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 is not the things themselves but a product constructed from various materials, 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 tying themselves to “human rights.” But no such rights exist as natural and universal. Every right is positive, situated, historical. Hence, when a particular outlet is criticised, expressions such as “don’t shoot the messenger” — as though the messenger were a divine herald whose innocent voice did nothing but transmit 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 embody its internal conflict. As for the “right to information,” what really exists is the social circulation of information itself; what matters is how it circulates and who controls it. This is a political question, because factions and ideologies, the various social groups and agents, companies and so on, each operate to control those flows or to carve out a space within them. Information sociology is therefore shaped by political forms, and not the other way round.
- The myth of independence, or of impartiality. Through this myth, media content — and especially its opinion lines — is presented as untainted by spurious interests. This is what justifies the expression “fourth estate.” But there are not three estates, nor four, divided according to areas of competence: there is one alone, contested by different factions or parties. Against this myth, then, we have to acknowledge the necessary embedding of the media in their environment, their inevitable political bias — declared or otherwise — and the economic dependencies that, in a thousand subtle ways, shape their content. They are not, in other words, 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 cannot be reduced to the political parties that compete in elections; they include the offshoots of those parties throughout society, and any grouping that, even when it does not take part in the game of governments, acts in its own interests and uses its own means of communication.
These myths conceal something further: the commodity character of the contents these media companies produce. A product presented in continuity with — and often confused 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 — above all on television. Examples like the following make it obvious: some news bulletins 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 onanistic references to the very myths laid out here are constant. On television, ideological constraints 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 entrenched, in sectarian fashion, in extreme camps (in reality, the camp of the outlet itself, pitted against a straw man in the role of the villain). In the media that style themselves more serious — the press and the radio — the ideological bias is more apparent, though often camouflaged beneath an appearance of journalistic rigour; it is easily uncovered in the disproportionate attention some topics enjoy at the expense of the neglect of others. Finally, as a sample of how absurd television news bulletins can become, they often fill their scarce airtime with items whose only merit is having been caught on camera (people falling off motorbikes in distant countries, or hikers being chased by bears) — pure spectacle.