'It’s the system, stupid'

This article was first released in 2020. Some references may be out of date.

The defeat of Donald Trump (despite winning 70 million votes) in the recent US election together with the continuing death and disruption resulting from the coronavirus pandemic are hugely significant events. Both point to the centrality of structural factors including poverty, racism, inequality and the vulnerability of ruling elites.

Yet our media remain overwhelmingly preoccupied with the importance of individuals: by portraying Trump as the polarizing ex-president, Johnson as the bumbling fool and Merkel as apparently the sole grown-up in the room. They are mesmerized by a roll call of commentators, journalists, pollsters, celebrities and public health experts. They are dazzled by what’s on the surface but all too rarely dig beneath the immediately observable.

Where is the emphasis on the conditions that give rise to anger, scapegoating, backlashes and a continuing ambivalence towards consensus politics? Where is the ‘slow’ journalism and the preoccupation with historical context and underlying data? Where is the detailed analysis of movements and trends as opposed to spectacle and sensation?

Mainstream political communications is not immune to this trend. It is often too microscopic and studied mainly in relation to its discrete components: technological affordances, political utterances and mediated routines. The emphasis is on the visible and the visceral, not the elusive and opaque; on process and performance as distinct from underlying conditions of power; on institutional rather than ideological factors.

The pandemic has certainly intensified some of the trends that we highlight in our new book, Media, Democracy and Social Change including the enduring power of the state, the fragility of traditional political parties and the meekness of mainstream media in posing sustained challenges to the negligence shown by so many governments around the world.

For example, the combined forces of coronavirus and centrism were supposed to ‘kill off populism’ because populist leaders like Trump, Bolsanaro and Johnson failed adequately to manage the pandemic in their respective countries. That may have been just a little optimistic as the pandemic also provided these figures with an opportunity to blame the usual people: to lash out at ‘foreigners’ for spreading the virus and to blame the ‘liberal media’ for spreading ‘bad news’. For example, Trump attacked journalists for downplaying his alleged policy successes in mitigating the ‘Chinese virus’ while Brazil’s Jair Bolsanaro dubbed the pandemic a ‘fantasy’ and a ‘media trick’. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, linked migration to the outbreak in Hungary and used Covid-19 as the pretext to cement his control of domestic media by passing a law that punishes anyone who publishes ‘false’ or ‘distorted’ facts.

Coronavirus is thus both the latest backdrop that allows authoritarian populists to reproduce their binary worldview and a crisis that has highlighted the devastating impact of the erosion of democratic processes and institutions including the media. Big tech and mainstream journalism have not transcended these fundamental democratic cleavages but instead have been circumscribed by the shortcomings of the social systems from which they originate.

At a time of enormous uncertainty, disruption and complexity, we believe that it is necessary to focus not so much on the pieces but on the puzzle as a whole and to identify the underlying dynamics, not simply the headlines, of contemporary political communications. This requires a holistic orientation as opposed to a piecemeal approach that is absorbed above all with the latest technological innovation or the most dramatic political operators. It involves conceptualizing political communications as a system that is shaped by its relationship to broader forces of social reproduction rather than being the product of immanent technological characteristics or the media savvy of a handful of charismatic personalities. In particular, it means that we have to evaluate political communications in relation to the fundamentally unequal relations of actually existing capitalist societies as opposed to the normative visions of the healthy democracy that we do not have.

Book Details
Media, Democracy and Social Change
Aeron Davis, Natalie Fenton, Des Freedman, Gholam Khiabany
September 2020
ISBN: 9781526456960