Normative media theories: the media in the new democracies

Choice Reviews Online, 2009

Media as a key area of systemic change: spillover effects Media system change is, of course, part and parcel of the general process of what may be called systemic social transformation. McQuail (2005) describes the media system as the actual set of mass media in a given national society, characterized by such main dimensions as scale and centralization, degree of politicization, diversity profile, sources of finance and degree of public regulation and control. Each system is also characterized by certain organizing principles expressed in what call a "philosophy" of the press system as well as in a set of normative goals the system is intended to pursue. These, in turn, reflect the given society's general circumstances and its view of the media, resulting in its media policy. Media system change results from changes in both these cultural (cognitive, conceptual) and structural (policy, economic, institutional etc.) factors. According to liberal theories of democratic state, such as those of John Stuart Mill, democracy is unthinkable without freedom of speech, freedom of press and freedom of association. Accordingly, media freedom is generally seen today as a necessary precondition of democracy -and vice versa. This volume confirms that the media are both an independent and a dependent variable in democratic development. Much is made in the literature of the need for an "enabling environment" for media freedom and contribution to democracy. What, however, if the social, political and economic environment is less than favourable and "enabling"? In the present volume, Bajomi-Lazar looks at the prerequisites for consolidation of media freedom, while Sparks, Mungiu-Pippidi, Jakubowicz and Gross analyse the reasons why in post-communist countries the media often operate in a "disabling environment". To perform its functions, the media have to fulfill a number of expectations and provide a number of services for democracy. list eight key expectations regarding the democratic performance of the media: In the process of nurturing young democratic institutions and democratic citizenship, democratic performance of the media had an important impact on democratization in general, but also on its specific sectors. By covering issues of the day as well as longer term trends, media democratization often had spillover effects (or trickle-down effects) regarding democratization of particular institutions. By framing stories and building agendas according to democratic criteria, media performance had the opportunity of shaping public opinion about concretes cases reinforcing rule of law both in politics and the economy. By uncovering wrongdoing and abuse of power, investigative reporters and political scandals in the media helped to set the norms of acceptable vs non-acceptable behaviour in new pluralist democracies (on the role of political and media scandals in defining socially acceptable norms of conduct, see Markovits and Silverstein 1988). Insofar the media performed their democratic roles, they also contributed to the process of consolidation of democracy in all its five dimensions listed by Linz and. Besides spillover effects, another relationship between democratization of media and systemic democratization may be captured by the metaphor of ontogenesis, introduced by Jakubowicz in his paper. The concept of ontogenesis in developmental biology captures "individual development of a living thing, all sequence of its transformations". 5 In other words, it means that every specimen of the species repeats in the course of its development all the stages of evolution that the entire species had gone through in the process of its philogenesis. As the starting point of the transformation, the official Central and Eastern European media systems up to 1990 were characterized by a wide-ranging system of censorship overseen by Communist Party agencies, the monopoly of state broadcasting and exclusive state/party ownership of the press, party nomenklatura as media executives, and hegemonic propaganda content (Sükösd 2000). Given this historical context, as Jakubowicz notes in his paper about public service media in the emerging democracies, Central and Eastern European countries are thus discovering that when they transplant an institution copied on Western patterns, they are in reality launching a process that will retrace the developments that ultimately led to its successful development elsewhere. They must therefore repeat -albeit probably in an accelerated form -the experience (and all the mistakes) that Western European countries went through before they were able to achieve something close to the desired results (PSB is strong and truly independent only in a few Western countries). It is almost like the process of ontogenesis in biology. In a historical view of systemic transformation, the concept of ontogenesis may refer to the development of particular institutions of democracy, replicating (in whole or in part) the historical sequence of their earlier development in other societies. The institutional pattern of newly established and transplanted democratic media institutions may be seen as one in which democratic potentials are encoded. However, whether such potentials can be realized and the institutions can be utilized according to their basic principles remains subject to conflicts and particular conditions of their social, cultural and institutional embeddedness. In Central and Eastern Europe, repeated media wars, i.e., continued struggle for media independence, have been characterizing media system transformation. In media wars, journalists, editors, their unions, media managers and civic groups fought in various coalitions with governments, oppositions, political and as well as business clans. Media wars and other similar developments can be seen as subsequent periods through which the ontogenesis of democratic media institutions proceeds. Such media wars included fights by various clan media and several phases of struggle against central control and for independence in Russia and Ukraine from the 1990s; Hungarian media wars around public service broadcasting that became focal conflicts of political struggles (during the 1990s); a famous strike of public television personnel against government intervention in the Czech Republic (2000); similar recent developments in Slovakia; street protests against the persecution of the Rustavi-2 TV station in Georgia (October 2001); street protests in Moscow against the elimination of NTV, an independent TV station (2001); a campaign against changes in PSB law, threatening its political subordination in Slovenia (2005); protests in Poland against pressure being put on public and independent media and against ultimately unsuccessful attempts to vet journalists for possible history of collaboration Indeed, the two lists are very similar. The major changes in European (and, to a certain degree, global) media also later characterized media system evolution in post-communist countries. The challenges are the same; however, one may discern certain limited exceptionalism of postcommunism in the speed (the historical time frame) of the process, and certain specific factors characteristic of post-communist regions (e.g., the relative lack of domestic capital, professional skills and democratic political culture). The fact that commercialization and marketization are placed so high on the list of processes transforming media systems in post-communist countries may seem surprising. That they should play such a role certainly was not the intention either of the idealistic dissidents before the collapse of the communist system, nor of the policy-makers immediately after its demise. Nevertheless, as pointed out by a number of authors in this volume, it is the market forces which now provide most of the impetus for media evolution and change in post-communist countries, especially those where democracy is the strongest and societal conflicts (that always intensify political pressure on the media) have, to an extent, been contained and channelled in the political process. How did post-communist societies, particularly media policy-makers, react to the compressed (and, at the same time, pressing) challenges that are listed above? One may identify three media policy orientations that contributed to shaping views on the new media order. The first was the "idealistic" orientation. In line with the tendency of dissidents, underground democracy activists and democratic oppositions to think in terms antithetical to the communist system itself, this orientation assumed the introduction of a direct communicative democracy as part of a change of social power relations. This was promoted by the intellectual, cultural and later political opposition to the communist system, fascinated with western concepts of "access", "participation" and "social management" of the media. The idea was to implement the democratic participant press theory and create a media system based on the values of equality/justice and solidarity (McQuail 1992: 66-67), with a facilitative and dialectical/ critical role for journalists (Nordenstreng 1997). While the concept of "public service broadcasting" may have appeared in this thinking, the real plan was to turn "state" into "social" broadcasting (i.e., directly managed and controlled by society). Another strand within the idealistic orientation grew out of theorizing samizdat, 6 the selfpublished, underground literature that broke censorship and the official communication monopoly of the Communist Party. This independent communication network involved participation in an emerging public sphere in which authors and activists freely discussed matters of the public

Central European Journal of Communication, 2016

Th is book is a much needed contribution to the study of media and media change in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It focuses on the relationship between the media and politics, and seeks to overcome the Anglo-American bias characteristic in both analyses of media-politics in the non-Western world, and in the study of the transformation of media systems in post-communist Europe. Th e need to de-Westernize media studies in the new European democracies has been repeatedly articulated in the literature ever since the fi rst decade of the post-communist transformations (see e.g., Sparks, 2000; Lauk, 2015). In the 2010s there appeared several valuable collections that contributed signifi cantly to this task (

US-China Law Review, 2017

The quality of the practice of the political culture is closely linked to the democratic development of a country. The development of the civil society requires development of a democratic political culture, free media, a creation of critical public, democratic socialization of citizens and promotion of civic values which focus on the citizen. Today, there are different conceptions of democracy. One would be that in which democratic society possesses means of assistance that could, in some reasonable way, to participate in the management of their works and the information would be free and available to all, said Noam Chomsky 2003. The second concept is that, according to Chomsky, the public is banned in the management of its obligations and the information is strictly controlled. Depending on who accomplishes influence of the media, whether it concerns the country or the ruling party or the owner of the media company, there are different kinds of theories and those divisions are discussed in this paper. Hence, this paper is devoted on the types of theories of mass media which correlates to the level of development of democracy.

2012