1.
Democracy and Media
What is Democracy?
...............................
Is media crucial in a democratic society? Why?
................................
It is because democracy presumes ‘an open
state in which people are allowed to
participate in decision-making, and are given
access to the media, and other information
networks through which advocacy occurs’
(Hauser cited in Cooper 1991: 42).

2.
The questions are:
1. Do we really participate

3.
The Failure of Democratic System
Why those incidents happen?

4.
The Failure of Democratic System
1. The failure of democratic system
2. The absent of choices
3. Manufacture of consent
4. Pseudo events
5. The limitation of objectivity

5.
The Failure of Democratic System
Democracy  people decide
Who are ‘the people’  the majority as
reflected through the result of General
Elections
How if the majority of eligible voters do not
use their right to vote? Are the ones chosen
in General Election reflected the choice of
majority of the people?

6.
The Failure of Democratic System
Elections Turnout Trend
Niemi and Weisberg 2001: 31

7.
Do they really
different?

8.
The Absent of Choices
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9.
The Absent of Choices
A further limitation on democracy is the absence of genuine choice or pluralism.
 Many parties, however they are hardly different
“ Even in Britain, where the Labour and Conservative parties have traditionally
been distinct ideologically, the 1990s saw a coming together of agendas and q
policies on many social, economic and foreign policy matters. In the 1997 general
election, ‘New Labour’ unashamedly adopted many of what had previously been
viewed (including by most members of the Labour Party itself) as right-wing
Conservative policies, such as privatisation of the air traffic control system. In
doing so, New Labour proclaimed itself at the ‘radical centre’ of British politics,
emulating the Clinton administration’s 1996 re-election strategy of ideological
‘triangulation’ (Morris,1997 cited in McNair 2003: 24).
Triangulation in the US, like Labour’s radical centrism, meant taking what was
popular and common-sensical from the freemarket right (such as the reduction of
‘big government’), while adhering to the core social democratic values of social
justice and equality of opportunity.

10.
Manufacture of Consent
Despite the failure of democratic system and the absent of
choices, there are also media-related downfall, namely the
manufacture of consent (Walter Lippmann1954: 245).
Remember: The legitimacy of liberal democratic government
is founded on the consent of the governed (the people).
The problem is that the consent of the governed is not the
original consent of the people, but the manufactured one.
Who manufacture people’s consent?
 Mostly Media

11.
Manufacture of Consent
Politicians combined the techniques of
social psychology with the immense reach of
mass media.
Persuasion or Manipulation?
To inform or to direct?

12.
Pseudo-Events
Pseudo-events (coined by Daniel Boorstin in 1962)  the increasing
tendency of news and journalistic media to cover ‘unreal’, unauthentic
‘happenings’.
(Unauthentic events which deliberately created/managed in
order to convey a certain message and/or to reach a specific
goal)
This tendency, he argued, was associated with the rise from the
nineteenth century onwards of the popular press and a correspondingly
dramatic increase in the demand for news material. ‘As the costs of
printing and then broadcasting increased, it became financially necessary
to keep the presses always at work and the TV screen always busy.
Pressures towards the making of pseudo-events became ever stronger.
Newsgathering turned into news making’ (Boorstin 1962: 14).

13.
Pseudo-Events
“In a democratic society . . . freedom of speech and of the press
and of broadcasting includes freedom to create pseudo-events.
Competing politicians, newsmen and news media contest in this
creation. They vie with each other in offering
attractive, ‘informative’ accounts and images of the world. They are
free to speculate on the facts, to bring new facts into being, to
demand answers to their own contrived questions. Our ‘free
market of ideas’ is a place where people are confronted by
competing pseudo-events and are allowed to judge among them.
When we speak of ‘informing’ the people this is what we really
mean.” (Boorstin 1962: 35)
Triggers:
1) The lazyness of reporters  Talking news
2) The realm of media capitalism

14.
The Limitation of Objectivity
A further criticism of the media’s democratic role focuses on the
professional journalistic ethic of objectivity. This ethic developed
with the mass media in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, and has been assailed ever since as fundamentally
unattainable (McNair 2003).
For a variety of reasons, it is argued, the media’s political reportage
is biased and flawed – subjective, as opposed to objective; partisan,
rather than impartial. As Lippmann put it in 1922, “every
newspaper when it reaches the reader is the
result of a whole series of selections as to what items shall be
printed, in what position they shall be printed, how much space
each shall occupy, what emphasis each should have. There are no
objective standards here. There are conventions” (1954: 354).

15.
The Flow of Political Interests and Influence in
Democratic Landscape (Achmad Supardi)
Interest Groups ------------------Spheres of Influence-----------Target of Influence
Media
Pressure Groups Structural Political
(NGOs, Associations) Representatives (Parliament)
Lobby groups Media Citizens
Political Party Political Party
Politicians
Feedback (Input Feedback
and Vote) (Input)

16.
cccc
Lippmann 1954
McNair 2003
Niemi, Richard G. and Herbert F. Weisberg. eds. Controversies in Voting
Behavior. Washington, D.C: CQ Press, 2001.

17.
Print media
Radio
TV
Online media

18.
What trigger the emergence of individual
broadcasters?
What are the impacts of individual
broadcasters for political campaign?
What are the effects of individual
broadcasters for government/policy-
makers, media, industry, and interest groups?

19.
The Failure of Democratic System
Colin Seymour-Ure  Television has become an
‘integral part of the environment within which
political life takes place’ (1989: 308)
As a really powerful actor, can media do their role in
a balance to the rights allocated to them in a
democratic society?  The need to observe both
‘the democracy” and “the media”