CONSTRUCTING PUBLIC OPINION.
How politicians and the media misrepresent the public. (4:22)
Source: http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=h_slmhM6qPI
One of the most important beliefs that people have about politicians is that politicians do whatever polls tell them to do. We hear a lot of complaint about
the lack of strong leadership, that politicians find out what the public wants and then they’ll pander to it, or at least they say they’ll pander to it.
Now, what this idea of the poll-driven politician creates is the impression that the political system may have all kinds of problems but on the whole, it’s responsive and accountable to the public. But once you actually start to look at public opinion in a more detailed way, what you discover is that the idea of the poll-pandering politician is really a myth.
For example, there’s broad support in the US for a whole range of policies. Polls show that most people support increased spending on inner cities; more spending on regulation on the environment; more spending on education; more spending on health care. We also find the majority support increases in the minimum wage, stricter gun control, and campaign finance reform.
In other words, if politicians really were poll-driven, then they’d be in favour of a whole range of liberal or left-wing policies, when in fact they’re not. And the question that this raises in a democracy is how is this mismatch between what the people want and the policies pursued by their representatives possible.
So, how do we explain this contradiction between the myth that politicians reflect the public and the reality that on most economic issues, they actually ignore public opinion? Well, let’s look at how the news media covers public opinion. When the media report on polls, what they’re actually doing is telling a story about what public opinion is, rather than just reflecting it. They’re constructing how we understand public opinion. And the news media have a lot of power here, because they choose what questions to ask and what questions not to ask. Ordinary people’s opinions usually only count inasmuch as they respond to that conversation.
Media influence on public opinion has been studied for many years now. We know, for example, that the media often play what is called an agenda-setting role. Public concern about issues tends to follow media coverage of those issues, rather than any changes in the real world. A few years ago, the degradation of the environment, issues like global warming, destruction of wilderness and chronic air, water and soil pollution, started to get a fair amount of media coverage. Accordingly, polls suggested this was one of the most important issues for most people. But then the news media started to lose interest, and even though most of the environmental problems had become worse since then, polls showed public concern decreasing. Or take an issue like drugs. Over the last two decades, public concern about drugs has
come from 3% to over 50% and back to 3% in polls. And those shifts have absolutely nothing to do with the scale of the problem, and everything to do with the volume of media coverage.
The power of the media to define what issues are seen as important has to do with the relationship between what the media report and what they don’t. Media influence in this sense is subtle but profound. The media can help shape
or modify what we know about an issue. The media create the impression of the American public has a real choice: you can choose Bush or you can choose Gore, the implication being that they’re both very different. But on substantive budgetary or economic issues, the differences between them are really on the margins. Both leading democrats and republicans support the privatized health care system, they support corporate-backed global trade agreements, they support maintaining cold war defence budgets, and they generally favour the interests of big business. But the media give the impression that democrats and republicans represent a broad range of opinion by focusing on civil liberty, not monetary issues, like gay rights or abortion, where democrats and republicans really do differ, and this masks the degree of the elite consensus.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Exam script I
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Some years after that famous Hays Code…
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has ordered a group of ABC Television stations to pay a $1.4-million US fine over an episode of NYPD Blue that showed nudity.
In a notice filed Friday, the FCC said it would fine 52 ABC affiliate stations in the Central and Mountain time zones for airing the episode. Stations in the Eastern and Pacific time zones were exempt because they broadcast the episode at 10 p.m. local time, while the affiliates being fined broadcast it at 9 p.m.
The agency said it had numerous complaints over a 2003 show in which a boy surprises a woman as she prepares to take a shower. The episode of the long-running police show included multiple shots of the woman's naked buttocks, the FCC said.
The FCC found the nudity qualifies as indecent because "it depicts sexual organs and excretory organs." ABC had argued against the fine, saying the buttocks are not a sexual organ and that fans of NYPD Blue would be well aware of the "realistic nature of its storylines." ABC, owned by the Walt Disney Co., plans to appeal the ruling.
The $1.4 million well exceeds the $550,000 US levied against CBS over Janet Jackson's breast-baring incident during the 2004 Super Bowl. The station is challenging that decision in federal court.
Some years after that famous Hays Code… (II)
THE FCC AND INDECENCY REGULATION
Attempts to control the content of expression in the United States have been around longer than the government, and efforts to regulate indecent broadcasting began with the Federal Radio Commission (“FRC”). When Congress passed the Communications Act of 1934, it transformed the FRC into the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) and expanded the role of the agency from addressing signal interference to overseeing the development of telecommunications. It was this law that began the FCC’s foray into the regulation of obscenity and indecency. Today, regulation of broadcast content in the United States comes from several different sources, all of which inform the FCC and the parties subject to the FCC’s jurisdiction.
The FCC’s legal authority to regulate indecency is codified at 18 U.S.C. § 1464. At only twenty-eight words, the statute makes it a violation of federal law to broadcast obscene, indecent, or profane material. The condensed statute reads, “Whoever utters any obscene, indecent, or profane language by means of radio communication shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”
The statute’s enforcement provision provides the FCC with the right to imprison or fine parties found guilty of broadcasting violations. Until 1994, the statute contained a $10,000 cap on per violation fines. In that year, the maximum fine amount was raised to $27,500 per violation. In June of 2004, the FCC raised the amount to $32,500 to adjust for inflation. Now, the BDEA (Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act) provides for even greater fines against broadcasters who air indecent content Although 18 U.S.C. § 1464 prohibits the broadcast of obscene, profane, or indecent material by broadcasters, the federal government cannot completely expunge indecent material from the broadcast airwaves due to the Supreme Court’s recognition of such material’s limited First Amendment protection. Consequently, the FCC has established a safe-harbor period during the hours between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., when children are unlikely to be among the viewing audience, wherein indecent material may be broadcast. Nonetheless, because the § 1464 proscription only constrains broadcasters, cable operators do not have to conform their indecent programming schedules to meet the safe-harbor requirements. Section 1464 provides little guidance for broadcasters facing enforcement for broadcasting ostensibly indecent material outside of the regulatory safe harbor. Such broadcasters may be subject to fines or forfeitures. Instead of containing specific guidelines, the provision serves as a general warning. For example, it contains no definition of the terms “obscene,” “indecent,” or “profane.”
And although the FCC has defined “indecent material,” it has done little else to further define or clarify the other terms contained in § 1464. In 2001 the FCC authored an Indecency Policy Statement to illustrate how indecency determinations are to be made. Under the 2001 policy statement, the FCC must make two determinations before it can conclude that material is indecent. First, the FCC must determine whether the material falls within the definition of “indecent content,” which specifically requires that the FCC determine whether the material involves sexual or excretory conduct. If the material does not, it falls outside the subject matter proscribed by the indecency regulations. However, if the material does involve sexual or excretory conduct, the FCC must make a second determination because sexual or excretory conduct is necessary, but not sufficient, to render material indecent. Thus, the FCC must also determine whether the broadcast was “patently offensive.”
Source: WHEN IS ENOUGH TOO MUCH? THE BROADCAST DECENCY ENFORCEMENT ACT OF 2005 AND THE EIGHTH AMENDMENT’S PROHIBITION ON EXCESSIVE FINES by AMY KRISTIN SANDERS, ESQ. * Assistant Professor, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities; Ph.D., University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, 2007; J.D., University of Iowa College of Law, 2003.
Friday, November 16, 2007
Sunday, November 4, 2007
THE FOX IN THE HENHOUSE
Adapted from TIME Thursday, Jun. 28, 2007 By ERIC POOLEY
“They're taking five billion dollars out of me and want to keep control," Rupert Murdoch was saying into the phone, "in an industry in crisis! They can't sell their company and still control it — that's not how it works. I'm sorry!"
It was a little before 5 o'clock on Friday, June 22, and the chairman of News Corp.--the world's third largest media conglomerate, with a value of $68 billion, and one of the few megacorporations controlled by a single individual--was at his desk on the eighth floor of his midtown Manhattan headquarters, trying to shore up a deal he had dreamed about for a decade.
On the wall beside Murdoch, 76, six muted flat-panel television monitors were tuned to 11 different stations — five split-screened and one devoted entirely to his beloved Fox News. But he never glanced at the monitors. He was speaking in soft bursts to an investment banker on the other end of the line. Murdoch had stripped off his jacket and tie, and his thin, dyed-brown hair was scattered across his scalp. His controversial $5 billion deal to acquire Dow Jones & Co. and its crown jewel, the Wall Street Journal, was in danger of crashing. Murdoch was playing poker: to get the deal back on track, he had to threaten to walk — and mean it.
Two months earlier, at a secret March 29 breakfast in the News Corp. building, Murdoch had told Dow Jones CEO Richard Zannino about his $60-a-share offer for the company — a staggering price for a stock that had been trading around $36. But the family that has controlled Dow Jones for more than 100 years, the Bancrofts, at first rejected Murdoch's bid because some of its members loathed his tabloid style and feared he would trample the Journal's independence. The family haggled for two weeks over a proposal designed to buffer the Journal's newsroom from Murdoch.
Murdoch hated the proposal. In his view, it would give the Bancroft family more involvement over the Journal after they sold it than they had exercised before. So he rolled up his sleeves and started working the phones, making his feelings known to key players in the deal, turning up the pressure and threatening to pull his offer — a move that would have sent Dow Jones stock plummeting back to earth.
Murdoch wanted to jolt the Bancroft family back to reality, and if the deal was going to die, he wanted to be the one to kill it. "If we clean this up to our satisfaction, the family will reject it. So why don't we just reject them?"
As it turned out, Murdoch didn't have to withdraw his bid. The threat of pulling was enough to get the family to budge.
Should the deal close as expected, Murdoch — the ultimate outsider, the ink-stained interloper who started in 1953 with a single paper in Adelaide, Australia — would add capitalism's daily chronicle to an empire that now comprises the Fox movie studio and television network, satellite TV systems in Europe and Asia, more than 100 newspapers and a fast-growing Internet division that includes MySpace, the massively popular social networking site.
He generates his own good fortune by being perhaps the most gifted opportunist in media, a man whose nose for a deal makes him the last of the true media moguls, the one who's still building — grabbing Dow Jones, dreaming about trading MySpace for a big chunk of Yahoo!, trying to launch a Polish TV network.
And he lives like an old-fashioned tycoon too, hopscotching the planet on his 737 and recharging on his yacht off St. Tropez. Recent stop: London, where he got thrown from a horse (but didn't break anything — too busy). His likeness was unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery and he threw a party in Kensington Gardens for 400 friends, including incoming British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Murdoch and his third wife, Chinese-born Wendi Deng, 38, have added two daughters, ages 3 and 5, to a fiercely competitive yet surprisingly close-knit family of four adult siblings from his two previous marriages. Murdoch likes to say he has 20 good years left.
Today the notion of this tabloid terror controlling the world's leading business journal is being met with ferocious opposition in many quarters of the American media. Some of the opposition is principled, some of it is sanctimonious, and some of it seems driven by a tangle of ideological and commercial motives. Each day brings another investigative story about Murdoch using his media properties to boost his business interests, reward his friends and punish his rivals, and each story carries the message that this man will destroy the Journal by using its hugely respected news pages as his personal fief. Of course, its editorial pages are already more conservative than Murdoch.
What´s Wrong With The News
Uniquely, FAIR works with both activists and journalists. We maintain a regular dialogue with reporters at news outlets across the country, providing constructive critiques when called for and applauding exceptional, hard-hitting journalism. We also encourage the public to contact media with their concerns, to become media activists rather than passive consumers of news.
FAIR is a media watch organization offering constructive criticism in an effort to correct media imbalance. We advocate for media access on behalf of those constituencies in our society that do not have the wealth to purchase their own TV stations or daily newspapers. We scrutinize media practices that slight public interest, peace and minority viewpoints.All of us who founded FAIR have media backgrounds. Our sympathies are with the working press. We do not view reporters, editors and producers as our enemy. Nor do we hunt for conspiracies. The villain we see is not a person or group, but a historical trend: the increasing concentration of the U.S. media in fewer and fewer corporate hands.FAIR was launched in mid-1986 at a time when the major media were bending distinctly rightward. Big media businesses were being absorbed by even bigger ones, with dangerous implications for those viewpoints already underrepresented. Well-financed right-wing groups like the misnamed Accuracy In Media (AIM) were harassing journalists who uncovered unpleasant truths about poverty, inequality, government corruption or U.S. military and nuclear policy.FAIR came into being to offer a different kind of media criticism -- fully in keeping with the First Amendment. We do not work to prevent the airing of viewpoints with which we disagree. Our approach is to work for the inclusion of new viewpoints, not the exclusion of old ones. We seek to invigorate free speech by striving for a more pluralistic media.We are dismayed that leaders of public interest movements generally do not speak for themselves in the major media. A graphic example: the nuclear freeze campaign. Arguably the biggest grassroots movement of the decade, the freeze won virtually every time its proposal was on a ballot. Yet when the freeze was discussed on national TV or in national publications, the leaders of the movement -- many of whom were women -- rarely got to speak for themselves. Instead they were spoken for by politicians and former leaders of the military establishment.FAIR seeks to break this pattern of exclusion by dialoguing with media programmers, reporters and editors. In a democratic society, news and responsible opinion should extend beyond the perspectives of government and corporate elites.
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