21
The Political Economy of Political Ignorance
Introduction
In this study I focus on the phenomenon of “political ignorance,” which is on the increase even though we ostensibly live in “knowledge societies” and in an age of momentous scientific advances. I claim that ignorance will continue to grow, since its production is inherent in the prevailing political economy, notably, that of symbolic goods. Indeed, this is a media-induced affliction, since commercial channels, notably television, compete fiercely for the control and exploitation of the human commodity in leisure time-bound economies. The problem is that political knowledge is constitutive for democratic regimes and, as such, ought self-evidently to be guaranteed in democracies. Given this status, political ignorance should be extinct. I argue that this situation cannot be reversed under the premises of a capitalism that commodifies not only contents, communication processes, and systems, but also citizens themselves, that is, a system which makes the acquisition of sine qua non knowledge conditional to competition between market forces, which inescapably results in what I would term “market censorship.” My aim, therefore, is to analyze prevalent economic and power relations that result in the phenomenon of civic ignorance. I start by conceptualizing the notions of knowledge and ignorance and, subsequently, by exposing instances of political ignorance and its growth – in Europe – over the last decades. Findings regarding increasing political ignorance are examined and compared to corresponding content analysis research, linking deficits of political information in mainstream media with ignorance.
In my main analysis of political economy, I explore the whys and wherefores of ignorance and its galloping trends by interrogating economic structures, motives, and economically driven role transmutations. My aim is to identify the mechanisms through which political ignorance is produced by the media and associated systems, by confronting the nexus of political ignorance and economic structures that have transformed not only communicative functions, but also human roles, beyond recognition. But if political ignorance is increasing as a consequence of media transmutation, could not citizens circumvent this trend and rid themselves of this influence by turning to the Internet for political knowledge? In order to address this issue, albeit briefly, I focus on the role of political economy in regard to key aspects of search engines and their impact on active efforts to acquire knowledge.
Civic Knowledge and Ignorance
Even though it is seemingly a clear-cut notion, ignorance is rather difficult to conceptualize, mainly because it signifies a default entity – a black hole.1 Normally, we conceive of ignorance simply as the opposite of knowledge. Lasswell (1948, 224) defines it as “the absence, at a given point in the process of communication, of knowledge which is available elsewhere in society. Lacking proper training, the personnel engaged in gathering and disseminating intelligence is continually misconstruing or overlooking the facts, if we define the facts as what the objective, trained observer could find.” He moreover deems that “sheer ignorance is a pervasive factor whose consequences have never been adequately assessed” (1948, 224).
Human societies have treated knowledge as a strategic resource, since it has always been vital to community survival (Morin 1986). Political consciousness and awareness in particular are the building blocks of modernity and the foundations of human emancipation. Knowledge is power, just as ignorance stands for powerlessness. Particularly when it is profound, ignorance may induce personality disorders, underpinning syndromes of cultural impoverishment. Uncertainty, confusion, indecisiveness, gullibility, insecurity, and feelings of resignation or being at a loss are familiar symptoms related to ignorance. Most crucial are symptoms manifesting lack of strategic knowledge about how to face challenges (Morin 1986). The worst manifestations of this phenomenon are being unaware of one’s ignorance or unable to distinguish opinion or abusive propaganda from fact. Such disabilities result in political marginalization and, indeed, depoliticization.
Political ignorance
Political ignorance, which concerns me, is the opposite of a supreme civic value: awareness. Citizenship is a condition which requires essential information (Kellner 1990, 65, Dahl 2000); conversely, political ignorance annuls citizenship and alienates citizens by undermining civic roles or concealing rights. Acquired political knowledge is, therefore, indispensable for any civic identity or action (Dagger 1997) and for democratic co-operation. Identifying its existence or absence as well as its trajectories is therefore crucial.
As a mental and psychological invalidity syndrome, political ignorance hinders citizens’ appreciation of established power relations. But if people ignore which power institutions govern the polity, they cannot grasp how, to what purpose or interests, political institutions operate. Neither can citizens influence policies, even in matters concerning them directly.2 Political ignorance limits citizens’ ability to judge, decide, or calculate action on politically induced outcomes, a situation which amounts to depoliticization. In effect, political ignorance renders citizens incapable of living their civic lives or benefiting from rights, let alone participating in “self-government.” Ignorance, so conceived, is a complex affliction.3
The media were originally legitimated as providers of social knowledge, even as guarantors of continued political socialization. In this conception, their hypothetical abolition would bring democratic breakdown. My analysis suggests that the media have themselves largely abandoned that political role and renounced corresponding responsibility by effectively vacating their political mission. Instead, they have turned to serving the profit-making machineries of capitalism. Thus civic ignorance acts itself as a testimony to this abandonment.
Rather than the term “ignorance” some authors adopt approximations such as “information gaps,” “knowledge gaps,” “information poverty,” or “information divides” (Watson and Hill 2002, Meyer 2002).4 My conception of ignorance as invalidity points to intricate, yet lasting or chronic, afflictions, entailing loss of personal control and undermining trust in social institutions and community organizations. Such invalidity significantly corrodes self-confidence, thereby feeding suspicion, itself a fertile ground for anomie and the politics of intimidation. Ignorance fosters gullibility, disarming people even in the face of abusive propaganda. Xenophobia, racism, and sexism breed in ignorance, generating habitats sustained by commercial media “cultures” intent to infotain or entertain us to death (Postman 1986).
Knowledge still a civic prerequisite
Schattschneider raises the symbiotic link between democracy and knowledge: “An amazingly large number of people do not seem to know very much about what is going on. The significance of this kind of popular ignorance depends on what we think democracy is” (1960, 128–9). What is provocatively underestimated is that citizenship requires knowledge (Keane 1991, 140). Indeed, political knowledge as a civic fortification of the public interest is essential for democracy.
Two modalities leading toward ignorance
We can distinguish two main modalities resulting in ignorance. The first stems from lack or underprovision of knowledge, while the second, which has alarmingly risen recently, emanates from inundating people’s minds with redundant material. Either form in itself is harmful, but their combination, as advanced currently, is crushing. Structural attacks against knowledge-producing institutions are manifest in pressures to commercialize university systems or when privileging marketable research and intensifying its exploitation. These trends suggest a near total commodifying assault on knowledge, which thereby results in the radical transformation of its purpose, nature, supply, and its relation to individuals. Knowledge is sold by those who possess it as a commodity exclusively to those who can afford it. Fundamental principles, such as universal access to knowledge as a public good, are thus subverted along with the consensus about knowledge as a prerequisite for citizenship. Rather than a politically empowering factor, knowledge mutates into a key economic asset by which competitive advantages are pursued in zero sum games.
Profound ignorance results in the inability to distinguish between valuable knowledge and useless or harmful information. Yet power relations are determined by that very capacity. In addition, the exponential growth in communication systems and contents overloads individuals with masses of redundant information, which undermines cognitive capacities as vital control tools. It is therefore critical to appreciate strategic knowledge in terms of “real interests” as opposed to “perceived” or “subjective” interests (Gramsci 1971, Lukes 2004).
Today, individuals are supposed to empower themselves through knowledge, not only in sociopolitical matters, but as economic agents – consumers, polyvalent employees, competitive entrepreneurs – to whom knowledge is paramount. However, elementary knowledge gaps in public affairs, notably about prevailing power relations, generate powerlessness and frustration, thereby debilitating individuals within the very technoeconomic paradigm that celebrates knowledge-intensive capital. Not surprisingly, corruption thrives in conditions of ignorance and lack of transparency by constraining understanding of intricate economic processes (Strange 1986).
Political Ignorance in the EU
To most of its citizens the European Union (EU) is a distant political entity, but political ignorance alienates it still further. Once in a while, this acknowledged malaise fuels concern, particularly when linked to the notorious “democracy deficit.” Indeed, civic ignorance has even been blamed for stalling the Union’s process of integration (Wallström 2006, Kaitatzi-Whitlock 2008, Golding 2006, Peel 2004).5
EU citizens are monitored by rolling surveys, measuring awareness over longer periods (several years to decades), thus providing sources for further research on ignorance. Eurostat charts respondents’ perception of information about EU institutions and policies. Such horizontal social history or opinion depictions, cumulatively form a valuable corpus conducive to a longitudinal, comparative analysis. By reading such surveys longitudinally, we gain historical depth, but also a systematic comparison of fluctuations in perceptions.6 The originality of this material lies in the fact that it synthesizes an interface between reception and content analyses, yielding valuable, albeit pessimistic, findings.7 This approach reveals growing trends of political ignorance while linking this outcome with corresponding default media outputs. Matching the two processes over time unravels the origins of ignorance. When additionally supplementing the results of two ad hoc investigations regarding citizens’ knowledge of Europolitics, we obtain a mutually reinforcing research result. Hence we can indisputably identify the structures and processes that produce ignorance.
Awareness about EU institutions
To chart perception of mediated contents concerning the European Parliament (EP) since its establishment,8 citizens were asked whether they had: “recently seen or heard, in the papers, on the radio, or on television, anything about the European Parliament?” (Eurobarometer). In the examined period (25 years), respondents who learned about the EP in the news were few, while the statistical picture presents significant changes over time. In 1977, nearly 50 percent of respondents, on a cross-country average, confirmed learning about the EP from the press. Conversely, those answering negatively were 42 percent. Ten years later, in November of 1987, these rates were reversed. Citizens perceiving news about the EP in the press constituted only 42 percent, whereas those unaware of such news rose to 50 percent. This inversion is most intriguing. First of all, there is the anticipated learning curve regarding Europolitics. Secondly, throughout the 1980s, the EP was remarkably active. Thirdly, it underwent a significant strengthening of its role within the intra-EU policy-making constellation, acquiring joint decision-making powers. Fourthly, EP forces launched controversial projects promulgating a political rather than economic approach to European integration, thereby gaining distinctive momentum. The combination of these elements should have raised the EP’s visibility enormously. Yet the opposite occurred. A decade later (November 1998), the picture had deteriorated still further. Only 40 percent of Eurostat respondents confirmed perceiving news about the EP, resulting in negative answers exceeding positive ones, by a full 10 percent.9 Interviewees also responded to similar questionnaires about the EU’s “executive,” the Commission. Again, negative answers steadily exceeded positive ones over the nine-year period examined on cross national average. A majority of 60 percent of respondents did not recall news about the Commission or its policies, an outcome suggesting a sharp drop in corresponding political information supplies.
In summary, perception of news was decreasing steadily, while eventually only four in ten Europeans perceived something about their directly elected institution. The overall number of citizens perceiving information about the EP from the media decreased by a full 10 percent over the period surveyed. Given the fact that concurrently the number of media outlets proliferated exponentially and that media exposure increased explosively, such findings demonstrate that Europeans were informationally starved, gradually getting less and less political information, thereby generating high levels of ignorance about their crucial affairs.
The revenge of the ignorant
Interest in EU affairs had already started to be monitored in 1973, at a time when the EC consisted of 12 member-states. Interviewees were asked: “And as far as European politics are concerned, that is matters related to the European Community, to what extent would you say that you are interested in them? The “not much interested” column prevailed throughout. Respondents bracketed in the “not at all interested” option were the second largest group. By contrast, those interested in Europolitics “a great deal,” formed the smallest group.10 Meanwhile, over the years, interest in Europolitics decreased, although it was already tiny at the start.11 These trends, taken in combination with the fact that decision-making power was conceded from the national to the supranational level, are most troubling. Although the scope of political prerogatives transferred to the EU kept growing precisely while politics immigrated to “Europe,”12 a steep drop in political interest was manifest.
Ad hoc studies
Growing civic ignorance is confirmed variously, but at least two related studies deserve particular attention. The first was conducted in the early 1990s and the second in 2001. Cross-comparing the findings of my longitudinal reading of Eurostat surveys with these ad hoc studies13 is interesting, not least because all are concerned with citizens’ political knowledge about Europolitics and the sources of it. They also link knowledge deficits with citizens’ disaffection with Europolitics, while attributing manifest gaps of knowledge and rising political ignorance to information deficits.
Communication deficits, political ignorance, and disaffection
Reactions against the Maastricht Treaty (1992), expressed in the disapproving referendum in Denmark, alarmed EU politicians, who blamed such a popular verdict on ignorance. So an independent committee of experts was appointed to study and face this crisis of legitimacy. Its mandate was threefold: to establish the truth concerning political knowledge, to assess causes for the communication deficit, and to submit policy recommendations to remedy the problem. Indeed, the De Clercq Report diagnosed ignorance,14 linking this condition outright with communication deficits,15 while stressing that “there is great dissatisfaction with current Community processes everywhere” (Clercq 1993, 5). “The contents and aims of the Maastricht Treaty are not at all well known, even in those countries where a debate took place before a referendum” (1993, 184), this being a “perfect example of the phenomenon of confusion” (185). Many citizens “deplored the lack, inadequacy, and inappropriateness of the information available to them” (205). Indeed, the report highlighted that citizens are “open and welcoming to information about Europe” (205). The report recommended a political communication that would promulgate interactive relations between media, politics, and citizens, thereby advocating nothing less than a recasting of the democratic system. Ignorance was attributed to default media practices and deficits in political communication.16 Overall, the De Clercq findings were shockingly revealing, but most shocking of all were its recommendations that urged imperative democratization of communication frameworks and processes. Not surprisingly, these were rebuffed vehemently and tacitly buried by the ultra-neoliberal establishment of Brussels.17
“Abysmal ignorance” in perceptions of the EU
The Debony study corroborated facts about entrenched ignorance, as well as its continuation into the new millennium. The most striking of its findings was the observed divides in knowledge between member states. Political knowledge was greater “in the pro-European countries of the ‘South’ (Greece, Portugal and Spain, including Ireland), where even people in the middle to low socio-economic categories can name many of its spheres of public activity” (Debony 2001, 8), but also among candidate countries (Sweden, Finland, Austria), irrespective of “whether or not they are inclined to view the EU as a good thing” (2001, 8).18 Political knowledge was poor in the large, most populous states, notably Germany and the UK, where “there is the greatest lack of knowledge” (ibid).19 These results concur with corresponding Eurobarometer data, as German and British respondents hardly ever passed the 50 percent threshold in awareness counts. In addition, a 2004 Eurostat survey confirmed “still an awful lot of ignorance about the EU – and often more in the old member states than in the new” (Peel 2004). Since these were the educationally richest Europeans, such findings are as shocking as they are embarrassing. Debony highlights this in stinging language.20
There is a considerable, sometimes abysmal, lack of knowledge, in the other countries, where ignorance, confusion or very rough approximations are a general phenomenon. The Commission and the Parliament are often known only by name; the two are sometimes confused; knowledge of their roles and responsibilities is very vague; there is often almost total ignorance of the institutional mechanisms; it all seems extremely remote. (Debony 2001, 9)
Debony corroborates the prevalence of ignorance through a different methodology, elaborating, moreover, on the “abysmal gaps of knowledge” and their implications for civic readiness.
Matching knowledge gaps with content deficits
Over the last decades, content analysis studies have explored political information and press coverage of Europolitics.21 They show that the media, including some of the most prestigious ones, deselect or severely cut down news and current affairs on Europolitics, treating them as unnewsworthy. Mainstream media downplayed Europolitics as of negligible importance. Intriguingly, such treatment applied even to crucial milestones of EU integration, such as the Maastricht Treaty, the adoption of the common currency – the Euro – or the Constitutional Convention of 2004.22 Their news coverage was assessed as minimal and never rising to a net positive balance. Given that such milestones mark quite substantial power transformations in the EU process of integration and decision making, such “media snobbery” is preposterous (Media Tenor 2005a, 2005b, Ludes 2004, Kaitatzi-Whitlock 2005). Content analyses show, moreover, that among the three most important EU institutions, the Commission is given the most media coverage, while the EP, the only institution elected by popular vote across the Union, is given the least. The EP being treated as the least newsworthy institution of all, it was effectively liquidated from current affairs programs (Media Tenor 2005a, 2005b).23 Given such remarkable deficits in supplies of regular political information, a correlation between the two interlinked phenomena – first, the rising levels of political ignorance among citizens, and secondly, the corresponding lack of coverage by the media – is imperative, since no one can acquire unavailable contents. Ignorance is thus attributed to deficits in political content supplies by the mainstream media. Analysis thus far explains how ignorance is produced by refusing to provide knowledge. In the following section, I explore the second modality by which ignorance is produced, that is, by seizing the minds and occupying the attention of people.
Intensified Production Modes of Political Ignorance
Having established the growth of political ignorance and its relation with content deficits, it is important now to question why it evolves and how it is determined by the political economy of contemporary capitalism. I attribute default, yet indispensable, civic knowledge to economy and media functions. Therefore, I need to disentangle the nexus which implicates the human commodity in its various functions.
Economic structures, actors and roles
The economy at large comprises the sui generis, supplementary domain of media markets which constitutes its motive force. As highlighted by Dallas Smythe (1977), commercial media sell the commodity of audiences to advertised industries for funding in the form of advertising revenue. In the inverse transactional cycle, commodities are sold to individuals, as customers who thus pay first for products’ use value, but secondly also for their advertising costs, which remunerates advertisers and the media, which will then resell viewer packages all over again. This “vicious economic circle” involves an array of subsidiary, parasitic transactions and actors developing around the basic market equation. Although channels produce the commodity, audience time, together with viewers, the fundamental economic role played out by viewers is one about which they are mainly unaware. Obviously this ignorance is essential, because if the media enlightened citizens about this relation, they would inevitably betray their abuse of viewers as exploitable commodities. What is socially dangerous is the maintenance of ignorance for strategic and competitive purposes. And this condition applies here. Implicit in this approach are the links between ignorance and corruption, the incidents of which are innumerable during the ongoing global economic crisis. Nonetheless, free market economics is predicated on full awareness of parties involved in the market as sellers or buyers. Even though market imperfections are conceded, due to faulty knowledge, nonprofit agencies that would “reduce knowledge imperfections” (Hill 1997, 15) are missing.
Charting a rough map of actors and functions in play here apart from entrepreneurs, products, and media owners, that is, the controlling players of the economy, we can see that actors and assets of the media-centered domain include the following: individuals in their respective capacity as audiences (commodity) and product buyers (agency); journalists, content creators; politicians and politics; political and cultural programming (content); airtime on screens, especially prime time; commercial propaganda messages and suppliers; advertised products on sale; viewer ratings companies, quantifying program competitiveness; opinion pollsters. All these thrive around the profit machine of the now genetically diverted communications media. In these cycles, individual viewers combine a number of economic roles with corresponding exploitations.
Intense structural control is exerted on all roles, as during daily market operations, (1) airtime is “sold” by channels to advertisers; (2) conversely, aggregates of viewers are sold to advertisers and, subsequently, to advertised industries having first produced audience time; (3) advertisements are sold by advertisers/advertised industries; (4) news, entertainment, or hybrid programming is supplied, ostensibly free of charge, to viewers; (5) channel performance ratings are sold to both advertisers and channels, thereby determining newsworthiness and program priorities, whereas (6) media-commissioned opinion polls usually vet popularity fluctuations and competitiveness of political personnel, which overtly serve as staple, publishable news but are also useful covertly.
Central mutual exploitation engages the media and the advertisers. They exchange viewers jointly and exploit them interchangeably, first as commodity and subsequently as consumer. Yet the capital that changes hands between these two controlling agencies is paid by consumers. This process produces the public as the ignorant financier of the media. Consequently, the most exploited but also the most deceived factor of all in this political economy are individuals, in their multiple roles as: (1) freely choosing viewers, (2) captive audiences of commercial messages, and (3) consumers of advertised products.
In order for this syndrome of lucrative economic roles to obtain, the synergetic commodity of viewing time is a prerequisite. Audiences and networks “produce the commodity audiences’ watching time” (Jhally 1990, 75) jointly in a tacit accord entered whenever individuals become viewers. Yet as soon as they do so, and by inadvertently conceding to become captive audiences of commercial propaganda in tandem with watching their chosen programs, viewers simultaneously become trapped. They constitute a uniquely precious commodity, since it is in this way that they are manipulated toward consumerism. Commercial channels strive frantically to screen attractive programs in their competition to capture the largest audience segments. During these processes all political actors are commodified and intensely commercialized. Such crucial transmutations initiate not only the genesis of the human commodity, but also that of the commodified politician.
The symbolic mediated domain
Focusing on the mediated subdomain and its specificities for viewers as citizens, we ascertain that, once individuals join mediated flows, various economic roles emerge. The first evolves when viewers watch programs of their own choosing and the second when they are coerced to watch commercials in intervals during programs. Viewers must enact both of these roles in order to be readily salable to advertisers. During the course of the first, broadcasters strive both to capture viewers’ attention amid tough competition for audiences and to keep viewers hooked. What viewers watch while hooked is economically paramount to broadcasters, firstly, because this condition is their pass to achieving the sale of viewer packages. People are thus unwittingly “cast” in economic roles, which prepare the way for the key economic role of the consumerist society: when the commodity viewer emerges as paying customer. For all targeted exploitation to happen in such a complex setting, it is imperative to occupy and colonize the minds of such a multiply exploitable asset. This colonization can only be guaranteed by supplying attractive rather than taxing shows, that is, contents emptied of political or educative significance. To this end, both competition and deregulation are crucial structural premises, dictating and concurrently underpinning redundant information supplies. The importance of such functions is crucial, as they inherently prioritize lowest common denominator programming, which pertains rather to entertainment, at the expense of knowledge-supplying genres. In the face of intense competitive pressures, programming not conforming to lowest common denominator features is threatened with extinction. Hence, such competitive market modalities foster the massive growth of ignorance.
Nonetheless, citizens expect to receive political information from the media. Indeed, the press is the only institution accredited with such a remit. Television was “the main, though largely unacknowledged, educator in the country” (Schiller 1989, 320). This is not the case any more. Television could fulfill such a politically pivotal role only if it were, primarily or exclusively, dedicated to an education system mission as proposed by Schiller (1989), Garnham (1990), and Bourdieu (1996). Such a mission has now been relinquished, either de jure or de facto. The role of public service broadcasting, in raising civic awareness and forming democratic agoras for dialogue, is largely submerged, while it is deplored by commercial media. Hence, commercialization of television marks the most decisive turn toward the transmutation of the fundamental role of the media and inherently of the political.
The human commodity and the cycles of its exchange
Commercial media orchestrate several processes of exploitation: consecutive, cyclical, or concurrent. The fact that commercialization and competition are now relentless has diminished the options for beneficial media contents enormously, in terms of citizens’ real interests. By the same token, viewers’ choices have shrunk dramatically, since most knowledge-enhancing programs are filtered out, just as hooked viewers get trapped in media habitats that aggressively recycle empty signifiers (see Patrick 2009).24 Media attention is ostensibly a leisure time engagement but, as has been aptly stressed, since viewers create surplus value for the exploiting agencies, attention constitutes labor.
People’s available leisure time is limited as it is occupied predominantly by television viewing.25 The number of individual hours spent watching, multiplied by the number of programs and advertising messages exposed, multiplied by advertised products sold, are key links in the chain of this lucrative economy. Statistics regarding informative contents show that political programming is declining sharply, a trend evident also in journalistic and production job losses (Hobsbawm 2006). The emerging disequilibrium consists of more hours of TV exposure with more redundant information. Competition pits programming genres against each other: entertainment versus political communication and civic education. The former are in demand and promoted aggressively, while the latter are sidelined. Battles end with quantitative decreases and qualitative distortions to the detriment of knowledge.
Political communication is waning in a process where the “attention of the reader, listener or viewer has to be grabbed quickly if one media firm is to take custom from another” (Crouch 2004, 46–7). Competition “prioritizes simplicity and sensationalism, thereby degrading the quality of political discussion and reducing citizens’ competence” (Crouch 2004, 47). But what is politics if knowledge about it is, conditionally, locked out of the domain of public visibility, dissemination, and communication? The sector with the utmost political significance, in its genetically diverted shape, has become the playmaker of several other, ulterior market games. This attention and time economy thus serves to disempower viewers.
Electronic public spaces were largely free from the constraints of market control and the corrosive effects of commercialism. However, following the neoliberal onslaught on electronic public spaces since the 1980s, democratic politics has lost out to the market in the domain of communications. By far the most underestimated consequence of the Transfrontier Television Directive (Council of European Communities 1989)26 is the absolute subjection of public spaces to competition and deregulation. The once inherently political public space is now dominated by the market, exclusively for profit objectives and the consequence of the market imposed as the exclusive censor of media content.
Modes of market censorship: qualitative transmutation and distortions
In such a high-intensity market setting (Leiss 1976), commercial propaganda holds three pivotal roles: first, as monetary broker; secondly, as human commodity broker; and, thirdly, as content censor. The most important element, in relation to ignorance-producing processes, is that the former two functions could not succeed without tightly controlling the third. As a result, while advertising supplies audiences to advertisers and revenues to media simultaneously, it censors all “counterproductive” knowledge contents. Herein then lies the crucial nexus of this media-induced ignorance: concepts such as political judgment, political will formation, citizens’ demands, and policy rationales have turned into odd terms of a bygone age. A regression of this magnitude generates long-lasting damage to political knowledge, the fundamental premise of democracy. This then is the political economy of political monopoly control.27
Decisive battles occur in the interface between markets of material and of symbolic goods, where the former prevail and control outcomes for the latter. This is why viewers set off to marketplaces of ideas – seeking, let us say, knowledge on current affairs – but instead end up buying packages of blurred clichés, having meanwhile paid the advertising industry on top of it. The clash is between an anticipated, responsible “civic trustee” role of the media, as political agency, versus the harshly economic role of the media as the “pimp” of viewers.
Since they are unaware of their commodification, and of transactions operating on their back, viewers participate in power games beyond their control. The deception consists in viewers turning to broadcast media for information, which the media do not deliver because they deal in quite different markets. Viewers become frustrated regarding their civic-cognitive expectations, because the alliance between advertisers and media supplies menus – subject only to profitability criteria – censoring out content beyond such objectives. Hence, the en bloc imposition of genres “that sell” favoring outright light entertainment over current affairs, a situation which causes civic ignorance.
But even within political programming zones, similar competition strategies displace the more serious programs in favor of infotainment, which superficially features political material, though it is essentially devoid of its essence.28 The market strategy then pits two major categories against each other and, in doing so, condemns the category of political information either to displacement or to genetic diversion. Since the historical legitimation of the media derives from their civic trustee role, they cannot abolish political communication altogether. So they vacate it, maintaining simply the external form of that legacy in the hybrid caricature of infotainment. Knowledge deficits in current affairs are thus masked under that form.
Due to their multifaceted and pivotal economic role, viewers evidently constitute the most sought-after resource. They are the object of desire in fierce competition battles. Coveted viewers must be enticed ingeniously. Within cut-throat competition settings, knowledge-conferring programs seem heavy, boring, or plain indigestible. According to market logic, they must be supplanted by attractive, popular shows. Novel program concepts and recipes are frantically sought only to engage viewers’ attention. Enticing contents become the tempting bait for viewers, who subsequently become the bait for the advertiser. The market censor rejects any programming not serving such compulsive purposes. Within such a harsh framework, quality is dispensable as unfit for economies of scale, and so are citizens’ needs for political knowledge. Clichés justifying cuts in politically informative material indicate that “viewers reject it” or “it does not sell.”29 Consequently, a totally sui generis division of values is imposed.
By simply juxtaposing attractive with demanding programs, we can observe that the mere comparison favors the former. After having impoverished program menus and cultivated superficial entertainment approaches so that the discontinuity of information has made hard data seem even harder or knowledge contents off-putting, the media blame people for finding it indigestible. Consequently, news and current affairs programs are marginalized; along with other cultural forms they are filtered out from screen visibility.
In such a high-intensity market, ratings meters become central. They calculate channel performance, ranking their competitiveness in catching larger segments, thereby being instrumental in allocating advertising revenue and in censoring contents. Current affairs programs or documentaries are reduced, while, conversely, reality shows proliferate. A wave of populism is sweeping television screens, subverting previous hierarchies of programming and imposing the criteria of market viability. Journalists, too, are afflicted, as jobs are lost, casualized, or bureaucratized.30 Journalists can avoid clashing with the market censor through self-censorship, conforming to bias or to nondescript output, or adapting their work to suit the infotainment mask (Hobsbawm 2006, Meyer 2002, Thussu 2007, Rosen 1992). Overall, such market conduct censors politics out, while keeping citizens politically numb and nicely suppressed.31 This market, then, liquidates citizenship, while elected politicians look on.
From lowest common denominator to highest rating
As already indicated, the battle between commercial channels is about assembling larger audiences for aggressively marketed products, thereby securing economies of scale. Two mutually reinforcing mechanisms operate in this process. The first involves projection of mass appeal, eye-catching shows, constructed around the objective of mass satisfaction, accruing either from standardized recipes of sex, scandals, violence, and private life gossip or from bland, homogenized, yet viewable shows. The rise in scandal-specific contents in current affairs zones (Tumber and Waisbord 2004, Thompson 2005) cannot be explained simply by improved investigating methods. Intense interchannel competition grants comparative advantage to scandal and that matters in incessant races for highest ratings. Since all mainstream media compete basically for the same audience, standard recipes for success prevail and kill diversity. Competition-driven processes simplify and trivialize complex or sophisticated political programs as simplicity gains over complexity. Generally, the “what sells” concern prevails as the iron rule, effecting utter trivialization. Responsibility to inform clashes with the need to attract. The implicit business logic is to magnetize and capture attention, either by simplifying or scandalizing. The second mechanism occurs in synergy with viewers, just when they coproduce the commodity of audience time.
Selection of programs accrues in what media economists call “lowest-common-denominator programming” (Cave 1989). In multichannel markets, viewers gauge available options in search of preferred programs. When not finding their preferred programs, but wanting to retain the option of watching television – it being a cheap form of entertainment – they negotiate viewing second-best programs. In lowering their expectations, either in terms of quality or genre (e.g., art documentary versus soap), eventually they end up watching their second, third, or other choice. But each time a viewer condescends to a least-bad type of show he or she is obliged to watch only a partly satisfactory program. Nonetheless, precisely via such discounting viewers aggregate into large groups, notably granting that critical distinguishing mass that turns shows to scale economies. So the total sum of those watching their second, third, or other choice cumulatively builds up the much-coveted top rank position.32 Paradoxical though it seems, those choosing a rather nondescript program X, as their last option, contribute to elevating X into a mass-appeal show conferring to it that extra, critical mass in this covert race. Thus, lowest-common- denominator programs gain dominant rank status.33
Poor informational quality is nothing compared to such a market prize. Redundant programs prevail precisely because they grant economies of scale, and push consumers to triumph over citizens (Crouch 2004). Conversely, even though high quality programs gratify significant segments of first-choice viewers, over time both are penalized. Notwithstanding high quality, when programs fall to the bottom of the ratings’ lists, they are eclipsed as the market censor operates on numerical control and quantitative criteria. The impact of such sacrifices on citizens’ knowledge is crushing. The supreme market censor thus determines collective ignorance and its corollary: depoliticization.
Thus citizens sustain such ignorance-inducing censorship indirectly, thereby debilitating their own position. Since availability of programs is conditioned on viewers compromising to watch minimally satisfying programs, viewers collude with the market censor’s dictates. In addition, in entertainment, criteria of pluralism, diversity, or quality are questionable, since we trespass on subjective terrain where de gustibus non est disputandum (there is no disputing about tastes). Knowledge of facts, however, is quite distinct from aesthetic preferences, as it is a civic requirement that cannot be relinquished “for fun.”
Citizens’ ignorance and collateral damage
As numerous aggressive approaches to viewers betray, the medium of television has refined methodologies of entrapping people’s senses. This happens, firstly, by colonizing audience time and by attracting their attention, thereby “walling people’s awareness” (Mander 1978, 53). Secondly, it disorients minds ideologically, for example, via cult fetishisms, identity manipulation, or agenda setting. Thirdly, through the effect of confusion as stressed in both the ad hoc studies described above (see the section on Political Ignorance in the EU); such high intensity market setting “works to make individuals increasingly confused as to the nature of their needs” (Jhally 1990, 19). By the same token, such overloading systems confuse people about their real interests and the priorities in their needs (Lukes 2004, Kaitatzi-Whitlock 2007). Fourthly, it suspends critical ability, implicit in the moving image, yet accentuated by staging or shooting techniques. Fifthly, it cultivates infantilization or even brutalization, implicit in the worst reality shows. Furthermore, belonging to a captive audience itself incurs vulnerability. Adverts bombard viewers at moments of susceptibility and dispositional weakness, during relaxation, when critical ability tends to be suspended.
Seventy percent of EU citizens turn to television for (political) information (Wallström 2006, Vissol 2006). An equally high rate (71%) admit being “little or not at all informed” (Peel 2004).34 Is this coincidence accidental? The analysis in this section, which focuses on the reasons for the depletion of essential information from channels, but also the modalities by which people’s minds are possessed with redundant content, suggests that such exorbitant knowledge gaps are due to the commitment of commercial channels to profiteering and to transmitting torrents of homogenized, redundant contents. That is a system of disorienting and confusing citizens, rather than enlightening them.
The Political Economy of Active Knowledge Seeking
One of the key problems of the web is its indiscretion in terms of genres and kinds of information. Unlike journalism, a key professional task of which is the clear distinction between the categories of facts and opinion, on the web, where anybody can upload symbolic goods, contents are entirely mixed and blurred. Inherently, no generic search engine (SE) will deliver such categorizations. This situation is highly problematic in itself, because of mingling and confusing diverse kinds. As such, it is detrimental as both knowledge and significant information are central categories for learning, and therefore, need to be treated systematically. SE data-mining processes on the web fail to do so. Moreover, overall, knowledge or significant information makes up only a fraction of sources retrievable on the web. But the economics of web information supplies is the factor that hinders properly cognitive processes.
The only way to avoid bias and abuse in allocating information and knowledge sources is to exclude all parasitic exploiting functions and agencies. This general rule applies also on the web. The only way then would be to constitute retrieval functions as public utility services, that is, universally accessible, but publicly accountable and transparently operated facilities. This entails avoiding commercialization of such web services at any cost. However, given the near total commercialization of cyberspace, alternatives exist only within commercialization, basically involving direct or indirect exploitation. Put differently, for SEs to run viable businesses, their services can either operate direct business-to-customer transactions or mediated ones with the intervention of a parasitic third partner, advertising.
Experience shows that the markets for goods that are not indispensable are not fit for business-to-customer transactions. The devise of a tandem exploitation scheme, just like the one undertaken by mass media, therefore becomes unavoidable. This scheme consists of the supply of the commodity of web user to advertised companies. In short, while SEs provide requested information, concurrently and conversely, they push users to advertisements or sites of preselected, best-paying companies, as in the case of Google. Here, then, the brokerage function revisits the public, causing its tacit collusion. By assuming the insidious ostensibly free-rider role, users concede concurrently to the function of advertiser exploitation. Just as in the mass media, SEs coproduce together with seekers the commodity of seeking time during which advertising slips in.
Focusing on this nexus of relations from the perspective of SE, in order for them to draw revenue, they must undertake the classical double brokerage role. The service they deliver is directed to individual users looking for some order in the chaos. By developing catalogue files and filtering data, on the basis of devised algorithms, SEs guide seekers to relevant sites. So the actors engaging in SE-orchestrated processes comprise: (1) information seekers, (2) search engines, and (3) companies advertised (either through ad banners or pay-per-click). But whereas (2) and (3) negotiate directly at a profit, (1) functions, unwittingly, as “bait” toward the mutual exploitation objectives of (2) and (3). Hence commercial media, notably television and SEs, exploit viewers and web users respectively in very comparable ways.
In the young market of SEs operating in the vast domain of the web, Google has rapidly become the most popular search companion. Its popularity hinges on an irresistible business concept which turned it into the indisputable market leader, that is, PageRank: its method of using web link structures, rather than just elementary co-ordinates of sites or documents (O’Reilly 2005). Google distinguished itself also thanks to an innovating business approach (Vise and Malseed 2005). Apart from PageRank, Google launched its “Ad Sense” policy, thereby converting users into business allies in enabling advertising against remuneration, in a virtual kind of outsourcing. However, such comparative-advantage-generating strategies effectively overshadow the considerable shortcomings of this SE.
Users are not aware of the fact that PageRank35 disregards considerable amounts of useful sources. It is estimated that Google will furnish only about 60–70 percent of all public entries on the web, that is, of technically retrievable information, on any single demand. Thus sites not considered for selection belong to PageRank information rejects. Yet this is only the first stage of Google’s information-censoring practice. The second stage occurs within the bulk of scanned retrievable material, via processes of arbitrary prioritizing. Google marginalizes “less worthwhile sources” simply by ordering them at the tail ends of huge lists of items. Conversely, it prioritizes sources with the most optimizer links attached to them. So linking becomes strategic once somebody sets up shop on the Internet. This is of course a modified replica of the lowest common denominator process operated by the mass media. Consequently, this system furnishes only a small fraction of significant information, along with prioritizing it, to the effective detriment of web-searchers. Because selection criteria – determined by commercial considerations – operate inherently in the algorithm of PageRank, constant and systematic bias accrues. PageRank prioritizes popular or “most visited,” rather than most appropriate or, critically, most significant sites on specific entries and requests. This procedure amounts to a perfectly populist business strategy. Nonetheless, what cognitively appears as a shortcoming, makes perfect business sense. Site visitors click on flashing links; however, for each click on artificially optimized and paying links, that advertised customer of Google remunerates it, automatically, with a handsome prenegotiated price. This action locks together two willing partners and one transient, unsuspecting commodity partner.
The financial mechanism that is based on pay-per-click is conducive to satisfying implicated actors, that is, individual seekers, SE business funding, and ad promoting. So although a fair amount of valuable information is left out by PageRank, this method is cost-effective commercially. The unprecedented amounts of Google traffic testify to this but also to the superiority of the pay-per-click system when compared to ad banners. Interestingly, the comparative advantage of this dominant market player consists of prioritizing – and thus rewarding – sites which are already maximally linked up, thereby granting further popularity to “haves” and channeling preference to already recognizable brands. This practice explains why the absolute majority of web users gravitate towards the 100 best known information brands worldwide, many of which are already famous offline brands. Although SE traffic covers only a part of Internet traffic such bias tarnishes its heralded equality and diversity.
The second equally crucial relation is between SEs and offline and online competitor media. The breakthrough of Google’s pay-per-click application impacts dramatically not only on web markets and the entire system of symbolic goods’ markets, but also the economy at large. Notably, financial resources emigrate from offline to online media where the share of SEs is growing exponentially. Market research demonstrates that SEs lead with the highest percentage of the overall online advertising expenditure.36 Long-term effects in the allocation of information, knowledge, opinion, public discussion, evaluation, and critique can be gleaned as a consequence of such remarkable web market trends. Firstly, advertising revenue is rapidly migrating from offline to online media, with dire anticipated repercussions on the former’s sustainability. Secondly, in online applications, advertising revenue seems to be migrating to SEs and particularly so to Google. This rising movement converts network economies and the SEs, in particular, into crucial brokers not only of online knowledge, but also determinants of the sustainability of other sources of knowledge.
Google leads, then, a remarkable concentration trend in market power and control. Trends in online advertising funding are very much determined by its overwhelming success. Consequently, the responsibility of Google in furthering and entrenching concentration in symbolic goods’ markets is paramount. By the same token, its traffic occurs at considerable risk for systematic and accurate knowledge and significant information. In other words, although active seekers head for knowledge, the virtual system systematically imposes its own biasing criteria. Hence, web-bound processes determine allocation of power in terms of knowledge, apparent knowledge, and ignorance.
Concluding Remarks
Political ignorance about substantive power relations within the EU, as analyzed in this study, constitutes a political embarrassment for a region comprising, arguably, the best-educated populations worldwide. In the face of such regressive conditions and related legitimacy backlashes, the Commission of the EU launched its Plan-D for Democracy, Dialogue and Debate to “reinvigorate European democracy,” thereby aiming to create a “public sphere, where citizens are given the information and the tools to actively participate in the decision-making process and gain ownership of the European project”37 (Commission 2005, 2–3) and promising to initiate long-term consultations on the principles behind its communications policy. Although rhetorical, this policy pronouncement is doubly significant: firstly, because EU elites acknowledge the severity of the problem, and, secondly, because they confess that communications media constitute our fundamental collective means for political knowledge and democratic discussion. Conversely, increasing political ignorance undoubtedly constitutes major regression, since people’s ignorance results in abuse of power. The twin trends of rapidly diminishing civic awareness and of concurrently decreasing political interest effect the dire condition of depoliticization, which entails a terminal democracy deficit.
Media markets under regimes of deregulated competition are positively harmful for civic knowledge. The causal links between these phenomena indicates that democracy deficit will only be remedied when political knowledge and communication are rectified. Citizens’ understanding of power relations and politics can only be fostered by transparency about political institutions, power relations, and decisions. The failure of contemporary capitalism lies in bartering its own ultra-profitability with an ignorance-producing media regime and hence with the essential demise of democracy. It is a capitalism which dictates the commodification and the marginalization of both citizens and politicians, by making knowledge and democracy deficits structurally prerequisite for its own predomination.
Notes
1 “Ignorance” is absent in communication dictionaries. See Lilleker (2006), Watson and Hill (1997), O’Sullivan et al. (1992).
2 This conception derives from Steven Lukes’s three-dimensional concept of power (2004).
3 Indeed, even factual bits of knowledge, if irrelevant or oversegmented, may contribute to effective ignorance.
4 The “ ‘knowledge gap’ research has revealed that the spread of television consumption to more people involving larger segments of their time does not equalize the stock of politically relevant knowledge among subgroups of society, but instead widens such gaps between them” (Meyer 2002: ix).
5 The most striking case being the “You Do Not Know, Vote No” campaign in the 2008 Irish referendum (www.indymedia.ie/article/87345).
6 This is not identical to knowledge. Yet it is an essential source for political knowledge. “Perceived knowledge” is a gray, often imperceptibly counterproductive, mental condition.
7 Eurobarometer publishes regular Eurostat surveys twice a year. Surveys regarding the European Parliament started in 1977 and lasted until 2001; surveys regarding the Commission started in 1987. The first Eurostat survey in 1973 addressed “interest” in EU affairs. Some surveys still continue, while others have been discontinued.
8 The EP was established in 1977 and was first elected in 1979. By far the lengthiest survey is on awareness about the EP.
9 Pan-European EP election years present exceptions to this pattern.
10 An upturn surged in 1986, yet raised interest in Europolitics was short-lived. 1986 marked a turning point in the power battles between the market and “the political.”
11 Weak interest in politics is corroborated by De Clercq: “La majorité des Européens (55%) ne s’ intéressent pas beaucoup ou pas du tout a la politique” (1993: 28).
12 Notwithstanding such “denationalization,” the media continued to focus on national arenas, thereby breeding a peculiar depoliticization.
13 Both were commissioned by the EU in 1993 and 2001 respectively.
14 Hjarvard (1993, 90) highlights “cleavages between capital growth and administrative development in the EU, without commensurate ‘public knowledge’.”
15 “Les débats occasionnés par la ratification du Traité de Maastricht dans nos Etats membres ainsi que le résultat de diverses consultations populaires ou parlementaires auxquelles ils donnent lieu révèlent un manque préoccupant de connaissance de la construction européenne et une perception parfois déforme de sa réalité. Le déficit est d’ autant plus accusé que sont grandes les espérances et les inquiétudes du grand public sur ce sujet” (De Clercq 1993, 5).
16 The “absence or weakness of channels of European information is worrying – while at the same time the need for sources close at hand is manifest” (De Clercq 1993, 208).
17 Fierce attacks against it were targeted by British media, leading to its burial. For the Report’s fate and its recommendations, see also Tumber (1995). For propaganda against it, see Booker and North (1993). The fact that it is unavailable in official EU libraries, even for research purposes, is an indication of its “burial.”
18 Given the referenda of 2005 on the Constitutional Convention, the issue of whether citizens knowingly dismissed it is crucial. See Introduction to Kaitatzi-Whitlock and Baltzis (2006).
19 Leys confirms such findings with British statistics concurring with Debony’s qualification about “abysmal ignorance”: “One voter in five was functionally illiterate. Knowledge of modern history was confined to a tiny minority … Images, music and other non-verbal signifiers increasingly displaced words” (Leys 2001, 52–3). Besides, “two thirds of teenagers had little or no interest in politics and scant political knowledge (2001, 20). See also Lloyd and Mitchinson (2006) on “general ignorance” and the “comprehensive and humiliating catalogue of all misconceptions, mistakes and misunderstandings in ‘common knowledge’ ” (2006, xv).
20 There exists “gross ignorance in the UK and in Germany” (Debony 2001, 9). Discrepancies in ignorance between countries need to be further investigated in conjunction with the role of hegemonic and ethnocentric media and elites in respective countries. A positive correlation between better knowledge and pro-European stances is observable. This is a valuable insight per se. Besides, one might speculate that anti-Europeans might have used it strategically. In smaller, better informed countries “a fairly high amount of interviewees could at least identify the Commission and the Parliament and had an approximate idea of their respective composition and role, [and] institutional mechanisms” (Debony 2001, 9).
21 Such studies examine political information output in key media, notably, journals and channels in major EU countries such as Germany and the UK.
22 Poor media coverage, even of historical milestones such as the adoption of the common currency, is commented on by Ludes (2004).
23 Surveys suggest that the EP is the most recognizable among EU institutions. Counterbalancing coverage among local and regional press and the fact that 500 Euro-Parliamentarians communicate interpersonally, dialoguing with citizens in local constituencies, offsets such mainstream media effacing.
24 For the concept of “empty signifiers,” see Laclau (1996).
25 Seventy percent of Europeans turn to TV for their information (Wallström 2006, Vissol 2006).
26 In 1989 the EC and the CoE subjugated electronic public spaces to the control of global market forces, through their transfrontier television policies.
27 “Media bias becomes the only real knowledge owned by the public sphere” (Lilleker, 2006, 119). See also Crouch (2004, 48).
28 “Infotainment, incorporating talk shows and reality based programming has been the most forceful growth trend in the five major European markets in recent years” states Dahlgren (1995, 49), invoking data by the Geneva- based media analyst, Paolo Baldi (1994).
29 Both research evidence and political campaigns demonstrate citizens’ urge for knowledge. See the section on Political Ignorance in the EU above.
30 The 2005 film Good Night, and Good Luck features journalism fighting successfully, though at considerable cost, against political censors and McCarthyist intimidation, though failing to beat the market censor.
31 This fits Marshall’s description of “the ‘war’ of the capitalist class system against citizenship” (1995,103).
32 This is described as Hotelling’s principle (Cave, 1989).
33 Exceptions to the rule exist. Programs of high quality may genuinely attract massive audience as viewers’ first choice.
34 The equivalent figure 30 years back, in 1973, were 63 percent (Peel 2004).
35 There are “over 200 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) factors” that Google uses to rank pages in the Google search results (SERPs). Anyone wishing to pursue artificial optimization for high ranking can find it on confirmed Google SEO Rules on the web.
36 Market research conducted by Price Waterhouse Coopers (2007) (IAB).
37 The Commission’s “Plan-D” policy was its stillborn project against a crushing civic defiance expressed in the referenda on the Constitutional Convention (in France and the Netherlands, May 2005).
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