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.