Median valta

 When considering the power of the media, the following development trends are of the essence: the increasing significance of the Internet, the predicament of quality journalism, the decreasing circulation figures and advertising revenue in the West.

What then, is the power of the media? It is above all power over opinions, power over the attitudinal climate, power over attention. What and how the media pay attention to or turn their attention away from – that is wielding power: agenda-setting for social debate, weighting issues, raising some issues onto the agenda and keeping quiet about others.

New technology has increased the amount of different media and media consumption. We can identify two trends in the media world: firstly, growing variation in quality and secondly, increasing similarity of the media. 

As the amount and use of the media have grown, competition between the various types of media has accelerated and assumed even questionable forms. The diversity in the quality of the media has increased. In practice, heedless of the means they use and of the facts, reporters hunt for scoops, big headlines and scandals in order to enhance newspaper and magazine sales and keep up with the competition.

As President Reagan put it: “The facts are stupid things.”

I consider it a problem that the conventional serious media have adopted the same kinds of journalistic practices for their own operations. This means that media contents are becoming uniform, entertaining and personalized.

The media’s most important task is to make the wielding of political and economic power transparent and provide the citizens with an opportunity to evaluate for themselves whether the solutions that have been made are well-founded and justified.

As the media control government, it is necessary that there is control over the power of the media to counterbalance it. Is self-regulation sufficient to control the power of the media? Media ethics are about journalists’ own choices and the reasons on which they base those choices.

Ethics are about more than law. Media ethics involve the desire to follow higher ethical standards than the written law requires, in order to be able to preserve the credibility of operations in the eyes of the citizens.

We also need criticism of the media. Being a power wielder, the media must submit themselves to the same kind of monitoring and control of power wielding as other wielders of power. The reader ombudsman system is a fairly common form of self-regulation for the press in the Anglo-Saxon world.

For example, the devastating earthquake in the province of Sichuan, China in May 2008 became public through the twitter community, through which also aid activities were organized.

In many countries the operations of the media are still regulated by government. The media are owned and also controlled by the state. The media have been harnessed as part of the power-wielding mechanism in society; this has nothing to do with the freedom of expression exercised by the Western press.

The discussion about the power of the media also involves the change and crisis of the media associated with the nation-state. From a historical perspective, national publicity was created after the Second World War, with the driving forces being large family-owned newspapers, national TV channels and quality journalism, which reported national issues and maintained national publicity.

Since the end of the 1980s the situation has been changing as a result of marketization and globalization as well. In particular, national broadcasting companies are now in trouble, as they have to justify their existence. An example of this is the debate about the status of the BBC in the UK. The quality journalism of daily newspapers and television is in crisis and has to consider its earning logic. The Internet has created a large number of new publicities that challenge the established media.

The current development has many good features. People no longer blindly respect authorities and institutions, and they can access publicity more easily and be actively engaged therein, for example organize political movements more easily than before. Some power has transferred from the institutions and the established media to citizens (Castells).

However, the current development involves the risk that quality journalism becomes tabloidized and trampled upon by entertainment; politics become scandalized and public life fragmented on the Internet in small pigeonholes where like-minded people will reinforce each other’s prejudices. In the Western world the idea of publicity is to provide space for varied and unacquainted people to meet and test different thoughts through discussion. In this way publicity has served as an important force in building and developing society, at the same time contributing to the commitment of citizens to joint projects.

To counterbalance the problematic trends, it would perhaps be good to uphold some sort of a public communications policy, including the maintenance of a public service company and a common publicity of high quality, as well as the provision of media education in schools. However, the communications policy should be considered from new standpoints: the public service must not strengthen the power of the state but, instead, reinforce the citizens’ power in society.

Especially the public service companies should be reconsidered, and they should, in a way, reinvent themselves and justify their existence by something other than national interest and the integrity of the state. It is likely that the services will more and more move in the direction of ensuring multiple voices and citizenship, and not be controlled by the state – or actually, I think that they have to move in that direction and become democratized, if the public service wants to hold on to its financial basis and justify its existence.