Quadrant-I (E-text)

Module name/ title: News, Public Interest and Democracy

Paper: News and Society

Component I: Personal Details

Role Name Affiliation

Principal Investigator Prof. Biswajit Das Centre for Culture, Media
& Governance, Jamia
Millia Islamia, Delhi
Co-Principal Investigator Dr. Durgesh Tripathi, University School of Mass
Communication, Guru
Gobind Singh
Indraprastha University,
New Delhi
Paper Coordinator (if Prof. Biswajit Das Centre for Culture, Media
any) & Governance, Jamia
Millia Islamia, Delhi
Content Writer/ Dr. Manoj Das Sikkim University
Author(s)
Content Reviewer Prof. Biswajit Das Centre for Culture, Media
& Governance, Jamia
Millia Islamia, Delhi
Language Editor P.K. Satapathy Department of English,
School of Open Learning,
University of Delhi, Delhi

Component II: Description of the Module

Items Description of Module

Subject Name Media and Communication Studies
Paper Name News and Society
Module Name/Title News, Public Interest and Democracy
Module ID P1-M9
Pre-requisites
Objectives To look into the relationship of news and
democracy
Keywords News, Democracy, Public

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Module:News, Public Interest and Democracy

1. Introduction: News— democracy relationship

News and democracy enjoy an interesting and expanding relationship. They are
intimately connected to the extent that one cannot survive without the other.
Democracy centers around informed and participating citizenry whose institutional
basis is largely provided by the news media in contemporary societies. At a time
when the connection between the political parties and elected representatives on the
one hand and the electorate on the other in modern democracies is increasing
becoming divorced and distant, unlike that of in ancient Athens, it is the news media
that bridges the gap between the two. In fact, news media has become the centre
stage of politics today, a phenomenon scholars refer to as ‘mediatisation of politics’
(Mazzoleni & Schulz, 1999). For news, on the other hand, to be able to discharge its
democratic role, has to enjoy ‘freedom’ that only a democracy can provide. The basis
of demand for ‘freedom of press’ – a demand that is historically traced to early liberal
thinkers like Thomas Pyne, John Stuart Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Milton and
others, but continue to reign even today – rests on the premise that spirit of vibrant
democracy leading to greatest public good or interest can be vigilantly defended and
furthered by free news media.

2. Learning Outcome:

This module shall acquaint you with the role of news in democracy. This module shall
deal with the idea of public interest, multiple views, informed public etc. which play an
important part in democracies.

3. Role of Media:

A good starting point to discuss the topic is to briefly examine the news media’s ideal
role in a democracy. Scholars have described it variously. James Curan’s (2005)
exposition in this regard is particularly instructive. In his stimulating essay ‘What
democracy requires of the media’, Curan articulates five key roles of the media that
can be particularly applied to news media: (i) it should represent various organized
groups, (ii) as open forum, it should facilitate debates of ideas and activism, (iii) it
should manage the generated conflict by promoting dialogue and reciprocity (iv) it
should act as a watchdog both on state and non state forms of power, and (v) it
should empower citizens with variety of balanced information. Curan (2010)
envisages a media system where there is division of labour among different media
and argues that ‘media organized in different ways, doing different kinds of
journalism, can make different contributions to the functioning of democracy’ (p.55).
Underlying such positive and normative expectations from news media is an
acknowledgement of news media’s power and authority in modern democracies. This
is also drawn from the implicit idea that news is a public good, an essential public
utility service, that needs to be delivered seriously in the ‘public interest’ by

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journalists in contemporary democracies that itself thrives on informed citizenry. A

closely related approach is also to look at the role of journalists vis-a-vis news in a
democracy. McQuail, Graber and Norris (2008) note of two broad conventional
versions here: one that sees news as an objective and trustworthy account of reality,
reported in a dispassionate manner by professionals who are ready to play an
adversary role vis-a-vis government; the other sees news not as independent of
politics but as one with basic political values and beliefs. The former is often referred
to as ‘objective journalism’ and the latter ‘advocacy journalism’. It can be reasonably
argued that public interest ideals require journalists and media systems to adopt
elements from both the models. Before we proceed further, it is important that we
understand the theoretical concept of public interest and its application in news
media.

4. Public Interest and News

The concept of public interest, as such, is heavily contested and needs qualification.
Held (1970) articulates two main versions of what constitutes public interest. At one
end, in the context of news, is the ‘majoritarian’ view that equates public interest with
pleasing the majority of consumers in the news market by giving them what it wants.
At the other end is ‘unitarian’ or ‘absolutist’ view where the public interest is decided
by reference to some single dominant value or ideology that itself is decided by
guardians or experts leading to a paternalistic system. In between the two extremes
there are alternatives, but none offers a clear guidance. It is possible that public
interest of the unitarian order gets transformed into that of majoritarian one over a
period of time due to proactive and sustained efforts of the news media in generating
public’s sense of need for what is supplied by it. Citizen’s hunger for news on the
political developments during India’s freedom movement is an astute case in point. In
contemporary era, however, a judicious blend of both the majoritarian and the
absolutist versions coupled with ad hoc judicial determinations is believed to be an
acceptable public interest media model today. Such a blending however differs
across nations and societies.

Let us examine what exactly constitutes public interest in the context of

contemporary news and media. Denis McQuail (2005) lists out at least 10 criteria of
public interest with respect to news in a democracy. These can be succinctly
categorized into three broad typologies: media structure, media service and media
restrictions. These are listed in table 1.

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Table 1: Main public interest criteria and requirements of news in democracies

Media structure & Kinds of service Restrictions

operational
conditions

Media Freedom Support for maintaining Respecting the

public order right of individuals
 Freedom to report
freely and  Duty to assist authority
independently at times of grave
 Freedom to receive the external threats, actual
media of their choice war, extreme internal
conflict or violent terrorist
acts, ordinary crime

Plurality of ownership Support for democratic Harm to society

process
 Opposed to
concentration of news  Covering full, fair and
media ownership & reliable information on
monopoly of control
public matters
 Giving access to many
voices in the society
 Facilitate the
participation of citizens in
social and political life,

Diversity of information, Quality of cultural provision Harm to

opinion and cultural individuals
content  Issues of moral and
decency
 Reflect diversity of the  Respect the dominant
society values and moral
 Should be open to new standards of the society,
movement and ideas
and its traditional valued
and give reasonable
access to small culture
minorities  Give space to minority
arts and culture and
support original and
creative production

Meeting the international

obligations

Source: Adapted from McQuail (2005), p.165-168

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Implicit in McQuail’s idea of public interest is the argument that media, and news in
particular, is like a double edged sword – it has immense potential to serve the
greatest public good if it fulfills these criteria; great risks are at stake when it does
not. Even as one would be tempted to romanticize the ideal role of media as the
torchbearer of public interest in a democracy as hitherto described, we need to be
realistic in acknowledging that news does not operate in a vacuum. News production
is a cultural process that cannot be separated from its social, economic, political and
organizational environments. You would have studied this aspect in detail in an
earlier module. For our present purpose, it will suffice to reiterate here that news is a
cumulative function of these environments which differ from nation to nation and
change over a period of time within the same nation. There is a general opinion,
however, that increasing commercialization of news business, reliance on advertising
revenue, prodigious growth of the media sector leading to cutthroat competition,
deregulation of the news sector both in terms of allowing FDI in the sector and
allowing private players, particularly in the TV news market, among many other
factors, balk the news media from discharging its public interest functions. In other
words, there is a serious conflict of interest between that of the majority on the one
hand, and on the other that of the media and those who seek to covertly promote
their private interest through it.

A vibrant democracy requires that multiple opinions emerge in the public discourse,
these are intensely debated and some form of reasoned consensus ultimately
emerge. News media, as Curan (2005) also argues, should play a proactive role in
facilitating this process. Scholars have pointed out that this function of news media is
seriously undermined in contemporary societies even as news media continue to
have a global upsurge. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky (1988), in their
compelling examination of how news media ‘manufactures’ consent through
‘propaganda’, lists out five mandatory set of successive ‘news filters’ that every news
has to pass through before the public receives it. These filters are: (i) concentrated
media ownership and their profit orientation, (ii)advertising as primary income source,
(iii) reliance on information provided by government, business and experts, (iv) Flak
(i.e., negative responses to media programmes) as a means of disciplining the
media; and (v) anti left ideology on news coverage. Herman and Chomsky’s argue
that even as private media, otherwise free from formal censorship, portray
themselves as spokesman for general community interest, news that is ultimately
churned out are destined to marginalize dissent and promote the government and
dominant private interests. Their implicit idea here is about how journalistic
processes themselves are used, often inadvertently, to prevent audiences from
accessing diverse information and critically thinking about facts, opinions and
meanings presented to them. There is an additional threat when politicians and
political parties either own news media houses or have significant stake in them as is
a growing trend in India today.

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The issue of progressive depletion of journalistic ethics has also come in for scathing
attacks worldwide .in recent times. An investigative documentary on paid news
syndrome based on investigations by the Press Council of India (2011), for instance,
encapsulates this reality well. It would be fruitful to view this documentary ‘Brokering
News’ available on YouTube to understand how even eminent journalists and media
houses engage in an unholy nexus with politicians, corporate interest groups,
entertainment and sport industries to produce ‘fake news’ and advertorials and how
public interest ideals are grossly undermined in the process. Unethical practices like
blackmailing politicians for money in lieu of coverage, prevalent practice of ‘private
treatise’ where companies offer shares to media houses for ad spaces are indicators
that do not augur well for the news media sector vis- a vis its responsibilities in a
democracy. Various commentators and scholars have articulated how corruption in
the Indian media is seriously undermining democracy and public interest issues
(Guha Thakurta, 2011; Guha Thakura & Reddy, 2011; Raman, 2009)

5. Democracy and Commoditization of News

Does commoditization and commercialization of news then necessarily result in a

democratic deficit? The response is not as simple as it ostensibly appears to be as
there are varied opinions on it. German philosopher Jurgen Habermas (2001), in his
often cited treatise ‘Structural transformation of the public sphere’, had argued that
the introduction of modern day commercial media in politics results in degradation of
‘public sphere’ that otherwise facilitates public discourses on vital issues concerning
the public – a discourse that is otherwise so vital for vibrancy of a democracy. Implicit
in this line of argument is the idea that the commercial logic of maximizing sales
demands that news contents be depoliticized and de-intellectualized.

Contesting such a claim, Sevanti Ninan (2007), in her study of Hindi press in north
India, argues that advertising and incentive driven marketing of the Hindi Press since
early 1990s, in fact, has effectively led to a creation of new cultural product that
people would want to consume – a blend of national and international news, local
news supplements, crime, magazine supplements, religious and cultural news. This
had led to new civic squares in town and villages where ‘local gentry, local
governance and local crime competed for attention’ like never before (p.20). The
emergence of multi edition newspapers and excessive localization, she argues, had
serious social and political implications – both positive and negative, but one cannot
discount the fact that it reshaped the individual citizen’s sense of belonging and
identity. As Ninan notes of what she calls ‘reinvention’ of the public sphere in north
Indian villages and towns:

Its commercialization of the election process, its democratization of access to

its pages, and the resulting inclusiveness of the news universe, its revival of

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dialect and its self-conscious reassertion of tradition in order to win over the
mass reader, were all processes within this reinvention. (P.26)

In a similar vein, Nalin Mehta (2009) argues about the rich democratic dividends that
the 24 –hour television news has yielded in India. He posits that deliberative Indian
democracy was greatly enhanced due to the exponential growth of private news
channels in the country since late 1990s. He reasons to say that television’s
coverage of current affairs and political issues through various programming genres
like regular talk shows, studio debates, live public debates outside , political satires,
interviews in their various formats, daily opinion polls, citizen journalism, etc. has
greatly extended the idea of ‘argumentative India’ that Amartya Sen characterize
traditional Indian society with. Mehta argues that by animating argumentation and
dialogue and ‘combining it with the language of liberal democracy and the spectacle
of television’ (p.39), television news channels brought politics to the common man as
never before and have greatly invigorated democratic ideals.

Such a line of argument that credits the news media’s role in democratizing politics,
however, does not go uncontested. The implication of news on public interest and
democracy is to be assessed not only on the basis of accessibility to news, but also
on the basis of its contents and coverage. We have earlier referred to the argument
on depolitisation of news. A major means to achieve this is by making news
increasingly entertaining; this is particularly true in the case of television news. In
fact, as Daya Kishan Thussu (2007) rightly points out in his book News as
entertainment: The rise of global infotainment, such ‘entertainment’ is a diversionary
tactic to draw the attention of the public away from the given harsh realities of neo-
liberalism. Citing the example of what he calls ‘Bollywoodisation’ of Television news
in India (p.91), Thussu argues that increasing trends towards infotainment – soft
news, life style, celebrities, cinema, crime, cricket – has diluted and debased news
and public interest. Thus even as more and more people have a chance to
participate as news consumers such participation does not add much value to
democracy. Curan (2005) however differs with this opinion. He argues that certain
social issues are best delivered through soft news genres which are packaged with
doses of fiction and entertainment. However, he cautions that if ‘coverage and
analysis of public affairs is eclipsed by entertainment, democracy becomes starved
and anorexic’ (p.136).

Mass media news has predominantly remained urban centric and event oriented
catering largely to issues that matter to the affluent. India’s case is an astute
example. As Mudgal (2011) demonstrates, through his study of six highest circulated
English and Hindi dailies in India, the country’s national dailies devote only a
‘minuscule proportion of their total coverage (about 2 %) to rural India’s issues, crisis

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and anxieties’ (p.92). This is despite the fact that most of India is rural. Television
scores over the print in this respect. In a critical examination of television news media
in India Somnath Batabyal (2011) articulate how television news is primarily targeted
at the affluent section of the audience who could be sold to the advertisers and to
that extent even the television journalists in India are recruited from the wealthy and
privileged backgrounds to act as conduit between advertisers and intended
consumers. Such requisite profile of journalists finds resonance in the relatively
serious and matured Indian print media as well. Citing a 2006 CSDS report on the
reality that news on dalits in Indian media are excluded, J. Balasubramaniam (2001)
articulates that 90% of decision-makers in the English language print media and 79%
in television were from the ‘upper caste’. It is then obvious that the constitution of
news media industry has a significant implication on the type of news covered and on
the way it is produced. Question is raised about whose interests are attended to in
the news and at what cost. It is apparent, as Batyabal (2011) also argues, that
despite the mushrooming of television new channels in India, content remains largely
unvaried. Critics have argued that the Murdhochisation of the Indian press has
undermined the news media’s role as a ‘responsible institution that disseminates
information and promotes debates [….]’ (as cited in Batabyal, 2011). This is
particularly true of television news as bulk of the population is symbolically
annihilated into silence.

Such a critique on television news is not peculiar to India. In matured news media
markets like that of the America, television news has been blamed for turning the
nation into an ‘Alzheimer nation, unaware of its own or anyone else’s past, ignorant
of its own or anyone else’s present’ (John Simpson of the BBC, as cited in Batyabal,
2011, p.65). Robert McChesney’s (1999/2007) disdain for contemporary media has
been so severe that he considered it as a ‘significant antidemocratic force’ in the
United States and to varying degrees worldwide. While it is difficult to discern a
common global pattern of media-driven democracy (Mezzoleni & Schulz, 1999), it is
reasonable to be generally skeptic of the contribution of news and news media to
democracy and public interest agenda. Scholars have demonstrated that despite the
expanding news media market globally there is no significant rise in the turnout for
elections – admittedly an important though not a perfect barometer of democracy. In
fact in countries like the US, turnout in election have been plummeting since the last
30 years (McChesney 1999/2007). Similarly, in India’s case, it has been argued that
there has been no correlation between the prodigious growth of 24-hour satellite
news channels during the last two odd decades and the turnout in elections during
the period (Mehta, 2009).

6. Digital Technologies, Alternate Media and Democracy

Our discussion will remain incomplete if we do not touch upon the significance of
digital media (including social media) and other forms of alternative media in both

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promoting and subverting public interest in a democracy. Internet technology,

particularly web 2.0 has opened up huge potential for individuals and groups to
generate and disseminate ‘news’ to the world. Contemporary history bears testimony
of its potential in organizing and sustaining social movements by societies across the
world (Castel, 1996) and in highlighting news that otherwise would have never come
on mainstream news media for obvious reasons. At the same time, apprehensions
have been raised about the risks associated with these unregulated flow of
information as the new media often turns out to be a platform for promoting hate
speech, fake news, terrorism, intergroup conflict, etc. An interesting panel discussion
on Rajya Sabha TV, (2016) is illuminating in this context. On the other hand, small
and alternative/community media have been demonstrated to foster democracy,
lending voice to the voiceless and empowering them. Digital technologies and their
convergence have facilitated the process further. A classic example is that of CG Net
Swara in India, an experiment carried out amongst the tribal of Chhattisgarh and
Madhya Pradesh (see Mahaprashasta, 2011). Since these aspects merit separate
treatment and have been covered in subsequent modules, we do not intend to dwell
further into it here.

7. Conclusion

Media functions best in an enabling, liberal and free economy, but it is this freedom
that has turned the media today into a profit driven advertising oriented business, one
that privileges private interest over public interest. Given the significant position that
mass media occupies in the totality of individual’s and society’s life in the
contemporary era, and given the tremendous inherent potentials of news to further
democracy and public interest (and also conversely undermine it), it is important that
news should be freed from all the impeding factors that prevent it from discharging its
public interest responsibilities. While this may sound idealistic and impractical in the
given political economy setup in which news media functions, it is not impossible. A
few points need to be considered to correct the situation. First, suitable approaches
need to be adopted by nations for reconciling the needs of the market and
democracy. As Curan (2005) succinctly points out, these can be achieved through
four main strategies: (i) public service broadcasting (through public regulation or
ownership), (ii) social market policies (antimonopoly law, regulations, and minority
media subsidies), (iii) the strengthening of media staff rights and influence, and (iv)
fostering of a public culture among journalists. The role and intervention of public
service broadcasting has today become all the more relevant in a news-media
ecology overwhelmingly dominated by commercial media houses; this assumes
particular significance in an era where uncontrolled and unverified ‘news’ on the
internet including social networking sites often pose serious threats to larger public
interest. To these strategies may be added the twin idea of promoting media literacy
movement and the need for media reform movement. Media literacy movement
privileges the need to develop ability among the masses to critically reflect on the
media contents they access and help them decide which media to avoid and which to

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use in ways that best serve their purposes. Media reform movement engages in
advocating for reform of government policy and regulation of media in order to
change the very structure of media institutions and for opening new channels of
communication independent of both state and corporate control. It is obvious that the
need for such media activism has become all the more relevant like never before in
the interest of the public and for democracy in contemporary societies.

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