While humans need only one heart to pump life-sustaining oxygenated blood to the body, a democracy requires more than a single source to circulate the life's blood of representative government—information—to its citizenry. It is generally argued that the wider the variety of sources informing the electorate about politics, the better. However, the degree to which issues like the increasingly concentrated ownership of the news media, juxtaposed against the simultaneous growing availability of different cable television channels and Websites, actually affect democratic health has received too little systematic, scholarly attention. Two exciting new books address these issues in strikingly different yet intellectually stimulating ways; their dissimilar conclusions about issues surrounding media ownership and the influence on democracy and democratic behaviors of media choice provide worthy grist for the scholarly mill.
C. Edwin Baker's Media Concentration and Democracy makes the case for opposing concentrated media ownership. An accomplished legal scholar who has had much to say about media markets, democracy, and the First Amendment, Baker focuses on three major arguments. First, and most importantly, he puts forward a “democratic distribution principle” that “democracy implies as wide as practical a dispersal of power within public discourse” (p. 7). Flowing from this general principle are two additional arguments against concentrated ownership—that dispersion of ownership both creates democratic safeguards and thrusts media outlets into the arms of owners interested in quality rather than the bottom line.
Baker's democratic prerequisites are more aggressive than Robert Dahl's claim in On Democracy (1998) that the availability, rather than Baker's preference for the widest possible dispersion, of alternate sources of independent information is necessary for a democracy. Baker argues that in order for democracies to achieve fair bargains, there must be a reasonable weighting of as many different people's interests as possible; this requires an extremely wide variety of media owners. Quick to recognize that the “common good” may require media to communicate en masse, he supplies two caveats to his thesis. First, the wide dispersal of ownership could result in a heavily segmented audience, making fair bargaining and consensus difficult. Second, mass media deal with aggregates. Nevertheless, these caveats are brushed aside and do not prevent the democratic distribution principle from supporting the opposition to any merger of any media outlets. For the author, concerns about how media concentration makes the media vulnerable to outside pressure or creates the opportunity for the distortion of the news are of paramount importance.
Baker spends much of his effort answering supporters of media deregulation, countering claims, most notably by Benjamin Compaine (The Media Monopoly Myth: How New Competition Is Expanding Our Sources of Information and Entertainment, 2005), that concentrated ownership is not a problem as there are many owners of news media outlets and several sources from which people can acquire information. Baker forcefully argues that the entire media are not the relevant market and that it is a mistake to equate economic criteria for sociopolitical criteria when claiming there is an abundance of owners (p. 59–75). He assails the oft-cited hope that either the market or the Internet will provide a proper diversity of voices in the mediated world, suggesting that the most popular Internet news sites are corporately owned and that few websites reach a large number of people.
Arguing that a proper reading of the First Amendment values democratic processes, Baker embraces a theory of “complex democracy” derived from Jürgen Habermas, which requires discourses striving for uncoerced agreement, on the one hand, and fair bargaining, on the other (p. 146). While recognizing that these goals create tension for the democratic distribution principle, Baker does not grapple with this problem very seriously, nor does he revisit the aforementioned two crucial caveats to the democratic distribution principle. He closes with a series of policy prescriptions surrounding antitrust law and requirements that the government approve media mergers and stop those that increase concentration or allow owners to come from nonmedia firms. These, he admits, are not very likely, leaving the reader to wonder about more pragmatic efforts that might be made to encourage ownership dispersion.
The forceful elegance of Baker's arguments, their grounding in legal theory, and his clear prose are real strengths; the book is appropriate for graduate courses in law, economics, political communication, and democratic thought. The author gives the reader good reason to question the wisdom and legitimacy of the concentrated ownership of information providers. However, the arguments proffered fail to engage with political science work seeking to examine similar issues. He asserts that democracy requires people to be able to form opinions and express them, but fails to incorporate key political variables into his arguments. Absent are discussions of the capacity of citizens to make democratic decisions in a concentrated environment or with limited information, and the role that political institutions like the media play in creating conditions favorable for democratic decision making (Arthur Lupia and Mathew McCubbins, The Democratic Dilemma, 1998).
Moreover, a discussion of factors influencing a democracy's health ought to consider political parties. Paul Sniderman and John Bullock claim that democratic opinion is menu dependent—and that the parties make the menus (“A Consistency Theory of Public Opinion and Political Choice: The Hypothesis of Menu Dependence,” in William E. Saris and Paul M. Sniderman, eds., Studies in Public Opinion, 2004). Whether concentrated ownership affects the mediated communication of partisan issue positions is not addressed by Baker, nor does he consider that parties might create conditions that increase the concentration of debate, even with wide ownership dispersal, by stamping out perspectives not delivered by Republicans or Democrats.
While Baker argues that media concentration is bad for democracy, Markus Prior explores the thought-provoking possibility that increasing media choice has negative consequences of its own. In his theoretically innovative and methodologically rigorous Post-Broadcast Democracy, Prior explores how the media environment affects political behavior. He repeatedly and clearly demonstrates that increased media choice increases political inequality with respect to news consumption, political knowledge, and voter turnout while being a major culprit in the increasing polarization of elections and the electorate itself.
Prior's central argument is simple, elegant, and persuasive: Now that there are more television stations to watch, radio dials to tune in, and Websites to surf, those uninterested in politics can effectively remove themselves from situations where they would receive political information, while news junkies can always get a fix. This results in little to no change in aggregate measures of political knowledge and voter turnout, but misses important, and heretofore unseen, individual changes in political inequality. That is, when there were three television stations, if people wanted the television on at 6:30 they had to watch the news, and so even those who were not interested in politics were apt to engage in a process of Downsian by-product learning. With hundreds of channels at the fingertips of one's remote control, those interested in political news are sure to watch politically oriented news programming, while those who do not wake up wondering how they will hold government accountable are likely to flip to Desperate Housewives or Monday Night Football. Increasing media choice allows the politically uninterested to avoid learning about politics. This fact has serious consequences for democracy.
Using an innovative survey experiment, Nielsen research data, and sophisticated treatments of American National Elections Study and other survey data, Prior reports evidence consistent with his “Conditional Political Learning” model, which posits that “the effect of motivation on political learning depends on the media environment” (author's emphasis, p. 33). Analyzing data from the 1930s to 2005, Prior shows that broadcast television's inception increased the political knowledge and propensity to vote of the less politically interested by limiting their media choices, while the advent of cable allowed fans of entertainment to eschew political information, resulting in news fans making elections more partisan.
Prior's arguments with respect to political polarization are less convincing as they do not adequately deal with some of the major perspectives on partisan change during the the time period he studies. In one example, recently rearticulated by James Stimson, political elites were polarized on the abortion issue before public attitudes on abortion became predictable by partisan identification (Tides of Consent, 2004). Moreover, Geoffrey Layman and Thomas Carsey's many accounts of “conflict extension” in the electorate must be incorporated into explanations of polarization involving the media environment.
Given the focus on entertainment fans and news junkies, it is a bit curious that Prior does not consider the political relevance of some entertainment programs. Indeed, it is challenging to “get” the jokes on The Daily Show or The Colbert Report if one is not familiar with current events. Thus, some by-product learning may occur, especially for younger segments of the population, who have been able to avoid by-product learning as a result of high media choice.
These are minor quibbles. In the main, Prior's noteworthy accomplishment is sure to be required reading for scholars and students interested in the media, turnout, political knowledge, and polarization. Both books do an excellent job of moving forward the debates about media concentration, media choice, and democracy and should be widely read.
