Kari Karppinen - Rethinking Media Pluralism

SERIES EDITOR: PHILIP M. NAPOLI

This series seeks to publish research that can inform the work of policy makers, policy advocates, scholars, and students as they grapple with a rapidly changing communications environment and the variety of policy issues arising within it. The series employs a broadly defined notion of communications policy, in that it considers not only scholarship addressing specific policy issues and processes but also more broadly focused communications scholarship that has direct implications for policy making.

EDITORIAL BOARD

Patricia Aufdherheide, American University

Ellen Goodman, Rutgers University School of Law, Camden

Allen Hammond, Santa Clara University School of Law

Robert B. Horwitz, University of California at San Diego

Robert W. McChesney, University of Illinois

Jorge Schement, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

This book brings to a close several years of research, including many detours, and I want to thank all my colleagues and friends who have offered their encouragement or advice over these years. In particular, I am grateful to Hannu Nieminen for his advice and encouragement throughout the project. Many thanks also to the editor of the Everett C. Parker Book Series, Philip M. Napoli, for his support and comments along the way.

The Department of Media and Communication Studies in the University of Helsinki and my colleagues there have offered a productive but relaxed setting for working on this project. My thanks also go to the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster and the Donald McGannon Communication Research Center at Fordham University for visiting fellowships that greatly influenced this book.

Des Freedman, Peter Dahlgren, Hallvard Moe, Laura Juntunen, and the anonymous reviewers at Fordham University Press have all offered valuable comments on the manuscript in its different stages. Thanks also to David Kivinen for his proofreading help.

Media pluralism and diversity are values that few would oppose in principle. Access to a broad range of different political views and cultural expressions constitutes a fundamental value in media policy as well as in theories of the relationship between media and democracy. Opinions on the meaning and nature of media pluralism as a theoretical, political, or empirical concept, however, are many, and they embody some of the central conflicts in contemporary thinking about the role of media in society. The aim of this book is to analyze the ambiguities involved in and controversies surrounding the concept of media pluralism in two ways: by deconstructing the normative roots of the concept from the perspective of democratic theory, and by analyzing its different uses, definitions and underlying rationalities in current, mainly European media policy debates. Building on the critique developed here of the uses of pluralism and diversity in media studies and policy discourses, I will then argue for a more critical conception where media pluralism is understood not only in terms of variety or choice, but more broadly as a normative value that refers to the distribution of communicative power in the public sphere.

Although concerns for media pluralism in its different guises are by no means new, it seems that they have continued to gain increasing prominence in recent academic and political debates. This emphasis can partly be linked to the broader renaissance of pluralism in political thought. The theories and concepts underlying normative views of media and democracy have clearly taken a pluralist or antiessentialist turn in recent decades. Consequently, it is difficult to establish any universally recognized standards for evaluating media performance and quality. As normative judgments based on quality or truth have become increasingly problematic, definitions of public interest in the context of culture and media have shifted even more towards emphasizing pluralism and diversity. As John Keane (1999, 3) has noted, normative questions about the media, whether they concern the structure and organization or the quality of contents, are hard to answer with anything but platitudes about the need for diversity, balance, and variety.

Notions of pluralism and diversity also seem to invoke a positive resonance in media policy, so much so that they permeate a major part of the arguments in current media policy debates. Des Freedman (2005) notes in his study of UK and US media policy that contemporary policy documents are littered with positive references to pluralism and diversity, signaling their rise as a key justification for emerging regimes of media regulation. Keen to avoid the patronizing claim to know what is best for the people, defenders of public interest in media policy increasingly plead for values such as pluralism, diversity, openness, and creativity (De Bens 2007, 11). Hence, it can be argued that pluralism is not only an indisputable value but also one of the few politically correct criteria for assessing media performance and regulation.

Based on the fundamental principles of liberal democracy and a democratic public sphere, a plurality of viewpoints and perspectives in the media can be considered a self-evident value. Yet, this consensus in principle has not stopped disagreements about the definition of media pluralism, let alone its proper implementation or institutionalization. In part, this ambiguity can be traced to the nature of pluralism as a social value. According to Gregor McLennan (1995, 7), the constitutive vagueness of pluralism as a general social and philosophical value gives it enough ideological flexibility so that it can signify reactionary things in one phase of the debate and progressive things in the next. Similarly in media policy, the positive resonance of pluralism and diversity has been used in arguments for various and often incompatible objectives: for free competition and consumer choice as well as for further public intervention and regulation.