Managed Democracy - Part of the Team

News media filter information, retain influential role despite industry changes

On Point with David Cochrane was a short-lived indulgence at a time of shrinking media budgets. It reflected not only the close relationship between the political elites and the province’s only media celebrity but also the cult of celebrity that permeated CBC across the country.

The provincial government limits public access to government information.

Since Danny Williams’ days, it has lowered the information content of news releases, played up the superficial money announcements, and focused mostly on politically driven messaging that supports the publicity agenda of the Premier of the moment and his party.

Government officials also restrict access to information through the access to information system.  They rely on illegal deletions and other ways of limiting what should be widely distributed information.  They also withhold information from public websites that others make readily available.

Politicians can also rely on local media to help them manage the information the public gets.  None of that fits the image we have of reporters or how reporters see themselves. The Washington Post’s role in exposing the Watergate affair has helped shape our images of reporters and the news media as relentless guardians of free speech and democracy. They write the first draft of history. They are the bulwark of democracy.

Both All the President’s Men  - book or movie -  or other movies like The Post or Good Night and Good Luck! And television series like The West Wing reinforce those perceptions of noble reporters.  They idealize reporters and caricature the relationship between reporters and politicians.

Since radio became a popular medium in the 1920s there have been people writing about the news media and the role it plays in our society.  What major theorists from Walter Lippman to Marshall McLuhan or Noam Chomsky share in common are at least three key assumptions.  First, they assume the news media has power itself as news media and that the power operates independently of other factors or actors. Second, they assume that what happens in the United States – they base their theories on observations from or of America – happens everywhere else in exactly the same way. Third, they believe all news media are the same.

News media have their own grammar but not their own logic. They are undoubtedly powerful and influential. It is no accident that coup plotters will seize control of not only the police, military, and government offices but the local news media as well.

In themselves, print, radio, television, and social media are agnostic. They have no biases. They convey the messages of both the coup plotters and the government it disposed in the same way. The power and influence of the news media comes out of the social, political and economic context in which they operate. More specifically and more accurately, their influence comes from the people who fill them with images and words and apply meaning to them. And their influence comes from the people who consume those images and words and either accept the received context or replace it with their own.

News media reflect the society in which they operate. They reflect the social group to which the editors and reporters belong or to which they aspire to belong. In Newfoundland and Labrador, they reflect beliefs within society and attitudes toward the news media role in society. What’s most interesting for the future is the change in more recent years - the period starting in 2015 - in the society to which the different newsrooms respond.