MC433 - week 4

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These are my notes from October 19 for MC433 at the London School of Economics for the 2017-2018 school year. I took this module as part of the one-year Inequalities and Social Science MSc program.

The usual disclaimer: all notes are my personal impressions and do not necessarily reflect the view of the lecturer.

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Media Justice

Readings

Media and Morality by Roger Silverstone (chapter 6)

On hospitality and justice. I thought this was quite a good read . Incidentally, Silverstone was a founder of the Media and Communications at LSE!

• hospitality should be a key virtue of the mediapolis
  • basically means an obligation to listen
  • you need this if you want true media justice
  • quoting Derrida on ethics: hospitality as an ethic, not a right
    • it’s about welcoming the other without demanding reciprocity
    • not quite the same as tolerance, which is really just protective, scrutinised hospitality
  • dangerous but necessary part of cosmopolitanism
• existing media is based on conditional hospitality (contingent on good behaviour)
• the internet: hospitality without a host; open, but no one takes responsibility for the welcome (cool way of thinking about it)
• how to prevent abuse of hospitality: one forfeits the right to hospitality if one denies it to others
  • how this should be implemented is left deliberately vague
• on Rawls
  • media justice requires no distortion (as that leads to systematic exclusion)
  • we have to go beyond Rawls, toward responsibility over justice
  • justice in Rawls’ formulation is procedural, with an emphasis on the means
  • which can undermine individuals’ own sense of responsibility
• references Zygmunt Bauman’s book Postmodern Ethics
  • morality can only emerge from an existing social order
  • by taking individual responsibility we can transcend societal norms and thus redefine justice
  • society and collective thinking seduce us away from morality
  • thus we need to frame moral responsibility as individual, not collective/procedural
• Hans Jonas on the spatial concerns of moral responsibility
  • formal: taking responsibility for our own acts
  • substantive: taking responsibility even for the acts of others (like politicians being responsible for citizens or parents being responsible for their children)—non-reciprocal
• distinction between obligations (with the provider being the agent) and rights (with the claimant being the agent)
  • obligations-based approach better than rights-based approach because it preserves responsibility?
  • every right has a corresponding obligation
  • but there are “imperfect obligations” that don’t have corresponding rights
• to sum up: a procedural approach is insufficient
  • institutions become reified, with unforeseen consequences
  • individuals put faith in institutions at the cost of ceding their own personal responsibility
  • the media is key for shaping citizens’ view of world (think about the etymology of “mediated”)
• my thoughts on this: it’s a complicated balance between trying to be hospitable and knowing when not to be hospitable
  • you do need a platform that is welcoming to unheard voices if you want a shot at correcting injustice
  • on the other hand, we’re in a situation today where some voices are being given a platform when they perhaps shouldn’t be (think: Nazis)

Media Concentration and Democracy by C. Edwin Baker (chapter 1)

Published in 2006. On the need for a less concentrated media landscape. I agree with a lot of his points about media concentration but I worry that his solution isn’t radical enough …

• the term “fourth estate” (which refers to the press/journalism) derives from a historical European concept of the three estates of the realm (clergy, nobility, commoners)—not formally part of the political system, but with the potential to shape it
• the main argument: more concentrated media ownership is bad for democracy
  • normative view of democracy as an end in itself (equality, autonomy), not merely a means
  • the media as the most important institutional structure of the public sphere, influences ideology and thus voting behaviour (mediates relationship between public & govt)
  • thus a country’s level of democracy depends on the extent to which the media is egalitarian
  • it’s not that we should try to have complete equality of views/opinions (we can’t)—having specialists is a good thing
• the FCC used to disperse media ownership but they’ve recently relaxed rulings
  • Baker believes that ownership dispersal should be a basic constitutional process, separate from the actual content of the media (his is a proceduralist approach)
• Berlusconi effect: referring to Silvio Berlusconi, who controlled much of the media in Italy and managed to get elected as PM twice
• the main reason you’d want more independent media players:
  • less decentralised = less chance of corruption (theoretically—it’s easier to buy off one person than many)
• market failures that arise when media is too concentrated
  • even non-readers benefit from investigative journalism (since one result is injustices that are more accountable, less corrupt) but they may not be paying the newspaper
    • thus inadequate profit-based incentive to do important work
  • Baker mentions that newspapers tend to have high operating profits (since the goods they sell have low marginal costs, and the value of their brand is protected by IP law)—this was published before the rise of Facebook, though, and things have changed quite a bit since then
  • the ideal scenario: newspapers reinvest more of their profits into producing high-quality journalism
    • in fact, newspapers that are controlled by journalists tend to do exactly this whereas publicly-traded ones tend to cave into shareholder pressure
    • less focus on short term profits -> positive externalities in the long term
  • dispersal should reduce the incidence of conflicts of interest with advertisers (as each individual paper should have fewer advertisers to care about)
  • cross-ownership might save money in the short term but deleterious effects: repetition, reducing competition
  • basically he’s saying that capitalism is bad for the media and thus for democracy/society (as there is a divergence between “profitable” and “public interest” yeah no shit)

Speaking for Ourselves in The Nation

By Makani Themba and Nan Rubin. A short article on media portrayal during the civil rights era & its impact on racism in real life.

Lecture

• today: understanding Rawls’ influence in ideas on media dispersal / media justice movement
• some staggering stats on media concentration in the US (not sure of the source)
  • in 1983, 30 corporations controlled 90% of the media
  • in 2012, it was just 6 corporations (Viacom, News Corporation, Comcast, CBS, Time Warner, Disney)
• Baker’s approach w/ maximum dispersal is wholly procedural (à la Rawls)
  • he’s concerned about: democratic distribution / structural risk / quality control
  • in his view, media markets are a special kind of market and tend towards market failure
    • basically they under-produce high-quality goods (positive externalities)
    • (I would argue that they are a fairly standard kind of market but otherwise sure)
  • this is a normative framework: he’s establishing a benchmark to aspire to, not necessarily based on empirical evidence
  • he assumes that dispersal will automatically lead to less homogenous content
  • also doesn’t really address the degree to which even a dispersed media landscape will still be corrupted by the profit motive (sorta abstracts it away)
• Silverstone’s approach is very different—instead of Baker’s state-run media justice approach, he’s all about hospitality, responsibility, and individual moral obligation
  • he has a great quote on regulation being like grammar: it’s not enough to rely on that in order to truly flourish, you need norms as well
  • context of his writing: post-9/11 and Iraq war, when representation of non-Western cultures in the media was a hot topic
• the Media Justice Movement: telling the stories of underrepresented people within a commercial framework
  • relates to Young’s ideas on how to challenge the proceduralist vision

Seminar

• comparing/contrasting different approaches
  • the Hutchins report seemed to assume that the morality piece was already in journalism as a collective
  • whereas Silverstone wary of collective morality (since that can be used as an excuse) and more focused on the individual
  • neither really addresses what to do about the overarching profit motive & its effects on journalism
  • Silverstone also ignores the oppressed/oppressor distinction, whereas Freire puts the burden on the oppressed
  • also Silverstone mostly neglects to discuss larger structural forces that can dampen an individual’s desire to do good (THE PROFIT MOTIVE I know I’m a broken record)

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