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Video‐Power

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Giovanni Sartori
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MUCH OF OUR RHETORIC IS, TODAY, GLOBALISTIC. THE STATE unit, we say, is obsolete, and we are moving toward a global market with fewer and fewer frontiers. Concurrently our minds are opening themselves to a broader world, indeed to the ‘other worlds’ that surround our own. And the catalyst of this globalization is the enormous expansion of all kinds of communication, thereby eminently including our being able to see the world, all the world, in images in our homes in real time.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , 01 January 1989 , pp. 39 - 53
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1989

References

1 Barber, Benjamin, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984 Google Scholar. Note the subtitle.

2 Originally Dahl’s presidential address printed in the American Political Science Review, December 1967, pp. 953–70, under the title, ‘The City in the Future of Democracies’. I quote from its abridgement in H. S. Kariel (ed.), Frontiers of Democratic Theory, New York, Random House, 1970, pp. 370–94.

3 Luciano Pellicani puts it very well: the United States is a polity ‘rich in micro-deciders and poor in macro-deciders’ (Biblioteca della Liberia, XXI, 1986, p. 29).

4 It should be clear that my notion of localism does not contradict the standard argument that television ‘homogenizes’. Regardless of how much our life styles, tastes and thinking capabilities (or incapacitation) are rendered globally alike, we can still be home-centred and ego-serving. Indeed, as we all become equally garbage-sensitive, we all want our garbage dumped elsewhere (not in our neighbourhood). And if we all equally desire to become rich and famous, it is rational for each of us to leave others in poverty and obscurity.

5 In media terms this is rendered by the tenets that ‘people want … things relevant to their own lives’, and that ‘an event must be close to home’ (Doris A. Graber, Mass Media and American Politics, Washington, D.C., Congressional Quarterly Press, 2nd ed. 1984, pp. 78—9). The localistic feature is not at odds with the ‘no sense of place’ one (the theme subtly pursued by Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place, Oxford University Press, 1985), with the argument that by ‘merging discrete communities … television has made nearly every topic and issue a valid subject of interest and concern for virtually every member of the public’ (see esp. pp. 307 ff). One can be locality-centred in the political pursuit of one’s own concrete interests, and also get involved in ‘placeless’ issues. If so, what is to be feared is a ‘plural simultaneity’ of both ‘my place’ and placenessness which squeezes out the national public interest agenda.

6 Stone, Geoffrey R., in Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 02 1987, p. 20 Google Scholar.

7 ‘For an array often prominent general political issues that confront the country in any given year … the average citizen is likely to have a strong and consistent preference on perhaps one or two of them, and virtually no opinion whatsoever on the rest. Yet when an eager survey research interviewer … starts to ask … opinions are invented on the spot’ ( Newman, W. Russell, The Paradox of Mass Politics: Knowledge and Opinion in the American Electorate, Harvard University Press, 1986, pp. 22—23)Google Scholar.

8 Let it also be noted that while video-power is in no small part responsible for a number of decisions, the media’s own responsibility is never admitted. The Iran arms-for-hostages deal was largely prompted, in the mind of a post-Gutenberg President, by the continuous showing on TV of the families of the hostages weeping and denouncing the insensitivity of the White House. However, when the scandal exploded, the media mercilessly went after the (undeniable) stupidity of the President, never acknowledging that they were, if mindlessly, its originators. Similarly, in presidential campaigns the ever growing complaint is that the candidates are not issue-focused. Is it their fault? In part, they are advised to shun issues by their pollsters and media advisers. But it is also the very TV journalists who make the complaint who generally ignore issue statements unless they can be quoted as blunders or factual mistakes. Even though it does not cross their minds, the blamers themselves are far from blameless.

9 The story itself has been profusely chronicled. Bill Moyers, one of the few serious journalists to resist the tide, tells of the downgrading of CBS News as follows: ‘we began to be influenced by the desire to please the audience. The object was to "hook" them … Pretty soon, tax policy had to compete with stories about three-legged sheep, and the three-legged sheep won … And now we’re trapped. Once you decide to titillate instead of illuminate, you’re on a slippery slope … you become a video version of the drug culture and your viewers become junkies’. (‘Taking CBS News to Task: Bill Moyers Blasts its Show-Business Approach’, Newsweek, 15 September, 1986.) Thus (I now quote Peter J. Boyer, from The New York Times Magazine, 28 December 1986, p. 18) ‘an unemployment report from Washington might be cursorily treated or ignored in favour of a correspondent’s piece from the gates of a factory showing the grief of an out-of-work father at Christmas… And the correspondents learned that the way you got on the air was to write a snappy script and be entertaining’.

10 While the above seems to suggest that a mixed private-public TV system is preferable to a purely private one, a simple and sufficient remedy might be to prohibit commercials on prime news time. Nothing much would be lost if, under this restraint, a network decided to go news-less (but that would tarnish its reputation even more than its revenues).

11 Postman, Neil, in his very thoughtful book, confirms: ‘Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world’ {Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, New York, Viking Penguin Inc., 1985, p. 106)Google Scholar.

12 I discuss at length this point and opinion formation in general in the Theory of Democracy Revisited, Chatham, N.J., Chatham House, pp. 92—110.

13 This applies to print media no less than to TV. No Western capital city newspaper covers international affairs as little as the Washington Post. In general, 60 per cent of an American newspaper goes to advertising, just a 4 per cent consists of national and international news, and only part of that little is of a political nature. The comparative statistics (advertisement aside) are as follows: ‘on the average … it [foreign news] constitutes only 11 per cent of all stories in American newspapers … By contrast foreign affairs news takes up … 24 per cent in Western European newspapers … Foreign affairs coverage is limited even in elite American newspapers. For instance … in 1977 … only 16 per cent of the New York Times coverage was devoted to foreign affairs compared with … 44 per cent in the German Die Welt’. (Quoted from Graber, D. A., Mass Media and American Politics, op. cit., p. 303 Google Scholar.) As for TV, I distinctly remember an evening in which Brokaw’s NBC’s alleged World News consisted, in all, of body counts: people killed in Algeria, Israel and South Africa — that was it.

14 Indeed, our recognition generally is rosy-hued. In Newsweek 17 November 1988 one reads: ‘The era of TV II promises more of everything: more freedom, more control, more options’ (p. 86). Clearly, ‘more freedom’ is here just the same as ‘more options’, and one wonders whether more of the same show biz and ‘vidiotics’ adds up to anything. As for ‘more control’, I am at a loss: more control of the viewer over whom or what? This is fluff in writing.

15 That these apprehensions are not upheld, to date, by confirming evidence does not eo ipso entail that they are disconfirmed. My sense is that our research designs have yet to confront the problems that I am addressing.