Privately-owned Media and Democracy

By Farooq Sulehria

Less than a dozen corporations and six Hollywood Majors control global flow of informational and cultural products. Most of them based in the United States, dominate the world market

From Soviet experience to current Iranian regime, one concludes that state-control of media is not desirable. It stifles freedom of expression, hence, incompatible with democratic ideals. Democracy and an informed public are concomitant. But this does not mean masses are more informed when media are privately control. Consider the events that took place in the Observer newsroom in autumn 2002: Ed Vulliamy, was informed by Mell Goodman, a former CIA analyst, that, in contradiction to everything the British and American governments had claimed, the CIA were reporting that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. Goodman was willing to go on the record as a named source. This was an incredibly important scoop at a time yet the Observer refused to run the story. Over the next four months, Vulliamy submitted seven versions of his article – his editors rejected them all (David and David 2009: 5). Simultaneously, on the other side of Atlantic, Phil Donahue, host of Donahue on MSNBC from 2002 to 2003, despite having the highest ratings of any show on MSNBC, had his programme cancelled on February 25, 2003. A leaked NBC memo described how the show presented a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war…He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives” (Ibid: 7-8). Or consider, for example, the case of Greenpeace that tried to publish a poster as an advertisement in The Times, the Guardian and the Independent – all refused (Ibid: 12).

These examples are neither exceptions nor a conspiracy but a consistent pattern. A pattern that emerges when interests of the media elite collude. This essay will show that media-owning elite keep the audiences ill-informed, if not outright ignorant, by bombarding them with news-without-information. Hence, gravely deviating from the much-touted democratic ideals attributed to mass media.

Media Elite-democracy Paradox

Increasingly, media being idiomatic ‘watch dog’ are assigned the responsibility to keep the public informed. As ‘watch dog’, media should stay neutral. In fact, the word ‘media’ is the plural of the word medium, which can be defined as ‘the intervening substance through which impressions are conveyed to the senses.’ Air, for example, acts as a medium for the transmission of sounds – it is neutral, disinterested carrier of energetic vibrations (David & David 2006: 1).

However, convincing even a media ‘consumer’---be it newspaper reader or TV viewer--- let alone scholars, about media’s epistemological neutrality is nigh-impossible. Media outlets are often accused of a certain bias or lack of balance. Organisations like ‘Media Lense’ and ‘FAIR’, monitoring media activities, have come up with a host of studies exposing bias or self-censorship employed by the corporate media.

Critics like Chomsky and Herman, relying on their analysis of the US media, assert that privately owned US media largely function through a class-based monopoly of ideas, whereby “money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant interests to get their messages across to the public” (Herman and Chomsky 1994: 2). They identified following five filters that ensure that message released to the public does not disturb the status quo:

 (1) concentrated ownership and profit orientation  of the dominant media firms; (2)   advertising as the primary income source; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and ‘experts’ funded and approved by agents of power; (4) ‘flak’ as means of disciplining the media; and (5)  anti-communism as ‘national religion’ and control mechanism.’ (Ibid: 2). In the post-Cold War period, anti-communism has been replaced by Islamophobia.

The censorship described in Chomsky-Herman model can also be explained through an understanding of corporations at large. In his book, The Corporation, Canadian law professor Joel Bakan notes that corporations are legally obliged to maximize returns for shareholders. Company executives are literally compelled to subordinate all consideration to profit: “The law forbids any motivation for their actions, whether to assist workers, improve the environment, or help consumers save money. They can do these things with their own money, as private citizens. As corporate officials, however, stewards of other people’s money, they have no legal authority to pursue such goals as ends in themselves – only as means to serve the corporation’s own interest, which generally means to maximize the wealth of its shareholders. Corporate social responsibility is thus illegal – at least when it is genuine” (Bakan 2004: 37).

This ban on social responsibility has been established in legal judgments over hundreds of years. In a key nineteenth-century court case, for example, Lord Bowen declared:

“Charity has no business to sit at boards of directors qua charity.  There is, however, a kind of charitable dealing which is for the interest of those who practice it, and to that extent and to that garb (I admit not a very philanthropic garb )charity mat sit at the board, but for no other purpose” (Quoted, ibid: 38-9).

As a matter of fact, it was the corporatist commercialization of mass media that edged serious political content out and replaced it with crime news, sports, scandals, and hollow entertainment (Curran 1977, Bourdieu 1998).

However, commercialization is credited in standard academic narratives with the economic emancipation of the press from state control as the growth of newspaper profits, largely from advertising, enabled newspapers to free themselves from state and party subsidies.  This conventional wisdom is stated by Dr Ivon Asquith, for instance, in a study of the early nineteenth century press: “Since sales were inadequate to cover the costs of producing a paper, it was the growing income from advertising which provided the material base for the change of attitude from subservience to independence …The growth of advertising revenue was the most important single factor in enabling the press to emerge as the Fourth Estate of the realm” (Asquith 1975:721). According to New Cambridge Modern History, financially independent newspapers became ‘great organs of the public mind,’ amplifying the voice of the people rather than of governments and politicians (Curran 1977:197).

Schudson, justifies commercialization of mass media in yet another way. He thinks, commercial journalism sometimes best serves its democratic obligations by following the mercenary instinct of outdoing competitors by being at the right place at the right time when a surprising revelation surfaces of an unanticipated event happens (Schudson 2004: 10).

Schudson’s argument is contradicted by Bourdieue (2005: 44-45) who thinks newspapers’ mutual competition for scoops, exclusives, big names, in fact leads to ‘uniformity, censorship and even conservatism’. “One very simple example: the battle between the three French weekly magazines, Le Nouvel Observateur, L’Express and Le Point, results in their being indistinguishable. To a large extent this is because the competitive struggle between them, which leads them to an obsessive pursuit of difference, of priority and so on, tends not to differentiate them but to bring them together. They steal each other’s front page stories, editorials, and subjects… Another battle typical of what happens in the journalistic field is that the Le Nouvel Observateur and L’Express each in turn brought forward their publication by one day,” Bourdieue  points out (Ibid:44).

Similarly, Curran (1977) rejects the usual neoliberal claims about competition and advertising , in his study of British media’s history. He instead thinks, “Market forces succeeded where legal repression had failed in establishing the press as an instrument of social control, with lasting consequences for the development of modern British society” (Curran 1977:198).

Curran (1977) narrates that a direct state censorship in Britain was never fully effective as the state lacked the sophisticated apparatus necessary to control press. For instance, libel prosecutions, even when upheld, were often counter-productive. The circulation of the Republican, for example, increased by over 50% in 1819 when its editor was persecuted. Also, it was not the commercial press that posed problem. The principal challenge came from the radical press,  appealing by the 1830s to a large working-class audience, for which seditious libel prosecutions became a valuable source of promotion. ‘A libeler’, concluded the disillusioned Attorney General in 1832, ‘thirsted for nothing more than the valuable advertisement of a public trial in a  Court of Justice’. Understandably, the number of libel prosecutions fell sharply. Whereas there were 167 prosecutions for seditious and blasphemous libel in the period 1817-24, there were only 16 during 1825-34 (Ibid 198-99).

Hence, libel law being counter-productive was substantially modified in 1843.

The government relied increasingly , instead, upon the so called ‘taxes on knowledge’ – a stamp duty on each copy of a press publication sold to the public, a duty on each advertisement placed in the press, and a tax on paper.

Even press taxes, sharply increased between 1780-1815, were rendered ineffectual by systematic evasion of the stamp duty by a highly organised radical press with well developed distribution networks. Workers would also organise purchase of newspapers by pooling their resources or through their unions. Pressure was also exerted on taverns to purchase radical papers through the threat of withdrawing custom (ibid: 200-201).

Paradoxically, in the second half of the nineteenth century, despite the repeal of the advertisement duty in 1853 and the stamp duty in 1855, the radical popular press was nearly eliminated owing to ‘commercialisation’ of the popular press. “Newspapers concentrated upon the easy arousal of sensationalism rather than taxing political analysis in order to maximize sales: reports of crime, scandal and sport displaced attacks on capitalism as more salable commodities,” notes Curran (Ibid: 212). Technology further silenced the radical press.  Hoe printing presses, introduced in the 1860s and 1870s, were gradually replaced by rotary machines of increasing size and sophistication in late Victorian and Edwardian England. ‘Craft’ composing was revolutionised by Hattersley’s composing machine in the 1860s and 1890s. Numerous innovations were also made in graphic reproduction meantime. These developments meant a sharp hike in fixed capital.

However, even important was the effect of growing demand, released by the repeal of press taxes, on the running costs and cash flow requirements of newspaper publishing.   Hence, in 1855, it required a capital investment of  £ 4,000 to re-launch the then liberal Daily Telegraph …By the 1870s, Edward Lyod needed to spend  £ 150,000 to re-establish the Daily Chronicle (Ibid:212-214).

The US tale is hardly any different. The start-up cost in New York city in 1851 was $69,000… In 1945, it was being said: “Even small–newspaper publishing is a big business…[and]…is no longer a trade one take s up lightly even if he has substantial cash – or takes up at all if he doesn’t” (Herman and Chomsky 1994: 4).  In the USA, market players were patronised by the state. Postal subsidies, government printing contracts subsidised the partisan press until the middle of the nineteenth century. Libraries and schools purchased books and created readers for them. Copyright  was considered such an important policy that it was written into the constitution. “Without the government sanctioned and enforced monopolies provided by copyright, which was intended to preserve a public domain as much as protect authors, the modern commercial media system as we know it would be unthinkable. So much for the idea that the private media system springs “naturally” from freedom’s soil,” says McChesney (2004:4).

Even importantly, of the eight or nine media conglomerates that dominate the US (global) media system, the clear majority was built upon the leverage generated by having a radio, TV or cable monopoly license. It is even more the case that the governments build telecommunication infrastructures. So the government plays a foundational role (McChesney 2004: 5).

Once market forces, patronized by the state, had established their dictatorship over media business, it became increasingly difficult to sustain even widely-distributed progressive newspapers. For instance, in Britain the Daily Citizen, launched in 1912, with a capital of only £ 30,000 subscribed mainly by trade unions reached a circulation of 250,000 at its peak within two years and was only 50,000 short of overhauling the Daily Express established in 1900. A more left wing Herald had a circulation of, in 1914, 250,000. But none of them survived (Curran 1977: 215). The Daily Herald on its death bed, was read by 4.7 million people, nearly twice as many as the readership of the Guardian, The Times and the Financial Times put together(Ibid: 225). These lessons from history illustrate how market-forces spearheaded by private capital, muffled the diversity and dissent in the media market.

Unlike what Asquith claims, the crucial element that delivered the near-end of radical press was the role occupied by advertising. On the one hand, a disproportionate amount went to established middle-class newspapers, while advertisers withheld their support from papers on political grounds (Ibid: 216-218). On the other hand, the strategic control acquired by advertisers over the press in the first place exerted a powerful pressure on the radical press to move upmarket as an essential strategy for survival. It forced radical newspapers to redefine their target audiences, and this in turn forced them to moderate their radicalism in order to attract readers that advertisers wanted to reach. This process is well illustrated by the career of Reynold’s News (Ibid: 219).

Advertising-democracy Paradox

The role of the West in Iraq has been widely criticised yet only glimpses of the truth appear on TV screens because burned and blasted bodies obstruct the selling of cars and toothpaste!

The media executives ‘worry that the flood of grisly images flowing into living rooms from Iraq and elsewhere will discourage advertiser’. A General Motors spokesperson explained that her company “would not advertise on a TV program [just] about atrocities in Iraq”, while an advertising executive advised “you don’t want to run a humourous commercial next to horrific images and stories” (David and David 2006: 4).

This is, however, understandable since commercial model has the logic that newspapers have to attract advertising in order to cover the costs of production else the price of any newspaper would skyrocket spelling its demise. Britain’s most progressive broadsheet newspapers – the Guardian, the Observer and the Independent – are dependent on advertising for 75 percent or more of their total take (David and David 2006: 7). Or for instance, Greenpeace booked 20 hordings for a poster campaign. But then the advertising agency was informed that most of the sites – those owned by Mills & Allen – had been withdrawn. It was reported in the Guardian by its reporter, Erlichman, who faced problems at work for reporting it (David and David 2009: 13)

Hence, mere the threat of withdrawal of advertising can affect editorial content. In April 2005, General Motors had pulled its advertising from the Los Angles Times, after it called for sacking of GM chief executive Rick Wagoner (Griffiths 2005). Unsurprisingly, a survey of US media workers found respondents concerned about ‘pressure from advertisers trying to shape coverage’ as well as ‘outside control of editorial policy’…In May 2005, financial giant Morgan Stanley informed key publications of new guidelines that required its adverts to be pulled if negative stories about it were published. A key section of its planned addition to advertising contracts read: “In the event that objectionable editorial coverage is planned, agency must be informed as a last-minute change may be necessary. If an issue arises after-hours or a call cannot be made, immediately cancel all Morgan Stanley ads for a minimum of 48 hours” (David and David 2006: 7).

Similarly, when a 2000 Time magazine series on environmental campaigners, sponsored by Ford Motor Company, failed to mention anti-car campaigners, Time’s international editor explained: ‘We don’t run airline ads next to stories about airline crashes’ (David and David:12). The carrot-and-stick pressures from advertisers has the effect of herding corporate media away from some issues.

But the natural response to the above claim is: “Sorry, but we do see honest reporting and commentary in the media. The government has been widely criticised and challenged on its conduct in the build up to the Iraq war. Corporations are subject to robust censure and investigation – look at the Enron scandal”.

Journalist Jonathan Cook raised the same point in a reply to one of Media Lens’s alerts in October 2008. Cook, who previously worked for the Guardian and the Observer,  posed a crucial challenge: “How is it then… there are dissenting voices like John Pilger, Robert Fisk, George Monbiot and Seumas Milne who write in the British media while refusing to toe the line?”

In answering his own question, Cook noted the remarkable fact that this small group pretty much exhausts the list of writers who can be said to seriously confront the mainstream consensus: “That means that in Britain’s supposedly leftwing media we can find one writer working for the Independent (Fisk), one for the New Statesman (Pilger) and two for the Guardian (Milne and Monbiot). Only Fisk, we should further note, writes regular news reports. The rest are given at best weekly columns in which to express their opinions.” It is also crucial, Cook added, that we recognise both the positive and negative roles these individuals play: “However grateful we should be to these dissident writers , their relegation to the margins of the commentary pages of Britain’s ‘leftwing’ media serves a useful purpose for corporate interests. It helps define the ‘character’ of the British media as provocative, pluralistic and free-thinking – when in truth they are anything but. It is a vital component in maintaining the fiction that  a professional media is a diverse media”.

Cook examines the case of Fisk in more detail: “All the evidence is that the Independent might have folded were it not for his inclusion in the news and comment pages. Fisk appears to be one of the main reasons people buy the Independent. When, for example, the editors realized that most of the hits on the paper’s website were for Fisk’s articles, they made his pieces accessible only by paying a subscription fee. In response people simply stopped visiting the site, forcing the Independent to restore free access to his stories” (David and David 2009: 2-3).

Bourdieue takes the debate even further: “[S]o long as one talks about journalists, one is talking within a logic of personal responsibility: one is looking for people to blame and, on the other hand, one oscillates between the positive image that journalists continue to propagate (against all the evidence), with the theme of journalism as a countervailing force, a critical tool (no democracy without journalists), etc., and the opposing vision which sees journalism as a relay of the structures of oppression, etc… the visible agents become the scapegoats, whereas if one talks in terms of a field one substitutes for these visible agents – who, in Plato’s metaphor, are the puppets whose strings have to be found” (Bourdieu 2005: 42). He concludes that journalists are caught up in structural process which exerts constraints on them such that their choices are totally preconstrained (Ibid: 45).

To explain the dissenting voices in media, Tod Gitlin unpacks the bourgeois ideology fraught with contradictions. Capitalism routinely generates , even tolerates ideologies that challenge its own rationale. For example: “Workers are now told to be self-sacrificing and disciplined for eight hours  a day and to relish their pleasurable selves for the next eight: to give themselves over to the production interests of the company of the office during the week and to express their true , questioning, consuming selves over the weekend” (Gitlin: 269-70).

But contradictions of this sort operate within a hegemonic framework narrowing down the range of contending world views. Corporate media embody these contradictions. Media’s claim to legitimacy requires them to take a certain risk of undermining the legitimacy of the social system as a whole (Ibid: 270-271). However, when a “large-scale social conflict is imported into the news institution” it is reproduced “in terms derived from the dominant ideology. Discrepant statements about reality are acknowledged – but muffled, softened, blurred, fragmented, domesticated at the same times” (Ibid:274-75).

It is also important to note that the hegemonic system, for regulating conflict in media, works when there is political stability. When crises  erupt, the hegemonic frame begins to shift. For instance, editors at the US corporate media outlets turned sympathetic to moderate anti-war activity during the Vietnam anti-war movement, for various reasons: Younger reporters wanted to share in their generation’s rejection of the war,  editors worried about their sons  draftability or were influenced y their anti-war children and spouses. The Washington Post’s Exceutive Editor Ben Bradlee, for instance, complained: ‘ We tell reporters not to march in a demonstrations. But what can you do when their wives march in demonstrations?’ (Ibid:276). The media, finally, are corporations of a peculiar type...More to the point, the product that the networks sell is the attention of audiences; their primary market is the advertisers themselves (Ibid:277).

Conglomeratisation-Democracy Paradox

The journalism attributed to the global media prefers advertising-driven, commercial ventures. The so-called 'news breaking' and 'block-busting' stories that concentrate upon accidents, disasters, political crises and the histrionics and cruelties of war are finding more space. The stories filed by trained journalists from or around trouble spots are shortened, simplified, repackaged and transmitted in commercial form. Hence, we have terms like staged ‘sound-bites’. Flashy presentational technologies, including the use of logos, rapid visual cuts, and 'stars' are assigned a centre-stage. News exchange arrangements-- in which subscribing news organisations exchange visual footage and other material- excellently give a finishing touch to the job.  These trends make one draw pessimistic conclusions. “Far from nurturing democracy, global journalism produces a bland commercial pulp for audiences who are politically comatose,” obeserves John Keane (2004) .

It is imperative in order to grasp global media, to gauge the various dimensions of media when it is privately owned and run for profit.“What you are seeing”, says Christopher Dixon, media analyst for the investment firm Paine Webber, “is the creation of global oligopoly. It happened to the oil and automotive industries earlier this century, now it is happening to the entertainment industry” (McChesney 2004:  8).

There is an increasing trend of concentration. Less than a dozen corporations and six Hollywood Majors control global flow of informational and cultural products. Most of them based in the United States, dominate the world market (Herman and McChesney 1997).

The global corporate powers can indeed pose a great threat to democracy and freedom of communication as communication markets can and do restrict freedom and equality of communication by generating barriers to entry, monopoly and restrictions upon choice and by stifling the prevailing definition of communication from that of a publicly useful and publicly meaningful good to that of commercial speech.

The conglomeratisation is also stifling the diversity. Not merely the production line is the same, the product is also becoming identical albeit with different packaging. Disney, for instance, employs the logic of synergy to all of its endeavors. Its Home Improvement Show proved successful on its ABC network. Disney then had Home Improvement star Tim Allen take roles in Disney movies and write books for Disney’s publishing firms. The other giant media conglomerates are increasingly emulating this pattern (McChesney 1999:23).

However, protagonists point out that the declining ability of the state to direct electronic broadcasting owing to increasingly global nature of electronic communication and the role of satellite dishes and private cable systems (Arora 2006: 27) undermining dictatorships. Role of AlJazeera, for instance, in the ongoing Arab revolutions has caught the imagination of many.

Earlier, in the 1980s the world witnessed that even hermetically sealed Soviet world could not withstand the tide of information that brought its collapse. Similarly, in China in 1989, inspired by news of changes in the Soviet Union and the Philippines, protests broke out invoking a sympathetic global response. According to Arora, “In broader terms, what international mass communication have the potential to do is to serve as a source of information otherwise restricted at the domestic level” (ibid: 31).

Huntington seems to agree: ‘Thanks in large part to the impact of global communications, by the mid-1980s the image of a “worldwide democratic revolution” undoubtedly had become a reality in the minds of political and intellectual leaders in most countries of the world. Because people believed it to be real, it was real in its consequences. People could and did ask about the relevance for themselves of political events in far-off countries. Solidarity’s struggle in Poland and Marcos’s downfall in the Philippines had a resonance in Chile that would have been most unlikely in earlier decades’ (quoted in Arora 2006: 32).  

It is also pointed out that along with governments, social movements and civic initiatives, the global journalism associated with these media has helped lay foundations of a global civic society that, although structured in part by large media conglomerates, is a basic precondition of nurturing democracy at the global level (Keane 2003).

However, Mchesney points out that the global commercial media system is radical in that it does not respect any tradition or any custom if profit is undermined. “But ultimately it is politically conservative, because the media giants are significant beneficieries of the current social structure around the world, and any upheaval in property or social relations, particularly to the extent that it reduces the power of business, is not in their interest”, says Machesney (2004: 16). Former Murdoch editor Andrew Neil subscribes to McChesney’s viewpoint when he wrote of his ex-boss Mr. Murdoch : ‘Rupert expects his papers to stand broadly for what he believes: a combination of right-wing Republicanism from America mixed with undiluted Thatcherism from Britain’ (David and David 2006: 6).

As of writing these lines, nuclear meltdown at Fukushima caused by earthquake in Japan on March 11 have sent shivers across the globe. The story on Truth Out that these nuclear plants were built and designed by General Electronics, has largely been ignored. Year ago, Bourdieue was pointing out that expecting journalists on NBC conducting “interviews with people who live near a nuclear plant undoubtedly would be … but then again, such a story wouldn’t even occur to anyone” (Bourdieu 1998:16).

But why have media conglomerates gone global? The business-as-usual explanation is technology  harbingering radical improvements in communications enabling Western media empires reach out rest of the world. This explanation is also offered in case of  globalization. However, this is only a partial explanation, at best. The real force has been a shift to neoliberalism. In concrete terms, it was relaxation/ elimination of barriers to commercial exploitation of media and concerted ownership. The countries signing agreements like NAFTA or the WTO were obliged to end state monopoly over air waves.  Neoliberalism is no way built into technology’s DNA. The digital communications could have been used to simply enhance public-service media had a society opted to do so. With neo-liberal values, however, television, became subject to transnational commercial development and was thrust into the centre of emerging global media system.

Once in place, firms must become larger and diversified to reduce risk and enhance profit-making opportunities as the logic of the system dictates. They must straddle the globe so as never to be outflanked by competitors (McChesney 2004: 11).

Instead of playing any liberating role, as the media conglomerates spread their tentacles , there is reason to believe they encourage popular tastes to become more uniform in at least some forms of media. Based on conversations with Hollywood executives, Variety editor Peter Bart concluded, “the world film-going audience is fast becoming more homogeneous.” Whereas action movies had once been the only sure-fire global fare – with comedies considerably more difficult to export – by the late 1990s, comedies like My Best Friend’s Wedding and The Full Monty were doing between $160 million and $200 million in non-US box-office sales (Ibid:16).

According to Machesney, with hypercommercialism and growing corporate control comes an implicit political bias in media content. He thinks the commercial promotes values which present consumerism, class inequalities, and individualism as natural whereas political activity, civic values, and anti-market activities are marginalized. Also, journalism itself gets divided along class lines. High-brow press is pitched to the business class and suited to its needs and prejudices. Of course, there are exceptions but in general, the journalism reserved for the masses tend to be the sort of drivel provided by the media giants on their US television networks. In India, for example, influenced by the global media giants, “the revamped news media…now focus more on fashion designers and beauty queens than on the dark realities of poor and violent country”  (Ibid: 17). Hardly a democratic function!

Conclusion

The media are not like understanding Maths or Physics. Appearance is deceptive. To understand why appearance is so different from the reality, we need to understand who owns the media and who control them. Even when states do not practice censorship, market forces force media to stay quiet on certain subjects. However, unlike the neo-liberal myths about market-forces, the state continues to play a decisive role in media systems. The states, as the case of Great Britain and the United States shows, often tilted in favour of big capital as against radical press. Though one finds dissenting voices and counter-currents in the mainstream media yet the priority is assigned to ratings and advertisers. This logic leads to a culture of conformity. Also, the logic of media’s private ownership has led to conglomeratisation. By implication, conglomeratisation has muffled the diversity.  The corporate media do not play any meaningful democratic role even at global level. For those committed to democracy above neoliberalism, the struggle is to require informed public participation in government policy making. Specifically, in view of the importance of media, the struggle is to democratise communication policy making. A balance in communication systems is necessary to put the media back on democratic track. This can not be achieved through technology. The technology-driven explanations for globalization and media expansion/democratisation sound fascinating but offer no real explanation or alternative. The new forms of communication can only be created by new forms of collective organisation.

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Farooq Sulehria is working with Stockholm-based Weekly Internationalen. Before joining Internationalen. He worked for one year,2006-07 at daily The News, Rawalpindi, with Lahore-based dailies, The Nation, The Frontier Post and Pakistan.

Source: viewpointonline.net

URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-media/privately-owned-media-democracy/d/5403