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MIA0010.1177/1329878X18782987Media International AustraliaTurner

Article

Media International Australia

The media and democracy in 1­–12

© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1329878X18782987
https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X18782987
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Graeme Turner
The University of Queensland, Australia

Abstract
In the mass media era, the role of the media was universally regarded as fundamental to the
proper functioning of the democratic state: the media’s capacity to provide information freely to
all citizens ensured they had equal access to the democratic process. There were many, though,
who registered concern at the top-down, government-led and highly concentrated structures
of power embedded here; it was easy to demonstrate how the flow of information could be
manipulated and the power of the media abused. Consequently, the arrival of the digital era
seemed to radically modify that power relation for the better. The initial enthusiasm, though, has
been challenged by what, a decade or two later, we have ended up with: a digital landscape that
does indeed offer unprecedented access to information, in ways that have been transformative
– but that is also awash with socially regressive content: fake news, hate speech revenge porn and
so on. In this article, I want to discuss some aspects of what we have got from the digital era so
far, with a particular focus on the changing relationship between the media and democracy – and
within that, the role of news, information and the practice of journalism.

Keywords
democracy, journalism, media, public interest, the digital era

In the mass media era, the role of the media was universally regarded as fundamental to the proper
functioning of the democratic state: the media’s capacity to provide information freely to all citi-
zens ensured they had equal access to the democratic process. In this article, I consider certain
aspects of how this role has fared as we have moved into the digital era, before considering the
so-called ‘crisis in journalism’ as among a number of factors that highlight the need for a more
committed engagement – from governments, the industry, and policy-makers – with the principle
of regulating the ‘reinvented media’ (Turner, 2016) in the public interest.
My starting points for this discussion come from a couple of days in June 2017 when three
media items caught my attention because, together, they appeared to encapsulate certain aspects of

Corresponding author:
Graeme Turner, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, The University of Queensland, 4th Floor, Forgan
Smith Tower, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia.
Email: graeme.turner@uq.edu.au
2 Media International Australia 00(0)

what has become of the media as an industry, as a field of representation, and as an institution, over
the period during which we have transitioned into the digital era. The first of these reports on an
incident in early 2017 when a text message and photograph had been circulating through WhatsApp
among the Hispanic community in northeast Miami which claimed that Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) agents were hauling undocumented migrants off to detention centres in buses
– seemingly the implementation of Trump’s ‘deportation force’. Panicked callers turned to the
information source they trusted most – Univision, the Spanish language television network.
Univision’s journalists hit the streets, while their fact-checkers analysed the photograph of the ICE
bus in action. The reporters soon learned that there was no deportation sweep under way and that
the photograph was from 2014. They pumped out Facebook and Twitter posts debunking the
rumour and circulated a corrective television package for Univision stations across the country.
They could do this because they saw the need and because they were ready. Several years ear-
lier, Univision had responded to what they saw as the dangers of a declining commitment to the
positive role the media could play in support of their community. They increased their investment
in original reporting and the provision of information. They set up new investigative and documen-
tary units, as well as new units for podcasts, mobile video and informational graphics. Over a
period of 2 years, during which large numbers of journalists were being laid off elsewhere,
Univision made 75 new hires (Rutenberg, 2017).
A few days before that story was published, Australian actress Rebel Wilson succeeded in her
defamation action against a predatory journalism outlet which had trashed her reputation in the
interests of ‘having a bit of fun’. She was awarded more than 4 million dollars in damages for being
defamed by a series of articles in the Australian magazine Woman’s Day that claimed she had lied
about her age and her real name to deceive her fans. The articles were based on information that
had been investigated in 2013, at which time Woman’s Day, according to the emails cited during
the defamation hearing, had come to the conclusion that Wilson ‘wasn’t lying as such’ and that the
story was ‘too problematic’ (i.e., untrue) to run with. In 2015, however, Wilson had a new film
coming out and so the magazine decided they would do the story anyway. ‘Keep it vague’, the edi-
tor instructed, ‘don’t be too mean, and you’ll probably get away with it’. Undermining the profes-
sional reputation of an actress, acting on false information from a source who was not prepared to
go public, for this editor, was a ‘fun story’. Wilson disagreed, sued, and won.1 She said at the time,

far too often I feel the tabloid magazines and the journalists who work for them don’t abide by professional
ethics. Far too often I feel that their conduct can only be described as disgusting and as disgraceful. I’m
glad, very glad, that the jury has agreed with me. (Barry, 2017)

My third example is a cartoon which was published in The Guardian Online on the same day as
the Univision story (Rowson, 2017). It depicted the event in which a van was driven into a group
of Muslims gathered outside the Finsbury Park mosque in London; this was a deliberate and
racially targeted attack which resulted in the death of one person and injuries to a number of others.
(The driver has since between sentenced to life imprisonment.) On one side of the van the cartoon-
ist has inscribed ‘Read The Daily Mail and The Sun’. The accusation made here is that the forces
which fuelled the racial hatred expressed in this crime were those of the tabloid news media.2
I am offering these as points of reference for three types of contemporary journalism practice,
each of them reflecting a different set of implied relations to the public interest. The first is an
example of journalism practice that is committed to accurately informing the citizenry and prior-
itising the public interest – assumptions once central to the view that a responsible and ethical
media was one of the fundamental components of a functioning democracy. The value of this form
of media practice is to the community. In the second example, the Rebel Wilson case, we have a
Turner 3

brand of journalism which locates itself primarily within the entertainment business. Here, the
performance of ‘news entertainment’,3 while located discursively and institutionally within the
domain of journalism, is used to generate profit with little of the traditional journalistic regard for
the public interest or corporate responsibility. Notwithstanding the constant invocation of journal-
istic principles by outlets such as this, the ethical and ontological lines that distinguish fact from
fiction – or, more commonly, rumour – disappear, and any value the story generates is simply com-
mercial. The third example points to those media proprietors who take this one step further and
exploit their capacity to generate anger, fear and mistrust as a commercial attribute: this is usually
criticised and also to some degree depoliticised by the use of the term ‘sensationalism’, which
reduces it to a choice of presentational style. This type of media practice is overwhelmingly focused
on commercial or market outcomes, but it is also exploited by some proprietors as a tool of political
power that is nonetheless commonly authorised by reference to the public interest.
In terms of the traditional or, perhaps now rather, the ‘ideal’ model of the relation between the
media and democracy, the gap between the two extremes of examples 1 and 3 is substantial.
However, it is probably the Univision example which is the most surprising because it is running
so clearly against the grain of the currently dominant tendencies and practices of mainstream jour-
nalism both offline and online. It is worth reminding ourselves how we got to this point: where the
most democratically engaged and pro-social model of media practice of these three, the one most
explicitly committed to the public value of journalism, is also the most anomalous.
The context from which these models of practice emerged is dominated by the media’s globali-
sation and commercialisation, to some extent assisted by widespread strategies of deregulating
commercial media, as well as the decline in government support for public broadcasting. While not
universally the case, but certainly in Australia and in many other Western democracies, the connec-
tion between the media and the public interest had already been weakened well before the digital
era. Citizens had become markets, the corporate interests of commercial media proprietors had
come to dominate the policy agenda, and those interests were increasingly articulated to a transna-
tional corporate footprint and a neoliberal politics, hence the enthusiasm which greeted the devel-
opment of the online media environment. Here, it seemed, was a sphere of media consumption,
production and distribution that was not/could not be controlled by the major global media corpo-
rations. With new modes of access to the media, user-generated content and social media, the
capacity to ‘produse’, to copy and to share, many claimed that the power of Big Media had been
significantly reduced (Bruns, 2008; Shirky, 2008). In what was perhaps the most widely circulated
catch-phrase, journalism professor, Jay Rosen (2006), announced that power had now been
reclaimed by ‘the people formerly known as the audience’.
I am among those who were critical of this position at the time and of the manner in which so
many academic accounts of the arrival of the digital were unduly influenced by industry spin
(Andrejevic, 2013; Miller, 2007; Turner, 2010, 2012). Jim McGuigan (2009) has suggested that
media, communications and cultural studies’ reluctance to subject industry spin from the digital
entrepreneurs to the customary critical scrutiny may have been related to the fact that it was gener-
ated by ‘cool capitalism’ rather than by, say, Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp. It is certainly the case
that the headline disrupters of the digital era were seen to constitute a progressive, even empower-
ing, turn in commercial media and information services, and thus, their promises and predictions
were given greater credence than media studies would ever have offered to the proprietors of tra-
ditional media.
There are some areas, I should acknowledge, where you could argue that the promises have
been kept – although they are not in the area of news, information and journalism that concern me
here. Stuart Cunningham and David Craig (in press), for instance, suggest that we need to distin-
guish between what happened in the news and information sector and what happened in relation to
4 Media International Australia 00(0)

what they call social media entertainment (SME). In their analysis of SME – that is, user-generated
online entertainment – Cunningham and Craig describe a hybrid sector of pro-am production, dis-
tribution and consumption that has remained largely outside the control of the mainstream media
companies. The pivotal roles played by YouTube and the multichannel networks in this, as well as
YouTube’s gradual transformation into something like a traditional television network, do encour-
age some qualification and nuancing of that proposition, I believe. (In that respect, Aymar
Christian’s (2018) new book Open TV provides a usefully complementary account.) That said, it is
overwhelmingly in the area of news and information where the dream of online democratisation
has most categorically turned into a nightmare.
What the digital era has so far produced confirms the view that the claims for democratisation
and empowerment were, to say the least, unduly optimistic. As I have argued elsewhere (Turner,
2006, 2010), while there was certainly a demoticisation of the media, the open access it provided
was always just as likely to facilitate the spread of challenges to democracy as the free exchange
of liberal views. Predictions that the proliferation of news blogs and social media platforms would
revolutionise journalism, expanding the supply of news and information, have not been fulfilled:
the Univision example stands out because it is so much of an exception. The number of journalists
employed, in most places, is in decline and the rising number of freelancers working under precari-
ous conditions constitutes a major challenge to those calling for better, more courageous and more
independent journalism; paradoxically, perhaps, the absorption of journalists into the ‘gig econ-
omy’ weakens their capacity to produce precisely the kind of journalism we need.4 Furthermore,
the many news blogs and social media platforms which deal with news largely do so as sites of
remediation; in general, as well, they have focused upon comment, opinion, and rumour rather than
on original reporting or the development of new sources of information.
The crucial element here has been the thoroughgoing commercialisation of the digital media
space and thus the role played by advertising. While there are some other models in play, and I will
turn to them later on, the competition for attention required as a means of securing viable levels of
advertising revenue has ruled the digital space and has overwhelmingly determined what practices,
what principles and what content prevail. Monetisation has been the enemy of democratisation.
The battle for attention – and the strategies used to compete in that battle – certainly attracted audi-
ences, and it also skewed the character of what content was made available: towards entertainment,
towards provocative, shareable content and so on. The battle has also been highly attritional. As a
result, the political economy of the digital world has become increasingly concentrated and the
power of Facebook, Google and Amazon, in particular, has grown dramatically. Mathew Hindman’s
(2009) critique of ‘the myth of digital democracy’ noted almost 10 years ago that the degree of
corporate concentration online had already outstripped what had occurred in the traditional media;
as online entities come and go, and as the powerful acquire the weak, this tendency has only accel-
erated in the intervening years.
The implications of this situation have now become a key public concern – even among those
who might once have lined up alongside the digital optimists. The fact that these platforms, not-
withstanding their power and influence, are not bound by any of the ethical or regulatory con-
straints of traditional journalism means that they have been able to compete for attention
untrammelled by regard for, or regulatory protections for, accuracy, privacy or journalism ethics.
Even key figures in the development of the online economy, such as Pierre Omidyar (2017), the
founder of eBay, have registered alarm at this; he has described social media as undermining
‘transparency, accountability, and trust in our democracy’ (2017). Digital media producer and
Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC, Jonathan Taplin’s (2017) polemical book
Move Fast and Break Things has the subtitle ‘How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered
Culture and Undermined Democracy’. The Australian news magazine, The Monthly, devoted the
Turner 5

cover of its July 2017 issue to a piece arguing that ‘Facebook is killing our media, not democra-
tising it’ (Fiek, 2017). (At this point, it is worth noting that such comments could be accused of
being as just as subject to hyperbole and exaggeration as the statements from the digital opti-
mists.) Even in the United States where resistance to government intervention is the default set-
ting, the ‘R’ word was being raised on mainstream television: Donald Trump’s favourite TV
host, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough of Morning Joe, has suggested that it was now time to regulate
Facebook: ‘Tell me’, he said, ‘at what point does the federal government step in and say, “You
start handling yourself responsibly or we will step in”?’ (Mandese, 2017). And, of course, as this
essay was out for review, we had the eruption of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which pro-
voked widespread calls across the political spectrum for Facebook to be regulated (McNamee
and Parakilas, 2018) – with some even asking whether this was to be the ‘beginning of the end’
for the social media giant (Bogle, 2018).
It is probably fair to say that there is now something of a consensus on what is going wrong and
a menu of issues cited within public and academic debate: a decline in the quality and accessibility
of information; the commercial and political use and misuse of personal data; the separation of
political debate from authoritative evidence, from the national or community interest broadly con-
ceived, and from the structures of moderation ensuring accuracy, privacy and civility; the corrosion
of institutional authority; the commercialisation of all aspects of media performance, and the pri-
oritisation of the commercial over the public interest. And it is widely argued now, especially in
response to the steady emergence of information about interventions in the US elections in 2016,
that what Toby Miller (2007) has described as a ‘democratic deficit’ (p. 17) is not just a problem
for journalism, or for the media in general, but for a properly functioning democracy.
It has taken longer than one would have hoped, however, for this consensus to emerge, and there
are reasons for that. A core reason is that in most democratic countries, the mythology of the open
Internet was so powerful that the application of ‘light touch’ regulation was regarded as a positive
– a welcome scaling down of the exercise of power. What we might now, perhaps, see as a mistake
was then seen as enabling and progressive. It is also important to remember, however, just how
modest were the beginnings of such giant corporations as Facebook and therefore why their regula-
tion initially would have seemed totally unnecessary. It is hard to imagine that any of those involved
at the conception of any of the early social media platforms, for instance, ever expected to achieve
the scale and influence they now enjoy. Early on, then, there was every reason to see this as some-
thing like the flourishing of an online cottage industry rather than the beginnings of a global oli-
gopoly.5 Indeed, that early history continues to be invoked even now whenever regulation is
proposed: those resisting such regulation claim that it would threaten the innovativeness and crea-
tivity of the technology industries.
There were other considerations at this early stage, however, which also played their part. What
was seen as the global and borderless character of the digital world was cited as evidence that
nationally based regulation was neither desirable nor viable; this aligned quite neatly with the
widespread resistance, among many humanities and social science academics, to what they saw as
the inherent conservatism and exclusivity of nationalism as a political force. Against that tendency
was a mythology of openness constructed through the ideological alliance between San Francisco
counter-culture communitarianism and Silicon Valley libertarianism (Turner, F. 2006) which also
made calls for regulation look regressive. As time went on, however, and as the commercial power
and social influence of digital platforms (social media, search engines, retail) began to evolve,
there was another crucial strategy which facilitated their development into the kinds of enterprises
they are now: their successful representation of themselves as technology companies, rather than
media companies. As telecommunications service providers, they were not to be held responsible
for the content they carried. Furthermore, since they were based on peer-to-peer communication,
6 Media International Australia 00(0)

they were not comparable to the traditional mass media, such as television broadcasters.
Consequently, they did not fall under the oversight of media regulatory regimes and were not sub-
ject to any of their obligations or constraints.
Napoli and Caplan’s (2017) recent article follows earlier work such as that of Tarleton Gillespie
(2010) in addressing the long history of social media companies such as Facebook, ‘insisting they
are not news organizations, or even media companies, at all’ (Napoli and Caplan, 2017: 1) in order
to be treated as technology companies. Napoli and Caplan’s article provides what is probably the
most thorough point-by-point takedown to date of the technology companies’ claims. It also out-
lines the rationale for these claims being made in the first place: that is, to ensure that these com-
panies are ‘sheltered from many of the negative obligations (i.e. obligations to police/protect
against the circulation of certain types of speech) associated with media companies’ (Napoli and
Caplan, 2017: 16), as well as ‘more intensive government oversight, in the form of affirmative
obligations to serve the public interest and more stringent regulation in areas such as concentration
of ownership’ (Napoli and Caplan, 2017: 8). Napoli and Caplan (2017) argue that the platforms’
success in defining themselves in this way has been fundamental to their development:

… part of the way that these companies were able to evolve into dominant media firms is by circumventing
the media legal and regulatory frameworks that may have inhibited their rapid expansion and/or imposed
more legal liability and/or social responsibility costs along the way. And the discursive strategy discussed
here likely plays a role in facilitating this circumvention. (p. 9)

Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance before the US Congress may well have marked the point at
which this strategy had reached its use-by date.

Journalism and the public interest in the digital era

Journalism has been one of the big losers in this, notwithstanding all the hopes for so-called ‘citi-
zen journalism’ and the proliferation of news sites online. The distinction between fact and opinion
has been seriously blurred, right across the news media, and the authority of an ethical journalism
has been devalued by the fact that so much of what presents itself as journalism today does not
conform to any sort of ethical standards. The battle for attention has created a fertile environment
for fake news. As the editor of one high-profile online news blog, The Daily Beast, has commented,
the partisan media in the United States focused on a ‘narrow but intense niche audience, and the
only way to keep them engaged was to keep them addicted to a diet of anger and anxiety’. That, he
said, ‘is where the hate news starts to seep in’ (Sass, 2017). Mark Andrejevic (2013) has argued that
in the battle for attention, the category of news and information has been reduced to its discursive
characteristics so that the performance of news becomes just another genre of entertainment – with
consequences for the authority, credibility and status of news generally. What actually constitutes
news – even for more traditional outlets such as the broadcasting networks – has changed, as every
day it gets closer to merging with the category of rumour. Naomi Klein (2017), in No Is Not
Enough, quotes a report which claims that during the last US presidential election, the three major
nightly news network shows combined spent a total of just 32 minutes on issue coverage, and the
rest was spent on ‘the reality show of who said what about whom, and who was leading which poll
where’ (p. 51). Americans, and indeed the rest of us, are now living with the consequences of this.
On the more positive side, what has come to be called the ‘crisis of journalism’ (Curran, 2010,
2011) may have begun to generate something of a recovery in the industry’s own sense of its proper
social function. Reports of the industry talking to itself now cite a growing recognition of the impor-
tance of a journalism that does more than generate a profit and that delivers benefits to society. Some
industry leaders have highlighted the need to ‘invest directly in quality news producers’, to ‘insist
Turner 7

on a fact-based debate’, to ‘call bullshit’ and to ‘make important stories interesting’ (Sass, 2017).
This is from Vincent Peyregne, presenting findings from a global study of world press trends to the
69th World News Media Congress in 2017; ‘we used to trade in attention. But trust is our new cur-
rency. Any decline in trust erodes the foundation of our business: credible, first-rate journalism’
(Loechner, 2017). It is significant that this comment was in response to a major shift in global news-
paper revenues in which reader-based revenue (US$86 billion in 2016) outstripped advertising rev-
enue (US$68 billion), that reflected what now seems to be a fundamental shift in newspapers’
business model (Loechner, 2017). The shift to reader-based revenue has seen the global media
building loyal audiences around high-quality journalism, Jack Loechner (2017) reports; a particular
segment of this audience is the young, who are prepared to pay for journalism online ‘provided they
see the publication as a reliable source of news and bond with its mission and purpose’.
Public support for independent quality journalism also seems to be growing in some areas.
While programmes of public subvention for news and information services go back to at least the
1970s in France (Smith, 1977), and are not uncommon elsewhere in Europe and Scandinavia, they
are now being proposed as correctives to the current situation in new locations. Using funds gener-
ated by the sale of spectrum used by old public media stations, the New Jersey legislature has
invested in a consortium to bolster public interest journalism and a focus on local issues. ProPublica
has introduced a 3-year programme to employ a fulltime investigative journalist in up to six news
organisations located in US cities with populations under 1 million (Guaglione, 2017). The
Guardian has set up a non-profit venture in the United States, aiming at tapping philanthropic
organisations for financial help to report on issues including human rights and climate change. And
in Australia, a Senate inquiry into the future of journalism considered (but regrettably did not
adopt) a proposal for a levy on the online platforms to be used to develop a fund to support not-for-
profit public interest journalism.
As more and more commentators talk about the Internet ‘destroying democracy’, and as more
and more advertisers reveal their sensitivity to public debates about the social and political impact
of the online giants who carry their advertising, a number of these giants are showing signs of
accepting the need for greater self-regulation. Both Twitter and Facebook have acknowledged they
need to do more to counter hate speech, incivility and political manipulation through, for instance,
fake news sites from Russia; this may have had something to do with the decline in Facebook usage
over 2016–2017 (Hutchinson, 2017), and it also reflects Twitter’s concern about its ongoing viabil-
ity as consumer and government scrutiny intensifies. Facebook is reported to have hired 10,000
fact-checkers to help distinguish material generated by bots, the identification of fake news sites
and so on. Self-regulation on this scale is not a simple matter, however, even if it were theoretically
possible for it to be done manually. Some of the strategies already undertaken in this regard have
highlighted the difficulties involved. In 2017, in what has become known as ‘Adpocalypse’,
YouTube was hit by a massive advertisers’ boycott of the platform, protesting at the manner in
which advertisements were partnered with content on the site. The monitoring and screening sys-
tem YouTube developed in response, as well as the changing policy settings for monetisation, seri-
ously impacted the SME producers and resulted in especially discriminatory outcomes for minority
content and producers such as those within the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and
queer) communities (Cunningham and Craig, in press).
While certainly welcome in both practical and symbolic terms, such developments and the
related initiatives mentioned earlier are only papering over the cracks. The more fundamental issue
for reconfiguring the relationship between the media and democracy for the digital era is how pol-
icy-makers should deal with the problem of regulating Facebook, Google, Amazon and the other
technology companies now operating as key components of the global media economy. The hard
truth is that the social consequences of the reinvention of the media have been far more diverse, far
8 Media International Australia 00(0)

more complicated, far more contradictory and far less pro-social than was originally envisaged. It is
time to acknowledge that this reinvention has resulted in the rise of large, powerful and unregulated
media companies whose activities generate a wide range of potential social, cultural and political
impacts, some of which at this point we can identify but do not sufficiently understand. That is the
predicament in which we find ourselves, as we consider how to design a regulatory regime for the
digital era that is shaped by a recommitment to protecting the public interest.
How should we go about it? That’s a large issue, and I can’t do it justice in the space remaining
– nor could I claim to have the answers we need. I want to make some observations, however,
about what we need to consider as we seek those answers. In his response to my presentation of an
earlier version of this article, Stephen Coleman (2017), whose most recent book Can the Internet
Strengthen Democracy? makes a powerfully persuasive case for the positive opportunity the
Internet represents for the rejuvenation of deliberative democracy,6 argued that my call for a
renewed commitment to regulation was aimed at the wrong target in that it was focused upon the
regulation of the technologies concerned. If I was correct in my analysis of the situation, he went
on, then the core problem is to do with the marketisation of the Internet, not the technologies them-
selves, and therefore any regulatory intervention should be aimed primarily at managing the mar-
ket in ways that protect the public interest. I accept the logic of that position and it does chime with
certain interventions that have already occurred in various jurisdictions. The approach taken by the
European Union as part of their Digital Single Market Strategy (Lewis, 2017), for instance, is one
of the most uncompromising and likely to be one of the more effective: it sets specific standards of
practice to be met by the digital platforms as the price of entry to their market and is clearly focused
on screening out fake news and what it describes as ‘illegal content’ (European Commission,
2017). A market of that scale can do this; notoriously, China has had such mechanisms in place for
a long time in the service of very different objectives, but these may be the first democratic juris-
dictions to seriously attempt it. Smaller national markets have less leverage to compel compliance,
however, and so this is not necessarily the ‘solution’ to the situation. Other options include impos-
ing a levy on social media and transnational streaming services as a form of support for the local
content industry (Quinn, 2017) or tweaking the algorithms used by streaming and online search
services to ensure high levels of visibility for local or national content. There are further examples
of initiatives which are using market-related mechanisms to produce pro-social outcomes else-
where that are not dissimilar to the frameworks currently used to regulate commercial broadcast
media in many jurisdictions – although without the traditional focus upon concentration and own-
ership. That latter issue, however, is not irrelevant in this context. A core source of the power of
Google, Facebook and Amazon is the fact they are effectively transnational monopolies. Targeting
these monopolies as anti-competitive, or disaggregating these companies – breaking up Facebook,
Instagram, and WhatsApp, for example – is not such a radical idea when viewed against the histo-
ries of anti-trust and anti-cartel legislation in Western market democracies over the years. It is hard
to imagine any government attempting to do something like this at the moment, nonetheless.
That said, I maintain the view that, in this case, we need to do more than regulate the market.
There are key concerns about the current relation between the media and democracy which are to
do with the specific capacities of some of the technologies involved in the reinvention of the media,
not just about the commercialisation of their applications. The secrecy surrounding how algorithms
work, for instance, and the lack of transparency about how private information is gathered and
repurposed are just two areas where there are legitimate questions about exactly how we should
view what it is these technologies are designed to do. These are not minor issues; the collection and
sale of private data is core business for Facebook, for instance, and the lack of transparency about
how this business is conducted is built into the technology. The Cambridge Analytica scandal has
demonstrated how, and on what scale, the data collected can be misused, raising the level of public
Turner 9

and political concern. The European Union, again, has taken the lead in attempting to address such
concerns through its General Data Protection Regulation regime which requires companies to
acquire explicit consent for data collection and use. The penalties for businesses breaching these
regulations include fines of up to €20 million or 4% of global turnover (Bogle, 2018).
Hopefully, we are becoming more aware of the danger of simply allowing whatever technical
affordance is in play to just ‘run’ without oversight or constraint as if it was inherently socially
neutral; certainly, such awareness has been raised in relation to, for instance, the growth of revenge
porn, online bullying, the grooming of targets for paedophilia and so on. Nonetheless, one of the
core defences of their business proposed by the likes of Google and Facebook is in fact based on
the automated nature of much of what they do: the ‘hands off’, ‘who are we to intervene?’, approach
is one of the ways in which the Internet giants have claimed to be corporately disinterested while
serving the customised interests of their consumers. Such a position – that these are value-free
platforms, driven by consumers’ choices, which should be allowed to participate in the social with-
out human intervention – is losing ground now. Taking its place is a more widespread recognition
of the need for a more focused, critical and pro-social scrutiny of what these technologies actually
do and how they are used. That is the scrutiny required if we make informed decisions about what
aspects of the reinvented media demand regulation and control in the public interest. We are not at
that point yet. The patterns of convergence and divergence which make up the contemporary media
environment are all too rarely surveyed as a set of interrelated and intersecting forces; rather than
approach them as the communications equivalent of an ecological system, we have tended to
examine them as separate species existing in specific habitats. The former task is getting much
more difficult, of course, given the scale involved and given the fact that researchers working in
media, cultural and communications studies reflect the same market fragmentation and genera-
tional divisions in terms of media consumption that we find in the broader population. Not all of us
working in media studies find ourselves using the full range of media technologies available; this
necessarily limits each of us in our capacity to understand how these technologies are experienced
by their users. For these and many other reasons, there is a lot of work for our disciplines to do:
examining the proliferating cultures of use that now obtain in the multiplatform environment, for
instance, or investigating specific platforms, portals or enterprises in order to understand more
precisely how the machinery of the algorithm responds to the data which feed it.
Notwithstanding Stephen Coleman’s challenge then, I take the view that we need to regulate
both the market and the technologies: we need to regulate the whole operation of an industry that
has gradually metamorphosed into something very different to what it originally appeared it would
be and now stands to constitute a significant chunk of the domain of the social. Given its power and
extent, and given the fact that we know it can do harm as easily as good, this industry needs to be
brought back into a closer alignment with the public interest: through mandated codes of practice,
legally enforceable constraints and obligations of social accountability (on, for instance, the edit-
ing, curation and provision of content). Germany is perhaps taking the lead in this direction so far,
with the passing of its Network Enforcement Act in January 2018. Under this legislation, online
platforms such as Google, Facebook and Twitter face fines of up to €50 million if they do not
remove ‘obviously illegal’ hate speech within 24 hours (Bornstein, 2018). Different strategies cur-
rently in play within various jurisdictions include some kind of affirmative levy or taxation regime
to fund domains of local or national public interest (such as independent investigative journalism)
that may be disadvantaged by these transnational corporations’ scale, influence and profitability.
The complexity of the task ahead, however, is underlined by the fact that we may need quite dif-
ferent regulatory arrangements to deal with fake news, or with the use of data, or with the obser-
vance of community standards in relation to hate speech revenge porn and so on. Furthermore,
whatever is designed will need a mix of agreed standards for self-regulation as well as for more
top-down mandated requirements.
10 Media International Australia 00(0)

All of that said, we found ways of constructing just this kind of multi-faceted regulatory regime
for television, radio and, to a lesser extent, print, in the past, although admittedly that was in a very
different time culturally and historically; also, much of what was initially established for these media
has been wound back as community standards have been perceived to change and as a more liberal
approach to regulation itself has been normalised. A regulatory regime for social media, moreover,
could well need to be on a scale that far exceeds anything that has been done before. More impor-
tantly, and here it differs from earlier media regulatory regimes, it will likely impinge on the rights of
individuals, not just those of media organisations. So, coming up with a regime that deals with such
considerations adequately is a daunting task. As we saw with the YouTube takedown, even activities
undertaken with good intentions can turn out to have negative consequences.
Notwithstanding the difficulties, the problem remains. These platforms exercise a powerful
social and political influence much as the traditional media were understood to do, but they are free
from the social, political and cultural constraints that regulators had to varying extents imposed on
the mass media. There is an urgent need to address this situation. The precondition for that happen-
ing, however, is the comprehensive recognition of the necessity of re-establishing some priority for
the public interest in the digital era. This is as necessary for those in politics, in policy and in the
academy as for those who manage the media industries. All of these groups need a better under-
standing of what the problems are and what needs to be done to address them before the policy-
makers can come up with appropriate strategies.
In Australia, let me say as I close, with the cosy relations between government and the com-
mercial broadcasters continuing to drive policy, with the prevailing attitude still about finding ways
to hogtie the digital disrupters in order to protect the favoured local moguls and with very little
curiosity from government about how to better understand what actually happens in this new media
environment, we are still a long way from that eventuality.

Acknowledgements
Early versions of this article were presented at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the
University of Queensland, the School of Media and Communications at the University of Leeds and the
Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. I would like to thank those who
attended these seminars and provided comments and suggestions; they have all fed into the development (and
hopefully, the improvement) of the article. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of the first
draft of this article for their helpful comments.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publi-
cation of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes
1. The scale of the damages awarded has been sucessfully currently being contested in court by Bauer
Media, supported by a range of other media organisations clearly concerned about the precedent this
decision will represent. Wilson has appealed this decision.
2. I should note that this was angrily refuted by, in particular, The Daily Mail who seemed to be arguing that
this was a case of mistaken identity: the real culprit, they suggest, was The MailOnline from which they
claim an institutional separation.
Turner 11

3. The first time I became aware of this formulation was when I encountered it in the masthead of the noto-
rious British tabloid, Sunday Sport. For those who have never encountered it, Sunday Sport was estab-
lished in 1986 and established a market for its trashy mix of topless women and clearly bogus ‘news’
stories such as ‘NASA Evidence that Kim Jong was an Alien’ – a handy reminder that ‘fake news’ did
not begin with the Internet and was not confined to The National Enquirer.
4. I am indebted to Penny O’Donnell for pointing this out to me. The change in labour relations for so many
journalists has not attracted much academic attention so far, but the incremental precarity of so much of
the profession is a crucial but, Penny O’Donnell argues, overlooked element in the narrative of what has
happened to journalism in recent years.
5. I would like to thank Chris Cheshire for reminding me of this aspect of the early history of the digital
start-ups.
6. Or, as he puts it, how ‘digital technologies, spaces and codes could play a significant role in facilitating
practices conducive to a more inclusive, respectful and deliberative democracy’ (p. 119).

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