The Political Economy of Mass Media: Implications for Informed Citizenship

Informed citizenship is taken as fundamental to democratic governance. Deliberation, political participation and holding elected officials accountable for their actions presuppose an electorate capable of expressing informed opinions. In modern democracies, the institution entrusted with delivering relatively costless access to public affairs information is the news media. In recent years, however, as outlined below, significant changes to the regulatory and economic framework within which news organizations function have called into question the media‟s ability to make good on this civic responsibility. In this chapter, we focus on two key transformations in the media landscape. First, news organizations the world over are moving in the direction of a profit-driven or market-based model. Second, the revolution in information technology has set off an explosion in the quantity of media choices available to consumers. The net impact of these changes on the news audience is twofold. First, market pressures coupled with enhanced consumer choice have reduced the public‟s exposure to news programming, thus increasing the number of citizens who are either ignorant or misinformed abou