Thoughts on journalism and democracy

For the next couple of days I’ll be kick­ing around ideas about journ­al­ism and demo­cracy.

Here are some bor­rowed thoughts for starters (and, no, I don’t agree with each and every one):

Read­ing news­pa­pers, and per­haps writ­ing to them, pub­lic meet­ings, and soli­cit­a­tions of dif­fer­ent sorts addressed to the polit­ical author­it­ies, are the extent of the par­ti­cip­a­tion of private cit­izens in gen­eral polit­ics dur­ing the inter­val between one Par­lia­ment­ary elec­tion and another

John Stu­art Mill, Con­sid­er­a­tions on Rep­res­ent­at­ive Gov­ern­ment, 1861

In a demo­cratic age, in the midst of a pop­u­la­tion which is able to read, no pos­i­tion is com­par­able for per­man­ent influ­ence and far-reaching power to that of an editor who under­stands his voca­tion. In him are ves­ted almost all the attrib­utes of real sov­er­eignty. He has almost exclus­ive rights of ini­ti­at­ive; he retains a per­man­ent right of dir­ec­tion; and, above all, he bet­ter than any man is able to gen­er­ate that steam, known as pub­lic opin­ion, which is the greatest force of politics.

W.T. Stead, Gov­ern­ment by Journ­al­ism, 1886

[I]t is … hard to com­pare the press with any other busi­ness or institution.

It is not a busi­ness pure and simple, partly because the product is reg­u­larly sold below cost, but chiefly because the com­munity applies one eth­ical meas­ure to the press and another to trade or manufacture.

Eth­ic­ally a news­pa­per is judged as if it were a church or a school. But if you try to com­pare it with these you fail; the tax­payer pays for the pub­lic school, the private school is endowed or sup­por­ted by tuition fees, there are sub­sidies and col­lec­tions for the church.

You can­not com­pare journ­al­ism with law, medi­cine or engin­eer­ing, for in every one of these pro­fes­sions the con­sumer pays for the ser­vice. A free press, if you judge by the atti­tude of the read­ers, means news­pa­pers that are vir­tu­ally given away.

Wal­ter Lippmann, Pub­lic Opin­ion, 1922

Dahl argues that if everyone’s votes count equally but a few elites con­trol what goes on the agenda, demo­cracy has not been fully real­ized. And equal access to decision-making by itself is not enough—all must have enough inform­a­tion to make com­pet­ent choices.

These fun­da­mental ten­ets, abstract as they sound at first, are the reason On Demo­cracy has such far-reaching implic­a­tions for Amer­ica. For example, take Dahl’s asser­tion that demo­cracy can­not be achieved even if every­one votes, if only a few elites are allowed to speak in pub­lic forums.

Our Amer­ican sys­tem has been in ten­sion with this idea ever since Buckley v. Valeo, in which the Supreme Court declared that spend­ing money is a form of speech. Ever since that decision, “speech” in many pub­lic for­ums has become expli­citly depend­ent on the size of one’s wallet.

Review of Robert Dahl, On Demo­cracy, 1998

[T]he effect­ive oper­a­tion of a demo­cratic polit­ical sys­tem usu­ally requires some meas­ure of apathy and non­in­volve­ment on the part of some indi­vidu­als and groups. In the past, every demo­cratic soci­ety has had a mar­ginal pop­u­la­tion, of greater or lesser size, which has not act­ively par­ti­cip­ated in politics.

In itself, this mar­gin­al­ity on the part of some groups is inher­ently undemo­cratic, but it has also been one of the factors which has enabled demo­cracy to func­tion effectively …

Samuel Hunt­ing­ton, in Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Hunt­ing­ton, and Joji Wat­nuki, The Crisis of Demo­cracy, 1975