October, 2011 Volume 21, Issue 3 Newsletter Welcome Roundtable: Flow of Political Information Data Sources Announcements Archives Social Media	Roundtable The Flow of Political Information in the Digital Age: What's Better and What's Worse?
	Michael X. Delli Carpini & Bruce A. Williams Media Regimes, Democracy, and the New Information Environment In our new book, After Broadcast News: Media Regimes, Democracy, and the New Information Environment (Cambridge University Press, 2011), we explore the implications of changes that have radically reconfigured the mediated public sphere in which we live. In it we argue that these changes have dissolved the assumptions, distinctions, and hierarchies in place during what we call the "Age of Broadcast News." These changes have been regularly noted by scholars and journalists, though almost exclusively from the perspective of this quickly collapsing era. As a result, the crisis of this particular "media regime" is seen as a crisis of democracy itself. Viewed from a broader historical vantage, however, it is the Age of Broadcast News that is exceptional in its attempts to limit politically relevant media to a single genre ("news") and a single authority ("professional journalists"). More significantly, there is little evidence that the Age of Broadcast News did a measurably better job than previous regimes at informing the public, encouraging enlightened democratic dialogue, or - in short - serving the broader interests of a democratic society. Several conclusions can be drawn from our interpretive historical review. While narratives of U.S. democracy have always presumed the importance of an engaged citizenry, and of the centrality of an independent press and the rights of free speech and assembly in ensuring such a citizenry, the specific meanings of "engaged citizens," an "independent press," "free speech," and "free assembly" have been contested and redefined over our history. These contestations have ebbed and flowed, with periods in which institutionalized norms (media regimes) have naturalized extant practices punctuated by moments in which disjunctures between theory and practice become too obvious to ignore. These disjunctures have been driven by sometimes gradual, sometimes sudden economic, political, cultural, and technological changes. To date at least, new media regimes inevitably emerge, the result of political struggle with clear winners and losers, eventually becoming naturalized until the next disjuncture occurs. We are at such a critical disjuncture in the United States today, one in which the media regime in place for the latter half of the twentieth century has been dismantled and the contours of a new regime have yet to be formed. In the past, such moments have provided significant and rare occasions for reconsidering the relationship between media and democracy, often in very public and even organized ways (for example, the Rockefeller Seminars of the 1930s and the Hutchins Commission of the 1940s). Although we make no claim that these past efforts produced results that advanced democratic practice (in many cases, quite the opposite could be argued), we do believe that the current moment affords us yet another chance to "get it right" as both scholars and citizens. But what does "getting it right" entail? At a minimum, it requires serious consideration of what was most beneficial and most problematic about past regimes, what is potentially most beneficial and most problematic about the new information environment, and in each case how best to nurture the former and avoid the latter. We provide no firm answers to these questions, in large part because we believe such answers ought to emerge from deliberations that include all of the "stakeholders" who are affected by them. We do, however, have suggestions for shaping the issues with which such a deliberation might deal, as well as some starting principles for assessing the democratic potential of the media and how well it meets this potential. These principles are based on a consideration of the qualities of past media regimes, the qualities of the information environment in which we currently live, and a more expansive notion of what we mean by both politically relevant and democratically useful media. Lessons from Past Media Regimes Past media regimes had several distinct but overlapping qualities that are relevant to any discussion of the current and future role of the media in U.S. democracy. Cutting across the three regimes that dominated from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century (the Partisan Press, the Penny Press, and the age of Realism) are the relative absence of distinctions between fact and opinion, politics and culture, news and entertainment, personal and political, journalist and citizen, and so forth; distinctions which became much more common in recent periods. Also characteristic of these earlier regimes was the notion, articulated and instituted in various ways, that mediated representations of the public world were midpoints on the continuum from the occurrence of events and emergence of issues to their interpretation and use, a continuum along which citizens themselves played an active, deliberative role at all points. Additional qualities that were more specific to particular regimes from this earlier period include the partisan press's (unsurprising given its name) explicitly partisan affiliation and slant, as well as its elite-controlled content; the penny press's mass-oriented, nationalized content, its competition-driven model in which single communities featured numerous papers, its independent partisan slant, and its regular use of citizen journalists (a.k.a. correspondents); and the age of Realism's multigenre approach for uncovering the "truth" of things, its acceptance of science and data as a journalistic tool without abandoning a more narrative reporting style, and its explicit efforts to uncover social inequities and push for social change. Each of these qualities both presumed and reinforced notions of media and democracy that differed in significant ways from both each other what would follow. The media regime emerging within the Progressive Era of the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked a more dramatic and arguably limiting notion of both politically relevant media and politically engaged citizens. Its fundamental qualities - professionalized journalism, fact-based objective reporting, the separation of politics from popular culture, elite-dominated politics, citizens as observers - became further institutionalized and reified in the Age of Broadcast News. Layered onto these qualities in the latter regime were increasingly centralized (in terms of ownership, outlets, and content) media, increasingly routinized formats, and a growing emphasis on the watchdog function of the press. This most recent media regime had a number of valuable qualities, such as the nightly ritual of citizenship - watching the evening news - which engaged most Americans and created a common political agenda and sense of national community. And a profession devoted to holding elites accountable by providing citizens with timely, useful, and otherwise inaccessible information, gathered and disseminated in a disinterested manner, has an important place in any new media regime. Our point is that in assessing the new information environment's strengths and weaknesses, it is important to not to uncritically accept the Age of Broadcast News' underlying assumptions, to romanticize its actual characteristics and practices, or to solely use this era as the standard to which any new regime should aspire. Emergent Qualities of the New Information Environment The qualities of past media regimes provide a useful starting point for thinking about the contours of a future regime. But one must also consider the emerging qualities of the new information environment, qualities that will be crucial in developing norms and practices that might encourage its most democratically useful tendencies and discourage its least democratic ones. This new environment has unprecedented potential to dramatically increase the volume and range of information available to and about citizens; to increase the speed with which information can be gathered, retrieved, and transmitted; to decentralize the sources of information; to alter the media consumption habits of individuals and groups and thus increase the control they have over the information they receive; to increase the ability to target specific messages to specific audiences; to increase the number and range of information producers and alter the relationship between producers and consumers; to increase both vertical and horizontal communication among citizens and between citizens and elites; and to increase the interactivity of communication. In turn, these technological innovations have intersected with and been shaped by changes in the cultural, economic, and political environments of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The result has been the emergence of a media environment whose central qualities are, to use Fiske's terms, "multiaxiality" and "hyperreality." These qualities are anathema to many of the core tenets of the Age of Broadcast News but not necessarily to a democratically useful media regime. To the contrary, we believe they open up the possibility of a new regime that incorporates the best of the Age of Broadcast News while also making possible the reemergence of useful qualities found in earlier regimes. Defining Democratically Useful Media An additional requisite for assessing the promises and pitfalls of the new information environment, and the efficacy of any new regime that emerges from it, is establishing a common understanding of democratically useful media. As a starting point, we suggest the following definition of politically relevant media: media texts that shape opportunities for understanding, deliberating, and acting on (1) the conditions of one's everyday life, (2) the life of fellow community members, and (3) the norms and structures of power that shape these relationships. We believe this definition is sufficiently broad to include communication that is not automatically tied to particular genres (e.g., the nightly news), sources (e.g., professional journalists), or media (e.g., newspapers) while still allowing one to distinguish between more or less relevant texts. It also includes consciously normative assumptions regarding what democratic citizenship (i.e., understanding, deliberation, and action) and politics (i.e., self-interest, collective interests, and institutional power) entail. Finally, it treats mediated texts as politically relevant not only when they encourage democratic citizenship but also when they discourage it (i.e., a text can shape opportunities by constraining understanding, deliberation, and action, as well as by enhancing them). In turn, however, our definition of politically relevant media can be easily transformed into a yardstick for measuring the democratic utility of media texts (and the regimes producing them) by focusing on their potential for enhancing democratic citizenship. For example, a broadcast news story, newspaper article, blog entry, or fictional television drama that reduces public understanding, deliberation, and/or participation - and the media regimes that produce them - are politically relevant but not democratically useful. Building Blocks for Constructing and Assessing a New Media Regime Drawing on lessons from past media regimes, the emergent characteristics of the current information environment, and our definitions of politically relevant and democratically useful media, we suggest four criteria that we believe should underpin debates regarding the hyperreal and multiaxial media environment in which we now live. We believe that these criteria - transparency, pluralism, verisimilitude, and practice - salvage the spirit and intent of past efforts to create a democratic media environment while taking into consideration both the limitations of these earlier efforts and the promise and pitfalls evident in the new media environment. We understand that these four criteria are (and should be) debatable in their own right and so may not be the best or only ones to consider. As such, they are offered as informed suggestions, aimed to open rather than to settle discussion. But we also believe that explicit criteria and deliberation about them are desperately needed now, as the very relationship among media, citizens, and politics is in flux. Without such a public dialogue, and a set of expectations to tether and shape this public discussion, the democratic potential of this new environment will likely be lost to a series of incremental decisions largely driven by market forces and entrenched political interests.