Strange data - Ukraine readers on the public interest

This week has been momentous for the Ukraine. In Europe - or at its doorstep - live ammunition has been used against protesters, killing perhaps hundreds.

And this week, more people than ever in Ukraine read my blog. It was the blog about public broadcasting and the public interest. It is 16 people so far, a tiny number. However the "surge" in readership suggests an interest in the relationship between the state and public broadcasters, between private interests and government.

This is the political economy of media.

There are differing sets of questions and concerns:

• how government media institutions respond to vested interests; 
• how public broadcasters respond to governments; 
• and a third set of interests is what private media companies do. 

I have no idea what is happening in Ukraine, apart from US and international media coverage. Each reporter and source offers a perspective and many of them uncritically channel the views of those being interviewed. (In contrast, in the US, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) TV has camera footage from behind both the protesters and government police officers, which is a framing exercise indicating an attempt to offer viewers both sides of a complex story.)

Why is this framing important? Here is a guess that is not reflected in most media reports I have seen and heard: Ukraine is cursed with an unfortunate geography: close to Russia and its transformation and Slavic culture (closed and traditional) while also close to Western Europe and drawn to the west's social and economic approaches to governance and culture (open and disruptive).

How could public interests be served by broadcasters in such a cauldron of competing cultural interests? I suspect this is the pressing issue for policy makers in a country that is currently tending towards eastern styles of autocracy, while looking to the west for liberal models of development and democracy.

To readers in Ukraine - please stay the course in pursuing the public interest. It will probably be a model that I don't recognise because there is no single model of the public interest and public broadcasting. Every nation needs its own national broadcasting system to suit its democratic purposes.      

Is the public interest served by public broadcasting?

IN the past couple of  months several news articles and print media discussion pieces have assessed moves against the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) the national public broadcaster. Late in January, the ABC's journalism was called into question by the Prime Minister Tony Abbott, for its coverage of refugees seeking to escape into Australian territorial waters from Indonesia. Abbott statements

It was a nationalist-centric set of comments, is notable for the way it constructs the ABC's role as one that should offer preferential reportage of Australian interests:

"Prime Minister Tony Abbott has berated ABC News, arguing that it is taking ''everyone's side but Australia's'' and that journalists should give the navy the ''benefit of the doubt'' when it comes to claims of wrongdoing."

Following this outburst, and a somewhat less subtle one last year from Australia's Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, who asked if the ABC was promoting the national interest. Bishop the role of public broadcasters has become a hot target for conservatives. The ideals of a public broadcaster like the ABC are independence and criticism, hallmarks of the modernist model of society.

The ABC is about to be reviewed by the Federal Government in an "efficiency study," following several accusations that the broadcaster if biased against the country and towards the left. Efficiency study  (In this scenario, the political left has been effectively  reconstructed in the public imagination by conservatives as liberal, creating the impression that liberalism - tolerance - should be strongly contested, even overturned). This case has been been promoted by conservative think tank IPA - an Australian privatisation protagonist, with close associations with Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation. Together these two institutions have  created a pincer movement influencing public opinion. It hardly qualifies as public opinion though, and needs to be  redefined when the opinion is singular or mono-tonal in its views.  Comment from IPA  

Inevitably, the ABC (and its privatised partner Special Broadcasting Service, SBS) will survive, having been suitably disciplined.

The move to curtail public broadcasting has not been restricted to Australia, with a 10% cut to National Public Radio (NPR) late in September 2013. NPR 10% staff cut  In the US there is consistent drip of negative commentary and political action against NPR and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), resulting in the steady loss of public funds from Congress for the broadcasters. Endless campaigns for donations and sponsor advertisements have become part of the flow from public broadcasters in the US. Symbolically, the public is reduced by the campaigns to endless requests for support of itself, to tell its non-commercial stories, to investigate, critique and report. One exception being college radio stations.

The moves against public broadcasting opens two related perspectives, which are obvious and will not be considered in detail here:
1. The public interest aspect of public broadcasting;
2. Organised private interests as opponents of public broadcasting

There is a larger point for media and communication scholars and users:  How to make sense of public broadcasting in the era of privatization.

This discussion is engaging for public interest theorists who believe in and support liberalism's core ideology, tolerance. The irony is that liberalism as applied to public broadcasting has shown itself to be a complicated beast. The tolerance that is at the centre of public broadcasting - the ideal of a diverse society fully represented and sustained by the national broadcaster, to paraphrase the founder of the BBC, Lord Reith - allows the intolerant to reject tolerance. In the public broadcasting present, tolerance for divergent views is treated with intolerance by opponents of tolerance.

This is a larger issue that hardly gets to the core of contemporary political economic theory, much less democratic visions of the relationship between the state and its citizens. The point is that any certainty about public broadcasting as a public good is open to questions that are driven by the private economic interests of for-profit media owners and political interests who (frankly) are intolerant. of diversity and difference.

The arguments are of interest to those people who seek to understand the new media and communications order in the internet era, because many of the arguments against public broadcasting emerge from internet-based libertarians. Namely, the Internet is a superior source for all news and information, it is ubiquitous, universal and open to all. Why take tax payers' money to fund public broadcasting when commercially viable internet providers can offer the same services?

Here is the IPA line, taken from the article cited above, which mirrors a News Corporation line:

"If there was ever a case for a taxpayer-funded state broadcaster, it doesn't exist today. Australians have at their fingertips access to more news from more varied sources than ever before. Online, every niche interest and point of view is well covered. And as private media companies continue to struggle with profitability, the continued lavish funding of the ABC only serves to undermine their business model further." 

Readers of this blog will be familiar with this line of argument from News Corporation. When the Australian Independent Media Inquiry (Finkelstein) recommended in February 2012, a News Media Council to offer a review of journalistic performance, News Corporation was keen to offer the argument "the Internet is the solution."  (Final Finkelstein Report)

Margaret Simmons from The University of Melbourne, Centre for Advanced Journalism offered a constructive summary of Finkelstein - which indicated key points in the debate. Yet her summary like many others failed to mention the gorilla in the room, the ideological master stroke of those people and organizations opposed to public broadcasting  - the Internet. (Margaret Simmons Summary). To add to this "gorilla" are questions about the nature of the public interest in a society without public broadcasting alternatives. More works needs to be undertaken to explore this ideological shift - that is, the Internet as private provider and a mechanism used to anchor arguments against public interest institutions. It is an important and complex discussion.

At other conjunctures, it is pretty simple. This brings News Corporation in its news configuration, not its television side, to the table. John Birmingham writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, 12 December, 2013, generated the headline "Simple as ABC: Murdoch out to crush ABC." Simple as ABC

Always always always there is power and money to be considered; the power of a conservative government in the short term, the wealth, power and interests of the Murdoch family and their media properties over the long arc.

Totalized Information and liberalism

The Economist, 16 November, 2013 editorialised on the rise and rise of surveillance, drawing attention to the remorseless rush toward “ubiquitous recording” of pretty well everything. editorial Video cameras everywhere, defines the emergence of visual culture on a massive scale.

The magazine noted in “Every Step You Make,” that the “perfect digital memory” will become a commonplace, as will surveillance on grand and granular scales. It cited Google’s Glass computer, a mini smart-phone, worn on the wearer’s nose, as just one of many digital tools being developed. And so it goes, in the totalized information world. 

There are two points to reflect on:

1.       1. A fascist tendency towards the control society. If the totalization factor becomes inescapable, there is every reason to be concerned about the closure of the public interest. Without fail, every effort at totalizing control is operationalized by private corporations with privatizing intent. Interestingly, Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with creating the World Wide Web, is on the record expressing concerns about this trend, suggesting that governments should do more. Berners-Lee  Ultimately, private interests have difficulty expressing any concern for the public interest. That is often the preferred definition of private concerns as they play out. 

2.      2.  The promoters of Liberal politics are not always prepared to identify the ideology at play in their value system. However, The Economist made the case about the totalized information world in a manner that should be welcomed. In fact, the magazine made the point about the “deeper impulse” of liberty; “freedom has to include some right to privacy: if every move you make is being chronicled, liberty is curtailed.”

     This is where the discussion moves to an important register, namely the legal banning of devices. The use of dashboard cameras is forbidden in Austria, notes the magazine. Yes, and so is most texting and phone use while driving, and mobile phones in public swimming pool change rooms because of their video making capacity. Google has banned the use of face-recognition applications on Glass, while Japanese camera-makers, says The Economist, ensure their products make a sound when they take a photograph.

Governments, added The Economist, “should be granted the right to use face-recognition technology only where there is a clear public good.”  Facebook and Google “should be forced to establish high default settings for privacy.”

Then this:”…the new cameras and recognition technologies should be regulated so as to let you decide whether you remain anonymous or not.”
What is The Economist on about? Here in the late stages of neo-liberalism, in an era that has seen calls from this same magazine for free trade and the opening up of markets, is a major U-turn. Is there a sudden rethink? Has a boundary line been reached in the liberal imagination? Has the internet with its promise of the freedom of unregulated communication and media led to this? It appears that The Economist has a renewed interest in a politics that demarcates boundaries around the private and the public.

Here is the context: All of a sudden, what an individual does can be totally scrutinized. This becomes worrying, yet it is perhaps typical of  a particular brand of Liberalism, that only when the freedom of the individual is at risk, do the advocates of individual freedom speak up. The particular type of freedom that is being defended by The Economist needs critical evaluation, because it may well be that the freedom being defended is that of the previously privileged individual who is now, at last, under threat of surveillance. The King, the Man and the Woman can no longer hide securely and privately in his and her castle, planning privately to orchestrate economic and social advantage to others' disadvantage.
     

“Liberal politicians, says The Economist, “have been lazy about defending the idea of personal space, especially online. The fight should start now. Otherwise, in the blink of an eye, privacy should be gone.” 

With the exception of the final sentence (privacy is already over, as Wikileaks, Edward Snowden and all the files they have leaked suggest) this paragraph marks an end point in the short political history of the Internet. 

 “The fight” will not start with an editorial. It will start when the loss of privacy in the new totalized information world becomes painful, when the damage that has already been done is obvious – when good people, progressive people, sensible people, are subjected to all manner of actions by those acting according to private interests. It will be a fight unlike any other and has been given a start date in the history of liberalism by The Economist.  

"Vacuum cleaner approach" - NSA electroninc eavesdropping and the public interest

New York Times coverage of the National Security Administration (NSA) files leaked by contractor Edward J. Snowden, has allowed that newspaper to ask consistently pointed questions about government intrusions into communication. The coverage has been pretty modest in the way it has channelled public outrage, yet mindful of the obligations of public media. More significantly, the Times has offered helpful insights into the operations of government in the digital era.

The license it has taken to describe some of the actions of the US Government agencies - especially the NSA - has met some of the key requirements of public interest theory. The Guardian has been more pointed still. The NSA Files

Describing the collection of French data as a matter of national sovereignty for France (20 October 2013), the Times has raised the public interest bar. Reporting that the NSA recorded 70 million digital communications between December 10, 21012 and January 8, 2013, the Times has opened up questions about the US approach to international relations in the digital era. Everything is being impacted by digital communications, even national sovereignty. Some academics have suggested that sovereignty is no longer a useful category. Try running that proposition past any national leader, against the background of the US vacuum cleaning private data outside the US.

Everything is sucked into the digital vortex. vacuum cleaning data The French, the Germans, the Brazilians are right to complain. Any complaints from the Australian Government? The  history of Australia is that there are few if any complaints, as Australian Governments go out of their way to be compliant with super power wishes. The words "Australia" and "national autonomy" are unlikely to appear in the same sentence. Most critics would describe this as a rather pathetic track record on Australia's part.

Edward J, Snowden (the NSA files leaker) and Wikileaks security files offer insights into the normalised world of US "electronic eavesdropping" in a way that confirms fears that Big Brother is everywhere. Securitization - scrutiny of all communication, private and public under the umbrella of national security interests - can be assumed. It is the culture.

I am suggesting that new questions have emerged because of the scrutiny of digital communications by the NSA and the securitization vortex into which we have all been drawn. I am asking how the public interest can be defined in the current context, a context where security has redefined everyday life.      

 

Weak media regulation - questions worth asking

For those of us who follow News Corporation and its chairperson Rupert Murdoch, this article by The University of Melbourne political scientist Sally Young in Melbourne's Age newspaper is instructive. The headline itself was a prompt to read more. "How will the government reward News Ltd for its wholehearted poll support?"

Here is the link
Murdoch influence on media policy?

The history included in the article is testament to a weak national regulatory environment, where the big boys appear to be on the record for always getting their media way. It's an unlucky country! Small population, a few wealthy scions and a limited supply of oxygen (OK that last one is meant as a metaphor to suggest that the absence of diversity in media ownership in Australia produces some remarkably shallow and callow news coverage. As for analysis, it could be more diverse and critical.).

Another point to identify here is Sally Young's provenance: political science. What she offers is an interdisciplinary viewing of media history, political economy together with regulation theory and economics. All worthy elements of a critical discussion about weak governments who cower before self interested media and communications institutions and the men who run them.  

Is democracy supposed to look like this?

Feudal media organizations - Michael Wolff on News Corporation journalism

Any student of the television soap opera genre knows the importance of the family structure. Every step of that structure is negotiated with the patriarch as the centrally challenged focus of the domestic structure. The social relations are always somewhat subtle, even while power is the central matter under examination. Keeping or giving up control is what is being negotiated in those daily TV shows.

The most excessive view on family business is the ancient idea that the patriarch  - the alpha male - is unchallengeable. This perspective is the foundation of feudalism.

Somewhat surprisingly, last week New York media analyst Michael Wolff referred to News Corporation as well as the New York Times Company as "feudal" organizations.

In fact, Wolff is unusually well placed to comment on News Corporation after writing The Man Who owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch (2010), an authorised biography of Rupert Murdoch. Wolff refers to News Corporation and the New York Times as institutions run by a single male. Their structure mirrors the old family model: "dynastic and feudal."

This claim is at once breathtaking in its accusatory energy, while on closer examination it seems that the evidence for Wolff's claim is in place to support this view. Wolff on News feudalism

Of more moment may be the profile of the men who are employed as CEOs of both firms Mark Thompson (NYTimes) and  Robert Thomson (News). Indeed, an entire raft of men populate the higher echelons of these media firms, even though (last time I checked) 50%+ of the global population is female. What type of men become the CEOs, the editors in chief, the editors of these publications?

Unfortunately we cannot say with any certainty what the character types are and I am not aware of any academic studies of a sample of former lieutenants that indicate the type of person who works immediately down the line of command from a patriarch like Rupert Murdoch. (Former editors would be  good place to start). It is an important question for media analysts, because the critique of New Corporation news media is that it has been beholden to the political interests of Rupert Murdoch, who dictates the editorial line in state and federal elections in territories around the world where he owns news outlets - US, Australia, UK.

In other words, what kinds of people, what kinds of journalists agree to do what they are instructed in order to advance their careers? From a gender perspective, the question can be refined as, what kind of men?

This question seems especially relevant these days when so many journalism students are taught ethics, social responsibility and research methods in an effort to help guide their pursuit of the truth. What happens to the principles of reporting when an angle is called for by the boss? Should journalists merely cave? The feudal model would suggest that there is no choice, no room for debate and no questions to ask. It may be the explanation for the malaise of journalism as a profession, with apologies to all those faithfully practising their craft.

 

  

Ganging up on Rupert? - News Corporation becomes the news

With the Australian Federal election firmly decided in favour of the conservative Liberal-National Party Coalition it is time for those of us in media studies to engage in some analysis of the reporting across the media. The approach News Corporation has taken to reporting in its original home base, Australia, is an example of election influencing. Media critics are well aware of News Corporation's interest in boosting conservative causes.

It is fair to say that the defeat of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) government led by Kevin Rudd on September 7 was in the sights of the Murdoch-owned press for many months, and yet in seeking a change of government, Mr Murdoch himself became the news. Even his tweets were reported. Tweets by Murdoch New media such as Twitter, has moved the public into a relationship with media owners as opinion makers, generally unmediated by gatekeepers. In Mr Murdoch's case he can and do say whatever he likes, without editors telling him what to say or moderating his commentary.

The narrative from the News Corporation bunker was one sided: remove the ALP by reporting on the party and their leadership in antagonistic and negative ways, while reporting on the conservatives in supportive and positive ways. It is a well tried path, as Fox News support of the Republican Party and President George W. Bush played out in the 2004 US election. The election coverage in support of the conservatives and against the ALP in the News Corporation Sydney Telegraph tabloid was calculated by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Media Watch, a weekly 15 minute television commentary at around 134 anti-Labor articles and headlines out of 293. Media Watch  It hardly proves much except that it distracts from detailed journalism.  

Peter Botsman put it as follows:
"The media portrayal of the Rudd campaign has been beyond belief. It was a true 1950s ‘we will tell you what is good for you’ exercise. The Murdoch press effectively acted as a storm anchor that pulled back any positive news about Labor in any other media source...." Botsman Working Papers

But the importance of all this is elsewhere. Australian Labor Party supporters - the True Believers as they are called - could have spent more time devising policies that make significant contributions to public welfare, instead of counting the coverage. The media as the story is a function of a narrowing band of policy options. There are distractions everywhere, with little progress made on progressive policies, perhaps importantly on media and public communication debates, that would entail broadening the circulation of ideas through multiple sources. (The News Corporation argument is that the everyone has the Internet, so there's plenty of diversity. Do not be concerned...).    

It's business as usual.  At least the global aspects of media kicked in to the Australian election to add some stringent colour. There are two examples to this part of the story: the first is an unfounded yet public accusation from a mining tycoon and leader and funder of Palmer United Party (PUP - woof woof!), Clive Palmer, that Rupert Murdoch's estranged wife Wendy Deng was a Chinese spy Litigation central - Clive Palmer; the second that the UK Levenson inquiry followed Mr Murdoch to Australia, in the form of his chief British Labour Party antagonist Tom Watson.Tom Watson Sydney Morning Herald coverage

Both of these "events" put the Australian activities of News Corporation into the global context. In the former case, perversely, in the latter case, critically. No progressive public policy ideas made the light of day in this whirl of media wind.