Balkinization

Sucking the Air Out of Democracy

The coverage of the Iraqi war has all but swallowed up every other subject in the mass media, particularly on cable networks like CNN and Fox News. The tendencies that were so pronounced in the first Gulf War have now become dominant in the coverage of this conflict. The major networks and cable outlets have seized upon the war as a "big story" and pursued it relentlessly to the discussion of virtually everything else. There is no doubt that this is the most important story right now, and deserves the most coverage. My criticism is that it has become the only story. That is not good for democratic self-governance.

The form of media coverage I am criticizing is not new. It evolved over many years, but it was perfected in response to scandals like the O.J. Simpson Trial and public events like the death of Princess Diana. It is part of a more general cultural phenomenon, in which the news media rush from ‘big story’ to ‘big story.’ rather than offering a wider array of issues as part of the relevant public agenda. Because the media expect that their viewers want round the clock coverage, they give them round the clock coverage, and they find every new ways to fill the time to prevent boredom and loss of audience.

This is not simply the familiar criticism that coverage of news-- and in this case of war-- has become a species of entertainment. That is a worrisome aspect of current war coverage. Rather, my point is that media coverage of the "big story" proliferates discussion about itself and pushes aside most other public discourse and most other items that might be on the public agenda of attention.

During coverage of such a "big story," the mass media does not simply repeat the same stories over and over again. Rather, to avoid boredom, the media find ever new angles to discuss. They chew over the events repeatedly, generating new lines of inquiry and new ways to cover the events. Experts are called in; maps are displayed, argument and counterargument are arranged, quarrels are produced, subsidiary controversies are stoked and relished. In this way the media coverage produces every new aspects to discuss. The culture of the big story, in short, proliferates discourse about itself.

Proliferating discussion in this way does not increasingly get to the truth – rather it approaches the question of what is true from increasingly diverse angles of inquiry. A big story's natural trajectory is not towards depth but rather breadth of coverage – it ceaselessly expands its agenda for discussion outward, capturing more and more subjects, experts, political players and other individuals as possible topics of discourse.

The problem for democracy arises because a Darwinian logic is at work. Audience attention is a scare commodity. More time spent on covering the big story and its mushrooming concerns means less time for coverage of other events. What starts as a demand for transparency – for more information and for more accountability – ends up as a form of diversion that crowds out other information and other public concerns.

While all attention is focused on the big story, government is still operating and government officials are still laying plans and hatching schemes. But nobody is watching them or paying attention to what they are doing. Public choice theory teaches us that interest groups are best able to dominate government policy making when they have concentrated interests and when the political system offers them "slack"-- that is, when public attention and the public agenda is diverted elsewhere. Similarly, government oficials are most likely to engage in self-dealing or enact unwise policies when no one is paying attention. That is precisely why the culture of the big story is so dangerous. By diverting public attention to a single story, endlessly reported and discussed, the mass media effectively increase the amount of slack available in the political system. This allows politically powerful interest groups to push their favored agendas and politicians to make unwise decisions and promulgate unwise laws without democratic oversight.

Slack has always existed in democratic political systems, but the media has played an important role in combatting this slack. But the way that media coverage has evolved has produced precisely the opposite effect-- instead of the mass media shining more light on government abuses of power; it how helps to conceal them through its obsessive focus on a single "big story." As a result, we are now going through a particularly dangerous time for American democracy. A great deal of undesireable legislation and executive decisionmaking is going to happen during this period, hiding in plain sight. It is incumbent on the media to tear themselves away from their obsessive compulsion to cover it. Increasingly, I fear that they will not.

Posted 6:09 PM by JB [link]