In 1959, C
Wright Mills argued that what we observe as ‘controversy’ in the news media is really
about day-to-day politics and masks the more consensual and less visible ‘power
elite’ that lies behind the military industrial complex. A decade or so
later, Stephen Lukes’ work on power suggested, in a similar vein, that the
exercise of real power is often manifest in what is left out of the public agenda.
The problem,
however, is that state-corporate power has indeed become big news in recent
years. From corruption in the British Arms Trade, to secret rendition, to
Cablegate and the revelations of mass surveillance programmes run by the NSA
and GCHQ. These are not occasional lapses in an otherwise consensual news
agenda, nor are they confined to the fringes of news, or the brevity of
short-lived scandals.
Some
attribute this to the rise of a so-called ‘Networked Fourth Estate’ (Benkler
2011) that has reinvigorated watchdog journalism through collaboration with
NGOs, hacktivists and citizen journalists. Others suggest it is more to do with
pervasive ‘cultural chaos’ (McNair 2006) resulting from the collapse of cold
war consensus and the spread of digital technologies that have collectively
made it very hard for governments to keep secrets. Others still point to a
growing dissonance within elite structures of power that make it easier for
journalists to give voice to dissenting views.
But
something doesn’t add up here. Because when we turn our attention to the effects
of all this coverage, the picture doesn’t quite tally with the promise of the
networked fourth estate, nor does it resonate with the notion of cultural chaos
or an increasingly fractured elite. This is because substantive accountability
outcomes rarely seem to follow media scrutiny of the national security state,
however intense. In the UK, the Iraq War Inquiry is still yet to publish its
report more than 5 years after it stopped taking evidence. The Gibson Inquiry
into secret rendition was scrapped altogether mid-way through its hearings and
the revelations of mass surveillance have resulted in no reform measures
whatsoever.
Could it simply
be that we expect too much of journalism in terms of its capacity to engender
social change (Schudson)? Or are journalists – in mainstream newsrooms at least
– somehow implicated or complicit in this ultimate failure of accountability?
I want to
argue that the intense media scrutiny of the national security state in recent
years reflects a more subtle and sophisticated ‘power of omission’ in which
certain frames, issues and sources are systematically marginalised or excluded
from the ‘story’ agenda, in a way that ultimately serves the agenda building
strategies of officials and elites. We can see this in the way that certain
leaks from Cablegate received minimal or no attention in television news, or
the way that the leaks as a whole quickly became subordinate to the personal
life of Julian Assange. We can see it in the way that the debate over the
legitimacy of mass surveillance programmes has been shaped around the
negotiated trade-off between privacy and civil liberties on the one hand, and
prevention of terrorism on the other. The underlying assumption of this framing
is that mass surveillance programmes are indeed used solely in the prevention
of terrorism, despite copious evidence that they are used for corporate
espionage and the advancement of economic and geopolitical interests, which
some would call imperialism.
No comments:
Post a Comment