Essay
L01 Additional Functions of Media in Democracy
Additionally, this list of three primary functions is not fully exhaustive, and other scholars develop more detailed functions of the media in democracy. For instance, Schudson (2017) elaborates on a more detailed list of media functions:
⦁ Information
⦁ Investigation
⦁ Analysis
⦁ Social empathy
⦁ Public forum
⦁ Mobilization
⦁ Democratic education.
Most of these functions generally fall into Iyengar’s three broad categories, but they help us think a bit more practically about journalism’s contributions to democracy. Information, investigation, and analysis are all a part of the watchdog function of the press, while social empathy is a part of the populist view of a public forum of diverse perspectives and experiences.
Mobilization was an essential element of newspapers in the 19th century, during the party press eras. Now, for traditional newspapers, mobilization is mostly relegated to the opinion page where a variety of voices offer interpretations and calls for actions.
This issue of democratic education is an outlier to traditional views of media functions. Scholars do not often consider how the media implicitly inculcates its readers with certain assumptions about democracy. Take note of how Schudson (2017) describes this:
“But the media abdicate their democratic educational function when they give the impression that democracy means simply majority rule or realizing some mystical will of the people. There is no “will of the people” that endures beyond the moment of its expression (say, in an election) apart from the methods of “realizing” it and the constitution and institutions through which it gains its sustaining legitimacy.
The media should contribute to a view of democracy as a system of checks and balances operating within a system of free and fair elections with protections for civil liberties, human rights, and the rule of law, regardless of what a particular moment, popular mood, or apparent meaning of an election might appear to dictate.
In other words, journalism should seek to educate its audiences in a sophisticated concept of democracy that locates it not in popular expression but in a system of elections, laws, and rights in which popular expression holds an honored, but not unconstrained, place.”
Consider for a moment your democratic education via your news sources. Do the news sources that you read educate you on the sophisticated elements of democracy? Or, do the news sources tend to give the impression that democracy is equal to some “mythical will of the people”?
In another piece, Schudson argues that contemporary media are failing to inform their readers of the way how American democracy now practically functions:
“The only persistent failure, in my view, is that the New York Times is trapped (like most of the rest of us) in the election-centered, “informed citizen”-dominated model of democracy that does not offer readers much illumination about how contemporary democracies operatethe growing role of the administrative state, the growing monitorial and auditing institutions both inside and outside government that seek to hold that administrative state responsible to the Congress and the public, the growing capacity of interest groups and public interest groups to seek political objectives through litigation, and the changing role of citizens when they can exercise their political interests routinely 365 days a year rather than once every couple of years at the voting booth as the American founders expected.”
Do you think this criticism is fair? Is it important for papers like the New York Times to spend more time illuminating these complex changes and processes? Would this “democratic education” lead to a more functional democracy?
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