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POWER AND POWERLESSNESS

Liberal democracy depends on the idea of popular sovereignty – the notion that the people are the ultimate authority who confer legitimacy on the authority of government who exercise political power on their behalf. But wrapped up in this deceptively simple idea is a complex and fraught relationship between the practice of democracy and the exercise of power that also draws our attention to democracy and powerlessness. Is democracy about rule and order or rather, is it defined by dissent and struggle? Is power something to be resisted from below or as a force of rule exercised from above? Ideal notions of democracy are concerned with the power of the people and the capacity of people to act collectively to bring about change. It is worth remembering that the idea of democracy cast in this way has not always been well received. Rather, those with power, in the upper echelons of society, have shunned the ‘power of the people’ as the unruly and downright dangerous power of the masses (Macpherson, 2006). Seen from this perspective the masses require controlling rather than seeking their inclusion in any notion of shared power attached to democratic ideals. Others, such as Rancière (2004), have sought to firmly locate democracy within a more defiant meaning, attaching it to the inclusion of those who have been traditionally excluded from any say over public affairs (amounting to those without wealth or entitlement by birth). In other words, different conceptions of democracy understand power (and hence powerlessness) in different ways and point to different approaches to social and political change. In practice, it is power relations that define both the nature of democracy and the position of all social actors within its realms.

Interpretations of the meaning of democracy generally fall into two main camps. On the one hand, there are those who foreground the necessity for accountability, legitimacy and representation in systems of rule and point to things like mechanisms of voting representatives into government and referendums that offer intermittent checks on executive power as a means of establishing forms of governance that reflect the desires of the people. In this manner, democracy is used as a normative principle for conferring political legitimacy. This is usually where we find liberal deliberative theories of democracy. But elections in themselves do not fulfil the requirement of modern democracies. The people must also monitor and influence officials’ behaviour while in office – and this has proven problematic in a context where the views and opinions of certain institutions or elite actors have taken precedence over others. Popular sovereignty has been difficult (and some would say impossible) to maintain in the age of global capitalism where corporations, banking and financial agencies, who show patent disregard for the will of the people within nation states, continue to be a dominant influence on the nature and practice of political economic decision-making (Schäfer and Streeck, 2015). This is one reason why the role of the media in holding power to account is seen as paramount in functioning democracies. As overseers of government, the people must have alternative sources of information. No single source, especially an official government source, is sufficient. Freedom of the press is therefore considered to be an essential aspect of democratic governance (see Chapter 4). Furthermore, mainstream media and commercial media institutions in particular have in many cases revealed themselves to be part of the system of global capitalism that they are supposed to be monitoring and deeply entangled with political power brokers in governments, throwing the idea of popular sovereignty into question.

On the other hand, there are those who consider a key characteristic of democracy to be autonomy and collective self-rule – the rule of everyone by everyone – that inscribes equal political status (and power) to all and refuses domination by any one person or class. This approach often refers back to power from below and relates to practices and organizations external to mainstream political institutions such as those found in civil society. Here, democracy is used as a precondition for justice with the claim that equal political participation is necessary for fair and just collective decision-making. This sort of conceptual splitting of power into two factions, positions social and political change within radical democratic theory as a form of extraordinary disruption of a routinized institutional order. It is in these acts of insurgence where it is claimed that democracy takes place. This is where agonistic theories of democracy tend to reside (Mouffe, 2009). Between deliberative and agonistic democratic theory we can see the distinction between the articulation of power as the force of a centralized, hierarchical command, and power as the force of collective constitution. As Saar (2010, p. 11) notes:

In these formulations, power is understood as either ‘power over’ or ‘power to’ – where the former is wielded by some people over others (relating to thinking such as Weber (1994) and the Frankfurt School); and the latter tracing back to Spinoza (1996) in the seventeenth century, where power is a constitutive feature of social life and is not so much wielded as embodied in social relations and collectives (Barnett, 2017). Although these differing approaches have often been deemed incompatible, both these traditions of thought are relevant and useful to an understanding of media, power and democracy. Concentrated media ownership exerts a level of domination over symbolic power and it can also exert political power and influence (see Chapter 6). Politicians fearful of what news organizations will print or broadcast about them are more likely to seek their favour through forms of media deregulation and tax privileges or subsidies. Of course, this doesn’t always work and does not preclude the constitutive power of subjects as free agents able to resist and counter domination both through rejecting dominant media discourses and indeed establishing their own media forms and outputs, as we will return to at the end of this chapter.

Media power, people power and democracy

In recent times there has been no shortage of instances where media institutions and communication practices have become both concrete sites and compelling symbols of systemic political crisis and democratic struggle. The movement for media reform in the UK precipitated by phone hacking and ever-increasing concentration of media ownership has sought to make the media accountable for its illegal and unethical practices and to increase media plurality. We have also seen opposition to oligarchic media concentration in Italy, Hungary, Australia and Argentina, to mention but a few key sites. Or we can point to intensive conflicts involving state actors with deterritorialized networks of informational activism – from the ongoing cases of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange to Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and the National Security Agency (NSA) (Scahill, 2013). These struggles for the right to communicate and hold power to account have ensured that public debate on whether or not – and in what forms and ways – the media enhance or frustrate the practice of democracy endures. But they are usually situated within the conceptual framework of liberal democracy and the role of the media therein – hence the battle is conceived as one where the media are (or should be) enablers of democracy to the extent that they provide people with a full range of views so that they can better vote for political representatives who will then make decisions on their behalf.

As media scholars we tend to focus on and problematize the media side of this debate. Media, as Dahlgren writes, ‘are a prerequisite – though by no means a guarantee – for shaping the democratic character of society’ (2009, p. 2). By examining such issues as media ownership and pluralism, freedom of the press and the emergent digital possibilities for citizens to claim increased communicative autonomy, media studies scholarship has long sought to specify the institutional arrangements, public processes, civic practices and political-economic conditions that give substance to media’s role as a democratic prerequisite. However, less attention has been paid to what the democratic character of society should be. And scant attention has been given to the implications of the significant shifts in the distribution of power within existing representative democracies for established ways of considering media’s democratic functions, particularly in light of the global dominance of tech giants such as Google and Meta. Those concepts that position ‘media as democratic prerequisite’ need to account for how the democratic character of societies is not only ‘not guaranteed’ under conditions where the agency of representative democratic institutions has been diminished (Crouch, 2004, 2011) but where, under conditions of neoliberal capture, democracies, as Jeremy Gilbert argues, are riven by a ‘fundamental democratic crisis . . . a crisis in the capacity for collective decisions to be taken and upheld’ (2014, p. viii). Broken party...