There was a time when there were no newspapers. People used to pack peanuts and kill houseflies with other things. Then there was the Age of Enlightenment. The media wanted to sell to everybody, so they started targeting ‘the general public’ an imagined egalitarian community with perceived common concerns. In simple English, nave liberals started to believe the letters to the editor were not written by the editor but by ‘common people’ like them.
We’ve had our own moderate edition of Enlightenment in Pakistan for a decade now and correspondingly our own diet-liberals and John-Miltons-on-LPG. Part of the package are the assumptions that a) free media, without the interference of the state, is in the best interest of the society and b) consumers of information are the best judges of its quality and have a choice to accept or reject it. But that is more hope than fact. Let us see why.
1) There’s no such thing as free lunch. Someone must pay for it. The same way someone must pay for our free media.
The cost of laying out the infrastructure and producing the first copy of information is very high, but after that, copies can be printed or connections given out for very cheap. If everyone is made to pay the average cost, the media will miss out on income from those who can’t pay the average cost but are willing to pay for the cost that their own copy incurs. This is resolved by either stealing your neighbours newspaper or hooking up a wire on the local cable. Or by making everyone pay for their own copy, and making third parties pay for the primary cost in return for advertisement. In other words, the audience is sold to advertisers. That means a broadcaster will not air what the audience wants the most or what the most audience wants, but what the advertisers want the most or most advertisers want. Preference will be given to the interests of that section of the audience whose lifestyle and economic status suit the advertisers.
Simply put, if you belong to the rural majority who grow their own wheat and sell it to the urban minority, for all political purposes, you do not exist and your poverty does not matter. Those who live in the city get both the cheapest roti in the world and the cheapest phone call.
2) Free choice does not exist in vacuum: In fact, the media themselves are a factor in determining what the audience wants. When people buy a newspaper or listen to the news on TV, they seek information, education or advice. That implies that their own choices are not adequate enough and that they need to improve their ability to make good choices using better values and outlooks given in the media. Being a journalist and knowing my colleagues, that is hilarious. Anyway, the media does not respond to the audiences choices but tells the audience what choices they can make. And the kinds of choices the media will make available will depend on the advertisers.
This is even true for the kinds of choices made by people who were not even part of the transaction. It can’t simply be turned off. Media consumption can lead people to become more informed or less informed, and if that determines who people will vote for in the next elections, it concerns all the society. All citizens have stakes in whether the government makes correct decisions on warfare and welfare.
The media can also affect how we interact with other people. This means not simply that violence on the media will make the audience show more violent behaviour, but that the media will create the available ways in which we see other countries, religions, ethnicities, or gender, and it will help define social norms. Advertisers will have a significant say in all of that.
You will have to pay for a war that your country went into even if you switched off the TV every time that warmongering speaker came on. A face whitening cream company may decide how people look at a dark skinned girl even if she changed the channel every time that ad came on. On the positive side, your mother or wife won’t ask you every day what they should cook. Someone on TV will take care of that.
The ability of free media to expose the wrongdoing of the government and other entities is also overrated. Because the media intend to sell the exposs they make, they dramatically overstate the benefits. They also underproduce these benefits, when they heed to the advertiser or other benefiting entity or otherwise to go for quick reporting because of competition. The public, as a result, receives less of quality investigative journalism because it is more expensive to produce.
The author is a media critic and the news editor, The Friday Times
