Chapter 4 Flashcards
What is the statement about the case for supporting media as a critical component of development by James Wolfhensohn?
A free press is not a luxury. A free press is at the absolute core of equitable development, because if you cannot enfranchise poor people, if they do not have a right to expression, if there is no searchlight on corruption and inequitable practices, you cannot build the public consensus needed to bring about change.
What is the most revealing about that statement?
The fact that it fails to pin down the direct causal role of media development for development. Wolfhensohn’s statement is so well cited, because the case for media development is being made by such prominent figure in mainstream development.
What is the point of view of Pippa Norris?
The ideal roles of new media are as watchdog over the powerful; as agenda setters, calling attention to natural and human-caused disasters and humanitarian crises; and as gatekeepers, incorporating a diverse and balanced range of political perspectives and social sectors.
What is the primary function of the media in traditional liberal arguments about the democratic role of the press?
Act as a public watchdog – scrutinizing the activities of the state and other sources of power. According to this well-known ideal, the media should guard the public interest, protecting it from incompetence, corruption and misinformation by promoting transparency and accountability among the powerful.
Why is media described as the fourth state?
In this context, where media are providing a check and balance on the powerful in society – counterbalancing the power of the executive, legislative and judiciary. This is the primary logic behind the need for the media to be independent from the government – because once the media will become subject to regulation the assumption is that they will also lose their ability to be critical of those with power.
How this watchdog role can be fulfilled?
Through the work of investigative journalism, which can expose maladministration by public officials, corruption in the judiciary or scandals in the corporate sector.
How can the media fulfill their role as a watchdog in a more neutral way?
By providing routine, timely and accurate information about public affairs. This can help citizens to monitor the performance of governments in delivering basic services, for example.
What are the limitations to media to fulfill such a watchdog function?
There are real limitations to claims which unproblematically link media freedom directly to good governance and democracy in this way. The media’s impact is contingent upon other actors and processes. For investigative journalism to be effective, for example, it is not enough to simply expose wrongdoing. Other mechanisms of accountability, such as the judiciary, parliament and civil society, need to act if the powerful are to be held accountable.
Does the media act alone?
The media often do not act alone in exposing wrongdoing. While the watchdog role of the media may help to promote democratic accountability, so the institutional arrangements of democracy provide a hospitable environment for watchdog reporting. Democratic media do not, in and of themselves, create democracy. Democratic media need a democratic polity, and vice versa.
What is the Asian Model of media development?
Some degree of state control over the press is seen as necessary for avoiding division and achieving common societal objectives. Levels of citizens’ confidence in their government are significantly higher in societies with restrictive rather than pluralistic media environments.
What is the point of view of Singapor on the Asian Model of media development?
According to former Singaporean prime minister, having the media play the role as the fourth estate cannot be the starting point for building a stable, secure, incorrupt, and prosperous Singapore. The starting point is how to put in place a good government to run a clean, just and efficient system.
What is the point of view of China on the Asian Model of media development?
Former Chinese president stated that the proper role of media is to use their distinctive assets and advantages to convey the messages of peace, development, cooperation, mutual benefit, and tolerance.
What is the media malaises theories?
The ceaseless criticism of politics and politicians erodes the public trust and support for government institutions, making it more difficult to govern effectively. It is often suggested that aggressive and critical reporting of the governments of countries that have only recently become democratic can damage the public’s support for democracy itself. In many transition societies, accusations of corruption played out in the media are part of the arsenal of political contestation, which, even if it does not damage public support for democracy, does serve to focus political discourse on sleaze and scandal rather than other issues of importance.
What is the central premise of agenda-setting theory?
The media have the ability to influence the salience of topics on the public agenda. While media cannot tell us what to think they can help to set the agenda of what we think about. Unlike for direct effects theories of media effects, there is much empirical support for this view of the influence of the media. In the context of the media’s role in democracy and good governance, agenda setting refers to the media’s function in highlighting the importance of particular social issues for the public and politicians.
What is the point of view of Norris?
During urgent humanitarian crises in particular, independent reporters can act as a vital channel of information for decision-makers, helping to make democratic governments more responsive to the needs of the people.
What does the media need to fulfill this agenda-setting function?
Have the capacity and willingness to see out and publish this information. The media must also be free from the influence of those sources of power whose interests may be served by the concealment of these issues. The media must have achieved a certain level of media development.
Where are the roots of this agenda-setting role?
In a consumer representation view of the media on traditional liberal theory, whereby, in a free market, the media are understood to represent the needs of the people to those in power. The assumption is that, in a free market, newspaper are subject to the equivalent of an election every time they go on sale. They therefore serve as a daily reflection of public opinion because readers are assumed to buy newspaper that best fit their political opinions. Consequently, the media as a whole reflect the views and values of the buying public and act as a public mouth piece. In this view, the media play a vital role of channelling citizens’ concerns to decision-makers in government by providing information about urgent social problem.
What is Amartya Sen’s assertion?
No famine has ever occurred in a country with a free press. The most elementary source of basic information from distant areas about threatening famine are enterprising news media, especially when there are incentives – provided by a democratic system – for bringing out facts that may be embarrassing to the government (facts that an authoritarian government would tend to censor).
What is the first nuance of the direct causal link between media development and good governance?
First, it is not always clear who is setting whose agenda. In the consumer representation argument, public demand is the driving force of media content, which subsequently influences elites. By contrast, in a pure agenda-setting version of this argument, the news media are seen as often through them, on politicians. In alternative views, the media are seen as responding to competing elite priorities or as being governed by world events.
What is the second nuance of the direct causal link between media development and good governance?
This early-warning function of the media can operate only in a properly functioning electoral system with viable opposition parties. The information provided by the media will not be effective without supporting institutions, such as political competition, so that incumbents can be voted out of office, for example. The point is that the relationship between media development and democracy and good governance is two-way.
What is the third nuance of the direct causal link between media development and good governance?
The precise role of the media depends very much on the political and media environment of the country.
What is media as civic forum?
The third major role of the media is to serve as a space where journalists and broadcasters bring together a plurality of diverse interests, political parties, viewpoints and social sectors to debate issues of public concern.
What is the public sphere?
A normative vision of a public space in which public opinion is formed which supervises government. It is characterized by freely available access to information discussion that is free from interference by the state and by equality and mutual respect among groups and individuals.
What is the media role in the public sphere?
To provide an arena for the establishment of a consensus among the public, based on reason and rational deliberation, which can shape the direction of government policy.
What is the point of view of Paul Collier?
In terms of good policy, the media is absolutely critical if the government does not happen to get it right – which it probably won’t – then somebody in the broader society has to be articulating, critiquing and proposing alternative views – educating the government.
Why has the public sphere been criticized?
For being historically inaccurate and overlooking questions of social exclusion, it frequently serves as model of how the media should function in a democracy
What are the links between media’s role in establishing a public sphere and democracy and good governance?
They are reasonably clear (at least in theory). In a liberal democracy, the formation of policy should be a rational and deliberative process that takes into account the concerns and interests of all groups. The establishment of a free space to facilitate this process is vital for achieving this. The provision of inclusive opportunities for the participation and representation of all members of society in the media is a particularly important aspect of free and fair elections. Citizens can make informed choices about whom they vote for only if opposition parties, candidates and groups have fair access to the media.
What most differentiate poor people from rich people according to a report from the World Bank?
It is a lack of voice. The inability to be represented. The inability to convey to the people in authority what it is that they think. The inability to have a searchlight put on the conditions of inequality. These people interviewed do not have Ph.D. but they have the knowledge of poverty, and the first thing they talked about is not money. It is lack of voice of the ability to express themselves.
What are the problematics about public debate?
There is an assumption in this particular argument that public debate is always rational and that it necessarily produces logical and informed consensus on an issue. Yet in reality, public debate is not always rational and facilitating an open space of discussion is no guarantee of calm debate and consensus, rather than a polarization of views, increased animosity and illogical and emotional decision-making.
