Professor Nunes, in your view, how does digital culture relate to the broader realm of popular culture? How has digital culture transformed our sense of what constitutes popular culture?

I think in part I was trying to address that with the area theme for Communication and Digital Culture this year. I don’t know if I can say when the change occurred — if we are even talking about a line that divided the two realms — but certainly aspects of digital culture are increasingly integrated with what we traditionally think of as mass culture or popular culture. The idea of television shows with web tie-ins or alternate reality game tie-ins, for instance, has become increasingly commonplace. There is now much more interpenetration of digital culture and popular culture.

Part of what we have been trying to address in some of our panels in the Communication and Digital Culture area is how does one define ‘mainstream’. Does it make sense to talk about ‘mainstream’ as distinct from the digital? Can we define what might be a ‘digital mainstream,’ and how we might view that? Is it about content or is it a set of practices mirroring how one interacts with media, reflecting the expectations of consumers across paradigms of convergence culture? Our panel discussions brought a lot of this, with its problematic implications, to the foreground: the idea of the changing world of what it means to be a media consumer.

Numerous panels at this conference reflect the centrality of media to culture. I’d be interested in your reflections on the extent to which theoretically and substantively media seems inseparable from culture and the ways in which we might conceptualize that relationship.

I am not a historian of popular culture, or of this organization for that matter, but I think one of the points to be foregrounded about popular culture as it is addressed within the academy is the extent to which it is tied up with the study of mass culture, and the degree to which mass media provides a grounding for mass culture in the 20th century.

Long before the rise of any kind of “new media studies” presence within the framework of popular culture studies, you certainly have numerous works on dime store novels and television and movies and comic books. There’s a well-established precedent for this overlap in the study of popular culture and the study of mass media and mass produced objects. That highly disputed division between high art and low art, between high culture and low culture, marks a nexus of sorts between media studies and cultural studies.

My interest in digital culture lies very much in that connection between these two realms, an attempt to take media studies and cultural studies and look at the ways in which they overlap. We are at this schizophrenic moment of increasing consolidation of media companies at the same time that the idea of media production is increasingly moving from a small group of individuals who have access to the production apparatus to a large group of people who may be only marginally involved in media production but who are actively engaged in consumer-producer involvements with mass media ,such as with alternate reality game tie-ins with television shows. So I think it is a very interesting moment for media studies and cultural studies. In particular, we need to be thinking media as an expression of multiple cultures, and which cultures are reflected in these expressions.

Aside from the fact that the media is the object of scholarly inquiry, how, in your view, can the worlds of professional media and academia productively engage with each other? Should the two be separate, as some might argue?

There was a presentation yesterday by Ted Gournelos as part of the first panel in the Communication and Digital Culture area, which was looking at issues of convergence culture. A number of presenters on the panel were taking a stance that was a bit oppositional to Jenkins’ definition of convergence culture. Gournelos was making the point that in contrast to the Habermasian model of consensus culture that Jenkins seems to imply in his use of the term, “convergence” must also take into account conflicts of culture and conflicting investments in the production of conflicting public spheres.

I think we are once again at a moment where there is a sort of euphoric celebration of the way in which the role of media producer and media consumer continue to blur and how that blurring might give rise to a productive and liberatory social space. And this kind of rhetoric does work its way into the academy. There is oftentimes a rather naïve celebration of the proliferation of these idealized communities — as in its older form in the mid- 1990s, as theorists “waxed utopic” over the social and cultural impact of the internet. The popular uptake of these new media interactions is depicted as a kind of mediated populism — a proliferation of democracy online. I think we are in stage 2 of that same kind of euphoric uptake that we saw a little over a decade ago. You hear it all the time in these celebrations of what it means to be involved in Web 2.0.

Some academics have valorized this as a revolutionary moment without taking into consideration things like the free labor provided by individuals who have been putting content online, and the way in which this may play into certain corporate structures. I think there is always going to be a bit of a friction between an academic approach to media and culture and the way in which media corporations are making use of media and culture. There is a degree to which the academy should provide that critical lens, that critical reflection, that calls attention to what euphoria often elides or overlooks.

That does not mean that there cannot be opportunities for interesting academic work that steps outside the ivory tower, so to speak, and has its eye toward media production. I guess I am just a little suspect of what happens when production gets melded into certain corporate ideologies or corporate strategic planning.

How might we think of the internet as a cultural and political space? The everyday perception of the internet is that it is a neutral space, which itself is an outcome of a certain kind of thinking.

Some of my earlier thinking about the internet — and I was as guilty of this as a number of other first-generation internet culture writers — reflected a willingness to look at the internet as public sphere without fully taking into consideration what it means when the public sphere is entirely subsumed within corporate or state structures.

I think right now what’s going on in China with the Tibet protests is very telling. Just the other day I heard a report on NPR: the degree to which some rather clever computer engineers in China have successfully managed to shut down external communication and internal communication in China, the degree to which the state government can filter Google and Yahoo and can completely shut down access to YouTube or other international sites that it finds questionable — this really makes the case that any strong argument for the internet as public sphere that does not take into consideration corporate structures or state structures that can override or predetermine communication is, I think, a little naïve.

Again, I don’t want to come across as saying that it is impossible to have democratic communication by way of the internet but you always need to be aware of the ways in which these political structures and informatic structures delimit what it means to have democracy online.

Image: Sunil Krishnan

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Could the Iraq war have been prevented had the American media asked the right questions? How do conservative media commentators frame the actions of different religious communities? Does the media pay due attention to history?

INCREASINGLY FOCUSED ON competitiveness and profits, the mainstream American media is under pressure for its own survival. Indeed, it is at a critical juncture of having to choose between fulfilling its societal responsibility or succumbing to the political compulsions of our times. As a society we need to evaluate the importance of the media in our American system of governance. Does it still play the crucial role the founding fathers of our nation had envisioned for it?

Thomas Jefferson made a strong statement about the role of the media in a democracy when he noted, “If it were left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Describing the role of the press, George A. Krimsky, the former head of news for the Associated Press’ World Services and co-author of Hold the Press, writes, “In the wake of America’s successful revolution, it was decided there should indeed be government, but only if it were accountable to the people. The people, in turn, could only hold the government accountable if they knew what it was doing and could intercede as necessary, using their ballot, for example. This role of public ‘watchdog’ was thus assumed by a citizen press, and as a consequence, the government in the United States has been kept out of the news business.”

Could one say that the government in the United States was kept out of the news business in the past, but not any more?

In the recent past, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams told host Howard Kurtz that the Bush administration had “the right” to pay a columnist to tout its views in his column. As this article notes, Kurtz spoke of the “Pentagon planting positive stories, in some cases paying for positive stories in Iraqi newspapers.” The administration also paid journalist Armstrong Williams to promote its No Child Left Behind education policy. The Government Accountability Office, however, determined that the Bush Administration was wrong in promoting its educational policy through Armstrong’s column.

The essence of democracy is the ability to question everything in fairness and without worrying about censure against such inquiry. How many journalists from the mainstream media have failed this test in recent times? Let us examine a few situations and see the specific failures of the American media in each case.

The qualities of a commander-in-chief

As we speak, the airwaves are saturated with coverage of the presidential nominees in both parties. Why aren’t journalists questioning the rhetoric from McCain and Clinton that they are fit to be the commander-in-chief of the nation? We are a democracy, and it is not essential that our government should be run by a military expert. That was not the intent of our system.

I do not expect my president to be an expert in nuclear, biological, botanical, or other sciences and certainly not a military expert. I want a judicious person who can call on real experts as the situation demands and make the right decision in each case.

Journalists can still ask the candidates this question. Will they?

Precedent and patterns in the Rev. Wright controversy

The second week of March 2008 witnessed relentless coverage of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermon, “God Damn America,” in the American media. It was all one could hear on the cable channels. The pundits were suggesting that this might indicate the end of presidential candiate Barack Obama’s political aspirations, given that Wright was Obama’s pastor.

In the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Ralph Luker pointed out that “the quotation comes not from Wright, but from the Rev Martin Luther King Jr’s first address to the Montgomery Improvement Association on December 5, 1955. Both African-American preachers have understood prophetic biblical preaching far better than those who feign shock at and condemn Wright’s words.”

“Obama’s Minister ‘Hates America’ But When My Father Said the Same Sort of Things He Became a Hero To The Republicans”  wrote Frank Schaeffer in the OpEdNews. Schaeffer quoted his father, religious right leader, Francis Schaeffer, expressing similar sentiments. “Take Dad’s words” Frank Schaeffer went on to say, “and put them in the mouth of Obama’s preacher (or in the mouth of any black American preacher) and people would be accusing that preacher of treason. Yet, when we the white Religious Right denounced America, the white conservative Americans and top political leaders, called our words ‘godly’ and ‘prophetic’ and a ‘call to repentance.’”

The mainstream media largely failed to investigate if there was a precedent, if some one else had used this kind of language, if the reaction had been different, and why that might have been the case.

The burning of the US embassy in Kosovo

While driving around on Friday, February 22 earlier this year, I listened to every news channel. Our embassy was torched in Kosovo by radicals on that day. The media did not describe the violence as religiously motivated nor name any religious community as the culprit. I believe that was the right approach on the part of the media.

But I wondered: had those radicals been Muslims, what kind of demonization would mainstream conservative commentators like O’Reilly, Hannity, Beck, and Limbaugh have engaged in?

The war in Iraq

As the Bill Moyers Journal’s special edition program, “Buying the War,” compellingly demonstrated, the mainstream American media uncritically accepted the administration’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s ambition to acquire nuclear weapons and his links to Al-Qaeda. The five chapter report speaks for itself.

Had the media stood their ground, perhaps our administration would not have engaged in policies that have resulted in the deaths of over half a million Iraqis as per the figures provided by the medical journal Lancet estimate, 4,000 of our men and women, and a cost of anywhere from 1 to 2 trillion dollars.

Was their inability to ask the right questions of the administration not a colossal blunder on the part of the mainstream media?

Mike Ghouse is a writer and activist based in Dallas. He runs the blogs Foundation for Pluralism and World Muslim Congress.

Image: Sunil Krishnan

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IN INDIA, UNLIKE IN North America and much of western Europe, newspaper readership is rising sharply. More newspapers are sold daily than in any other country except China.

Newsstands overflow with publications in English and one or two local languages. They sprawl across sidewalks, dozens neatly lined up or hanging from walls, pillars or trees — glossy colour magazines, inky daily newspapers, local flyers and pamphlets of mediocre quality.

In Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, at least 11 daily Hindi newspapers are available, along with at least three Urdu papers, and more than half a dozen English papers. Dozens of magazines are available in these three languages. They cover all topics — news, fashion, medicine, weddings, movies, motorcycles, religion, travel, sports, yoga. There is an Indian version of Maxim. There are women’s magazines such as Femina, Marie Claire, Elle, Cosmo, and Saheli. There are magazines and comic books just for kids. Nearly every shopkeeper in his small store reads Dainik Jagran, Jansatta or Rashtriya Sahara. Dainik Jagran is one of Lucknow’s more expensive newspapers, going for Rs 3.50, about 9 cents. Others sell for as low as Rs 2. There is so much available and yet what there is appeals only to the middle class.

Media and the middle class

The media is big business in India, relying on corporate advertising and the spending of the middle class. But it is hard to claim it is a public good that reaches most citizens.

Contrary to what we might think, there is an inherent tension between India’s much-hyped economic growth and its deepening democracy. Economic success has enabled a middle class to emerge, but middle class culture remains irrelevant to the many Indians left behind economically. Democracy has enabled historically marginalised sections of society to become politically powerful through sheer numbers and effective grassroots mobilisation, while the elite have tended to retreat from the political sphere. Economic growth has led to greater inequalities, while democratic growth has given a stronger voice to those who suffer from those inequalities.

The media may do a good job of providing news to the estimated 300 million members of the Indian middle class — in fact, coverage of political issues tends to be quite good — but as long as more than 700 million Indians are sidelined from its gaze by their inability to conspicuously consume, the media’s role as public service is severely limited.

Vinod Shukla, the 67-year-old Lucknow editor of India’s largest newspaper, the Hindi-language Dainik Jagran, decried the media’s decreasing emphasis on serious news reporting, its frequent complacency, and its general unwillingness to challenge government or big business. He believes this began with the Emergency of the 1970s. Under the censorship of the Emergency, when the media was asked to bend, it chose to crawl — a famous quote from the time, repeated to me by Shukla. He believes this attitude remains today. This doesn’t make the media unsuccessful, but it isn’t playing the role of watchdog or societal agenda-setter as vigorously as people like Shukla would like.

He added the Indian media today must cater to the interests of readers to stay in business. The fact the media is primarily a profit-driven industry limits the scope of what it is likely to report and at times promotes trashy sensationalism in the name of news. Paris Hilton’s jail term, Lindsay Lohan’s alcohol rehab, and Beyonce’s public statements fill the international news pages in some papers. Those who read papers and watch TV are often more interested in interviews with Bollywood stars than rural poverty. More people want to find out about the new iPod than Indian foreign policy. The Times of India has become a notorious example of this phenomenon. Competitors such as The Hindustan Times, The Indian Express and Hindi papers like Dainik Jagran and Amar Ujala provide a better balance of the serious and the frivolous. Yet, this often leads to inferior coverage of more important issues. The media often abdicates its role as an educator in favor of being an entertainer.

When the media does address substantive issues, its reach is often extremely limited, according to Dr Sanjay Kumar at Delhi’s respected Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. He believes it is effective in spreading information, and studies by CSDS have shown that citizens have a high level of trust in the media. The influence of the print and electronic media during elections is growing, but is not as important as many assume, Kumar argues. Non-mediated, informal networks remain more significant in spreading news in rural India. He does not see this changing any time soon.

‘Why should I vote?’

There is a worrisome disconnect between the political power of poorer, traditionally marginalised communities and their consumption of media. Not only are these citizens unlikely to have meaningful access to the media, but they cannot afford the products appearing in newspaper advertisements and so would not be a profitable demographic under the current advertising model.

A 2006 CSDS survey reported that 26 per cent of respondents regularly (almost daily) watched news on TV, but 38 per cent never did. Only 15 per cent regularly listened to news on the radio; 48 per cent never did. Twenty-two per cent read a newspaper regularly; 47 per cent never did.

Raj Varma, a former editor of both The Times of India and Indian Express, asked me, “Why should I vote?” His argument was that he, a well-off city dweller, had all that he needed: a house, car, electricity, water, safety, a good school for his daughter, good doctors nearby. What else could the government do for him? If these are the people the Indian media caters to, it simply isn’t good business to trouble them with issues that don’t affect them and that they can do little about.

But poor Indians do vote. And if the media is not covering issues that matter to them, then how valuable is it to the process of political and social change? There was a dearth of meaningful coverage of Mayawati and the BSP during last year’s assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh. Instead, the emphasis was on the political circus of Rahul Gandhi’s campaign (though his Congress party was expected to finish a distant fourth), and on the BJP’s bickering with the Election Commission over communal campaign material. In recent years, both these parties have been supported by the urban upper-castes and classes in UP — the same group that largely controls the media. The ruling Samajwadi Party embarked on an advertising blitz.

The BSP did not advertise, nor did its candidates or events receive much media attention, despite predictions the BSP was likely to emerge the largest party in the state. It still won dramatically. The coverage of the media, which virtually ignored the party, did not matter to its largely economically marginalised supporters. A study conducted by CSDS after the 2004 Lok Sabha elections found that voters for the BSP had much lower exposure to the media than voters for other major political parties. This data leaves the poorest and most politically active citizens outside the influence of the media. Consequently, issues relevant to these citizens are generally not found in the media — agricultural issues, hunger, poor rural health care and education, lack of jobs, and ways of addressing these problems.

This would not happen in the US. Not because the US media is necessarily any better than the Indian at playing the role of public good — it only has the advantage that media consumers are also voters. Ignoring the issues of poor or minority communities in the US does not hurt the media’s image because these communities do not have the political clout to produce election results that defy media predictions. The ‘surprise’ outcomes of the 2004 Lok Sabha elections and the 2007 UP Vidhan Sabha elections demonstrate the challenge that the news media faces in India.

The ‘tyranny’ of the market

As long as a majority of Indians live in poverty, it is unclear how a media driven by profit can expand its reach. Nor would a widespread return to news somehow subsidised by the government or non-profit groups be likely. Things could of course proceed unchanged, but this would relegate the news carried by the media to be little more than entertainment for the middle and upper classes, weakening the democratic process in India. Are other paths available?

An informed media is often referred to as the fourth estate of democratic politics. Shukla stressed the need for an informative media in a well-run democracy. Sevanti Ninan, a journalist and media critic in Delhi, also asserted the media is a business that relies on a democratic form of politics. In her opinion, this is no small reason why print and electronic news have flourished here.

Despite the best attempts by many involved in the Indian news media to provide truly meaningful content to all segments of India’s diverse population, the larger system of the media in India — based on a US-style media model — and its relationship to the electorate limits its effectiveness and relevance. Addressing this contradiction will require collaborations and discussions between journalists, media owners, activists, politicians, citizens, academics.

Happily, such constructive discussions — involving top journalists and politicians at least — have recently been occurring in various forums. High-profile journalists such as CNN-IBN‘s editor-in-chief Rajdeep Sardesai have spoken forcefully in favor of a media able to “move away from the tyranny of the market that makes us cater to the lowest common denominator”. He asks broadcasters to sharply distinguish between “what is in public interest and what is of public interest” and to emphasise the first.

And yet, in the media at least, there are few examples of how to do this while remaining financially sound and competitive in a cut-throat media market. There is talk of industry self-regulation versus government regulation of content, but it is unclear if there is widespread interest in or political will to reach out to marginalised Indians or to reject the big money of a corporately-driven media. Regardless, one hopes that gatherings of journalists, politicians and activists will continue and will be more frequent and substantive in the future. Everyone in India has a stake in the debate.

And it is not an issue that only affects India. While India’s combination of an extensive free market media and high voting turnout by poor rural citizens may be rather unique, the media in other parts of the postcolonial world faces similar challenges to reaching citizens — low literacy, poverty, growing gaps between rich and poor, tensions between modern and traditional ways of life.

The media in the so-called developed world also needs to make its news content more reflective of the important issues facing the world. By dint of its size, wealth and influence, the Indian media seems well-placed to play a leading global role in producing a news media relevant to the majority of the world’s people, not just its elites.

This article is reproduced from SAJAforum.org, the blog of the New York-based South Asian Journalists Association.

Image: Sunil Krishnan

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