Media and Politics

Media in general have yet to gain the legitimacy necessary to fully participate in global governance deliberations. Non-traditional media—community radio, bloggers, citizen journalists and the like—face even more obstacles to achieving participation. This occurs for several key reasons. First, some global actors do not accept any media’s need to participate in global governance deliberations. Second, some traditional media have deliberately thwarted non-traditional media’s progress toward legitimacy as a global governance player. Finally, non-traditional have not embraced past lessons about how new actors gain legitimacy in global governance. This paper explores why non-traditional media have not successfully participated in global governance deliberations through the lens of the World Summit on the Information Society.

Media’s omnipresence and its role in the democratic process raise questions of the effectiveness of media framing in citizen deliberation. This paper will explore for whom and under what conditions television and its framing practices change public opinion and citizen deliberation, which in turn affect governmental policy decisions. In order to answer this question, I will examine the impact of television news programming through a probability probe that utilizes the CNN effect and media framing, applying an expanded version of Piers Robinson’s policy-media interaction model, belief importance, and frame alignment. I suggest that when policy is stable and media framing empathizes with the audience, especially with a frame that speaks to already held beliefs and highlights the importance of certain beliefs, citizens can change their opinions and are mobilized to further deliberation and action. I argue that these citizen deliberations, in turn, lead to a change in policy decisions. In particular, I concentrate on the 2008 South Korean protests about U.S. beef imports, when a news segment and subsequent coverage on South Korean television framed the issue and led to opinion formation and mobilization within the South Korean public to engage in mass protests, which I assert are a form of citizen deliberation. Subsequently, the South Korean president publicly apologized to the public, all of the South Korean cabinet ministers volunteered to resign from their positions, and the United States and South Korea informally re-negotiated trade terms – all over U.S. beef imports.

  The paper analyzes recent constructions of American public policy regarding funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Arthur MacEwan’s study of neoliberalism functions as a framework for understanding broad historical shifts in the perceived role of the State in funding the Arts on a national scale, while the primary investigation presents the suppression of Body Count’s song, Cop Killer, as a case through which to assess the viability of the neoliberal rationale for federal arts funding. The paper contends that the neoliberal approach to public arts has lead to funding rationales that construct art as a commodity subordinate to the principles of supply and demand, while limiting, if not denying, the constitutive role of art as political speech in the life of a democracy. Further, the case study suggests that Keynesian and post-Keynesian economic models apply more cohesively than the neoliberal model as a bona fide rationale for federal arts funding, where active federal arts policy is vital both in the creation and maintenance of a stable climate for the production of capital and in the proper functioning of a representative mode of government.