Tim Holmes asks if today’s media fulfil their role as a ‘fourth estate’ or whether they have instead become a tool for the ‘manufacture of consent’

The conception of the media as “fourth estate of the realm” is grounded in liberal democratic theories of its role in a functioning democratic polity. Much of the historical mythology such theories carry with them has been convincingly challenged (see, for instance, Curran 2002), but in general their normative content remains useful in evaluating media systems’ performance. Curran provides a concise formulation of the concept in Power Without Responsibility:

“As the “fourth estate”, the press scrutinizes the actions of the executive, and relays public opinion to lawmakers. The press also keeps people informed about what is happening in the world, and provides a forum of public debate. It thus lubricates the working of democracy by facilitating the formation of public opinion.” (Curran and Seaton 2003: 246)

Or, more concisely: “informing the public; scrutinizing government; staging a public debate; and expressing public opinion” (ibid). To these, Curran suggests, should be added a recognition of specifically economic power, so that, in terms of their normative role, “the media are conceived as being a check on both public and private authority.” (2002: 219)

In contrast to this normative ideal, the descriptive framework developed by Herman and Chomsky, principally in Manufacturing Consent (1994), outlines a “propaganda model” of the mass media (specifically the contemporary US media) in a “free market” system. This media’s selective activity is a direct consequence of several core institutional constraints, or “filters”: ownership (by large-scale media oligopolies, generally incorporated into larger corporate entities); funding (through the sale of lucrative audiences to advertisers); reliance on sources (reflecting both the resource constraints of the media themselves, and the relative prominence of resource-rich sources, typically employing techniques derived from the P.R. industry); “flak” (high-profile criticism, complaint and retaliation); and ideology (specifically, in Manufacturing Consent, “anti-communism” – though with the demise of the Soviet Union various more appropriate successors have been identified, among them a quasi-religious “faith in the market” [Herman 1999:269] and the “War on Terror” [Mullen 2006]).

Alex Doherty (2004) has recently proposed an extension of the model to the specific institutional structure of the BBC. In terms of ownership, Doherty notes the BBC’s status as a state-owned broadcaster, with a Government-appointed Board of Governors “drawn from a narrow elite sector of society with intimate links to government and big business”; in terms of funding, the corporation’s “licence fee renewal is at the government’s own discretion”, a significant lever of influence; while the last three filters affect the BBC in a similar fashion to the corporate media.

The overall outcome of this model, Herman and Chomsky claim, is the overwhelming predominance of elite framings in the mainstream media, with dissent marginalised. Where elite opinion is divided, the media will tend to reflect such divisions, but within strict limits. Media staff are selected for conformity to, and will in general tend to internalise, the norms and values of the institutions within which they work. Those that do not, the model predicts, will tend to find themselves marginalised or excluded.

A good deal turns on which of these models more closely conforms to reality. Given the crucial role accorded the media in facilitating the functioning of democracy in liberal democratic thought, the extent to which they follow either the predictions of the propaganda model or the requirements of the “fourth estate” role will inevitably raise fundamental questions about the degree to which a democracy is meaningfully functional.

From “control” to “chaos”?

A considerably more optimistic descriptive framework has recently been expounded by Brian McNair in Cultural Chaos (2006a). Following the model of chaos theory in the natural sciences, McNair proposes an analogous paradigm for understanding contemporary media systems, emphasising their largely unpredictable complexity. While the desire for control over the media on the part of elites remains, McNair argues, their ability to impose it has been undermined by such factors as decreasing entry costs, the proliferation of different outlets, and the rise of new media – in particular the internet, which for McNair represents a genuinely Habermasian “public sphere”. With the end of the Cold War, he argues further, an ideological transformation has overcome the Western media: the frame of the “national security state”, and its threatening enemy in the form of the Soviet Union, have fallen by the wayside. With this change, and with deference to authority generally declining, a new objectivity and pluralism have entered journalistic discourse. The main danger, according to McNair, is in fact an overly critical, “hyper-democratic” media promoting “corrosive cynicism” and frequently exaggerated hype; though, he suggests, this may be a necessary evil in democratic societies.

An examination of the contemporary media, however, reveals some rather significant problems with this optimistic assessment. In fact, as I will argue, while certain changes and developments are worth taking into account, McNair’s optimism is often naïve and largely unfounded, the contemporary media tending not to refute but to vindicate Herman and Chomsky’s thesis.

East Timor redux

One case study that may provide an illuminating point of entry into these questions is the death of former US President Gerald Ford on 26 December 2006, which, as with those of most public figures, provoked a good deal of commentary, reminiscence and reflection on his life and record in office, in obituaries, columns and editorials. One significant episode of his premiership notable by its absence, however, was Ford’s authorisation of Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor. This invasion and subsequent occupation, supported by the United States and Britain, became what many consider a genocide, with around one-third of the Timorese population wiped out (Goodman, Simpson and Nairn 2006).

In the week after Ford’s death, the topic featured in one article in the British media (Mulchrone and Hitchens 2006), and one in the US (Regan 2006). The leader-writers of the Guardian, generally considered the left extreme of the British press, published an editorial titled “In praise of… President Ford”, acording to which “our era is right to see him more generously” than his own. “America,” indeed, “would be truly fortunate if it can find itself another Jerry Ford.” (Guardian Editors 2006) According to an obituary in the same paper (Jackson 2006), apart from “the Nixon pardon, and a bungled assassination attempt”, there was “little to remember about Ford’s presidency.”

If mainstream journalism does indeed display the kind of “hyper-adversarialism” McNair claims, it is difficult to see how such a striking omission could possibly occur. There can surely be fewer more urgent concerns for a democratic polity than its government’s history of complicity in genocidal violence: here, however, that history was almost entirely elided. Overwhelmingly, in the British and American press, the East Timorese fell into the category of “unworthy victims”, as predicted and set out by the propaganda model. As recent research has suggested (Philo and Berry 2004; Lewis 2001), such “black holes of history” are often reflected in public knowledge, and can have serious implications for people’s understanding of the past.

Institutions and influences

While the example of Gerald Ford’s death, then, may illustrate most effectively the operation of ideology within the mainstream press, the other institutional factors described in Manufacturing Consent also persist. Restrictive patterns of ownership have been consolidated over the last few decades, with most media outlets now in the hands of a few conglomerates (McChesney 2002; Bagdikian 2004; Meehan 2005). While direct intervention by owners is not the norm, they are indirectly able to exert a powerful influence by appointing like-minded editors who foster and oversee a generally amenable journalistic culture (Curran and Seaton 2003; Monbiot 2004).

The importance of advertising revenue to the commercial media – what Herman and Chomsky term “the advertising license to do business” – has not lessened since the days of Britain’s Daily Herald, whose collapse despite popularity and increasing sales can be attributed largely to a haemorrhage of advertising revenue (Curran 2002; Curran and Seaton 2003; Richards 1997). The proliferation of different outlets has likely increased advertisers’ power relative to the media, by intensifying competition for revenue. Media personnel, it seems, remain keenly aware of these pressures. As Nick Taylor, editor of the Guardian’s “Spark” magazine, put it in one particularly candid email to the organisation Media Lens:

“Ever worked on a magazine launch? The first and only real questions are: who will advertise with in product [sic.] / Will it be read by people whom advertisers want to reach?

“Readers/viewers/listeners are the most important thing to any publisher or broadcaster. But, from an economic point of view, primarily because high numbers of readers means high ad revenue. And media survive only through ads. I and all writers/editors/ broadcasters would love it to be different but there is no option – the basic cost of producing the Guardian every day is (of course) more than the cover price. No matter how many readers bought it, we would lose money, in fact an increasing amount of money, without ad revenue – unless we put the cover price up to what it really costs us to make the paper, which is somewhere north of £5 a copy.” (Media Lens 2004)

Selling “people whom advertisers want to reach” to those advertisers is a crucial factor in constricting the ideological range of the mainstream press, as the history of the Daily Herald attests. Advertisers not only require quantity from audiences, but also, crucially, quality. As Eileen R. Meehan writes of US television broadcasting:

“Advertisers’ demand for such high-quality consumers means that highly rated programs that attract a broad range of consumers … may earn lower revenues or be cancelled while lower-rated programs that deliver the most valued demographic earn higher revenues and get renewed.” (2005:23)

Guardian writer Nick Davies attests to the stark influence these advertising-derived demographic pressures exert on media workers. “Marketing experts,” he writes, have even “rewritten news values so that it is now commonplace for news editors to demand a particular story in order to appeal to some new target group in the market place.” (cited Curtis 2003:376)

While this appears to be the main impact of the media’s reliance on advertising revenue, it cannot – as commentators such as Peter Wilby (2007a) have suggested – be considered its only influence. Advertisers naturally “require an ad-friendly environment for their commercials” in Meehan’s words (ibid:3), and direct prescriptions on content are far from unknown. As Noreena Hertz notes, for instance, “Procter & Gamble explicitly prohibits programming around its commercials “which could in any way further the concept of business as cold or ruthless”.” (2002:7) Similarly, a memo from Coca-Cola’s advertising department issues pointed instructions to magazines, requiring that:

“all insertions are placed adjacent to editoral that is consistent with each brand’s marketing strategy… We consider the following subjects to be inappropriate: hard news, sex, diet, political issues, environmental issues… If an appropriate positioning option is not available, we reserve the right to omit our ad from that issue.” (cited Steven 2003:110-1)

The power of sources has become an increasingly salient issue in the study of political “spin”. The proliferation of news outlets, and in particular the growth in 24-hour rolling news, have undoubtedly increased the pressures on news organisations in terms of time, money, human resources and demand for content; at the same time, the P.R. industry has undergone a huge expansion, and powerful, resource-rich groups are increasingly well-placed to exploit a generally collusive relationship of mutual dependency (Davis 2003; Franklin 2003). The pressures this relationship can exert on journalists are often very powerful. The New Statesman’s John Kampfner, for instance, has reportedly declared that “[n]obody will bloody speak to me because of the mad editorial line this magazine takes! How can I get scoops from government ministers when we accuse them of being war criminals and Nazis every week?” The magazine’s “far left” stance, according to Kampfner, made his job “impossible” (Private Eye 2004).

Management of access and the flow of information, then, are of considerable importance. Nicholas Jones (2007a; 2007b; also cited Holmes 2007b) has attested to New Labour’s promiscuous leaking of confidential material to carefully selected journalists in an effort to win favourable coverage, and the continuing use of the practice under Gordon Brown. Stories such as the Independent on Sunday’s recent front-page exclusive and editorial on the government’s proposal for offshore wind farms, which painted the government favourably the day after a highly critical protest march, may be seen as evidence both that this collusive, mutually beneficial relationship continues, and that powerful sources can often effectively supersede the publicity efforts of more diffuse, resource-poor groups (Holmes, ibid).

In Britain, a major source of journalistic “flak” derives from the harshly punitive nature of British libel laws, with eminent firms such as Carter-Ruck having earned a notorious reputation among journalists. As Geoffrey Bindman points out, “[l]ibel claims are rarely possible except between millionaires, whether individuals or corporations on both sides”;

“[t]hose who lose out are the poor victims who cannot afford to sue or those who are sued and cannot afford to defend themselves – and they are usually the ones most seriously damaged. Legal aid has never been available in libel cases.” (2000:72-3)

Well-organised and -resourced campaigns of flak by particular groups can also be highly effective. The American academics Mearsheimer and Walt, for instance, have recently noted the significant influence of the “Israel Lobby” in the US, which, “[t]o discourage unfavorable reporting on Israel … organizes letter writing campaigns, demonstrations, and boycotts against news outlets whose content it considers anti-Israel.” (2006:21) Philo and Berry (2004) identify similar campaigns of pro-Israel “flak” mobilization in the UK.

Other factors?

It is also worth considering other, more oppositional influences on the mainstream media besides those outlined by Herman and Chomsky (1994). Some of the filters they describe, indeed, can be exploited by relatively disempowered groups in an attempt to gain greater access and influence. The mainstream news media’s increasing reliance on external sources as “information subsidies”, for instance, can sometimes be exploited by relatively resource-poor actors (Davis 2003), as exemplified most prominently by environmental activists and other exponents of unconventional, attention-grabbing forms of protest. This often allows for some influence over the mainstream agenda, although to an extent that should not be exaggerated. Relatively resource-poor, “outsider” groups are generally confined to a “back-gate” position, unlike more powerful, agenda-setting elites (Wolfsfeld 2003; Anderson 2003). Well-resourced groups, particularly large corporations, are also well-placed to adapt their own P.R. strategies in unconventional ways, in order to garner more favourable coverage – often through the use of front groups, third parties, and even “fake citizens” (Stauber and Rampton 2004; Monbiot 2002).

The use of “flak” can similarly be mobilised by some resource-poor campaigners, including readers and viewers, particularly via the internet. Media Lens’s encouragements to readers to contact journalists, for instance, have mobilised email campaigns that, according to the Guardian’s George Monbiot, “have begun to force” media workers “to look over their left shoulders as well as their right” (Media Lens 2007). Journalistic agency is another factor: media workers are sometimes able to offer resistance which can have an impact on coverage (see, for instance: Palast 2003; Curran, ibid:223). Journalists’ power, however, is necessarily circumscribed by the institutions within which they work, which can make life difficult for persistent dissenters, and foster a (generally internalised) culture of compliance with prevailing norms (Curran, ibid:154-5; Curran and Seaton, ibid:84-5).

Best cases

Given these continuing institutional constraints on the mainstream media, to what extent does its ability to conform to the requirements of its “fourth estate” role survive? Recalling the four major functions of the media in this role – informing the public; scrutinizing government (and private power); staging a public debate; and expressing public opinion – allows us to examine and evaluate the media’s performance on each. For the sake of fairness, I have focused on what are generally regarded as exemplary instances of the media living up to its “fourth estate” ideals.

In terms of informing the public, the contemporary “news environment”, with its emphasis on continual updates and “24/7” rolling news, is often portrayed as an invaluable and unprecedented information resource. As McNair (2006b) writes, “[t]he quantity of news and other information available has increased exponentially”, while “the speed of its flow has increased … [a]nd information, like knowledge, is power.” As noted above, however, if anything the greater demand for content, accompanying more intense resource pressures on media institutions, has tended to make outlets more susceptible to manipulation by high-profile, resource-rich groups. In some cases this has led to the inflation of spurious rumour and unsubstantiated official claims (Lewis and Brookes 2004; Thussu 2003), and even to outright fabrication and “fake news” (Barstow and Stein 2005; Huck 2006; Goodman and Farsetta 2006; Goodman et al. 2006). According to Yvonne Ridley, for instance, during the Afghanistan war, “some TV reporters paid Northern Alliance soldiers $5 a round to start firing off as the cameras rolled”, in order to give the (far-from-accurate) impression that journalists were close to the action (Ridley 2003:249). Thus the media in fact seem ever more likely to supply misinformation.

While this view has been challenged by Norris (2000), who regards the contemporary media as contributing to a more informed public, Justin Lewis (2001:xii) provides an essential caveat regarding such information’s “ideological nature”. “Whether we have more or less of it,” Lewis notes, “information is neither neutral nor necessarily benign”. Indeed given Norris’s further conclusion that the “attentive public exposed to the most news consistently displayed the most positive orientation towards the political system, at every level” (ibid:251) – precisely what Lewis reads as the media’s exercise of hegemonic power – we might reasonably infer a more indoctrinated public.

In terms of scrutinizing government, journalists are often portrayed in certain hagiographic accounts as fearless investigators and exposers of official wrongdoing. Many of these have been vastly overstated, however. The iconic investigation into the Watergate affair, for instance, contrary to much popular mythology, was subject to a great deal of “elite guidance”, which largely framed the boundaries of issues and facilitated the release of information (Curran 2002:222).

A more recent example, cited by McNair (2006a), is Seymour Hersh’s revelation of the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Examining mainstream US press coverage, Entman (2006:216) observes that “stories and editorials were sometimes punctuated by framings of the torture policy that challenged the [Bush] administration’s preferred narrative of a few underlings run amuck.” As Herman emphasises (1999:267), the propaganda model predicts that such factors as “disagreements among the elite and the extent to which other groups in society are interested in, informed about, and organized to fight about issues” will result in a “relatively open or closed” media. These punctuations are worth noting, then – though, as Entman also acknowledges, the latter, officially-endorsed framing still predominated. Worth emphasizing in particular, however – a point Entman includes in a footnote – is the force exerted by the verbal framing within which the episode as a whole was (and generally still is) covered: “the naming of the narrative the “prisoner abuse scandal,” with each word functioning to moderate what might otherwise be more transgressive and dissonant. An example of a more threatening alternative label might be “American torture policy.”” (Entman, ibid:224)

McNair (2006a:70) raises a number of other issues relating to the Iraq war: the critical nature of much media coverage, including predictions of a potential “looming quagmire”; and “a prism” through which one commentator claims the European press “highlighted the human costs, difficulties and risks”.

It is odd that McNair sees this evidence as a convincing counter to critics of the media’s pro-war slant. In their summary of the Cardiff study’s findings, for instance (to which McNair refers) Lewis and Brookes (2004:133-4) explicitly acknowledge the framing of TV coverage around the war’s “process and progress”: “how long would it take for US/British forces to win, and at what cost?” The boundaries of debate here, as one recent comparative examination has suggested (Lanine and Media Lens, 2007), are strikingly similar to the Soviet media’s in covering the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. The fundamental questions were not of the motivation or legitimacy of that country’s aggression, but “the merit of the strategies for achieving its goals”. It is worth recalling that the propaganda model does predict criticism and debate, sometimes fierce, but within narrowly-defined boundaries; far from being repudiated here, then, its predictions seem to be confirmed.

To what extent, though, has the Hutton Inquiry facilitated an “ongoing media narrative of lies, deceit and betrayal” in the UK, as McNair suggests (ibid:65)? Again, a relatively narrow framing of the issue seems to predominate, which does not threaten the structuring ideology of Britain’s “basic benevolence” (Curtis 2003:380). Underlying the focus on questions of success and failure in implementing Western foreign policy goals, for example, is an implicit acknowledgement of these goals’ legitimacy. In correspondence with Media Lens in 2005, for instance, the BBC’s director of News, Helen Boaden, wrote in two different emails:

“[BBC defence correspondent] Paul Wood’s analysis of the underlying motivation of the coalition [that British and American forces “came to Iraq in the first place to bring democracy and human rights”] is borne out by many speeches and remarks made by both Mr Bush and Mr Blair.”

“To deal first with your suggestion that it is factually incorrect to say that an aim of the British and American coalition was to bring democracy and human rights, this was indeed one of the stated aims before and at the start of the Iraq war – and I attach a number of quotes at the bottom of this reply.” (Media Lens, 2006a and b)

According to Media Lens, accompanying her email “Boaden supplied no less than 2,700 words filling six pages of A4 paper of quotes from George Bush and Tony Blair to prove her point.” (ibid.) Far from even acknowledging the possibility of “lies, deceit and betrayal” then, Boaden clearly implies that these official claims provide a sufficient evidential basis for “factual” reporting.

Recent exchanges with prominent BBC staff on climate change provide an illuminating point of comparison. Given the scientific consensus on the facts of anthropogenic climate change, growing increasingly robust over a number of years (Oreskes 2004, 2007; NERC 2006; Le Page 2007; Harding 2007), we might expect this to provide a similarly sufficient evidential basis for factual reporting. The BBC’s Newsnight editor Peter Barron, however – having previously stated that “I don’t think it’s right to challenge the assumption that [Bush] wants democracy in Iraq” (Media Lens 2006a) – declared in correspondence that “the issue of impartiality does need to be taken into account in every programme we do”; and that, in this context, the “causes of climate change” constitute “a matter of controversy” (Holmes 2007a).

This apparent inconsistency makes considerably more sense if interpreted as reflecting the influence of powerful political and economic interests. On the issue of climate change, a number of high-profile front groups, funded by the fossil fuel industry in particular, have promulgated a “skeptical” line which the BBC has often given a legitimating platform (Holmes 2006; Monbiot 2006b). Tuchman’s (1972) diagnosis of journalistic “objectivity” as “strategic ritual” would therefore seem to retain its utility here, in describing a means of “balancing out and accommodating the most powerful lobbies and the loudest voices” (Lynas 2007). Far from seriously challenging power, then, the BBC often employs a strident rhetorical appeal to normative “fourth estate” principles in an effort to legitimate coverage favouring powerful interests.

Perhaps the most prominent examples of the news media staging a public debate are such deliberative discussion fora as the BBC’s Question Time. In Cottle’s (2003b:169) assessment, such forms represent “meaningful vehicles for wider deliberative processes”; McNair calls them “a logical and welcome extension of the democratic process in a media age” (2006a:67). Question Time itself, however, manifests clear limitations. Firstly, as Cottle notes, such vehicles are “rarely used”; in his sample, “extended” or “expansive” deliberative forms constitute less than 10% of those broadcast (ibid:162-3). Moreover, the elite predominance in framing the debate is marked. The debating panel tend to be drawn from the three main parties, along with an “expert”, businessman or columnist, and occasional “extra” (Curtis 2003:378-9). The very form of the debate, indeed, may be seen as implicitly favouring a top-down, elitist politics which tends to marginalise both the public and dissenters from the bounds of elite opinion. Aside from the opportunity to ask pre-arranged questions, applaud or jeer, the audience’s role is delimited in quite strict ways. Brief, undeveloped contributions are permitted – far from Cottle’s “sustained engagement” (ibid:168). More fundamentally, the structuring difference between such “opinion-based” forms and “factual”, “hard” news serves to reinforce the latter’s putative “objectivity” – obscuring prevailing patterns of assumption and selection.

A favoured example of the media’s success in representing public opinion is the very plurality of available media outlets, which purportedly reflects the ideological diversity of the public. In Peter Wilby’s (2007b) curt summation: “If you don’t like what’s in the papers, blame the readers, not the journalists.”

This is a misrepresentation in various fundamental ways. As we have noted, in general the market towards which commercial print and broadcast media are oriented is that of advertisers; their “product” lucrative audiences. Thus various rivals in a relatively condensed corporate oligopoly manoeuvre to gain market share (Meehan, ibid:22-3). Traits and divisions within the general population – and even among consumers – do not determine the plurality of media products, then, but rather (at least partly) patterns of variation within those particular, more or less “weighted” demographics “whom advertisers want to reach”. As a result, while news media have often employed a selective appeal to public opinion to justify content (GUMG 1985; Lewis 2001), in the UK evidence suggests that “the press has long been more right-wing than the public it is supposed to represent” (Curran and Seaton 2003:347), with a similar pattern evident in the US (Lewis ibid).

One brief example is provided by a July 2006 poll of British public opinion, which found that:

“More than two-thirds who offered an opinion said America is essentially an imperial power seeking world domination. And 81 per cent of those who took a view said President George W Bush hypocritically championed democracy as a cover for the pursuit of American self-interests.”

A careful examination of editorials in British broadsheets during the same month, using a ProQuest newspaper search (The Guardian, Times, Sunday Times, Independent, Financial Times and Independent on Sunday) found 10 articles alluding to the latter framing. Of these, two tended towards it, while eight tended against – a distribution roughly the inverse of public opinion. Three editorials alluded to the former, “imperial power” frame, tending strongly against it. As suggested above, these frames also appear largely inadmissible for the BBC.

The online revolution?

Like McNair (2006a), some optimists regard the changed environment brought about by the internet in particular as radically different from the preceding one. The internet, McNair argues, massively lowers entry costs: anyone with a computer and internet connection can set up and maintain a blog or website, which can be visited and viewed by anyone, anywhere in the world, at any time. Moreover, bloggers and “citizen journalists” can interact with, and even exert a major influence on, the mainstream media’s content and agenda. Thus the internet and “blogosphere” have become a close approximation to Habermas’s idealised “public sphere”.

The internet has effected various changes – facilitating the organising and mobilising of grassroots movements and campaigns, often via such decentralised outlets as indymedia (Downing 2005; O’Riordan 2005); the formation and dissemination of alternative media; and to a limited extent a greater openness on the part of mainstream outlets, including the ability to “jot in the margins”. McNair’s optimistic rhetoric, however, is grossly overstated. Given that global patterns of material and social inequality vastly restrict access to the requisite technology (Sparks 2005), a key requirement of Habermas’s normative public sphere – that “[a]ccess is guaranteed to all citizens” (Habermas 2001) – can hardly be said of the online environment.

Within those relatively privileged enclaves with such access, moreover, there are considerable efforts to command and direct online attention – “one of the most valuable resources in the new era” (Polat 2005). Those most able tend, unsurprisingly, to be well-resourced and well-established. “Without promotion,” in the words of one internet executive, “you’re just a lemonade stand on the highway” (cited Curran 2002:154). “It is abundantly clear,” writes Ebrahim Ezzy (2006), “that advertisers are seeing a compelling opportunity to leverage the Internet as a powerful medium that drives both branding and sales results”; the Economist (2006) even dubs Google “the world’s most valuable online advertising agency disguised as a web-search engine”. While media and entertainment industries are expected to be the largest online advertising spenders in the next five years, accounting for “more than a quarter of search advertising alone” (Gonsalves 2006), if current patterns of inequality continue, it will be the biggest, wealthiest companies that reap the benefits: in the first half of 2007, for instance, as few as 50 companies accounted for one-third of all ad spending (Peterson 2007). Moreover, online advertisers increasingly rely on interactive marketing (Economist, ibid.), whose relative expense “raises the barriers to market entry” (Freedman 2006:279; Cohen 2004).

The online “main square” therefore accompanies more marginal “back streets” (Curran and Seaton ibid:270). McNair himself acknowledges the importance for aspiring bloggers of gaining mainstream attention – even, as in his example of Norman Geras, through specific ideological positionings – suggesting the “resilience” both of existing mainstream media (Freedman 2006), and of that media’s ideological restrictions. Already, indeed, there is some evidence that the left in particular have been marginalised (Jones 2007c).

Accounts such as McNair’s, then, which stress the transformed character of the contemporary media environment, tend to evince a misguided technological determinism, failing to take into account the surrounding political, social and economic contexts in which such technologies are used. Combined with a failure to convincingly rebut established accounts of mainstream media’s ideological restrictions, McNair’s optimistic description is largely a mirage: a good deal more must change before the contemporary media come close to fulfilling their fourth estate role.

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