Democratization through the media? Part 2/2

The contribution of an effective media with respect to the accountability system in any democratic country is undeniable. It raises public awareness about corruption, its sources, costs and possible remedies and investigates incidents of corruption that are sometimes unnoticed.

However, when privatization takes place in a small poor nation where there exists a reduced and embedded business elite that has very close relationships with powerful people in the state apparatus, then it might not give the desired results.  Kilimwiko (1997) explains the case of Tanzania at that time, where the rise of the private sector news media was accompanied by the “emergence of media moguls who use their power to shield corruption”. In that country, in spite of the incursion of four TV stations, seven radio stations and more than eight daily newspapers, the government had voice all over, holding small or no accountability. On the other hand, Paul (1998) describes how in Russia the dependency of the private news agencies on powerful financial interests has decreased their potential to be agents of change.

Once the media are independent and it intends to fight and expose corruption, the journalists do it exposing themselves, many times risking their lives. Many reporters have disappeared, been harassed, imprisoned and killed. According to data from the Committee to Protect Journalists (2014), 1062 journalists have been killed since 1992. The eighty percent of them were investigating issues related to corruption, crime and politics. It is very important that they are given the right protection so that they can work and help eradicate corruption issues and enhance accountability. Of course, this is another difficult problem when taking into consideration the weak systems of justice existent in many countries, and when sometimes the systems of justice are corrupt themselves.

Another important element in the process of the media working for a better accountability in weak democracies is the access to information. The “right to know” is very closely linked to accountability. It is very difficult to hold an informed opinion or judgment when the authorities do not allow the general population and the media to access the information they need about the governmental activities and the decision making processes. Somehow it becomes suspicious when the state does not want to share information. It leads to think that they might be hiding something. But if they open up to the public, sharing what they do, how much they spend, plans for new projects benefiting the general population and so on, the civil society and the media will be able to form an intelligent informed judgment, generate debates and correspond with votes/confidence to their government. The legislation plays a very important role here, forcing and guaranteeing the right information for everybody.

Access to affordable, balanced, and objective media is vital to any democracy. Nowadays, the population uses the media to know what is going on in their communities, to check on and control what happens in government and corporations, and to play active, informed roles as citizens.  This leads us to ask ourselves: is the new media technology the key needed for weak democracies to somehow gain strength? What do the new media give us that the old media cannot provide?

The new technologies are playing important roles in making changes in politics, for example political parties have more and more turned to computer technologies, both for internal organizational purposes and for direct communication with members and voters; it has also helped poor political parties and individual candidates to be able to participate in a political campaign. Technological innovations are rapidly changing political and democratization processes across the world.  The growth of digital media has also helped to change the way people think and act, it has radically changed the way cultures, economies, governments, and human beings interact with each other, as well as transforming the ways in which knowledge and content are created, produced, and distributed.

Civic networking became a trend in the 1990s and up to now it continues to be a good democratizing strategy because of the interaction of several tactics in the political contexts, like the expansionist plans of government information departments, pressure from civil society and think tanks, lobbying by communications providers, and the aims of accountability, transparency and efficiency.

Stanyer (2008) asserts that “electronic democracy” best describes the conciliating role of digital technologies in enhancing citizen participation in the political level: “The way news is accessed is also changing. News can be downloaded as a podcast from news websites and watched at the audience’s convenience”. Some organizations have also observed the potentially positive effect of new media technologies in Africa, especially on the democratic and economic front. For example, the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) concluded in a study that the new media technology had proven to be the engine for economic and social development in the 21st century. According to the study, “since the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in 2003 and 2005, African governments have been far more proactive in pursuing policies and public-private partnerships that will bring affordable connectivity to their countries” (SIDA, 2009).

The cornerstone of democracy is claimed to be freedom of speech and expression. In this sense, the media and democracy should always be together as journalism is central to democracy, citizenship, and everyday life. But a very important question is: can media alone initiate change? Some have pointed to recent developments in North Africa to support the premise that media can certainly support change. In the case of Zimbabwe, for example, new media may definitely be helping spread democratic change, but we can also say that it is not the media alone, it takes a combination of factors like the political climate in the country, infrastructure, access to the Internet, the level of literacy and civil society (Mutsvairo, 2013). Kluver and Banerjee (2005) say that the use of the Internet as an apparatus for promoting democracy in the case of China is good, like online news and social media which are considered democratizing tools for the Internet.

 According to Bucy and Gregson (2001), the developing of a democracy driven by technology goes beyond net activism, it also includes the participation of the civil society online and the wide exposure to political messages. The civil society can access to information through the new media having the opportunity of accessing, filtering and searching the information they need from different sources, avoiding the bias that conventional media might have giving the population only one version of the information and this makes the population the power to participate more actively and get engaged into the political decision making process.  

In this sense even though the new media has the power to encourage change, the main problem is that civil society in a particular country still need to have access to digital technology, which becomes easier in the rich industrialized countries and very difficult in the poorest ones and, delaying the potential technology has to contribute to the democratic process.

The new media have already had significant political effects, and they are very likely to have even more dramatic effects in the future. As it has been demonstrated by the use of new online media during the recent Arab uprisings, these technological advances clearly have added effective new tools to the resources of people challenging authoritarian rule even as their oppressors are at the same time looking for ways to use these same tools to stop them. We cannot say that the media is the cause of the democratizing wave in the Arab world, certainly there exist many more factors that are key for that process, like cultural factors, internal policies and the external conflicts, but we cannot deny that the media facilitated things.

One of the factors in which the media was crucial was at the time of documenting abuse of force from the authorities and making them viral on the internet. Everybody (as long as they had access to internet) was able to watch and presence what was happening in those places, at the same time people who were there were able to organize and make huge protests against the rule. This is believed to have had a spillover effect on the neighboring countries, who were also encouraged to rebel and resist. So, even though the media cannot claim the main stage, it looks like if it was. Without the mass media, probably the regime would have tried to crack down the rebels in a more brutal way, and the protests would probably have happened in a different way, with less people and it would have taken longer to organize.

Contrary to what many of us might think, the revolution in Egypt was not spontaneous, the leader activists in charge of the revolution were part of several political and social forces and were trained by Western foundations and governments (Mozorov, 2011a). They knew what they were doing, and the connections they made were not only virtual, but with human networks.

Finally, there is a very important factor that we should not dare not to mention: political culture. The effects that the media had in Egypt are not the same as in Russia, China or North Korea. Talking about the latter, for example, we know that it is one of the countries that has less access to the internet in the world all along to the fact that the government controls the national media, that is, they control what people read, hear and believe. Besides, the citizens have been brainwashed at the extent that they would probably not have confidence in anything they read on Facebook or Twitter if it is against their “Dear Leader”.

In conclusion, yes, mass media had a very important role in the civil society’s uprising in the Arab Spring, and no, it was not the only factor. So we should not lose our focus: our eyes should be in those factors that make people be aware that they need a change, like cultural factors, internal policies, external influences and political culture, and only then we should analyze the way each country uses tools such as the media in order to achieve their goal. After all, democracy is worth it.

Dott.ssa Ana Figueroa