We take the term “mass media” in its common sense: companies that produce and disseminate messages. Their product is presented as the news — not as just any information, but as the relevant events. These media outlets justify themselves, through their professionals, by means of the following myths:
- The myth of objectivity. As though the filter of their activity did not exist, or were so clean that the facts passed through it “as they are,” uncontaminated. This makes possible slogans such as “that’s how things are, and that’s how we’ve told them to you.” Against this myth, one must insist that what the media offer are not the things themselves, but a product constructed from various materials and according to specialised methods and techniques — and, of course, according to an ideological bias.
- The myth of “public service”. On the basis of an alleged “right to information,” the media justify themselves as necessary and deflect any attack by hooking themselves to “human rights.” But no such rights exist as natural and universal. Every right is positive, situated, and historical. Hence expressions, when a particular outlet is criticised, such as “don’t shoot the messenger” — as though that messenger were a divine herald whose innocent voice did nothing but spread an objective truth, in keeping with the previous myth. Against this, what must be defended is not the necessity of any particular outlet, but the functionality of the flows of communication that, whatever form they take, are necessarily present in every society and represent its internal conflict. As for the “right to information,” what really exists is the effective reality of the social circulation of information; what matters is how it circulates and who controls it. This is a political question, because factions and ideologies, the various groups, social agents, companies, and so on, each operate to control those flows or to carve out a space within them. Information sociology is therefore determined by political forms, and not the other way around.
- The myth of independence, or of impartiality. Through this myth, media content — and especially its opinion lines — is presented as uncontaminated by spurious interests. This is what justifies the expression “fourth estate.” But there are not three estates, nor four, divided according to competences: there is only one, contested by different factions or parties. Against this myth, then, one must acknowledge the necessary embedding and participation of the media in their environment, their inevitable political bias — declared or not — and the economic dependencies that, in a thousand subtle ways, shape their content. They are not, that is, a fourth estate, but an instrument in the service of the factions that contest and divide up the pieces of the one and only power. These factions are not reducible to the political parties that compete in elections; they also include those parties’ ramifications throughout society, and any grouping which, even when it does not take part in the game of governments, operates in favour of its own interests and uses its own media.
These myths also conceal something further: the commodity character of the contents these media companies produce. A product that is presented in continuity with — and often in confusion with — others usually classed as entertainment or leisure: football, celebrity gossip, television galas, game shows and quiz programmes, “culture,” and so on. This makes plain the character of journalistic information as a product for diversion, escape, capture, and the sale of audiences — especially on television. Examples like the following make it obvious: some news programmes deliver the headlines with background music as though they were scenes from a film. Others feed endlessly on the same footage, or recycle the same set design for the morning, afternoon, and evening editions — products padded out with the empty bait of “human testimonies,” anonymous figures who, by saying nothing, say exactly what the outlet wants said. They give themselves awards, and the onanistic references to the very myths laid out here are constant. On television, ideological subjections are diluted in the spectacle of the medium itself, except in the more in-depth programmes, in which dialectical clashes abound between two groups of talking heads sectarianly entrenched in extreme camps (in reality, the camp of the media outlet itself, pitted against a straw man in the role of the villain). In the media that style themselves as more serious — the press and the radio — the ideological bias is more apparent, though often camouflaged beneath an appearance of journalistic rigour; but it is easily uncovered in the disproportionate attention enjoyed by certain topics as against the neglect of others. Finally, as a sample of how ridiculous television news bulletins can become, they often fill their scarce airtime with stories whose only merit is having been caught on camera (people falling off motorbikes in distant countries, or hikers being chased by bears) — pure spectacle.