NATURE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY AND THE ROLE OF MEDIA
WITH SPECIFIC REFERENCE TO AFRO-AMERICANS
Pranjali Bandhu
This paper attempts a sketchy critique of American democracy specifically in relation to the African-Americans and the role of the mass media in the ideological reproduction of their unequal status.
According to Noam Chomsky, “a society is democratic to the extent that its citizens play a meaningful role in managing public affairs (1991:6). For Cohen and Rogers it is that in which “free and equal persons together control the conditions of their association” (18). Taking these approaches to democracy as a starting point we can question whether the U.S., or for that matter any country presently or in the past, has constituted a democracy. Related to this is also the question whether, in the U.S. or elsewhere, existing social, economic and political structures help unfold essential human capacities and satisfy essential human needs.
So much for the broad parameters of our approach.
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY – HISTORICALLY SPEAKING
Historically, the series of revolutions that swept Western Europe and North America from the 17th century onwards were bourgeois democratic in nature. They were anti-feudal in that in the name of the sovereignty of the people and with their help the power of a hereditary aristocracy and clergy based on landed property was broken and replaced by the power of the upcoming bourgeoisie – the merchant, the trader, the speculator and profiteer.
The so-called discovery of the Americas by Columbus in 1492, followed by many other voyages of exploration, were part of the process of expansion of world trade and commerce. The prevailing mercantilist doctrine called for settlement and exploitation of overseas colonies. A host of economic motives – the search for gold and silver, the demand for raw materials, the quest for new markets, the desire for private profit, promoted the colonization of North America as of other colonies (Rossiter: 29). The thirteen North American colonies were meant to be perpetually subordinated agricultural and extractive areas for raw materials, a safety valve for excessive and unwanted populations, and a market for finished goods for the mother country – England (ibid: 31).
However, according to Andre Gunder Frank, within the framework of colonialism, the northeastern colonies came to occupy a position in the expanding world mercantile capitalist system and in the process of capital accumulation which permitted them to share in the latter as a submetropolis of Western Europe with respect to the exploitation of the South, the West Indies, Africa and Asia. The Northeast’s advantageous participation in the West Indian trade, the slave trade, and indeed world trade, as well as manufacturing developed largely for export led to considerable capital concentration and accumulation in the Northern cities. This privileged position, not shared by others in the New World, was a crucial factor in the economic development of the North East during colonial times and in its successful political policy of independence and further development thereafter (Frank: 194).
After an initial prolonged period of “benign neglect” which had favoured capital accumulation in the Northeast colonies an unabating trend of excess of imports from England over exports from the colonies arose in the decades preceding the revolution. The colonies did not care for the prospect of being forced forever to buy more than they sold. This united the colonial merchant, manufacturer, farmer and planter – with some significant exceptions – in getting rid of British domination.
The American Declaration of Independence in 1776 led to a confederation of the colonies (later called as the U.S.A.) and the promulgation of a Constitution in 1787. Even while the Constitution upheld the sovereignty of the people, it imposed limitations on its exercise. The Constitution was weighted in favour of the rich propertied classes and discriminated on the basis of race and gender against the promise of equality, which underlines its bourgeois character. Suffrage was not universal and largely confined to upper class white males. The much trumpeted system of checks and balances initiated by the separation of powers in government was also, for eg., partly a device to protect the interests of the well-to-do minority. The much trumpeted system of checks and balances initiated by the separation of powers in government was also, for eg., partly a device to protect the interests of the well-to-do minority. With the republican form of government and the theory of popular sovereignty triumphant, the rich did fear that concentrating power within that branch of government most directly, though not yet fully, open to popular control held the danger of levelism and what they viewed as democratic excesses (ibid: 239-240).
The institution of slavery was protected. For representation and direct taxation the slaves were counted as 3/5 of a human being. (Art. One, Section Two). The Federal authorities were not permitted to interfere with the slave trade for two decades (Art. One, Section Nine). And all fugitive slaves had to be returned to their owners (Art. Four, Section Two). These were serious limitations considering that 40% of the population in the South, and nearly 20% of that in the North, were slaves (ibid: 39, 41). Poor whites and women also being excluded from voting rights and with the marginalization of the largely already exterminated native Indian population, it ended up that those enjoying political power in the newly independent country were a minority. But their outlook and interests continued to shape subsequent policies in the U.S.A.
Baran and Sweezy have the following to say about the Civil War: “(it)… was not fought by the Northern ruling class to free the slaves. It was fought to check the ambitions of the Southern slave owning oligarchy which wanted to escape from what was essentially a colonial relation to Northern capital. The notorious compromise of the 1870s was a tacit recognition that the renewed colonial status of the South had been accepted by both sides, with the Southern oligarchy exploiting the Negro and in turn paying tribute to Northern capital for the privilege of doing so.”
MONOPOLY CAPITAL, IMPERIAL POLITICS AND THE BUREAUCRATIC STATE
The end of the 19th century saw an increasing concentration of political and economic powers despite the mass based populist and other movements. This period saw the rise of monopolies and trusts in virtually every major industry and business and the establishment of party machines and bureaucracy particularly in urban areas. A country where independent producers had predominated before the Civil War, was converted into a nation of employees, tenants and sharecroppers, the majority in poverty by the 1890s (Shapiro: 32).
Together with the growth of monopoly capital the U.S. also emerged as an imperial power. Expansion of trade and commerce and becoming an independent colonizing power had been implicit aim behind the Declaration” of Independence. The Monroe Doctrine established North American claims to the Western Hemisphere as its zone of influence and commercial exploitation. In the face of revolts against Spanish colonial power in Latin America it declared that “the American continents are no longer subject for any new European colonial establishments.” (Wilson, C.M.: 37). But as the events in Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Philippines etc. showed, it was perfectly justified for the U.S.A. to annex or intervene by force of arms in foreign territories. In the present century, particularly after World War II, the U.S. has emerged as a global imperial power. Thereby it caters to U.S. corporate interests which are: utilizing the raw materials, gaining investment opportunities, markets, cheap labour and other amenities from the underdeveloped countries and exporting technology, pollution, wastes and cultural degradation to them. Subversion of unfriendly regimes (Chile), direct aggression (Vietnam, Iraq) military and economic aid (Nicaragua), cultural invasion (through Hollywood blockbusters and now through satellite TV, cable networks and Internet) are some of its methods in this process of neo-colonisation. Internal repression of the poor and minorities (especially of the Blacks) and external aggression have been the twin objectives of an increasingly centralized, bureaucratized and militarized state machine built up in the last decades of the 19th century.
American democracy from this period onwards has come to mean a political system with regular elections where the voter has a choice between two factions of one pro-business party. Corrupt political party machines were set up in the urban areas in the period of rapid industrialization carried out largely with the help of waves of cheap immigrant labour mainly from South and Central Europe. The creation of the Tammanys was deemed necessary to block populist insurgency of those times which often united poor whites and blacks. They were complementary to the disenfranchisement of Blacks in the South by varied unconstitutional and illegal means including terror by the Ku Klux Klan. Strong political party machines were the chief means by which the power of the citizens was usurped, accumulated and centralized. (Shapiro: 91). Issues linked to personalities are paraded, but in policy and decision-making essentially the interests of the political power elites linked to the business elites are carried out. The American public, increasingly reduced to the state of mass society according to some social scientists, like C. Wright Mills, has as a result become politically apathetical. Voter turnout is below 50% in most U.S. States.
MANUFACTURING CONSENT – THE ROLE OF MASS MEDIA
The consent, passive or otherwise, of the public to the policies and decisions of the elites is sought to be obtained by means of the mass media, which are largely owned and controlled by big business and run along commercial lines. Sources of primary news are largely government and corporate bureaucracies. Pentagon, for eg., has a public information system that involves thousands of employees and spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year.
The media ought to enable the public to assert meaningful control over the political process by providing it with the information needed for the intelligent discharge of political responsibilities and act as a forum of communication for the same. The media in the U.S. serve instead to inculcate and defend the economic, social and political agenda of the privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and state. They do this in many ways: through selection of topics, distribution of concerns, framing of issues, filtering of information, emphasis and tone, and keeping debate within the bounds of acceptable premises. It is their function to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structure of larger society (Chomsky 1994: 302).
From such an understanding of the role of mass media we can take a closer look at how they are reflecting race issues. Research done on this subject indicates that the press and other media, like TV and cinema, are hardly different from most other institutions and organizations in U.S. society, ie, as a whole, they are a part of the problem of racism and reinforce discrimination and subordinate status of the Blacks while legitimizing attitudes of white supremacy, owned and controlled as they are by the dominant white groups (Dijk: ix).
We will cite here from various reports and studies of the media on the subject of race issues. The Kerner Commission, set up to investigate causes of civil unrest of the 1960s, was also asked to study the performance of the press after repeated accusations that it had been part of the problem. It concluded: “Media have thus far failed to report adequately on the causes and consequences of civil disorder and the underlying problems of race relations.” Media wrote “from the standpoint of the white man’s world.” “Most black people see the newspapers as mouthpieces of the power structure.” (ibid: 11-12).
C. Martindale in his book, “The White Press and Black America” (1986) reported that coverage of Black Americans had sharply increased during the 1960s as a result of the civil unrest and continued in the 1970s. Stories devoted to the normal life of the black community showing them in the context of total American society increased, while simultaneously more attention was paid to the causes of Black protest. However, despite these improvements, newspapers still retained the focus on stereotypical and negative issues such as race and conflict (cited in ibid: 13).
In their book, “Minorities and the Media” Wilson and Gutierrez showed that coverage in the press had gone through several phases, ie, through exclusionary, threatening, confrontation, stereotypical selection and integrated coverage phases. Much of the coverage of Blacks, Latinos and other minorities remains in the stereotypical selection phase, in which minorities are often portrayed as too lazy to work and involved with drugs, as “problem people” in general, ie, as people who have or cause problems. The occasional success stories that are reported assure the majority readers that minorities are still “in their place”, whereas the few who escape this place are not a threat to the majority. The coverage demarcates “Us” versus “them”. Integrated coverage would mean that minorities are represented equally in all types of news, not only in crime or conflict news, but this is not the case (ibid: 14).
That problems of coverage remain closely associated with discriminatory hiring practices was also established by a Subcommittee of the US House of Representatives after hearing evidence from many minority organizations in 1984. Several reports summarized in the New York Times in 1988 as well as in a special issue about Blacks and the Media of the NAACP magazine “The Crisis” (June-July 1989) find that only 2% of the 12,226 newspaper editors are black, that promotion is very slow and that 60% of the daily newspapers in the U.S.A. do not employ a single black journalist (ibid: 15). Issues that are particularly relevant for the black community, such as continuing forms of segregation, discrimination and racism, and the fundamental condition of poverty tend to be ignored or explained away in an ideological framework. The media convey the impression that after the Civil Rights movement and the advances in the situation of the Black people the racial problems have been solved, whereas in fact many problems have hardly changed since the 1960s. Although hiring of minorities by newspapers has improved since the 1960s, there are still many newspapers without minority journalists, whereas the other newspapers effectively limit access of qualified minority journalists to higher editorial or managerial positions (ibid: 16).
The coverage of the O.J. Simpson trials is evidence of the fact that mainstream media still “resonate with racial and gender stereotypes of the sexually criminal African-American male and the dangers he poses for white femininity” that have a long history in American society (Kozol: 647). Simpson, like many Blacks striving for success, throughout his career had constructed a media image that suppressed his African-American background. However, in the coverage of the trials his race is persistently foregrounded and brings to the surface white fears about the threatening black male. The allegations of a vicious crime repositioned him within the frame of the most prevalent image of black men in the media, that of the dangerous criminal (ibid: 659).
The case as it was presented in the mainstream medium of TV made it into a sensational spectacle yielding profit while worsening the racial climate. Millions of people watched the trials on TV and heard the verdict carried live by all major networks and cable channels during which time advertising slots reportedly were sold at five times the normal price (Upadhya: 2729). The complexity of race, class and gender issues was reduced to one of race only and that too in a highly stereotyped manner. Mainstream media, by its very structure and intentions, as we have indicated earlier, do not want to provoke or provide a forum for a reality based and introspective analysis about issues which would play a clarificatory role. Instead, irrational fears and prejudices were played upon and hysteria built up about “crime” which could provide useful public support for building of jails, putting more people behind bars and perhaps helping one political party into power in the next elections.
In fact, manipulation by the media goes to the extent that the minority, which is in danger, ie, the black male is presented as a threat to the majority. Facts tell a different tale. A high rate of unemployment creates a class of impoverished Blacks, particularly males, who resort to illegal activity in order to survive. While representing less than 6% of the American population Afro-American men comprise 47% of the prison population. Almost one of four black men aged 20-30 are in jail or on probation or parole. The U.S. has the highest percentage of its population behind bars of any country in the world, and the majority of them are poor and people of colour. Blacks make up 40% of the prisoners awaiting death penalties. The majority of the death row black prisoners have been convicted of murdering Euro-Americans. In the last 47 years no white person has been executed for murdering an Afro-American. The American legal system places greater value on white life than on black life. (Staples: 238).
The tradition of “lynching” black males is continuing in a legalized form. Black woman writer Kristin Hunter Lattany has her heroine in a novel say: “There’s a plot to destroy black males. Jails, drugs, the service… I plan to have at least six sons myself. I know we can’t afford to lose any more of you in this immoral war.” (“Love, African Style,” A Novel in Progress, Shooting Star Review, Winter 1988: 15-18).
The question we would like to ask in the end is: Is O.J. Simpson (standing for the black male) the monster as depicted by the media (though his criminality is not conclusively proven) or, in the words of Frantz Fanon, is it U.S. society that is the “monster in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.” (Quoted in Baran and Sweezy: 1).
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(Presented as a Paper at the American Studies Research Centre, Hyderabad, on 1.12.1995).