This is a work in progress. My Master's thesis was on broadcasting policy, and I'm slowly but steadily re-writing it as a book, to be titled Manufacturing Citizenship.
The proposed title refers to Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent (Pantheon, NY, 1988). I am not particularly interested in writing a full-length critique of Manufacturing Consent (an appendix to Manufacturing Citizenship would be sufficient to demonstrate its main flaws.) There is a more interesting, and far more productive, game afoot.
About Manufacturing Consent
Herman and Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent claims to be a book about "the political economy of the mass media". It is a frustratingly flawed; it contains little about politics (in the sense that it is evasive about its political premises), and contains little or no economic theory.
Manufacturing Consent raises some interesting and plausible criticisms of the way things are (as well as some entirely wrong-headed ones), but fails to offer meaningful solutions. At the end of 300 pages, the final paragraph of their treatise says this:
"The organization and self-education of groups in the community and workplace, and their networking and activism, continue to be the fundamental elements in steps toward the democratization of our social life and any meaningful social change. Only to the extent that such developments succeed can we hope to see media that are free and independent." (pg 307)
And that's as much as we get. They are either unable or unwilling to address the policy issues in a meaningful way. That's possibly because they identify government regulation as one of the ways that their conspiratorial elites control the media. They therefore cannot admit the possibility that media policies could be debated, shaped and implemented by reasonable people working to advance the public interest.
About Manufacturing Citizenship
Despite the flaws inherent in Manufacturing Consent it suggests something profoundly important: that the mass media probably do in fact have the power to manufacture 'consent' (by which they mean widespread acquiesence to, or ignorance of, U.S. foreign policy with which Chomsky in particular disagrees).
If we accept the media has this power then it must also have the power to manufacture 'citizenship' - by which I mean the widespread acceptance of, and active participation in, a democratic political system. And I think the media already does this quite effectively. The questions that arise in my mind are; does the media fulfil this role effectively enough, and are there sufficient safeguards in place to ensure that it will continue to do so in the future?
One of the challenges I faced when writing my thesis was that there are two very different "discourses" about broadcasting issues. People who are interested and knowledgeable about broadcasting from a political viewpoint (including constitutional law, public law, political philosophy, public administration) hardly ever discuss broadcasting in terms of economic efficiency and business strategy. The economists, on the other hand, seem averse to discussing the social and political outcomes of media policy, focusing instead on efficiency and the allocation of property rights.
My Master's thesis critically reviewed the policy advice provided to a Royal Commission on Broadcasting by the New Zealand Treasury. That advice was based on the mainstream economic theories on broadcasting matters, gleaned from international economics journals, so it represents a good review of mainstream economic ideas that support a fully deregulated, free-market approach to broadcasting policy.
My thesis focused on Treasury's use and misuse of economic theory, it also tested the policy prescriptions implied or advocated by the theory against the broadcasting policy outcomes one might think desirable in a democratic polity. In that sense, my thesis was also about the political economy of the mass media. However, "political economy" in this case was not a coded reference to a Marxist ideology; it was an integrated multi-disciplinary approach to important real-world policy issues.
My analysis is set in a strictly democratic political framework. The social governance concept outlined elsewhere on this website is the basic conceptual model (as opposed to Herman and Chomsky's 'propaganda model'). This implies that media audiences are comprised of competent citizens who are neither deluded nor suffering from 'false consciousness'. They are generally capable of judging whether or not they support government policies, but would be constrained in their ability to do so if insufficient or misleading information were provided by the media.
Because this was a Master of Public Policy thesis, my underlying assumption is that democratically elected governments are generally comprised of well-meaning people who can, and probably will, respond positively to well-considered and persuasive arguments and analysis. Changes to government policies can and will bring about meaningful social improvement. There are policies and regulations applicable to the mass media that would strengthen democratic social governance, and those that would weaken it. The ultimate objective of Manufacturing Citizenship is to identify which should be adopted and which discarded.
And why is this useful or important?
Democracy is a relatively recent invention; Amartya Sen, the Nobel prize-winning economist, who says democracy was the greatest invention of the 20th Century (because most democratic nation states only adopted it during that century). I also believe that liberal, secular democracy is an imperfect and fragile invention, and that it faces enormous challenges in the 21st century, including the end of the hydrocarbon energy and climate change.
Facing these challenges will not be easy: they will bring widespread social and economic disruption if we cannot deal with them effectively and rapidly. It will be difficult for a democratic society to maintain its integrity through a time of great upheaval - and especially so if the media (along with other institutions) fails in its duty to "manufacture citizenship".