By Eric Wamanji
The media of mass communication is undeniably an influential social institution. During its golden age, the media enjoyed the glorified distinction as the real public sphere that aids open discourse critical for democracy. But that is the ideal – where a romanticized media ends.
Progressively, the news media of Edmund Burke time epically refashioned itself from the Fourth Estate to a real estate – rubbishing the very sacred tenets of public service whose esteem it was anchored on. Instead, the media cheekily jumped to bed with the advertiser and other interested influencers- adversaries and exploiters of the public.
In this arrangement, the elite set themselves head over heels to control this critical instrument of commerce and social engineering. As Charles Wright Mills crisply observed in his 1956 seminal work, The Power Elite, that the elite have the penchant to control media, better still own it.
This is why: whoever owns the narrative controls the mind. Thus media owners, or those who arm-twist the media, are manipulating and spectacularly controlling our lifestyles. For, folks, media constructs psycho-cultural perspectives that shape societal thinking and actions – over time, the media influences perceptions, values, identities and beliefs.
Globally, the media is increasingly concentrating in the hands of a few who are not directly answerable to the electorate. Think of the Rupert Murdoch’s empire – the News Corporation. Others are Time Warner Inc or Comcast Corporation. In Kenya for instance -Nation Media Group, Standard Group, Radio Africa, Royal Media and Mediamax- are on an overdrive to consolidate and control media outlets and by extension wield immense power by influencing public opinion towards hegemonic bearings.
Of course, it is Italian philosopher, Louis Althusser, who aptly classified the media as Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA). If you tie Althusser’s postulations to that of Mills’, you can now understand why essentially anyone should be worried when too much media is in too few hands.
It would not have been an issue were it that those few hands controlling the media were infallible and altruistic. Yet, the history of the businessman has been the history of the pursuit of self-interest, manipulation, and self-preservation more than a history of public good.
It is clear therefore that the ideological perspective of the owners of these few media houses are dominantly fed to an unsuspecting and uncritical mass audience audience.
Of course, cross-media ownership, a beloved of the big media houses, makes business sense but threatens deliberative debates. Conglomerates are powerful and lethal. Divergent opinion inconsistent with the beliefs of the owner are crushed like crisp autumn leaves.
A controlled public sphere where only a privileged few can participate in discourse is a threat to democracy and the whole important watchdog ideal. It is also a swamp of propaganda.
All this is real as commodification of media products is in vogue.
Yet, media is a special product in our society that heavily influences the very act of societal being. Since media survival is dependent on advertisers, ours will be a realm heavily warped to the benefit of the advertiser and heavily skewed toward the ideologies of the handful of owners.
As you will know, William Hamiliton, then owner of the Wall Street Journal, was brutally honest:
“A newspaper is a private enterprise owing nothing whatever to the public which grants it no franchise. It is therefore affected with no public interest. It is emphatically the property of the owner, who is selling a manufactured product at his own risk.”
And thus, the oft- flaunted doctrine of an existing free press is utopian.
The commercial wing of media has won the battle of the newsroom like an ogre that forced its way into the bedroom of a virgin princess. And, oh la la… an unholy relationship emerged.
Perhaps it is this reality that, before he became a mogul, Rupert Murdoch in 1961 warned the news media thus:
“Unless we can return to the principles of public service, we will lose our claim to be the Fourth Estate. What right have we to speak in the public interest when, too often, we are motivated by personal gain?”
To tame this runaway mischief, ideas of a fifth estate have been afloat for a while in the academia realm. A reconstructed public sphere serving as a neutral market place of ideas is more desirable than ever.
Jürgen Habermas, he of the Structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into category of bourgeoisie society fame had a different hope. He banked on a virtual public agora for such discourses that would focus on rational intercourse of ideas, too critical for a democratic environment.
Theatre of the absurd
Yet, Habermas’ dream that would have come true in form of the Internet is just but an anti-climax. Social media, at our disposal, is a theatre of the absurd. The hoped rational-critical engagement is conspicuously amiss, as users turn it into Aleppo or Trans-Mara. It is getting worse during the electioneering period.
Of course the Internet would have been the baby of hope especially with the explosion of affordable smart phones, increased connectivity and affordability.
Instead, the space that had promised Canaan has become a tinderbox. Users fan the embers of hatred with blinkered slurs and shallow thoughts that demonstrates a lack of interaction with civility and decency. And thus, a good platform has also turned out to be manipulative narrowly advancing selective interests. It has also become a theater of the idle monster who lack any philosophical anchorage apart from the relish of splattering expletives to, mostly, imagined foes.
Yet, information, in its most transparent, objective and uncensored form is critical for the very growth and survival of society. One wonders, whence will the ideal platform emerge, in such a design that the elite and the busybodies of the Internet superhighway will not hijack.
Wamanji is a communication advisor and teaches media studies ewamanji@yahoo.co.uk