NDM News: Essay

I believe, as would a pluralist, that through the development of social media over the decades, audiences worldwide have become progressively more powerful in the production of news. With platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and many others, people take advantage of this "information revolution" to capture news as it happens and increase the speed at which it reaches audiences. Aleks Krotoski claims that this is a "paradigm shift" that is "on par with the printing press". We know that the printing press was a profound creation that changed the way news was communicated for centuries. What Krotoski is arguing is that new and digital media is having just as big an impact on audiences and news as the printing press did in 1440. 


One particularly poignant aspect new and digital media is citizen journalism. A definite advantage of this is that news is made much more unbiased through it. A recent example of this is the 2014 Eric Garner murder, filmed by Ramsey Orta, a member of the public. The footage he produced, that was spread around social media before making headlines effectively showed the true brutality of how Eric Garner was unlawfully killed by a white police officer. This event was especially significant given the rising issue of police brutality that, although regularly communicated, wasn't given sufficient or honest publicity until the release of Orta's footage. Had the story been entirely under the control of news institutions, they would have constructed the story to suit the preferred reading, implying Eric Garner was entirely in the wrong and that the policeman acted as a hero, when in fact the real events captured by Orta encourage an oppositional reading and tell us that what the policeman did was illegal, giving us a completely different viewpoint. This, along with many other examples, essentially reiterates the importance of citizen journalism and stresses how audiences are becoming more powerful than ever before.

Alternatively, others including Marxists, would argue that news institutions are still generally in control and that the notion that audiences are taking that over is entirely an illusion. This hegemonic viewpoint emphatically challenges the idea of audience empowerment and claims that the rise of social media "does not pose an immediate or even foreseeable threat" (Herman and McChesney) to the status quo enforced by news institutions. This could be supported by Pareto's law, which claims that "a minority of producers always serve a majority of consumers", fundamentally reinforcing the idea that, in the context of news, there are only a small number of news producers (none of which are citizen journalists) that successfully broadcast the news most consumed by audiences. This is further emphasised by Lin and Webster's statement that "the top 5% of websites accounted for almost 75% of user volume," again accentuating the inferiority of audiences. Another Marxist value, supporting the idea of one elite holding the power is the idea of Paywalls; news should be paid for, as James Murdoch advocates, "It is essential for the future of independent digital journalism that a fair price can be charged for news to people who value it." This is a clear example of how news institutions can successfully manipulate ardent news consumers into giving them money in order to be given access to news that according to pluralists should be freely available not just to read but to contribute to as well.