Background on the Internet and Democracy (4/10/2002)

Characteristics: old versus new media

• Old media: one directional (mass media); slower; more established
• New media: bidirectional (exchange); faster; more convenient for user, more dynamic, more global, more difficult to control/regulate; easier to filter; cheaper at the margin; personalization

• 20th century media (broadcasting): one-to-many, with little opportunity to talk back; tended to draw people away from each other - authoritative rather than interactive
• Also some positive effects - broadcasting government proceedings in some countries, for example
• Television and movies increase focus on images, 2-dimensional. "The medium is the message" - McLuhan; point ignored in early persuasion research of the 1950s
• "Old" media in many ways anti-democratic - increased power of a few ruling over the many across vast distances
• Internet and new media provide new possibilities for decentralized social decision making, dialogue, and dissemination.  Will this potential be realized?
• Barber - 3 possibilities: Panglossian - complacency, Pandoran - caution, Jeffersonian - hope
• Rheingold - need for people to be able to come together based on affinity, with technologocical and social infrastructure that supports the "public sphere"
• Sunstein - danger of narrowcasting, selective exposure, group polarization

• Failure of representative government to reflect the will of the people (e.g. health care, gun control) - may sometimes be seen as failure of "tyrrany of the majority" (e.g. free speech, separation of church and state, guns?)
• Popular misconceptions (e.g. foreign aid, overhead costs of private versus public health insurance, wealth and income inequality)
• Failure of plebiscites seemingly in the interests of the majority, e.g.
• Prop 217 in California (1996) - 51% voted against restoring a slightly higher marginal tax rate (10-11% instead of 9.3%) on the top 1% of income recipients, even though 99% or residents would experience no tax increase and it would raise needed revenue for public services
• CA Proposition 186 and Federal health care reform - 1994; Prop 186 (Single payer health insurance for all Californians) lost by a large margin, and even 42% of the uninsured voted against it
• Education and prison bond votes from 70s to 90s favored more costly incarceration instead of spending on schools
• Success of popular initiatives limiting individual rights (e.g. CA Props 187 - 1994, 209 - 1996, 227 - 1998, 21/22 - 2000)
• "Sledgehammer" effect - overly broad legislation (e.g. Prop 13 - 1978, rent control in San Francisco)
• Rapid rise in wealth/income inequality in u.s. since ~1977, tax changes that benefit the wealthy or better-off (decline in top tax bracket from 85.5%  in the late 50s to 26.7% in 1989; for median family rose from 9.06% to 24.3% during the same interval)
• Rise of supranational institutions that subvert local democracy  (WTO, IMF/World Bank, Hague protocols?)

• Criteria other than popular support often predominate in legislatures: pork-barrel deals, influence-buying, preservationist bias (e.g. defense spending after the Cold War)
• Representation, concentration of power distort incentives - more true the greater the concentration of power
• Distance of government from localities
• Size of the polity
• Economic inequality can perpetuate itself through disproportionate influence on outcomes

• Past approaches (term limits, motor voter legislation, vote-by-mail)
• Campaign finance reform (soft money ban; but see Buckley vs Valeo - 1976)
• Electoral reform
• None of the above (NOTA) - failed in CA in March 2000
• open primaries
• alternative voting systems (instant runoff, proportional representation)
• Lottery government (Phillips and Callenbach)
• Participatory democracy
• Deliberative democracy
• Fishkin, Luskin, and Jowell - deliberation changes people's minds, sometimes dramatically and lastingly, if they are exposed to opinions of a random sample of citizens

• Increasing control of broadcast and print media in the hands of a few conglomerate entertainment companies (see http://www.thenation.com/special/bigten.html) - result of deregulatotory legislation
• U.S. unique in extent of private broadcast media control - even PBS has commercials (roots in 30s decisions about radio - McChesney book)
• U.S. also has most economic inequality among rich countries
• Corporate controlled media bias reporting because of
• lack of separation between corporation's interests and news reporting (e.g. Time's Man of the Year 2001, cross-promotion) - must answer to stockholders, maximize profits
• influence with politicians through contributions, opportunities for access (including as commentators)
• internalized values of well-paid media employees
• desire for exciting news stories, but underlying stability
• geared toward well-off customers, bring in more money
• threats of lawsuits by corporations (e.g. movie The Insider)
• Good reference: Chomsky and Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media - institutional analysis; problem is structural rather than due to the values of people who are interested in reporting the news - those who don't go along have a hard time keeping their jobs

• Public has shown little interest in alternative media even when it is widely available (e.g., KPFA's ratings have not grown much despite its availability throughout the bay area)
• U.S. is in many respects more democratic, less paternalistic than the "egalitarian" countries of europe - more referenda, less secrecy, more free speech; and europeans often move rightward when popular voice is heard
• Widespread belief in u.s. that media are biased toward being too liberal, not too conservative