continued: "Something to Be Done: Transnational Media Monitoring" by Kaarle Nordenstreng
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Notes and references

The Rationale
The idea has a simple four-step logic that proceeds along the following path:

First, the mass media play a vital role in (post)modern societies and in the surrounding global culture, which makes them a backbone of a pervasive cultural environment-the media have influence.

This influence is today greater than at the time of the MacBride Commission because the "media reality" has gained ground from conventional reality, especially in political life. The problem is made especially serious by the fact that this mediated reality can be bought-unlike conventional reality.

Accordingly, the first step in this reasoning about media monitoring assumes that the mass media continue to be important in the world as instruments to address vast audiences and to shape public and private minds at the national and international levels. This means that, contrary to what many today suggest, new media technologies will not bring about an end of mass media and an "end of journalism." Surely, new means and practices emerge, but the basic characteristics of mass communication seem to remain and even increase in sociocultural influence.

Second, the mass media, in particular the printed press, enjoy a special constitutional statues (based on Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights), which gives them protection against much of conventional social policies-the media have freedom.

This freedom is a vital element in a democratic society-a safeguard of human rights in civil society. Therefore, the special constitutional statues of the media, providing them with autonomy, must be respected and defended as an essential part of the monitoring idea.

Third, the mass media not only enjoy an exceptional degree of autonomy, but also carry duties and responsibilities (based on the same international instruments) that call for normative regulation of this sphere of "cultural ecology," both on legal and ethical levels-the media have accountability.

This accountability is part and parcel of the same special constitutional status that grants freedom to the media. It would be both sociologically and politically naive to place media outside of any social controls. Accountability can conceptually be divided into various levels and aspects, including law and ethics. The aspect related to the present monitoring idea is focused on an analytical appreciation of the media content, thus largely bypassing all the well-known normative and structural aspects, including those media accountability systems that are implemented through professional codes of ethics of media councils (see Nordenstreng, 1999; 2000b). Thus, the monitoring being pursued here has a limited scope-limited but still significant if its potential is fully utilized.

Fourth, the mass media are being regulated by legal and financial means to a degree determined by the political balance of power prevailing in each society. And there is little that the professional and academic community can do about it, but there is an untapped potential for indirect participation in the democratic process of media accountability--through media criticism.

The media criticism called on here is not the kind of more or less politically motivated interest group advocacy that is well known everywhere. What is meant here is scientifically based description and assessment of media performance, mainly carried out by methods of content analysis. And the epistemological paradigm is one of conventional realism rather than postmodern phenomenalism. Thus, it is assumed that an objective reality exists, and it can be discovered more or less accurately, although in practice the media coverage may be far removed from true reality. In other words, the reasoning typically follows the correspondence theory of truth: comparing media coverage with extramedia data. However, truth checking can be left aside, and monitoring may be focused on tracing the trends and interests of the content alone-the ideological narrative of the media discourse which is customary in cultural studies.

Speaking of media criticism, it has practically no tradition in journalism in the same sense as in the fields of film, music, and other areas of performing arts-not to speak of literature, the basis of literary criticism and aesthetics. As a matter of fact, it is a challenge for journalism research to give better shape and recognition to what already has been exercised in some places under labels such as media education or media analysis. In this respect journals such as the Columbia Journalism Review, Amedian Journalism Review, and Extra! constitute a good reference point.(1)

This rationale not only renders support to a "monitoring project," but it even calls forth, indeed demands, some sort of an institutionalized accountability system. The system called forth was not a legal or administrative mechanism by official powers (governmental, parliamentary or judiciary) but something that falls within the sphere of non-governmental civil society. However, the system suggested is not another form of straight self-regulation of the media, because the content analysis is supposed to be carried out by independent scholars, and the overall media performance is supposed to be assessed by panels that would also be relatively independent from the media-otherwise the idea of accountability would be missed.

Obviously this is a line that is quite similar to the reasoning of the Hutchins Commission a half a century ago. The same rationale around social responsibility is more or less shared bya a number of later initiatives which do not only reflect narrow academic or social interests, but should rather be taken as indicators of a fundamental tendency in contemporary society in which the ever-larger role played by the media inevitably leads to reconsideration of the ways in which their accountability is defined and monitored. A strong political signal to this effect cam in 1993 from the Council of Europe whose Parliamentary Assembly passed a resolution and recommendation on the ethics of journalism. (2)

Although scientific content analysis constitutes a cornerstone of the "monitoring project," it does not suggest new, elaborate, and expensive research to be conducted before anything else. It is taken for granted that a lot of content analytical research is being carried out all over the world in any case-as master's these and doctoral dissertations by students, academic contributions by scholars, administrative exercises by authorities, and in some cases as international joint ventures. A notable example of the last mentioned type of research is the "World of the News" study carried out by the International Association for Mass Communication Research (IAMCR) for UNESCO in the early 1980s (see Journal of Communication, 1984, and chapter by Annabelle Sreberny and Robert Stevenson in IMM). The monitoring ideas does not advocate anymore such cumbersome projects that tend to consume a lot of mental and material energy, often with little outcome. Instead, it is strongly suggested to organize the pooling together of existing research and to invest the energies into the digesting of such accumulated research evidence.

There exists a lot of content analysis, especially as case studies, and in some instances such as the Gulf War there is a huge accumulation of evidence from numerous small and large projects, both national and international. The problem is, however, that these exercises are seldom pooled together so as to facilitate an overall review and assessment of media performance-neither in one country nor internationally. If done on a permanent basis such overviews would help to identify neglected areas not only in media coverage but also in studies of media content, which are too often based on a haphazard choice of topic and media. In such a manner one could counteract the tendency to end up with abundant piles of disjointed data, and one could also encourage young scholars to focus on content areas that are strategically important given the research carried out thus far.

As a matter of fact, much content analysis evidence is lost in the absence of an international system of pooling, accumulating, and comparing data from innumerous national case studies that typically focus on a limited topic or time period. Taken together such research evidence provides a great potential "to appraise and report annually upon the performance of the press" (as the Hutchins Commission put it, see below). Indeed, a global overview of media performance based on content analysis evidence would help the students and scholars in the field to better place their particular problems in an overall perspective. One might also self-critically observe that few fields of science have been as sterile in terms of assessing social and global responsibilities as has been the case with communication research, not the least content analysis. Where natural scientists are raising their voice regarding environmental problems and medical scientists continuously assess problems of human health, communication scientists should have a natural role in taking stock of media performance-not only in isolated cases but also as a global issue, both nationally and internationally.

Thus far there have been surprisingly few contributions in this field that address the question in a truly global manner. For example, when there was a need to assess what impact the Mass Media Declaration of UNESCO had brought to the field ten years later in 1988, it turned out that there was little cumulative research to count on (see Gerbner, Mowlana and Nordenstreng, 1993). However, Global Glasnost by Galtung and Vincent (1992) provides an exemplary demonstration of what can be done by capitalizing on a host of empirical data from existing literature combined with insightful theory and ethic.

Finally, one may ask why pay so much attention to content, especially at a time of media concentration and globalization? Is not content just a reflection of structures of production and distribution, ultimately ownership? Is not content after all an ahistorical category?

The rationale explained here by no means suggests to undermine structural factors behind and beyond media content. It admits that there is a need for similar, indeed parallel, monitoring of media concentration, consumption, and so on. But as pointed out above, the rationale is based on a firm belief that mass-mediated content constitutes a strategic part of broader reasoning about the media-their freedom and accountability, ultimately their role in democracy.

Consequently, the idea is not particularly new or radical. Rather at issue is a classic question of journalism-paradoxically neglected in the prevailing tradition of media theory and practice. continued

Next page: Initiatives to Act

Notes and references