At the beginning of Journalism and Democracy, author Brian McNair
writes that the book is essentially an attempt to answer the question, whether
"'the modern media [are] a force for good or ill' in British politics."
(p. x) McNair's argument here is part of a larger, ongoing debate within British
academic and journalism communities about a supposed "crisis" in
British political journalism. This crisis is the result of a number of different
phenomena, depending on who is doing the analyzing-a "dumbing down"
of political discourse, an excessively aggressive news media, the prevalence
of media "spin doctors," and finally, an elitist, "horse-race"
style of reporting that focuses on the process to the detriment of policy
(as the author notes, at least some of these criticisms contradict each another).
Presented this way, the subject of the study becomes somewhat narrower than
its main title might suggest. The "journalism" that is of concern
here is specifically political journalism, and the "democracy" in
the title is specifically British democracy. That having been said, since
many of the problems McNair addresses in this book are remarkably similar
to those that American news media are supposedly now undergoing, his broader
arguments, if not his empirical findings, are relevant to students of journalism
in the U.S.
Almost from the beginning, it is clear that McNair has his doubts about whether
the idea of a crisis has much use for students of political journalism and
the modern public sphere, and he proposes to use four general criteria-quantity
of information, quality of information, the degree of critical scrutiny allowed
of the political elite,
and the amount of access provided to the public-in order to critically examine
some of the claims enumerated above. He begins his argument by first providing
the reader with an quantitative overview of the amount of news now available
to the British public, through broadcast media and national print organs.
He finds that there is an abundance of political information in the modern
public sphere, but as he himself admits, despite the raw amount of information
available, there still exists in Britain a "two-tiered" information
market. The greatest proportion of British political journalism is both provided
for, and consumed by, the best-educated, best-informed sections of the population.
The author's comment on this finding is that rather than simply decrying the
amount of intelligent political commentary, critics might be better served
by asking "how to prevent the majority of allegedly apathetic or disinterested
citizens from falling even further behind in the distribution of political
information." (p. 41) The implication here, then, is that the charge
that there is a lack of serious news in the British media is not simply wrong,
but in fact evades the more cogent issue.
This sort of argument is where the strength of McNair's study lies: by critiquing
what are often overly broad claims about journalistic decline, Journalism
and Democracy attempts to move the debate to a different set of questions.
In examining the (supposed) nefarious effects of public relations, or the
emphasis on political sleaze, or the abundance of stories about the process
and style of politics (stories about Tony Blair's hairstyle, for example),
the author tries to redirect the discussion of crisis by placing these phenomena
into wider historical and social perspective. For example, McNair argues that
the rise of the political spin doctor was a natural result of the evolution
of liberal democracy. As the weight of public opinion became more important
to the development of policy, it was natural and inevitable that politicians
would increasingly turn to spin doctors in order to put the best public face
on their proposals. Moreover, the author argues that as interpreters of the
news, public relations groups are necessarily in conflict with the journalistic
community, who regard that task as theirs alone. The demonisation of the spin
doctor, then, is at least on one level a fight between two different professions
about who gets to play the role of storyteller to the public.
At times, McNair almost seems to act as an advocate for many of the features
of the modern media that the critics decry, and here I think that his success
is more spotty. His defense of what Americans might call horse-race or insider-baseball
journalism is an interesting one: "For better or worse, politics is now
(and probably always has been) as much about competition and process as it
is about policy. Politics is nothing (and it is certainly not democratic)
if it is not about competition between and within parties around policy."
(p. 49) I was less persuaded by his argument that stories about the sexual
deviance of politicians somehow signal a welcome retreat from the overly deferential
treatment of the past. These stories might be just yet more examples of modern
mass media producers' presumption that they are fit arbiters of private morality-a
claim that all citizens, it seems to me, ought to examine with a great deal
of suspicion.
In the end, McNair argues, the existing public sphere is far healthier than
we sometimes suppose. Critics of the modern media generally "express
aesthetic and thus essentially subjective objections to the style and
tone of what is, undeniably, an increasingly raucous and irreverential public
sphere." (p. 178). But McNair's analysis deserves a more interesting
conclusion that this. It is true that current criticisms of public discourse
are subjective, but so too would be any conceivable defense of this discourse.
The question that frames the book-"are the modern news media a positive
or negative force in modern politics?"-is a moral question. One does
not does answer it by pointing to the quantity of information available, since
McNair himself admits that this does not tell us if people are using this
information. Nor is the degree of criticism of the political elite an effective
criterion for answering a question about the relevance of such criticism.
The American political media contain a great deal of criticism-of the President's
love life, for example. Whether this is the sort of criticism that is needed
is a different question altogether, and in fact the real point at issue.
At the end of the book, McNair raises a number of questions, "more productive
questions," as he calls them, that he thinks scholars should be asking:
what can people do with the information they have, what do they want to do
with them, and what are limits to the amount of information in a democratic
system. A reader is left wondering why McNair did not start with these more
productive questions in the first place, especially since the strength of
the book lies in the author's ability to place common criticisms of the public
sphere in a wider social and historical context. By setting himself the wrong
question at the start he keeps his analysis in a straightjacket, and diverts
attention from the more interesting points he makes.
McNair states that he wishes the book to be read by both academics and journalists. Many of the arguments of crisis that the author addresses are not, in fact, scholarly ones, but journalistic criticism. Thus the book is not necessarily intended for classroom instruction, and its almost exclusive references to the British scene might make the general theme confusing for North American students. Nonetheless, Journalism and Democracy is a worthwhile book for scholars interested in the role of the news media and the state of the public sphere, if only because it forces a rethinking of the current critiques now about bandied about concerning the woeful state of affairs in modern political discourse. It is a useful book, in that sense, and it contains a number of thoughtful arguments. If the author had started off with the set of questions that, it seems to me, he really wants to engage, it would have been even more valuable.