Earlier in the month, Guyana commemorated World Press Freedom Day ostensibly under the theme “Journalism Under Digital Siege”. Internationally, there were a spate of reports that described Governments’ use of the super-stealthy, zero-click spyware “Pegasus”, which was, for instance, used by Saudi Arabia to spy on Jamal Khashoggi, who was later killed in Turkey. The Guyanese media fraternity understandably raised the issue of our Government’s position on utilising such spyware (which can commandeer confidential information on smart devices) to go after Journalists who are suspected of being anti-Government.
President Irfaan Ali firmly declared that his government would never resort to such action, since it is fundamentally antithetical to their democratic tenets. However, it is up to Guyanese Journalists to perform their job and ensure that the Government does not violate its declared policy. But there is another threat that Journalists ought to be concerned about and this one comes from the fast-evolving “digital” social media which have upended traditional journalism and can place good governance under “digital siege”. President Ali highlighted this danger, which appeared to have slipped under the radar of the mainstream media.
This tension in the relationship between the media and politics developed over the past few decades and has been dubbed the “mediatization of politics” and also needs to be placed on our media agenda and addressed. From the provenance of the media as pamphlets in the 18th century, its practitioners became known as the “Fourth Estate” and were considered as an indispensable aspect of modern, democratic governance. The press, which would be joined eventually by radio and TV, would “inter-mediate” information on the activities of the leviathan to the “people”. The media, then, in curating what they considered “news” for the next two hundred years engaged in “mediation” of what the people ought to know. This was a tremendous power that obviously had far-reaching consequences.
One consequence was the ongoing feedback effect between media logic and political logics. As one scholar pointed out there is, “the distinction between ‘politicised media’, seen as an imbalance in the direction of a circumscribed media system, and ‘mediatised politics’. The latter is seen as a situation in which politics has ‘become colonised by media logics and imperatives’, which are driven by “coverage without responsibility”. The challenge is that politics also has its own internal logic — the drive to agglomerate ever greater support for one’s party’s position to secure votes at elections. The question is to what extent does the present media logic trump and colonise political logic. According to one theorist, “media logic consists of a form of communication; the process through which media present and transmit information. Elements of this form include the various media and the formats used by these media.“ These formats are constantly changing as the medium develops and proves McLuhan point that “the medium is the message”.
The new media over digital platforms can now be received directly into smartphones and other such devices without any “mediation” or responsible curating and often without the consent of the receiver. Yet there is very little oversight and monitoring of these platforms and news. There was the enactment of a Cybercrime Act, but this ignores irresponsible political messaging.
Politicians have always been aware of the power of media and have customised their messages to satisfy this media logic. For instance, “if conflict has important news value when Journalists produce news content, then clearly outlining an enemy becomes part of the rules of the game for a politician who is seeking visibility in news media.” With the rise of social media and its free-wheeling, personalised style that directs its attention to specific audiences, no holds are barred as there is no appreciation of overarching societal obligations in this new media logic.
In Guyana, we have already seen politicians who will cater to this common lowest denominator logic of mediatization via social media, which will inevitably further fracture our society. Will the mainstream media close their eyes to this threat to good governance?
