Globalization, Media Market Deregulation, and the Future of Public Information
Presented at the UNESCO-EU Conference on The Global Public Sphere, The Media and the Information Society. Santiago de Compostela, Spain. November, 2000.
University of Washington
This is a story about the political consequences of the globalization of media markets. In part, it is a tale about the national media systems that have emerged after the formation and impact of global, mega-media corporations. These changes in national media systems reflect the pressures that global corporations apply to governments, opinion leaders, and publics to deregulate the social and civic responsibilities of communication corporations. Each nation experiences media market forces differently, depending on the economic, political and cultural filters that adapt the commercial formulas and market deregulation pressures to a particular context. This exploration begins with the case of the United States, and then examines some preliminary trends in European nations.
The American experience of the past twenty years is neither unique nor universal. The general lesson learned is this: the relaxation of socially responsible program and advertising standards enhances profits, but it adversely affects the quality of political information content delivered to citizens. One of the ironies of this cycle of media content deregulation in the United States is that audiences often become cynical about the society they live in, as that society is portrayed in often chaotic and threatening ways in both news and entertainment images. Another irony is that in many cases, audiences tend to blame the media messengers as part of the problem with society. Thus, in “the race to the bottom” to capture audiences with more dramatic news and more spectacular entertainment formats, those audiences become suspicious of being hyped and manipulated, even as they follow the breathless stories and media spectacles of the day.
The proliferation of media channels in more open markets has made for intense competition for audiences. Yet, the diversity of content in both news and entertainment formats did not increase with this competition. Instead, market-driven formulas led to standardization of information both at the source and in its distribution (Bennett, 2001). The programming focus on the corporate bottom line promotes more drama and mayhem to attract readers and viewers, even though the end result may be to undermine the loyalty of those prized audiences. Efforts to stabilize audiences often involve the de-emphasis of politics and public affairs content, and increased attention to branding media outlets through entertainment content targeted to lifestyle demographics, and shifting news formats toward lifestyle features such as fashion, travel, shopping, food, sports, and weather.
A general prediction based on the American experience is this: the information space of increasingly commercialized media systems is filled with less public and more private information. Although the cause-and-effect relations are hard to untangle in this cycle of information and economic change, the overall pattern is one in which audiences are treated more as consumers than as citizens. Perhaps not surprisingly, political participation patterns in many nations reflect (to varying degrees) a general citizen withdrawal from government and public life, and a turn toward lifestyle pursuits and consumption. These trends vary with national political cultures, levels of competition in the media systems, and the relative affluence and demographic diversity of media audiences, but they have become pronounced in the increasingly deregulated and fiercely competitive media markets of North America and Europe.
Consider an ironic finding from a study of journalists in five nations (Italy, Britain, Sweden, Germany, and the United States). Journalists in the United States reported fewer limits and restrictions on their reporting than did their colleagues in any of the other nations. Yet, when asked how they would approach different hypothetical news stories, the U.S. journalists proposed interviewing a narrower range of sources, and they considered a smaller number of possible story lines than did their counterparts in the other four nations. (Patterson, 1992). This narrowing of the news in what is often regarded as the world's most competitive, deregulated, and free speech-protected media system can be explained by several factors. One must, of course, acknowledge the centrist political culture of the U.S., and the strong professional journalism norm of "objectivity." However, this paper introduces evidence that takes us beyond the traditional homogeneity of mainstream American journalism to a sharp and recent decline in the quality of public information itself.
This transformation of public information in the United States has occurred in an era in which journalistic norms of objectivity have remained stable, and most media representatives claim that the proliferation of media channels has had a salutary effect on content diversity. Thus the journalistic abandonment of the public interest is not driven by changes at the individual level in professional journalism norms or motives. Nor is it driven by any easily demonstrated popular demand for less substantial public information. To the contrary, the media, and their news products in particular, have fallen in public esteem to the lowest levels recorded in the modern era of polling. The failure of these easy explanations for changes in public information content documented in this analysis points to a different and less culture-bound explanation that is useful for thinking about the future of democratic media systems in other nations.
During the twenty-year period from 1980-2000, the media markets in the United States experienced an unprecedented historical explosion of mergers and corporate growth. This economic revolution has reduced government regulation and lowered the public service obligations of media organizations as the swing toward a free market ideology has ironically created near monopoly business practices. True, there is fierce competition among media outlets for audiences. However, profit calculations require many of the products (from news to entertainment formulas) to be standardized by sharing common sources of production, and recycling the content through multiple outlets in the same corporate chain. Moreover, product innovation and consumer demand are generally satisfied only after profit-maximizing considerations have been factored into production formulas (Bagdikian, 1997; McChesney, 1999).
During this grand period of merger and deregulation, the editorial content of newspapers, television, and magazines transformed strikingly in the direction of more dramatized, entertainment-oriented, and personality-centered images of society and politics. Was there simply less significant news to report during the end of the Twentieth Century? Consider the international arena, which suffered the greatest shrinkage of corporate attention. Beyond a few mega stories (the fall of the Soviet Empire, genocidal regimes in the Balkans and Rwanda, and tensions in the Mid East), world affairs have occupied an ever-diminishing news space since the end of the 1970s.
Surely there is reason to look beyond a few dramatic event-driven crises to provide sustained, investigative, coverage of the sweeping process of globalization that has resulted in dislocating the lives and careers of a majority of workers in America and elsewhere. This new human experience ranges from the relatively trivial McDonaldization of the planet, to the important world digital communications revolution upon which trade regimes and new corporate structures depend. This global restructuring emanated at least in part from the United States. More importantly, the forces of globalization, once unleashed and given the blessings of multinational leaders, left and right, came back home in forms that changed lives, lifestyles, and the basic institutional structures in which those lives played out (Bennett, 1998).
There was, of course, a great deal of optimistic business coverage of these trends aimed at investors and consumers. And there was also coverage of the personal stories of the age of globalization: the victims of corporate downsizing, the mid-careers lost, the traditional family blown apart, the epidemics of emotional disturbances and the invention of miracle cures such as Prozac -- all set against a media backdrop featuring the lifestyles of the rich and the famous. But the big picture of world economic and political affairs that might make sense of these personal stories was literally squeezed out of the news by editorial choices to feature, instead, a world of chaos, disaster, famine, flood, and other biblical epics. In the calmer moments between fires and floods, the precious news space was given to social scares such as an over-dramatized twenty-year crime wave, the serial disorders of the tragic Princess Di, or the endless year that was devoted to the unappealing sexual appetites of Bill Clinton. As Anuradha Vittachi remarked about the British press at the dawn of the millennium, the story of the year that somehow missed the papers was the possibility of ending world poverty by redirecting the money squandered through corruption each year in World Bank and other so-called development programs. Instead, news consumers in the UK were treated to front-page coverage of the earth shattering revelation that footballer David Beckham enjoyed wearing wife Posh Spice's knickers (Vittachi, 2000).
As demonstrated later in this analysis, this so-called tabloid trend in media content has replaced information about issues, power, institutions, and social change that might help individuals grasp the personal impact of the global changes that swept society at the end of the millennium. This does not imply that the public information system of the United States was a model of democratic virtue prior to 1980 -- such nostalgia would not serve us well. However, the potential to use an ever more technologically sophisticated media to communicate more useful (or even more accurate) images of society and global affairs has thus far been wasted.
The intriguing and notable exception to this tendency is among the networks of citizen activists and non-governmental organizations now utilizing the low production and transmission costs of the Internet to circumvent the traditional media while communicating in information rich terms about a host of pressing human issues. (For examples of some of the better direct citizen-to-citizen information channels, see other resources on this site). The dilemma of these chaotic digital public spheres is that they are badly organized, often unreliable, limited in its audience reach, and in important ways excluded from policy governmental debates that echo the framing of issues and the political agendas of more traditional media. Indeed, the ultimate solution to the deterioration of the traditional media may be to replace citizen information channels with a public service, high access Internet information system that links citizens and policy makers in national and international deliberation. For example, Blumler and Coleman (2000) call for a “civic commons in cyberspace.” I will come back to this possibility at the conclusion of this argument.
Returning to our main story, one might argue that the trend toward market-driven, sensationalistic information actually gives people what they really want, and that democracy cannot aspire to be better than its citizen-consumers would have it. Indeed, there is evidence that people do get something of value from the scandals, human tragedies, and big screen celebrity melodramas of the day. I have even contributed to this line of argument in analyzing media content and public attention to the Clinton scandals (Lawrence, Bennett and Hunt, 1999). However, the capacity of media consumers to sift bits of meaning from the commercial information flow does not mean that popular demand, alone, explains the information trends. Nor does the fact of consumption, whether pleasurable or not, mean that people are objectively any better off following the intake of such information than they are after adapting to a diet of junk food and suffering the consequences of obesity and hardening of the arteries. More importantly, despite objective indicators that people were following the Clinton scandals, there was ample poll evidence that most would have preferred to have less of this fare in their media diets.
There are, in short, various reasons to think that content trends do not simply reflect market demand. To the contrary, there is a more realistic explanation for the transformation of media formats and public consumption habits: low budget people-centered, dramatized news is not so much the result of popular demand as it is most profitable product to produce. Other information formats turn out to be popular, but not so profitable (Bennett, 2001). For example, a national study of market share among high and low quality local television news programs in the United States found that the highest quality programs competed successfully with the lowest. In fact, the highest quality newscasts were more likely to move up in audience share (64% upward ratings movement) than the lowest quality news, which showed the next best market performance at 50 percent upward movement. Unfortunately, top quality newscasts amounted to just 10 percent of the national sample studied in the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. (Rosenstiel, Gottlieb, and Brady, 2000) My inference about why low quality programs far outnumber high quality ones is that they are simply far more profitable to produce. Parent corporations are not losing money on high quality news, they are simply not making as much as they do when they lower their product standards.
In this view, bad news is not the choice of the people; it is the choice offered to the people. Thus, the encouragement of pro- free market governments to maximize profit at the expense of other social values offer the best explanation of the current information "devolution." Various inducements to maximize profit over social values are apparent not just in the United States, but with greater frequency in other nations as well, and they come from neo-conservative and the new social democratic governments alike.
Throughout this argument, I am aware that many Europeans believe that very little about America as applicable to their situations. However, I propose that it is not so-called Americanization that the world needs to worry about in protecting the public values and cultural standards that make democracy vital in different nations. (After all, both Bertelsman and Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation have come to America with business models and products very similar to those already practiced by Time Warner, General Electric and Disney. The more general emphasis of my argument is that the forces of market deregulation, and more generally, globalization -- whether played out in the United States, Great Britain, France, Spain, or Germany -- are reshaping the ways in which most nations communicate. And these changes in communication affect media content, which, in turn, affects how people imagine citizenship, public action, governments, leaders, and democratic accountability.
The bottom line in this analysis is that open media markets and the accompanying relaxation of corporate social responsibility norms promote business decisions above public service and public interest information considerations. This explanation is far better supported by data than is the ideological proposition that free markets perfectly reflect and respond to consumer demands. Understanding information content in terms of profit constraints suggests that the balance between profit and social responsibility can be used to trace changes in media representations of politics and society through different societies and through different media sectors within those societies. For example, as American broadcast and cable outlets compete aggressively for the attention of increasingly fragmented audiences, print media feel pressures to change their formats as well. Even as they change their formats and marketing strategies, embattled print organizations are swallowed by conglomerates with holdings in broadcast, film, cable, and Internet.
The efficiencies of these empires include free advertising, shared marketing, recycling product across different outlets, and the convergence of technologies for distributing content to consumers. In the area of news, for example, the goals of business efficiency in these media empires are most easily achieved by using the same (often diminished) reporting resources to feed all the outlets in the chain. Those outlets, in turn, select what to report according to the marketing studies that shape the most cost-effective content for audiences. These common information streams and industrial formulas can then be styled and formatted using different packaging and marketing to draw those niche audiences to the various brands in the corporate product line. Consider some content trends in various American media sectors that reflect this market logic:
A national study of local news by the Center for Media and Public Affairs found
that crime dominated most programs, and that after removing the combination
of crime, weather, accidents, disasters, other ‘soft’ news, and sports, only
5 minutes and 40 seconds remained out of the 24 minutes and 20 seconds of noncommercial
news time for coverage of government, health, foreign affairs, education, science
and the environment. (Grossman, 1998) This means that ‘hard’ news gets less
time than commercials.
The trends in increased violent crime news cannot be explained as reflections
of actual rates of crime in society, nor are these profitable news formulas
just limited to local programs. To the contrary, the trends in crime news have
been going up as actual crime has declined. In the period from 1990 through
1998, for example, the number of crime stories broadcast annually on the NBC,
CBS, and ABC evening news programs rose from 542 to 1,392, during a time in
which the actual levels of most violent crimes dropped significantly in society.
(Brill’s Content 1999). If we look just at news about murder on the national
networks, the number of murder stories increased by 700 percent between 1993-1996,
a period in which the murder rate in society actually declined by 20 percent.
(Morin, 1997)
A more complete discussion of these trends can be found in Bennett (2001). However,
the point for now is that news images of American society and public problems
have changed notably during the recent period of media market deregulation and
increased competition among media outlets for profitable audience niches. Does
any of this matter? It turns out that it does. For example, people who watch
more news, and more ‘reality programs’ in general (i.e., programs like America’s
Most Wanted and Cops) are significantly more likely to misjudge the
seriousness of the crime problem, and to misjudge their own chances of being
victims. These trends are less pronounced in nations that still attempt to regulate
the content of such programs to better reflect social realities. (Fishman and
Cavendar, 1998) In the United States, fewer people felt safe in their neighborhoods
(29%) in the late 1990s than in the early 1980s (44%), even though objective
crime conditions warranted just the opposite feelings. (Morin, 1997). In this
and many other policy areas, perceptions of public problems and their solutions
are shaped by images of society that are to varying degrees constructed in or
out of the news by short-circuiting serious reporting, and replacing it with
topics and treatments based on cost calculations and audience marketing studies.
The information marketing formulas through which news is now produced have undermined the overall amount of public issue coverage on which sound public policy-making depends. In addition, the quality of the remaining political information that makes it through the media profit filters is more politically suspect as well. The logic of cost conscious news organizations is a politically unfortunate one from the standpoint of the citizen. The shrinking space for serious political news combines with diminishing organizational resources to make the news vulnerable to more public relations, political spin, promotion of parent corporations celebrity and entertainment products, and professionally staged events. As with the trends introduced earlier in the argument, these patterns vary from nation to nation, and system to system, but they are the evident to varying degrees throughout the advanced democracies.
In the increasingly commercialized, consumer-oriented media system, the supply of public information is increasingly provided by communication professionals who run election and issue campaigns, place stories about political allies and enemies, spin the day’s events, and generally represent the first line of contact for journalists working on stories. As suggested above, the decline of reporting resources in commercialized media systems means that news organizations increasingly rely on the materials produced directly by public relations firms, along with the information and staged performances produced by the professional communications consultants hired by parties, government agencies, politicians, and election campaigns. Communication professionals are also the first political priority for news-makers who understand (or have been led to believe) that controlled and managed relations with journalists are necessary for political success.
In the U.S., many of the scandals, dramas, and other "big stories" of recent years have come directly out of strategic communication campaigns aimed at using the news to elevate an issue, a leader, or a cause-- often while damaging the images and causes of opponents (Bennett and Manheim, 2001). Once these media dramas get going, news organizations often have business reasons keep them going, whether or not the issues involved are important, or the waves of allegations and rumors are even accurate. On the other side of the equation, newsmakers are faced with shrinking space for serious news coverage of their issues, and must increasingly resort to professional public relations and news management to get their messages into precious news space. (Cook, 1998)
In short, the spiral of business efficiency and stiff economic competition among shrinking numbers of large corporate owners undermines the depth, diversity, and social responsibility of public information content. At the same time, media organizations are more vulnerable to using information and story ideas produced by governments, interest organizations, and other partisan sources. In this process, politicians and political organizations recede from direct, spontaneous contact with journalists. Since news organizations seek well-produced events and stories to fill their high- pressure news quotas, journalists are forced to live with their compromised and cynicism-producing position in the political communication chain.
The chain of logic goes like this:
Perhaps the most ironic result of profit-maximizing journalism is that it undermines the confidence of people in the information they receive, along with regard for the journalists who produce it. (This is anything but a sign of the perfect harmony between profitable production and satisfying consumption that is often the alleged result of the hidden hand of the market). Not surprisingly, journalists have grown more cynical and dissatisfied with their jobs over this recent period. The result in the United States has been a spiral of cynicism about politics and public life. (Cappella and Jamieson, 1997)
In the not so distant past, most European polities featured fairly diverse, noncommercial media systems, with party papers, public service broadcasting, and various state information subsidies being more common than commercial outlets and degrgulated markets. Yet recent trends toward more commercial media outlets, market deregulation, and monopoly ownership have begun to change these systems. While the public service sector is generally far stronger throughout Europe than in the U.S., the shifting balance between commercial and public broadcasting has produced notable effects on program content, particularly in public service outlets. Consider several patterns here:
In 1980, a survey of 17 European nations revealed 87% of broadcast channels were public and 13% were private. In 1997, 45% were public and 55% were private. (McQuail and Siune, 1998, extrapolated from Table 3.1 leaving out the U.S. data)
Another survey of program content in European public service broadcasters found that the percentage of news and public affairs programming over this period of increased commercial competition dropped considerably. As reported in Norris (2000, Table 5.4, pp. 107-108), dramatic declines occurred in the percentage of all program content devoted to public information (news and public affairs) programs on public service broadcast channels in most European countries between 1971-1996. Examples of this diminishing public information programming trend include (public information content as a percentage of all programming):
While these percentage decreases have generally occurred in the context of overall increases in total programming time, they do suggest a relative de-emphasis on information aimed at citizens, and an increased emphasis on entertainment and lifestyle features paralleling the trends in the more advanced U.S. case.
Perhaps more importantly, and also following the pattern in the U.S., the tone of European news coverage seems to have grown more negative and sensational as well. Norris (2000, p. 197) reports a study of European newspaper coverage of the European Union between 1995-1997. Of the twenty-five topics measured for tone, only four had a generally positive tone, and the rest were negative.
As with the case of crime coverage in the U.S., the alarming and negative European news treatments also seem to have effects on public perceptions of the political and social environment around them. For example, the tone of press coverage of the European monetary unit (Euro) correlates significantly with support for membership in the European Union in the sample of nations. (Norris, 2000, p. 201) If these patterns are associated with the deregulation of media markets and the rise of profit pressures and competition for audiences in both private and public service outlets, then we are faced with a dilemma about how to secure the quality of public information that enhances democratic life and social cohesion.
Following this analysis, the key question becomes how to balance the profit forces of increasingly deregulated information markets, with the responsibility of journalists and democratic governments to provide citizen-audiences with commonly available and useful perspectives on their lives, societies and governments. This question increasingly faces journalism and government in many nations experiencing various patterns of deregulation in media and telecommunications markets. The conclusion of the paper offers a set of basic policy suggestions aimed at balancing corporate profits and social responsibilities by telling more of the important stories about world economic and political developments. This means that news organizations must be induced to tell important stories in ways that engage audiences even when those stories are not inherently sensational, or easy to tell, or produced by political communication professionals with spectacular budgets. Rather, news organizations in commercial markets that reward soft news formulas must be encouraged to cover more stories simply because they are of great human consequence and continuing importance.
Since most recommendations that news organizations be regulated or separated from commercial media corporations would be rejected as impractical or undesirable in today’s free market climate, we need to search for other solutions. One possibility is simply to find ways that make reporting important stories interesting and marketable. Consider, for example, how to report what is arguably the biggest story in the world today --globalization— on terms that might compete with the daily run of sex, scandal, celebrity, and disaster. The first question is how to tie the complexities of world economic and political change together in easy-to-digest, interesting news accounts.
One place to begin is to rethink the common practice of relying on the packaged pronouncements of party leaders, business corporations, and world trade and development organizations. These pronouncements result in fragmentary understandings that convey the unrealistic impression that prosperity awaits those who leave complex economic development decisions in the hands of those party leaders, business corporations, trade and development organizations. This story does not fit the realities of failure and corruption in less developed societies, or the painful experiences of economic restructuring and personal job insecurity in the more developed ones. More importantly, most government and publicity-driven accounts of globalization leave out the stories of many citizens who are working actively to make a globalized world a more democratically accountable and humanly scaled place to live.
Another way to bring news audiences back to politics –particularly young people who express the greatest cynicism about what they see in the news—is to put ordinary people who reflect the diversity of the potential audience into the news frame. One reason for the relatively high popularity of local newscasts in the United States is the focus on ordinary people experiencing the full range of human emotions. Unfortunately, the coverage of ordinary folks in local news is often restricted to relatively inconsequential human-interest events such as fires, crimes, lost children, sports triumphs, and accidents. How can ordinary people be brought effectively into coverage of more important public issues, particularly for seemingly distant topics such as globalization? News organizations can tell the story of globalization, for example, as a story of expanding our historic understandings of democracy and citizenship. Tell it as a story of generational change in thinking about democracy, accountability, and the social responsibility of corporations and trade regimes. This may not fit the business-driven news formulas as neatly as the more typical news account of battles between chanting, lawless anarchists, and polite trade representatives in suits trying to hold their meetings. However, it might be a story that is more interesting to news audiences searching for understandings of their worlds—particularly young audiences who are abandoning news in all media except the Internet.
In addition, finding local angles, even on international stories, seems important for attracting general interest. News organizations can generally find plenty of locally appealing stories about global life quality, youth activism, the growth of volunteerism and world concern among even the most difficult-to-hold younger media audiences. For example, the link between the Prague protests in 2000, the rock star Bono, and world debt relief may be a more enduring means of securing young news audiences than to reach those audiences through music features on the latest U-2 concert tour of local cities.
What prevents journalism from featuring new forms of global citizen action that engage people (particularly politically disaffected young people) in a variety of dramatic and important public activities, from expanding definitions of human rights, to promoting corporate codes of social conduct? The easy corporate answer is that such news would not interest most audiences. This begs the question of how to present information in ways that might be more interesting and accessible. Graber (2001) has argued that traditional media have been slow to reformat information in ways that are more attractive to diverse audiences. It is clear, for example, that neither story treatments nor uses of new communication media such as the Internet have been adjusted in most traditional news organizations to suit the well-known information preferences of younger audiences. (Rather, such audiences are targeted almost exclusively as economic consumers by commercial media). One simple solution is to create Internet information channels for different audiences. Few media allow the flexibility of formatting and audience targeting as the Internet.
Yet, rather than embrace the Internet, many media organizations, particularly publishing operations, have tended to fear it. The conventional wisdom is that the proliferation of information sources on the Internet will reduce traditional journalism and news organizations to nostalgic "information boutiques." (Krimsky 2000) How to prevent serious journalism from becoming a boutique business in the Internet age? Use the unparalleled resources of big organizations not just to report the latest strife in the Middle East or the horror du jour from Africa, but to tell the story of globalization and other high impact developments as a challenging prospect for rethinking democracy in our time. Put these stories on the Internet. If necessary, brand them with familiar themes, interactive features, and visuals that promote demographic loyalty to the corporate sponsors. Make those stories animated with graphics and full of light and sound, and the next generation of news consumers will find them. (This of course means that both governments and news organizations in many parts of the world need to think ahead to a time when Internet access is not prohibited by retrograde local phone rates and other access barriers that go under the much-discussed problem of the digital divide.)
In this future that is already so close to the present, commercial news organizations can redefine themselves by collectively sponsoring a global public sphere. Imagine, for example, a citizen's Internet gateway to global issues through which news organizations can provide different cultural and national perspectives for people to use in finding meaningful ways to connect with issues that increasingly concern them both at home and across the globe. Such local-global issue connections already include food quality, environmental standards and global warming, the genetic modification of organisms, the labor and rights standards of companies producing our fashions and amusements, and whether the sustainable future of the planet really must be sacrificed for the sake of this month's paycheck.
Since there is currently no such global public sphere (Sparks 2001), one must ask the practical question of whether there is a market for one. If such a market exists, it may well be found in the very same demographic groups that currently seem to threaten the future of traditional journalism: youth who distrust politics and traditional information about politics, but who have disproportionate access to the Internet, and prefer it as a communications medium above others. Those same youth --with some notable neo-nationalist exceptions-- have fewer national identifications standing in the way of joining an imagined global community that a new form of news can best help them to imagine.
The risk, of course, is that truly independent examinations of big economic and political stories will be rejected not because they cannot be made interesting to citizens, but because they run counter to the ideological interests of the business executives who have so many direct and indirect ways to influence what their organizations report. If efforts to promote successful high quality news are rejected by managers of private communication organizations, then we will have established a clearer definition of the limits beyond which commercial media cannot serve the public interest. Indeed, if experiments with more attractive treatments of important public issues expose the inherent political limits imposed by private corporations on news content, then we have established a strong argument for an independent governmental role in the provision of public information. Such contradictions would establish a strong argument for creating a public information trust through which citizen information would be gathered and distributed.
One possible version of such a public information system might be to adopt Blumler and Coleman’s proposal (2000) for a public information commons in cyberspace. The cyber-commons would be funded by public revenues and administered by independent citizens’ commissions. This model would vary from nation to nation. At another level one can imagine an international Internet information portal operated with United Nations or foundation funding. This global citizen portal would organize the many existing world information services currently operating beyond commercial influences on the Internet (see http://www.engagedcitizen.org for more illustration of this idea). The supply of news information for this portal could be generated by information services affiliated with reputable NGOs working in areas that new generations of global citizens would find worth understanding. Such a global public information system would not replace other news services. Nor would all audiences flock to it. However, if organized and promoted effectively, the global citizen information portal would fill the current void in sustained coverage of serious global issues that only grows more serious as national media systems are transformed by commercial pressures and market ideologies.
This transformation of public communication about the future of democracy is sure to play out differently in different cultures, in different party systems, and in different models of government regulation of public and private media markets. However, the future will not be a bright one for either journalists or for their audiences without a vision that transcends the unrestricted play of the market. Without a conscious effort to reinvent journalism and the very nature of public communication, the law that will prevail is the one that assures that media market deregulation creates incentives for media organizations to abandon social responsibility in making both entertainment program and news content decisions. It is a great irony that free markets end up corrupting public information. But this irony can be overcome if news organizations do not fear the loss of local and national news audiences in fragmenting societies and react to this fear with attempts to lure audiences back with cheap sensation and drama. Better that news organizations anticipate the future and get there ahead of --or at least along with-- their audiences. However, if the economic incentives for reinventing commercial media in these ways are limited by the very economic interests that define private corporations, then the solution for citizen information in a changing world will necessarily involve rethinking public information services on a global scale for a different generation of citizens.
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ã W. Lance Bennett. Do not reprint or reproduce without permission.