By Nicola Green
The ongoing fallout from the phone hacking scandal in the UK is a gift that keeps on giving for media sociologists.
The 24th of June saw (some initial) verdicts in the trials of several senior editors and managers of media organisations on charges of conspiracy – conspiring to intercept communications, conspiring to cause misconduct in public office, and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. In addition to the very high profile arrests and trials that have overall resulted from the scandal and its ensuing investigations – by many accounts nearly ninety individual arrests have so far taken place, and multiple corresponding charges applied – we now have seven guilty verdicts on organisational ‘conspiracy’ within Press organisations across all charges. Not so many when one considers the range and scope of cases brought, but also more organisationally-related verdicts than might have been contemplated even a decade ago.
While there are a myriad of legal issues that might assuredly continue to deserve our attention in relation to the scandal – not least the ongoing question of whether a corporate criminal case is also brought to trial – the questions raised by the whole affair are also undoubtedly central to the very future of the Press in the UK.
Because of course, these trials are not the full story in and of themselves. Alongside the legal issues, a range of important social and political concerns surrounding the relationship between media, political interests and public-democratic discourse have also emerged. A significant degree of grassroots political activism on privacy and press intrusion has ensued, the Leveson public inquiry into the “Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press” has taken place, and importantly, a range of changes to Press regulation have also been proposed – including everything from continued self-regulation of the UK Press under transformed conditions, to a Royal Charter for quasi-state regulation.
So how should we be making sense of such widespread upheavals to the institution of the Press in the UK? What kind of analytic strategies do we have to understand such rapid transformations in the situation of a centuries-old institution that is widely claimed to be not only independent and impartial, but crucial to the functioning of free speech in a healthy democracy? But that is also only one set of questions to ask. The other equally important set of questions revolve around how such empirical transformations might prompt us to re-examine our own analytic approaches, and re-evaluate their efficacy for explaining the multiple contemporary roles of the Press in public life.
In response to both sets of questions, it would be surprising if our thoughts didn’t turn to our old friend Habermas, and his enduring theoretical contribution on the role of the media in/and/as a ‘public sphere’. Many of us are familiar with Habermas’ general theory of the public sphere as ‘communicative action’ – a publically-focussed ‘ideal speech’ situation, where rational discourse comes into play amongst multiple, diverse and universally-participatory parties of equal standing in debates on the most pressing political issues of the day. As an ideal, it is a terribly nice proposition, all very democratic and high-minded. But quite a bit of Habermas’ own work has been concerned to demonstrate just how the contemporary economic and social organisation of media and politics are exactly antithetical to such a public sphere. That is, a significant part of Habermas’ thinking is concerned with analysing the ways in which the relationship between commercial mass media and formal political organisation in modernity has operated in such a way as to entrench political (and media) elites by articulating dominant ideological positions rather than engaging in (or with, or for) ‘rational’ and universal democratic discourse.
The question here then, is whether we might still use Habermas’ normative theoretical model to understand current upheavals in the UK Press – are legal challenges, regulatory transformations and public activism arising from events such as the phone hacking scandal likely to lead to more ‘ideal’, ‘rational’ and ‘democratic’ politics in a mediated public sphere?
Well, the jury might well still be out on that (so to speak). Certainly, there are a number of features in the phone hacking scandal that we might identify as potentially disrupting a quite cosy and longstanding status quo in the elite media/politics relationship with respect to the UK Press. The regulatory and legal challenges to media power presented by independent public inquiries, the introduction of criminal charges of conspiracy (under the ‘rational’ rule of law), and the multiple voices of political activists and victims, might indeed represent something of a challenge to the ad hoc power of the commercial Press and its role in public discourse.
Equally though, such transformations might also prompt us to re-examine some of the concepts that underpin our analyses of the role of media in a democratic public sphere – is it really the case that the Press could EVER actually produce the rational participatory discourse that Habermas outlines (and idealises)?
Arguably, the reporting of the phone hacking scandal could itself be considered an example of a Press discourse that represents largely commercial news values rather than democratic concerns, emphasising (as it sometimes has) subjective and emotional reactions to criminal wrongdoing, as well as the association between phone hacking and celebrity, rather than drawing attention to issues of public and political concern with respect to free speech, Press independence, or the question of regulation of the fourth estate more generally. Moreover, media theorists have already pointed out that a normative definition of ‘the public sphere’ tends towards the reductionist, and that empirically speaking, there are likely to be multiple and diverse public spheres – that is, a plurality of different forms of mediated public sphere that overlap and inform each other via diverse media platforms. Consequently, it is notable that many outcomes of the scandal are likely to pertain only to the UK Press, not to the myriad other forms of existing mass mediated political discourse, nor to networked political participation in a globalised media context.
So while important issues concerning the independence of the Press from political influence have undoubtedly been raised, and associated concerns about the balance of free speech versus the regulation of media activity in the public interest have been articulated, the substantive implications remain uncertain. Whilst the scandal might raise some specific issues pertaining to the regulation of the UK Press in particular, it seems unlikely that that it will pose widespread challenges to the power of transnational commercial media to shape democratic public discourse and political organisation. In either case however, it is apparent that the questions raised by Habermas’ analysis continue to be not only pertinent, but clearly crucial in framing our understanding of contemporary media developments. In other words, it does us no harm to continue to ask Habermas’ central questions.
So…. even in the event of guilty conspiracy verdicts, and as the fallout from the scandal rumbles on, the outcomes of the challenges posed continue to remain uncertain – and under these conditions, participants from all sides of the relevant debates are likely to remain ‘hacked off’ for quite some time to come…
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