Mass media: what's new?: Voice of Russia

I think there are two major changes. One concerns the economic development of the media. And the other one concerns the rise of the Internet and digital media. In terms of the economics that affects media, and I think that is a global trend and you can say there are the same developments in a lot of countries, I think there is a kind of increasing commercialization of the media. So, profit orientation and advertising as revenue has become far more important in this really very strong and dominant model in a lot of countries. And the idea of public service media or alternative media is something that has declined.

I think the strong commercialization of the media also has to do with the way many societies look like today. And this is especially to do with the rise of a kind of new liberal mentality that puts profit interests of companies first. So, I think the commercialization of the media is a kind of interesting effect of the liberalization of the markets.

For example radio and television markets in the EU where the markets were liberalized in the middle of the 1990?es because what it first results in is a kind of pluralisation of companies that are on the market. But what one can observe and what studies observe is that this plurality of companies and of sources does not necessarily mean plurality of content, but due to the commercial character, of especially radio stations and television stations, there is a kind of wrong dimensionality of content.

So, the type of reporting and the content of reporting is quite similar and now there is much more focus on entertainment than on politics for example. And so, what I?m observing and what the studies are also confirming is that one could call a kind of tabloidization of the mainstream media where there is much less time for politics, news, documentaries and there is much more focus on formats that promise a lot of advertising revenues, such as reality TV for example.

But if we assume that the media has a kind of important function for a society in terms of also having a role in the public sphere, and the public sphere is understood as a kind of opportunity for the citizens to inform themselves politically and to start political debates, then I think this public role of the media or the media as a kind of important part of the public sphere is increasingly being undermined. And I think it is a situation in many countries for the media that we should view quite critically.

So, I think the second big development in the past twenty years has been the rise of the Internet and digital media. And of course it has been strongly debated what kind of effect does the rise of the Internet has on politics and what kind of effect does it have on the citizens. And there are two kinds of competing hypotheses. One is an optimistic one. The scholars and observers are saying that now citizens have the opportunity to become journalists themselves. And what they especially describe is for example the rise of political blogging. So, they say there is a kind of pluralization of the information sources.

But there is another position that is more skeptical and that I also tend to hold. I think that there is definitely a kind of pluralization of the information sources available on the Internet, and also of political information. But I think this does not necessarily mean the increased democratization of the media landscape on the Internet and in general because the big question of media power on the Internet is really on of visibility. And the question is which bloggers are really so powerful that they get a lot of visibility in the public.

So, if one takes a look at rankings of the most accessed websites, then it is interesting and the leader websites are of the big established actors in the news business that get a lot of use of their websites, or it is very established journalists that also have blogs and these blogs get a lot. But simple citizens starting a political blog normally have not enough money, not enough time for taking care of this blog, not enough reputation and not enough time for building the reputation of this blog ? so, it remains kind of outside of politics in the online sphere.

So, what we can observe in the online sphere is that big powerful media actors, mainly large companies, also dominate politics in the online sphere. It is tendency one. And the other tendency, and it is not so different from broadcasting and newspapers, is that politics plays a minority role on the Internet. So, blogging is always an example where politics is also happening and there are political blogs. And of course these political blogs have plaid a certain role in conflicts like the Iraqi war and so on as independent information sources.

But if we look at the overall statistics and have a look at the percentage of all blogs that are political in character, then it varies between 1-4% of all blogs. The same goes for twits on Twitter or for videos on YouTube, postings on Facebook and so on. So, politics is really a minority issue on the Internet just like on TV where there is a kind of tendency that political programs or debate programs, political documentaries, news programs, educational programs and so on get much less air time now than maybe 20 years ago which also has to do with the commercialization of the media.

So, I think overall we can observe a kind of tabloidization of the media and the kind of strong economization of the media that takes together also this kind of the decline of politics and the space politics own in the media. And these are the tendencies that we can observe both online and offline.

But professor, that must produce an awful effect on the minds of the audience, I mean if people are getting used only to ? shall we put it ? consuming of entertainment programs ? they are not getting enough food for thought, are they?

Yes, of course. I mean the question is what kind of consequences does this have for the citizens and for democracy as well. And I think these are quite negative consequences. But of course there are discussions about alternatives. So, I do not think that this is like an absolute and necessary development of corporatization of the media and the cut democracy. Of course still there are countries where public services are very strong, although it has been undermined and commercialized to a certain extent.

But if we think of the BBC in the UK for example ? it has a very strong position still as a public service media. In terms of what the alternatives are to the corporate mainstream media, I think public service media is one idea. But here my question for example would be ? if we talk about the Internet, because the Internet is so much rooted into the commercial media scape and advertising is very strong and there are hardly any noncommercial online platforms. There are a few exceptions like Wikipedia for example.

So, I think we have to think about how could public service Internet platforms look like because we have an idea of what public service broadcasting is because in the history of broadcasting there was also a history of public service. But the history of the Internet is more a history of commercialism and of military applications. So, I think we have to develop a kind of idea of what public service Internet could look like.

But I think public service is only one idea and alternative media is another idea. Now, of course in print and broadcasting there is a certain tradition, although it is much analyzed in alternative media, that is platform public service media. So, if we think of open channels for example, of free radio stations and on the Internet there is also a kind of alternative tradition coming out of the open source movement. All these ideas like the creative commons licenses, open access, journals, Wikipedia would be an example. But no matter if we talk about online or of offline, the alternative media has always faced problem of how to mobilize resources and money for funding their operation.

So, if you have a public service medium, then you normally have to license fee as funding. If you have a commercial media, then there is advertising. But for alternative noncommercial media it is much harder. Normally the models are based on voluntary donations and it is much harder to obtain these donations.

The good example of an alternative online media of course is WikiLeaks. It is the online platform that has probably been most discussed and most controversially discussed in the past two years. WikiLeaks is based on a kind of alternative principle of leaking documents and citizens can upload some content there. But basically the WikiLeaks is run by a handful of people and suddenly they had millions of documents that needed to be summarized somehow and published, and then all of the controversies about Julian Assage emerged and they had a serious resource problem.

All depended on donations but what actually happened then is that some banks and credit card companies disabled the ability for people to give donations to WikiLeaks. And in the consequence WikiLeaks really got a lack of donations because it became more difficult to donate. And by mentioning this example, I think although WikiLeaks is an example that shows how powerful alternative media can be in terms of making political information transparent that those in power maybe want to keep secret ? it has its own political economy.

So, the media in the contemporary political societies has its own political economy and pretty much depend on having to mobilize resources and money. And if this stream of resources is cut to a certain extent, if there is no money supply for media, then it is very difficult to survive. So, I think for a lively and democratic media system we need something like WikiLeaks.

Now, since it is more than a year now, it is in an absolute crisis situation. And I think it is a concerning situation because it again means that media become dimensional, more of the same and there is less plurality in the media that would be needed in a kind of democratic media system.

If we talk about the online media, then they have advantages and disadvantages. One advantage of the online media is that the production costs are relatively low because publishing digital information online on a web space, basically in terms of the production costs, only costs you the labour force and the web space. And the web space is cheaper than air space and paper the newspapers are printed on. So, this gives certain advantages to online publishing.

But at the same time I think we have to deal with different kinds of resources that online media also have to deal with. So, a big problem is how to generate attention for an online medium. So, some people talk about emergence of an attention economy. Online attention becomes a huge resource and it is very difficult to mobilize. And what we can observe is that media, especially media companies that have a lot of money, that have good reputation and that have enough employees that can take care of the online media have big advantages in terms of gaining visibility online and being in the online attention economy.

So, I think the Internet is vulnerable in terms of being connected to existing power structures of the society that have to do with money, capital, political influence and reputation.

Professor, thank you so much. And just to remind you our guest speaker was Professor Christian Fuchs ? of the Uppsala University in Sweden.

Source: http://english.ruvr.ru/2012_12_30/Mass-media-whats-new/

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