Political Commentary In The Media Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Political commentary, prior to the mass media age, was predominantly the preserve of poets and philosophers. Once the industrial age created the market and the means for mass communication, the demands of poetry on the reader led to it becoming increasingly marginalized.

For most of its existence, the term mass media was synonymous with newspaper coverage; newspapers traditionally offered commentary through their editorials. Newspapers were expensive businesses with generally limited commercial potential, so it was common for rich families, who enjoyed influencing political affairs through the manipulation of mass opinion, to own them. William Randolph Hearst, for example, initially tried to speak for the common man; he engaged in investigative reporting that uncovered municipal corruption and the vices of the rich and famous. Eventually, however, he fell to promoting the 1898 U.S. war with Spain, as well as his girlfriend’s meager acting talents, which caused him to try to silence Orson Welles in the process. Less interfering proprietors, however, continued to act as gatekeepers, or interpreters of news, for their publics.

This bottleneck of editorial approval remained in place through the development of radio. The advent of television did little to alleviate it, although perhaps more power was given to legal departments to filter stories with potential liability for the networks. Television producers initially called upon public intellectuals from religious, academic or community institutions to comment on matters of public interest. These figures were presumed to be disinterested observers who spoke out of a sense of public duty. Unlike radio, however, television was a visual medium, and talking heads did not make for entertaining television.

The problem was compounded by the rise of twenty-four-hour news outlets, which unwittingly initiated opinionated, rather than ethical and insightful, cable news programming centered on controversial political commentators whose mandate was less about fairness and balance than it was about creating a sense of outrage in the viewer. Bill O’Reilly’s The O’Reilly Factor is credited with starting this trend, and his show remains one of the most popular. According to results of a Pew Research Center survey (Pew Research Center 2007), 21 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 turned to fake news outlets such as The Daily Show for news of the 2004 presidential campaign, while only 23 percent watched the networks.

The second problem was that, constrained by the imperative that the viewer not change channels, the already-narrow window for in-depth commentary and analysis has become reduced as the news networks are pressed to entertain rather than inform. This created a demand for spokespersons who could be relied upon to provide a controversial sound bite in under a minute so that the news programs could return to more entertaining pictorial coverage. News editors discovered that authorities had trouble discussing complex political problems coherently in the time allowed, so programs gradually replaced them with professional pundits.

Despite several seismic shifts in technology, relatively few political commentators have interpreted the way in which citizens access the news media. However, with the advent of the Internet, exponentially more informed and unfiltered commentators have the opportunity to inform an engaged and growing audience on matters of specific interest to them. The true breakthrough in reviving the art of political commentary came with specialized blogs. Experts began to blog on their fields, and television news programs started to feature stories that broke on blogs. This practice, while it attracted a younger audience, threatened the networks’ relevance.

Troubling as these issues are for Western democracy, the issues surrounding media in the developing world are of a completely different order. The historical foundation of the print-based culture of the West has been overlooked in much of the developing world, as illiteracy and the problems of rural isolation have combined to make radio the axiomatic medium for millions of people. In addition to relaying news and current events, radio is even used to teach literacy in eighteen developing countries in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Australia (Bates 2005, 117).

More disturbing than the choice of medium is the fact that supplying the material to fuel it is an increasingly dangerous occupation. In the decade prior to 2007, the International News Safety Institute recorded 1,100 journalists killed on the job, with Iraq reported as the most dangerous places for a journalist to work, followed by Russia and Colombia (Clarke 2007). Despite the importance Western democracies place on the delivery of timely and unbiased information, the democratizing power of fearless and unbiased media in the developing world is underappreciated in the West and consequently poorly funded. UNESCO’s International Programme for the Development of Communication (IPDC) is the only United Nations division to promote media access in developing countries, and it rarely donates more than $1 million per year across 137 countries (UNESCO 2005)

Bibliography:

Bates, A.W. Technology, e-learning and Distance Education. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Chomsky, Noam, and Edward S. Herman. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.
Clarke, David. “Over 1,100 Journalists Killed in Decade-Report.” Reuters Alert Net. March 6, 2007. www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/ L06229089.htm.
Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. “Today’s Journalists Less Prominent.” March 8, 2007. http://people-press.org/report/309/todaysjournalists-less-prominent.
“UNESCO Programme Grants Funding to 51 New Media Projects in Developing Countries.” September 3, 2005. http:// portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=26139&URL_DO=DO_ TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html.

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