Communication and Democracy:

The Crisis Beyond and the

Ferment Within
by Jay G. Blumler

In contrast to the questions asked by critical researchers,

a program of communication research for democracy “would
aim to single out for sustained analysis those communication
arrangements, patterns, and outcomes that are most likely
to promote or block the realization of democratic
values-or to show how far they have been attained.”

The ferment in the field of communication is not merely intramural, a

tribute to the eternally discontented and incorrigibly fractious academic
spirit. It also reflects an agitated turbulence among the objects of our
attention, to which we may no longer turn a blind eye. It has an external
as well as an internal dimension.
The external dimension stems from the crisis of legitimacy that is
currently being experienced by that institution long considered central
to the aims of Western democracies-the news media. Journalism, we
might say, has grown “too big for its boots.” At a time when so many
forces-volatility, apathy, skepticism, a sense of powerlessness, and
intensified intergroup hostility-appear to be undermining political
stability, media organizations have become pivotal to the conduct of
public affairs; they are little short of political institutions in their own
right. On the one hand, the citizen’s “dependence on media information
resources [has] intensified” (1).On the other hand, the leaders of many
social and political institutions, struggling on a slippery slope of waning
public regard, have more acute need of media access, especially as their
own communication channels have withered or lost credibility. Yet the

Jay G. Blumler is Research Director, Centre for Television Research, University of

Leeds, and Associate Director, Center for Research in Public Communication, College of
Journalism, University of Maryland.

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 Communication and Democracy

fitness of the now politically more crucial news media to shoulder such
enlarged responsibilities is more often questioned than accepted. They
are accused of denigrating the political sphere instead of serving and
invigorating it, encouraging opinion manipulation, and sapping partici-
patory dispositions (6, 13, 15). Meanwhile, their traditional justifying
creeds are also losing assent.
At bottom, the legitimacy crisis of Western journalism sprin
the increasing inability of many groups with a stake in civic a
recognize theinselves in stereotypical portrayals of their activities in the
major media; an undermining of the conventional journalistic view of
the nature of news itself-as a reflection of the more interesting and
sigriificaiit daily happenings-by a series of academic studies that have
depicted news personnel as “active creators of political reality” (9);and
the resulting implication that it might be permissible, after all, to blame
the messenger for the message. Philosophically, at least, such a crisis can
be resolved only by defining certain purposes, above and exterior to the
survival and pragmatic needs of news organizations, which media
institutions could be expected to serve and which would not entaiil their
subordination to dominant particular interests. For Western society,
such a conclusion points to a need to formulate notions of democracy,
from which communication requirements, together with fresh state-
ments of the purposes and stnridards of journalism, could be drawn.
The internal dimension is well reflected in Stuart Hall’s (10)descrip-
tion of the recent history of mass media research as a “movement from

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Journal of Communication, Summer 1983

essentially a behavioural to an ideological perspective.” This implies

that, if we do not wish to be hard-nosed, value-free behavioral positiv-
ists, we must become critical researchers, determined to unmask the
ideological functions of mass communications. For many of us, such a
choice is too stark and limiting. If, as Thunberg et al. (18) have put it,
“viewing Man as an object [a passive body that reacts to external stimuli
and influences in a predictable fashion] is part of the behaviouristic
tradition,” then we do not belong to it. But the critical paradigm, as so far
enunciated, lacks a clarity of ethic and realism of political diagnosis that,
when drawn on and applied, could help communication institutions to
realize a vision of human beings as active, choosing, purposeful subjects.
And again, a part of the answer could be sought in attempts to clarify
what democracy demands of communication, engaging policy-makers,
thoughtful journalists, spokespersons of social movements, and our own
students in discussion of the implications for journalistic principles,
practices, and prospects of improvement and change.
Admittedly, that is no job for behaviorism. Concerned with maximiz-
ing prediction (or with the amount of variance explained), it cannot
address those issues of communication purpose that clamor for debate.

Y e t three features make the critical perspective

equally ill placed--despite its exponents’ ardor
for commitment-to contribute to this task.

One of these features is a self-defeating tendency to utopianism. By

utopianism I do not mean emphases on more opportunities for people to
to have a say in decisions affecting their lives, a greater provision of
relevant and useful information, or changes in our concepts of communi-
cation from source-oriented to user-oriented perspectives-all of which
are proper democratic concerns. Instead, I mean a tendency to ignore
certain abiding political conditions that necessitate democracy, along
with communication forms designed to nourish it. In Robert White’s (19)
claim, for example, that democratic participation “demands a broad
equivalence of influence within a decision-making process,” a crucial
nettle has not been grasped but rather has been treated implicitly as if
eradicable by hefty doses of critical weed-killer. I refer to the need to
come to terms with those conflicts of policy goals, complexities of
information relevant to their pursuit, and long-standing features of
organizational working and power cumulations that make some division
of political labor between full-time decision-makers and ordinary citi-
zens an inescapable property of democracy. Ignore this, and sooner or
later authoritarian leaders will be installed in the name of democracy.
Accept it, and democratic theory has partly to be couched in the
language of accountability, carrying with it the implication for communi-

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cation that ordinary citizens should be sufficiently equipped, iriforma-

tionally, to hold decision-makers effectively to account.
Second, spokespersons of a critical perspective often show a danger-
ously unresolved attitude toward liberalism, which historically has
supplied most of the philosophic pillars of democracy. Do they propose
to abandon it altogether, or only certain parts, transcend it, realize it
more fully than current institutional regimes can manage to do-or
what? An underlying theme of much critical rhetoric is that libera 1’ism
has had its day: “The public philosophy of communication based on
nineteenth century ideals and libertarian principles is increasingly
inadequate” (19). So much is at stake that one is entitled to expect the
author of such a statement to clarify whether he regards liberal premises,
say, as providing necessary though insufficient conditions for democra-
cy, or considers that they must be comprehensively scrapped and
displaced by other premises-and, if so, by which ones. But lacking
clarity and sustained attention to such questions, there is a danger here
of throwing away the precious baby, needing nurturing within liberal
philosophy, with whatever bathwater threatens to drown it.
Third, the critical paradigm is incapable of reconstructing comniuni-
cation for democracy, precisely because, as Stuart Hall (10) has pro-
claimed, “the re-discovery of ideology” is “absolutely pivotal” to it.
Such an insistence on the ideological function of communication is
counterproductive in several ways.
For one thing, it deflects attention to the critical message by those
most in need of hearing it-for example, by alleging that news personnel
are not, perhaps cannot be, aware o f t h e very essence of what they are
doing, which is bound to provoke their incredulity and rejection. As Hall
puts it, news statements “may be unconsciously drawing on the ideolog-
ical frameworks and classifying themes of a society and reproducing
them. . .without those making them being aware of doing so” (10).Since
many audience members will also call on such frameworks without
awareness, there can be no independent check on the validity of the
readings of critical researchers, who virtually elevate themselves as
solely capable of teasing out the real meaning of the news. Among other
things, this is incompatible with the self-determining spirit of democra-
CY *
In addition, the critical perspective tends to slam shut, iiistead of
prying open, doors of possible improvement in the contributions of
journalism to democracy. This is because, in the critical perspective, the
transmission of ideological meaning is not a fortuitous feature of news-
making that can be mended and modified once it is recognized. ]Rather,
its roots lie beyond the news profession in the place of the media in
surrounding social structures and cultiiral formations. Thus, according to
the critical perspective, there is no way forward for journalists through a

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more conscientious application of their professional, “above-the-battle”

norms, enjoining them to serve the diverse sectors of the mass audience
equally well. In a sense, they can be only agents or pawns in the class
struggle.
Moreover, viewing the news as coherently ideological involves too
large a claim to be supported by other than a selective presentation of
evidence, which then runs the risk of smudging the dividing line
between scholarship and propaganda. It is difficult to see how the
Glasgow University Media Group ( 8 ) ,for example, could have judicious-
ly substantiated its claim that “the attentive and addictive viewer of the
TV bulletins would have found nothing in the period of our sample from
1 January to 5 7 u n e [1975]. . .which did other than confirm this belief
system” (namely, that strike action by organized labor was inimical to
the national, interest).

The temptation f o r critical researchers to assume

what they cannot demonstrate is illustrated by
the leading questions they ask about ideology.

According to Hall, for example, the critical paradigm raises two

questions about ideology: (a) how does it work and what are its
mechanisms, and (b)how is “the ideology” to be conceived in relation to
other practices within a social formation? Conspicuously absent, howev-
er, is the question of how far (to what extent, how often) the mass media
project certain ideological views ofthe world as distinct from others. The
question is crucial because it touches on the reason that, in the critical
literature, supposedly empirical phenomena tend to be established
conceptually and then illustrated rather than weighed.
It is true that Hall has also pointed the way toward a more problemat-
ic treatment, when writing that “ideology. . .has. . .become a site of
struggle between competing definitions” and that ideology depends “on
the balance of forces in a particular national conjuncture.” Such intima-
tions of a more open society are not followed up, however, because of
“the risks of losing altogether the notion of ‘dominance’ ” in ideological
analysis. “Dominance is critical,” Hall insists, “if the propositions of
pluralism are to be put in question.” Yet if “dominance” is what
distinguishes a critical from a pluralist perspective, one would expect to
find in the writings of those who adopt the former view some methodolo-
gy for establishing or measuring its prevalence. Instead, members of this
school tend to point to what they choose to call dominant, preferred
meanings in news output, without closely testing their internal coher-
ence or rate of presentation when compared with other specified
meanings.
Is there another approach to the political philosophy of communica-
tion that could avoid the antipopulist sterility of elite pluralism ( 3 , 11,

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 Communication and Democracy

17)P A point of departure may be found in John Plamenatz’s (14)

proposition that
if there is to be democracy, citizens when they make political choices
must have intelligible, relevant and genuinely different alternatives
to choose between, and the men who put alternatives to them must
’
have sufjicient motives f o r putting alternatives of this kind.
I have suggested elsewhere (4) that, from such a view ofdemocracy, two
demands on journalism follow directly. One is that the news media
should be organized to enable and constrain politicians, and other group
spokespersons and opinion advocates, to address the public in as
intelligible and illuminating terms as possible. The other is that cover-
age of public affairs should foster what has been termed “political
literacy” (7),including an understanding of “what the main political
disputes [in society] are about, what beliefs the main contenders have of
them,” and how these affect oneself and other people and values that
matter to one.

Could research play any part in furthering

communication for democracy in this sense?

A distinctive though indirect contribution could be envisaged, de-

pending on its angle of attack and study agenda. Of course, much
behavioral research tests the validity of hypothetically expected associa-
tions involving communication phenomena. For its part, critical research
predominantly asks whose interests are being served by communication
structures and themes. By contrast, a program of communication re-
search for democracy would aim to single out for sustained analysis
those communication arrangements, patterns, and outcomes that are
most likely to promote or block the realization of democratic values-or
to show how far they have been attained. What research priorities might
flow from such a perspective?
First, since the intelligible presentation ofchoice is vital to the role of
communication in democracy, there is a need for more diversity-
centered research, designed to disclose the range of options in media
coverage of political issues, the organizational conditions that may
broaden or narrow the diversity of media content, and how audiences
respond to it. Promising steps toward operationalizing the terms of
communication diversity in politics have been outlined by McQuail and
van Cuilenberg (12).
Second, more research is needed into audience responses to political
reporting. The matter is more than just the charting offact acquisition or
the opening and closing of so-called knowledge gaps. Modern media
politics has spawned a whole host of standards and indicators purporting
to gauge the adequacy of governmental performance (gross national

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Journal of Communication, Summer 1983

product, inflation rates, unemployment figures, balance of payments

results, interest rates, taxation levels, budget deficits, etc.), the mass
public’s grasp and use of which is quite obscure at present. In part, the
uses and gratifications approach has a place here-in probing the needs
and problems that citizens face when trying to make sense of political
events and arguments. But we also need some other lines of inquiry into
audience reception of the news, which might be regarded less as aids to
fact processing and more as sources of interpretative frameworks
through which members of the audience are encouraged to perceive
socially significant happenings. Instead of instructing audiences what to
think (as in the old “media as persuaders” model) or what to think about
(as in the agenda-setting model), a view of the media as disseminators of
interpretative frameworks would imply that they offer audiences certain
ways of thinking or suggest to them h o w to think about the sociopolitical
world.’
Third, we need more studies of the interaction of communication
sources with media personnel in a variety of news reporting areas. Much
hinges on this relationship. Differential patterns of media access may
result from it; the materials that audience members can use in making up
their minds about political questions follow from it. Moreover, prospects
of media reform for democratic purposes can be thwarted by the closely
entrenched accommodations to each other of politician sources and
professional news personnel (5).
Fourth, research might take account ofthe fact that, in order to serve
democracy well, media organizations need to be innovative, even
experimental at times (2). Innovatory impulses are particularly needed
in order to counter the routinization of news presentation that can stem
from collaboration with sources, pack journalism, format straitjacketing,
and sheer professional overconfidence. Historical studies of past innova-
tions in news reporting and observational studies of currently emerging
ones (16) could be useful in this context. Greater scope for such inquiries
should arise in the future, as new communication technologies diffuse
and provoke changes in media organization, public relations strategies,
journalistic norms, and patterns of political coverage.
Finally, it is implicit in much of the above that researchers should
view the political communication process in holistic terms, regarding
the contributions to it of the various actors involved-the sources and
originators of messages, professional communicators, as well as mem-
bers of the public-as enmeshed in relations of dependence and conflict,
conjunction, and disjunction with each other. Such holism is called for
particularly because, in the end, a communication system for democracy
must be designed to meet many needs and to satisfy many interests. We
need to be able to see how in specific systems these interests are faring
v i s - h i s each other.

I am indebted to Michael Gurevitch for this forniulation.

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