Professor Edward Herman, an authority on the mass media, talks to two Singaporean journalists on the evolving role of the media in the new millennium. This article was first published in [#1] BigO[/#] , April 2001 .

Q: With the Internet, are we media saturated? Is there still room for new media?

A : Who are 'we'? Globally only a small fraction of the population has access to the Internet, and even in the United States, less than half have access. Furthermore, the Internet is not a medium of mass communication, although it is very useful for individuals and groups for more limited communication functions (data searches, communication within narrower collectives and political allies).

Ordinary citizens still depend heavily on the mass media for news, political debate and entertainment. The main problem across the globe is that this mass media is commercial and dependent on advertisers, and therefore does poorly in serving the citizenry with information relevant to a democratic community.

The virtual law of mass media evolution, well illustrated by the history of US broadcasting over its 75-year life, is that under intensifying commercial pressures the public sphere shrinks and softens and is displaced with entertainment.

We need more media that does not depend on advertising, which means more public and community broadcasters, newspapers, magazines and Internet sites. The trend is not healthy at this moment in history, with even the Internet now being captured by large commercial interests like AOL-Time Warner.

The fight should be for de-commercialisation and the support of media, new and old, that are ad-free and independent.

Attract eyeballs

Q: Is the media more informative and substantive now or is hype more prevalent?

A : Hype is more prevalent, including entertainment that titillates and grabs attention, a focus on celebrities and sports, and anything that will attract eyeballs and hold them, even if only momentarily.

Information is heavy on style, even if hugely biased, but it is weak on politics and economics, excluding stock market quotations and analyses which are given generous coverage. This is in accord with the commercial model of the media, which is designed to feature consumer activity and divert attention from politics.

Q: There is a widely-held notion that this generation has been 'dumbed' down. Do you think so?

A : Yes, it has been 'dumbed' down. This is partly a result of the media focus on styles and acquisition of goods, and failure to make information about economics, politics, sociology and history very available or very interesting.

De-politicisation also results from the fact that in the new global order, political change has become difficult, so why bother to study and work on something beyond the bounds of being affected by the actions of ordinary citizens?

It is easier to be in tune with style changes and to join the consumption throng. One of the objectives of the dominant establishment and media is to transform the populace from citizens to consumers.

This involves a systematic 'dumbing' down of young and old. It should be stressed that there is a substantial minority of young and old resisters who continue to fight these deleterious trends. But they are a minority.

Their numbers may rise rapidly, however, as the new economic order proves that it is in service to a tiny global elite, which it will eventually do as inequality continues to increase, more and more suffer abuses in the global economy, the environment degrades further, and the bubbles continue to deflate and burst.

Crimes and lies

Q: Has the level of journalistic investigation and criticism declined?

A : Yes. There are still outstanding cases of solid media investigation and criticism, but there are huge areas in which the dominant media refuse to investigate and criticise, and most of their work is channeled into areas supportive of their companies and national corporate interest.

They rarely investigate the crimes and lies of their own state on matters like East Timor and Turkey, where their governments have been supporting the state terror of allied states.

And on subjects like the effects of depleted uranium weapons, as their military and politicians apologise for these, the media's foot-dragging is laughable.

The big media conglomerates are part of the corporate community and in treating its crimes and those of the national state, which the corporate community dominates, the big media behave as badly as Pravda did in the old Soviet Union.

The 'propaganda model' that Noam Chomsky and I put up in Manufacturing Consent , showing why and how the mainstream media serve as virtual agents of the powerful, has proven to be very much on target.

Q: In this media age, sex seems to be the primary vehicle driving media sales in all sectors from advertising to Internet and print media circulation. Why is this?

A : I'm not sure it is primary, but it is right up there with sports and violence. The reasons are simply that these sell - people watch and listen as the voyeur and competitive instincts are strong.

Sex and violence also travel well between cultures and they are not reliant on language and can be shown in New York City and Shanghai with messages understood. So where the commercial drive is the motive force for the media, sex and violence will get heavy featuring.

Suharto's downfall

Q: Was the media instrumental in the downfall of Indonesia's president Suharto or was the outrage against a compliant media one of the factors spurring on the protesters?

A : What was instrumental in Suharto's fall was the financial crisis, the economic decline which hurt many people badly and the withdrawal of Western support from the dictator who was reluctant to follow instructions from abroad.

A secondary effect resulted from the fact that with the crisis and withdrawal of support, the media and protesters got a little more freedom of action - space was opened and it was filled quickly.

The media were cautious but still reported facts that spurred on protests, like the bad economic conditions and the West's distancing itself from Suharto.

No doubt the protesters were angry at the media as well as ruling gangsters, but the effects of the media in this phase of Indonesia's political evolution were complex - the media spurred things on a bit by their own small bits of bold reporting as well as angering protesters.

Q: What news sources (mainstream and alternative) do you rely on? How do you personally approach the mass media, given that the news is presented with built-in biases? And might not alternative media be subject to the same problems, that is, they might be pushing their own propaganda?

A : It is important to have a variety of sources to allow checking of one against the other. By experience one learns about the nature of bias of particular media and even particular reporters, and that allows one to read them for what they are worth and to seek out the good ones.

Foreign media are very often less biased than one's own country's media, the latter often patriotic or constrained by local connections.

The alternative media are very important as sources, along with original suppliers of information like Amnesty International and refugee organisations that issue news from home countries like Guatemala, Haiti, Peru and Indonesia.

The alternative media may be biased, but their biases are usually open and clear, and represent important viewpoints and provide facts ignored by the mainstream media.

Culture-jamming

Q: What about the phenomenon of culture-jamming, for example, with Adbusters? Is it an effective way of fighting the mainstream propaganda and getting an alternative message out?

A : It is useful, and fun, but can be overrated. The outreach of the jammers is limited as the mainstream media are not going to help their enemies, and the big boys have the resources to saturate the population with messages only a tiny fraction of which can be 'jammed'.

There is no substitute for having media access for direct messages or messages that jam. We need our own media for both. Moreover, jamming is negative, it doesn't tell us what is good and right and what positive should be done to improve the world.

Q: Proponents of 'manufacturing consent' might argue that it leads to order and an orderly society is necessary for corporations to function and profit from. This suggests that the 'search for truth' is chaotic and might lead to ruin. Is 'truth' at odds with 'order'?

A : 'Order' is frequently at odds with justice, and Orwell's model of 1984 portrays a society where order is the highest priority, and it isn't very nice. Corporations frequently don't like 'truth' and want 'order' because this might suggest that unions are needed to protect workers, and struggles for union recognition that involve disorder should be put down in the interests of 'order', meaning higher corporate profits.

We should be extremely suspicious of the claim that truth threatens order - it is usually a rationalisation for the denial of basic human rights that we should always reject.

If corporate profits can't be sustained without repression, the answer is obviously sacrifice the profits, and the corporations themselves, if their means requires 1984.

Media control

Q: I'm sure you know that Singapore has a tightly-controlled mass media. The oft-cited reason is that we have to be sure that the people in control of the media are 'responsible' people who can be trusted not to run inflammatory stories.

The underlying concern is that in a multi-racial and religious society like ours, one which is only 35-years-old this year, things could go awry very easily. There were racial riots in the 1960s which remain very much in the psyche of older Singaporeans.

Do you think such controls are justified, even considering the constraints of our nation? How would you balance between these competing objectives and functions as watchdog, nation-building and sensitivity to local racial and religious peculiarities?

A : Re: Singapore and its special problems - can't answer this difficult question without more information than I possess, but I warn that tight controls over the mass media by officials is incredibly dangerous and almost inherently bad as they invariably abuse that power to prevent discussion of issues that need public understanding and debate, and to serve their authoritarian agenda.

Q: The other argument usually trotted out is that only elected officials should have such influence over society and people's lives and journalists are unelected persons who should not be given the right to affect society in such a sweeping manner.

What's your response to that? What gives an unelected media the right to be a watchdog and to dictate the public agenda?

A : If the unelected media are highly concentrated and dependent mainly on advertising this query is well taken, but this would be because they would be very likely to follow the agenda laid out for them by the elected officials.

Hopefully, there will be many competitive media entities, with a few small and independent of government and advertisers. This will make them a countervailing power to elected officials.

If the latter alone controlled the media they would use it to consolidate their power and you would have a de facto authoritarian regime even with the forms of democracy.

Democracy requires dispersed power, and a well-structured media independent of the elected officials is needed for power to be dispersed.

EDWARD HERMAN is Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and is the author of numerous book on economics, politics and the media. These include: Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media (co-author, Noam Chomsky, Pantheon, 1988); The Myth of the Liberal Media: An Edward Herman Reader (Peter Lang, 1999); and Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo War (co-editor, Philip Hammond, Pluto, 2000).