed pub­lic, and because the idea of an informed pub­lic is one of con­tem­por­ary polit­ics’ neces­sary myths. There’s actu­ally little evid­ence that broad­cast news is the unique medium by which the pub­lic can be mor­ally trans­formed, but plenty of evid­ence for a long tra­di­tion of social cri­ti­cism that sees the dom­in­ant inform­a­tion tech­no­logy as an agent of rad­ical change.

So where did the idea come from that the pub­lic deserved the news from tele­vi­sion? The answer that used to spring to people’s lips was a single name, John Reith. Reith developed the argu­ment that a short­age of wave­band made broad­cast­ing a pub­lic good, to be held in com­mon. It was a monopolist’s argu­ment with an aus­tere coat­ing of pater­nal­ism, and went by the name of ‘spec­trum scarcity.’ Just as imper­i­al­ism fol­lowed empire, the jus­ti­fic­a­tion came after the polit­ical fact of monopoly.

The mod­ern answer to the ques­tion is that the pub­lic needs inform­a­tion for our demo­cracy to func­tion. Demo­cracy requires an informed cit­izenry. Advoc­ates for this view are legion. Here’s one – France’s Claude-Jean Ber­trand, a world expert on media reg­u­la­tion. Ber­trand says:

Demo­cracy means that every cit­izen has a right to par­ti­cip­ate in the man­age­ment of soci­ety. To do that prop­erly, every cit­izen needs to be well informed. In other words, no genu­ine demo­cracy can exist without good ser­vice by the news media.

Here’s another fel­low trav­el­ler, John Rawls, ignor­ing fifty years of defence and for­eign policy decision-making, to claim that “without a pub­lic informed about press­ing prob­lems, cru­cial polit­ical and social decisions simply can­not be made.” So where is the evid­ence for this much-cherished assumption?

Where bet­ter to begin than polit­ical the­ory, except of course that it turns things upside down. Polit­ical the­ory calls this “the prob­lem of an ill-informed pub­lic.” It was an issue fam­ously thrashed out in the United States dur­ing the 1920s by journ­al­istic cynic Wal­ter Lippmann and philo­soph­ical ideal­ist John Dewey. At the begin­ning of the 1960s, it was still nig­gling away at Amer­ican polit­ical schol­ars, like E.E. Schatt­schneider:

If we start with the com­mon defin­i­tion of demo­cracy (as gov­ern­ment by the people), it is hard to avoid some extremely pess­im­istic con­clu­sions about the feas­ib­il­ity of demo­cracy in the mod­ern world, for it is impossible to recon­cile tra­di­tional con­cepts of what ought to hap­pen in a demo­cracy with the fact that an amaz­ingly large num­ber of people do not seem to know very much what is going on.

But today, they seem to be pretty much over it. To bring us bang up to date, here’s U.S. polit­ical sci­ent­ist Scott Althaus:

Although it is often pre­sumed that cit­izen pref­er­ences over policy are the opin­ions of interest to demo­cratic the­or­ists, and that demo­cracy requires a highly-informed cit­izenry, neither of these ideas rep­res­ents a dom­in­ant pos­i­tion in main­stream demo­cratic theories.

David Held’s Mod­els of Demo­cracy lists nine dif­fer­ent types of everybody’s favour­ite form of gov­ern­ment, and only one of them (num­ber 8) really requires cit­izens to be informed. That’s par­ti­cip­at­ory democracy.

[But for a cer­tain type of media schol­ar­ship, par­ti­cip­at­ory demo­cracy exists as a kind of demo­cratic Dis­ney­land. That schol­ar­ship, and its argu­ments, has helped shape the vocab­u­lary of pub­lic ser­vice broad­cast­ing. This is what it sounds like – “What is needed from a pub­lic interest point of view is a source of inform­a­tion that is impar­tial and trus­ted” from Gavyn Dav­ies col­lab­or­ator Andrew Gra­ham, who pre­sum­ably in all his years as an eco­nom­ist never encountered the Asso­ci­ated Press, Reu­ters, PA,CNN, Sky News etc.]

Does apathy require inform­a­tion? Does demo­cracy need inform­a­tion to func­tion? There is the neo-conservative view put by Samuel Hunt­ing­ton that “The effect­ive oper­a­tion of a demo­cratic polit­ical sys­tem requires some meas­ure of apathy and non-involvement…” — which implies that it does not. In the UK, both local and European gov­ern­ment seem to con­tinue levy­ing taxes, reg­u­lat­ing trade, col­lect­ing the rub­bish and extract­ing park­ing fines in what passes for an inform­a­tion vacuum.

Our demo­cratic encoun­ters are by and large lim­ited to the bal­lot box, and we vote about as often as Philip Lar­kin had good sex. I have voted in all five gen­eral elec­tions since my eight­eenth birth­day. The rul­ing party has changed once. The value of my vote has remained unaltered whether or not I bother to watch the news, join a polit­ical party or ana­lyse and com­pare each of the vari­ous (non-binding) polit­ical mani­fes­tos; and I’m a little irra­tional, accord­ing to Amer­ican polit­ical sci­ent­ist Jef­frey Fried­man:

People who try to become well informed des­pite the minus­cule chance that their opin­ions will mat­ter (by way of their votes) must be doing so either for instru­ment­ally irra­tional reas­ons, such as per­ceived civic duty; or because they are ignor­ant of the odds of their votes mak­ing a difference—meaning that they can­not have ration­ally weighed those odds against the costs of being well informed.

I don’t think it would be con­tro­ver­sial to observe that we do not live in a par­ti­cip­at­ory demo­cracy. And the con­sequence of not liv­ing in a par­ti­cip­at­ory demo­cracy is that our inform­a­tion needs are really quite mod­est. Except that pub­lic ser­vice broad­cast­ing has adop­ted inform­ing the cit­izenry as a jus­ti­fic­a­tion for mar­ket inter­ven­tion on a massive scale. Here’s the BBC’s sub­mis­sion to the charter review panel in 2004:

We aim to engage every­one in the UK with impar­tial and accur­ate news and inform­a­tion. We will help to pro­mote the public’s under­stand­ing of com­plex issues, which is fun­da­mental to a func­tion­ing democracy.

Engage? Func­tion­ing? As eco­nom­ist Mark Arm­strong notes in his ana­lysis of pub­lic ser­vice broad­cast­ing, there is “some irony in using the largely anti-social medium of tele­vi­sion to attempt to build com­munity spirit.”

It’s not an irony that strikes Car­oline Thom­son, the per­son charged with get­ting the BBC’s charter renewed. Here she is say­ing that one of the three main pur­poses of the BBC (it’s too big for just one) is to sup­port “UK Demo­cracy, by empower­ing cit­izens with the inform­a­tion with which to make informed demo­cratic choices through author­it­at­ive, impar­tial news.”

So, night after night, tele­vi­sion news builds up into a com­pre­hens­ive home lib­rary that helps you make the right choice on gen­eral elec­tion day. And once you’ve voted, it’s only 1,827 news shows to watch before the next one. Can that really be the reason we employ thou­sands of people, spend mil­lions of pounds and risk lives?

Per­haps journ­al­ists them­selves describe their role bet­ter? Here’s BBC2 News­night’s self appraisal – “ask­ing the tough ques­tions and hold­ing those in power to account.” But isn’t that the task of Par­lia­ment and our elec­ted rep­res­ent­at­ives? And then every few years, us the voters?

The inform­a­tion that tele­vi­sion news provides for the elect­or­ate goes massively bey­ond the lim­ited com­mit­ment that our demo­cracy asks of us. As if to make the point more obvi­ous still, the very demo­cratic sys­tem that sup­posedly requires informed cit­izens to elect our law­makers in par­lia­ments, assem­blies and town halls, is not con­sidered a suit­able method for choos­ing the reg­u­lat­ors of either Ofcom or the BBC’s trust­ees. The very gov­ernance of pub­lic ser­vice broad­cast­ing, whose chief civic jus­ti­fic­a­tion is appar­ently to inform the pub­lic to the point where they can make demo­cratic decisions, is deeply non-democratic.

Out­side of gov­ern­ment, demo­cracy has very lim­ited applic­a­tions in our soci­ety. Cor­por­ate gov­ernance doesn’t exactly prac­tise it. Not for noth­ing was the strike bal­lot Mar­garet Thatcher’s weapon of choice for dis­arm­ing Britain’s Trades Union move­ment. Vot­ing requires an invest­ment of time and resources that few people and organ­iz­a­tions are will­ing to make. But in a ghastly par­ody of the pub­lic ser­vice ethos TV enter­tain­ment pro­du­cers and their view­ers have embraced it, tex­ting their sup­port for among oth­ers Lady Thatcher’s daugh­ter, Carol, as she sur­vived yet another jungle ordeal.

Demo­cracy may have gained a little pur­chase in pop­u­lar pro­gram­ming, but so far as the news is con­cerned, the prin­ciple that cit­izens require inform­a­tion bey­ond that already avail­able in the mar­ket place remains the argu­ment in defence of pub­lic ser­vice journ­al­ism. But if that argu­ment has little back­ing from polit­ical the­ory, where does it come from? That need for author­it­at­ive inform­a­tion in order to live the good life? Soci­olo­gist Michael Schud­son has writ­ten about it. He traces it back to the late nine­teenth cen­tury. His­tor­ian Richard Brown takes it back to the sev­en­teenth cen­tury. I would like to ven­ture even fur­ther back.

To the begin­ning, in fact. “In þe bigynnyng was | þe word & þe word | was at god, & god was | þe word.” This is the open­ing line of the Gos­pel of St John, trans­lated into Eng­lish by fol­low­ers of John Wyc­lif in the four­teenth century.

The gos­pel was spread, as mod­ern mar­keters would note approv­ingly, by word of mouth. It was preached. Wyc­lif and his intel­lec­tual suc­cessors were try­ing to speed that pro­cess, but they also had an agenda. In arguing that reli­gious author­ity came from Scrip­ture, they were also mak­ing a polit­ical attack on the most power­ful inter­na­tional social and intel­lec­tual organ­iz­a­tion of their day – the Medi­eval Church. Dir­ect access to the Bible would trans­form an individual’s rela­tion­ship to God, to their fel­low believ­ers; in short, it would prompt them to rad­ic­ally reappraise their lives and the basis of tem­poral author­ity. It would inspire action.

The Medi­eval Church occu­pied much of the space now taken by the nation state. It admin­istered edu­ca­tion and health­care, under­took great pub­lic pro­jects, man­aged large enter­prises and had its own sys­tems of tax­a­tion and justice. It saw people through life from entry to exit. Like any over-stretched organ­iz­a­tion, the Church really wanted pass­ive acqui­es­cence from its mem­ber­ship rather than par­ti­cip­at­ory enthu­si­asm. The Bible was a sort of mani­festo com­mit­ment that the Church reserved the right to inter­pret, prom­ising not bet­ter pub­lic ser­vices or lower taxes but eternal life. Instead of hav­ing to fin­ance a City Academy, how about a new Lady Chapel? Instead of a seat on a red leather bench, you got a cor­por­ate box in the king­dom of heaven.

Wyc­lif and his friends did not approve. They thought the pub­lic deserved the news dir­ect, the good news that is – the Vul­gate. Of course, when the good book was painstak­ingly hand-written and in Latin, this made it prac­tic­ally impossible to read your­self. So Wyc­lif and his asso­ci­ates got trans­lat­ing. If God could be made to speak Eng­lish, the Eng­lish might be bet­ter made to hear him. This was an argu­ment about the role of inform­a­tion in trans­form­ing soci­ety. In case you don’t believe me, here’s a sum­mary of argu­ments against trans­lat­ing the Bible from one of Wyclif’s contemporaries:

Translation…will bring about a world in which the laity prefers to teach than to learn, in which women (mulier­cu­lae) talk philo­sophy and dare to instruct men – in which a coun­try bump­kin (rus­ti­cus) will pre­sume to teach. Trans­la­tion will also deprive good priests of their prestige. If everything is trans­lated, learn­ing, the liturgy, and all the sac­ra­ments will be abhorred; cler­ics and theo­logy itself will be seen as use­less by the laity; the clergy will wither; and an infin­ity of her­es­ies will erupt. Even the laity will not bene­fit since their devo­tion is actu­ally improved by their lack of under­stand­ing of the psalms and pray­ers they say…Translation will mean the demise of a major part of the unity of Christen­dom, the Latin language…

In other words, soci­ety will fall to bits.

In case you think I’ve veered rather wildly away from my pub­lic ser­vice journ­al­ism theme and am in danger of top­pling into a his­tory of the Reform­a­tion, let’s stop for a moment.

The reason for bring­ing Wyc­lif into a dis­cus­sion about the news is this. Wyc­lif believed that dir­ect access to the Bible was neces­sary for indi­vidual sal­va­tion. He thought the pub­lic deserved the news in order to change lives and save souls.

Wyclif’s ideas and their even­tual asso­ci­ation with the tech­no­logy of mov­able type print­ing meant that the Bible beat pub­lic ser­vice broad­cast­ing by a few hun­dred years. And prob­ably with the same lim­ited suc­cess. If he was here now, Wyc­lif would no doubt be dis­ap­poin­ted to learn that Eng­land still has an estab­lished Church, albeit a re-labelled one. And his hoped for moral revolu­tion? Still waiting.

Let’s jump for­ward to the out­skirts of Paris in 1830. A revolu­tion has just installed a con­sti­tu­tional mon­archy and Gust­ave de Beau­mont, an ambi­tious young pro­sec­utor, is shar­ing a flat with a co-worker. Eager to travel, Gust­ave per­suades the French interior min­istry to send him on an 18-month tour of Amer­ica to report on the prison sys­tem. His flat­mate tags along on a fact-finding jolly that takes them from New York down to Alabama and up to the Indian fron­tier. But while Beau­mont stays focussed on penal policy, his friend is fas­cin­ated by demo­cracy “its inclin­a­tions, its char­ac­ter, its pre­ju­dices, and its pas­sions.” He writes up the exper­i­ence in a book that was approv­ing in a super­ior sort of way, and there­fore much admired by Americans.

Here’s a little bit of Alexis de Toc­queville’s Demo­cracy in Amer­ica:

When men are no longer united among them­selves by firm and last­ing ties, it is impossible to obtain the co-operation of any great num­ber of them unless you can per­suade every man … that his private interest obliges him vol­un­tar­ily to unite his exer­tions to the exer­tions of all the oth­ers. This can be habitu­ally and con­veni­ently effected only by means of the Bible; noth­ing but the Bible can drop the same thought into a thou­sand minds at the same moment

Actu­ally, you’ve prob­ably guessed that Toc­queville wasn’t talk­ing about the Bible. The word he used was news­pa­per. Although he was hardly the first to make the point, his obser­va­tions make it clear that a shift has taken place between the world of the Bible and the world of the news­pa­per. Dutch journalist-turned-academic, Ben Knapen puts it like this: “Who­ever is unable or unwill­ing to draw socio-political guid­ance from the Bible, from Allah, or the Pope, will have to get it from mutual discourse.”

So, in a world where the Bible was being chal­lenged by the news­pa­per, was any­one inter­ested in the idea that news­pa­pers might take up the Bible chal­lenge and trans­form people’s lives? You bet.

Ready to pick up Wyclif’s baton was Henry Heth­er­ing­ton. In his last will and test­a­ment Heth­er­ing­ton denied the exist­ence of God, con­demned reli­gion as super­sti­tious non­sense and asked to be bur­ied in uncon­sec­rated ground, so it’s unlikely he shared Wyclif’s Chris­tian convictions.

His flag­ship pub­lic­a­tion was the Poor Man’s Guard­ian, which appeared under the ban­ner “Know­ledge is Power.” Just to give you an idea of what that know­ledge was, here’s Hetherington’s editor writ­ing in 1834:

the only know­ledge which is of any ser­vice to the work­ing people is that which makes them more dis­sat­is­fied, and makes them worse slaves. This is the know­ledge we shall give them…

Des­pite the inflam­mat­ory rhet­oric, this was non-violent revolu­tion. Heth­er­ing­ton, like Wyc­lif, thought inform­a­tion could prompt change, but in his world, it was the news­pa­per that would alter lives. As news­pa­per his­tor­ian Patri­cia Hol­lis noted: “edu­ca­tion, in Hetherington’s eyes, would sim­ul­tan­eously make men both polit­ic­ally act­ive and give them polit­ical power.”

Even though Heth­er­ing­ton thought people deserved the news, that it could change them for the bet­ter, there was a touch of the Piers Mor­gans about him. Launch­ing the Two­penny Dis­patch he prom­ised read­ers that it would have:

all the gems and treas­ures, and fun and frolic and ‘news and occur­rences’ of the week. It shall abound in Police Intel­li­gence, in Murders, Rapes, Sui­cides, Burn­ings, Maim­ings, The­at­ric­als, Races, Pugil­ism, and all man­ner of mov­ing acci­dents ‘by flood and field’. In short, it will be stuffed with every sort of dev­il­ment that will make it sell.

Everything but share tip­ping. Unlike the Mir­ror editor, how­ever, Heth­er­ing­ton was a tee­totaller, whose insist­ence on refus­ing beer and drink­ing only water dur­ing an out­break of chol­era took him to Kensal Green, London’s earli­est pub­lic cemetery.

One journ­al­ism his­tor­ian calls Heth­er­ing­ton and his rad­ical con­tem­por­ar­ies pub­li­cists “who wrote to change the world.” But any belief that they were the last rep­res­ent­at­ives of a golden age of informed debate can be quickly laid to rest by actu­ally read­ing what they wrote. They were actu­ally sec­u­lar preachers.

I have taken Wyc­lif and Heth­er­ing­ton as icons for the longev­ity of a cer­tain kind of social cri­ti­cism – that an unin­formed indi­vidual is a dis­en­gaged indi­vidual. The genre remains alive and well. Com­mu­nic­a­tions the­or­ist Her­bert Gans took the title Demo­cracy and the News for his schol­arly attack on the fail­ings of journ­al­ists and journ­al­ism, a broad­side that sim­ul­tan­eously lamen­ted the power­less­ness of the news media. A wise reviewer com­men­ted, “could [his] prob­lem be not with news, but with [his] dreams of how news can trans­form us?”

Gans is only one of the latest in a long tra­di­tion to believe this: if only people knew the truth! The idea that today the pub­lic deserves tele­vi­sion news in order for our demo­cracy to flour­ish has little cur­rency in polit­ical the­ory. His­tor­ic­ally it is a rad­ical myth. The informed cit­izen has replaced the hon­est worker has replaced the good Chris­tian. You can delete as applic­able: the pub­lic requires inform­a­tion from TV news/readings from rad­ical newspapers/a ver­nacu­lar gos­pel. Behind both the reli­gious and the sec­u­lar myths is the simple hope that inform­a­tion will trans­form whom­so­ever it touches, the touch­ing faith that if only people could bear wit­ness to the truth they will act for the good.

That faith trans­lated into our own time, exists in the offi­cial lan­guage of pub­lic ser­vice broad­cast­ing and in aca­demic writ­ing about tele­vi­sion. Here’s a typ­ical piece:

Tele­vi­sion is good when it cre­ates the con­di­tions for people to par­ti­cip­ate act­ively in a com­munity; when it provides them with the truest pos­sible information…and when it serves as an invig­or­ator of the demo­cratic process…

That was writ­ten in 1990 and since then the mes­si­anic tech­no­logy cara­van has moved on to the Inter­net, but the argu­ment is non­ethe­less famil­iar: inform­a­tion leads to engage­ment leads to par­ti­cip­a­tion leads to a more demo­cratic soci­ety. Let’s ignore the ques­tion of whether or not polit­ical par­ti­cip­a­tion really is more import­ant than caring for eld­erly rel­at­ives, play­ing with your chil­dren, or – heaven for­bid – pur­su­ing hap­pi­ness. We’re back where we began with par­ti­cip­at­ory demo­cracy, and the pub­lic ser­vice claim that TV news is the WD-40 neces­sary to open the rusty gates to democracy’s prom­ised land.

A medium which can live with the con­tra­dic­tions of run­ning a kids show in the 1970s called Why Don’t You Turn off Your Tele­vi­sion and Do Some­thing More Inter­est­ing Instead? is prob­ably not going to respond to an argu­ment based on his­tory and polit­ical the­ory. Just like the Medi­eval Church, pub­lic ser­vice broad­cast­ing is used to heretics, and it too knows that pub­lic apathy rather than activ­ity is the great pre­server of institutions.

Both the rationale and the oblig­a­tion for tele­vi­sion journ­al­ism to be provided as a pub­lic ser­vice are com­fort­ing myths. The rationale makes broad­cast journ­al­ists feel import­ant, the oblig­a­tion makes them cling to reg­u­la­tion as a final defence against being cast out into the void. Books, magazines and news­pa­pers all still exist, and even flour­ish, without the kind of grand inter­ven­tion that goes into broad­cast­ing. Pub­lic ser­vice rhet­oric also masks what crit­ics might see as insti­tu­tional and sys­temic failures.

If journ­al­ism is to sur­vive in television’s main­stream then it has to be because view­ers sup­port it with either their time or their money. Or soci­ety needs an open mar­ket in inform­a­tion and that mar­ket needs tough reg­u­la­tion to func­tion effect­ively. But if we really want to jus­tify a half-billion pound a year mar­ket inter­ven­tion in news, and a grow­ing online pres­ence, then a more com­pel­ling argu­ment needs to be made.

Tele­vi­sion journ­al­ism is won­der­ful, but it is not spe­cial, and rely­ing on the fairy-tale rationale that it’s a pil­lar of our demo­cracy does neither the pub­lic nor broad­cast journ­al­ists any favours. The pub­lic doesn’t deserve the news because demo­cracy does not require their involve­ment and tele­vi­sion doesn’t deliver it.

Tagged as: Alexis de Tocqueville, America, Andrew Graham, Associated Press, BBC, Ben Knapen, Britain, Caroline Thomson, cholera, City Academy, Claude-Jean Bertrand, CNN, Communications theorist, David Held, David Letterman, European government, France, Gustave de Beaumont, healthcare, Henry Hetherington, Herbert Gans, information technology, Jeffrey Friedman, John Dewey, John Rawls, John Reith, John Stuart Mill, John Wyclif, journalism values, limited applications, London, Margaret Thatcher, Mark Armstrong, media regulation, media scholarship participatory democracy, Medieval Church, messianic technology caravan, movable type printing, news media, online presence, Paris, Patricia Hollis, Philip Larkin, Piers Morgan, Police Intelligence, public services, Richard Brown, Samuel Huntington, Scott Althaus, Sky News, Thomson Reuters, United Kingdom, United States, Walter Lippmann