The Elite Gatekeepers: How the Media Captures Public Policy
By Barry Maley
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By trying to accommodate the seemingly endless parade of victims in the media, the state extends its grip more and more into the details of daily life.

From Adam Smith to Friedrich Hayek, the outstanding economists have usually been philosophers with broad social, cultural and political interests. They have sought to understand the complex interactions that occur between the economic and non-economic institutions of a Ôgreat societyÕ as well as the dynamics of their interdependence and the role of ideas.

In Australia at the present time there is a delicate balance between further economic and social reform and a plunge into backsliding and reaction. The issues at stake will not be fought out simply in debates over economic policy. Those debates and the electoral politics that revolve around them will be conditioned by sets of cultural attitudes and beliefs beyond economics.

It hardly needs to be said that national policies and the success of economic reforms such as privatisation and winding back protectionism, not to mention social reforms in welfare and Aboriginal reconciliation, are affected by the prevailing beliefs and ideas of those who lead public opinion. Progress in these and other matters is perennially at risk of opposition from those interest groups or Ôdistributional coalitionsÕ, to use Mancur OlsonÕs term, that would lose by it.

To the influences of the prevailing intellectual climate and group pressures must be added the independent role of the media and the beliefs of journalists and selected commentators who play a central role in framing public agendas and commenting on them. Indeed, it is in the media that we daily experience the coming together of the prevailing intellectual climate, interest group pressures and pragmatic politics, seen against a background coloured by the mediaÕs gatekeeper role and their selection and emphasis.

This is the context in which significant political and policy issues are publicly debated. Politicians are then confronted with a version of public opinion to which, in one way or another, they are forced to respond. It is a context that powerfully conditions the possibilities of reform.

Australian ideologies

It is difficult in a rapidly changing, diverse and pluralistic society to characterise acceptably the leading cultural trends and the ideas that animate them. I have attempted to do this in the table on the next page by positing two sets of opposed ideologiesÑÔliberal-conservatismÕ and Ôsocial democratic-postmodernismÕ. These two positions seem to me to sum up a great many of the assumptions and points of view which flow through the opinion-forming intelligentsia.

Only a relatively small proportion of the population would fit comfortably under either the Ôliberal-conservativeÕ or Ôsocial democrat-postmodernÕ divisions, but their small numbers are out of all proportion to their influence. Rather more would draw bits from both. In practice, and in dealing with particular issues, there is a great deal of mixing and crossing over. This is true of the major political parties, none of which can be wholly and consistently identified with one or the other. Nevertheless, each may be seen as regularly committed to more of one than the other.

Apart from those who are self-consciously ideological, most other Australians would doubtless shy away from ideology and any pressure to be ideologically categorised. If urged to sum up their points of view, many would probably draw feelings and customary responses reflecting Les MurrayÕs Ôvernacular cultureÕ of

. . . our deepest common values and identifications, the place of our quiddities and priorities and family jokes. The Melbourne Cup and the Fair Go and a myriad gum-trees live there, along with equality and Anzac Day and the Right Thing. It is the strain of denying or pretending to be indifferent to [the] stratum in our [national] psyche that gives the prose style of many of our more conscientiously disaffected intellectuals and artists its unmistakable shrill, hectoring note. (1999: 73)

The ideological stances summarised in the table opposite reflect some of the main themes of the Ôculture warsÕ, as the Americans call the struggles between intellectual elites to sway public opinion and to win allegiance to their preferred set of cultural assumptions. The importance of those cultural assumptions consists in the competing principles which they propose should govern national policies and the institutional structures that would actualise them.

Four aspects of this struggle in Australia will occupy us here:

(i)Ê the idea of a dominant elite and a prevailing intellectual culture, identified as Ôsocial democrat-postmodernÕ, which is opposed by a contesting eliteÑthose who can be identified as Ôliberal-conservativeÕ;

(ii) the role of the media, largely (but not exclusively) supportive of social democratic postmodernism, in shaping agendas of debate and commenting upon them;

(iii) the part played by interest or pressure groups; and

(iv) the political and policy outcomes.

The prevailing intellectual culture

To be reasonably familiar with academic writing and teaching in the non-science based studiesÑhistory, philosophy, politics, sociology, literature, art, drama, etc.Ñand with the daily media and the more serious magazines, is to be made aware of the dominance of social democratic-postmodern views and assumptions. They constitute, arguably, the prevailing politico-intellectual culture, not only in Australia but in the West generally. This has been broadly true since the neo-Marxist Ôcultural revolutionÕ of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which added new radical dimensions to leftist thinking of a statist and Fabian socialist kind.

Beyond the philosophical idealism and relativism of postmodernism, its central tenets critique Western civilisation from a structuralist and cultural perspective that emphasises command of the culture and institutions (Gramsci et al.), and the concealment of Ôbourgeois powerÕ in those institutions and the ideology which justifies them (Foucault et al.).

The leading ideas emerging from this criticism are that Western civilisation is inherently capitalist, exploitative and oppressive of minorities; destructive of the environment; racist, sexist and patriarchal; Eurocentric and monocultural; and that the character and power of its institutions are maintained by forms of discourse, the analysis of which (by deconstruction) reveals its true and repugnant nature.

Accordingly, such Western institutions as private property rights, private enterprise and competitive markets, the rule of law, constitutionalism, free speech, the family, education, science, religion, voluntary associations and private charity, art and literature, and an ideology of individualismÑall of which sustain and reproduce Western civilisation and which disperse powerÑmust be destroyed or radically transformed and the ÔdiscourseÕ captured in order to be liberated.

From the 1970s to the present, this view of Western civilisation and its Australian variant has dominated teaching in all but the science-based faculties of our universities and colleges. Many of the graduates of these faculties trained under such teachers now staff our schools, universities, law schools, public and private bureaucracies, the churches and the media.

Cultural commentators such as Roger Scruton (1998: 127-8) have noted the nihilistic intellectual and artistic dead end to which postmodernism and deconstruction lead. But its genealogy can also be linked to the much older idea of human perfectibility.

The notion that mankind is perfectible and that perfection can be achieved only in the ideal society and through service to it is an idea as old as Plato. It leads naturally to the view that in the pursuit of perfection individuals are simply undifferentiated components, like raw clay to be moulded, used and directed in the project of achieving the ideal society.

The history of the 20th centuryÑits wars, its oppression and its murdersÑhas been shaped by ideologies (preeminently Marxism) committed to the view that individuals are expendable and that their individuality must be sacrificed for the greater good. The totalitarian societies that have lived by these principles have killed 100 million of their own citizens in the last 80 years, quite apart from the millions killed in the wars fought to resist them.

We do not live in a totalitarian society and it is not likely that we will. But the ideological bent that seeks perfection and which is intolerant of recalcitrant individualism and stubborn attachment to the local, the traditional and the idiosyncratic is no less strong among us than among the Russians or the Cubans or the Cambodians or the Chinese.

The differences are, first, that we have a protecting heritage of more or less autonomous institutions, the rule of law and established democratic and constitutional processes; and, second, as a consequence, the ideological drive for influence and transforming power is forced to insinuate itself behind the mask of humanitarianism, beneficence and Ôsocial justiceÕ. But the drive is there and as its successes mount, the line of institutional defences becomes thinner and thinner.

The velvet glove of virtue

Since there can be no higher objective than the construction of the perfect society, those who see themselves in the vanguard of such a projectÑthose who can see further than the unenlightenedÑmust necessarily be people of the highest virtue.

It follows that the members of such an elite come to display what Michael Warby of the IPA has called moral vanity or what Thomas Sowell has called moral exhibitionism. Surely all of us have noticed the parade of righteousness and superiority, and the polemical fierceness directed against dissenters, by those who come to lecture us from the moral high ground that they are so eager to occupy.

It is by claiming to be the instrument of social justice that such an elite seeks to smuggle in a moral credential. ÔJusticeÕ is a term that resonates with all of liberal persuasion, but on a classical understanding of justice as process the adjective ÔsocialÕ, though seductive, is fraudulent. In the past, we have understood justice to be essentially procedural under a system where all are held equal before democratically and constitutionally valid laws and where such laws apply to all without fear or favour.

Social justice purports to remedy all misfortunes, however lawfully incurred, and right all wrongs, no matter when they occurred or what the cost. It seeks immediate and often ad hoc remedies for the undeserved hard cases that inevitably occur within any system of procedural justice and finds infallible markers of injustice in social and economic inequalities of various kindsÑbut especially in inequalities of income. Undeserved misfortunes and inequalities, including those with an ancient history, thus become sufficient reason for suspending the general rules of procedural justice, irrespective of the injustices and immediate and distant costs that doing so might entail.

Social justice, thus conceived, inevitably undermines the rule of law and consistency in delivering procedural justice, and it places demands upon governments to act promptly in ad hoc ways to mitigate disadvantages of lawful origin. Even within the courts, including the highest, the urge to achieve social justice may override the delivery of Ôjustice according to lawÕ, leading to judicial activism.

Elsewhere, since equality is the touchstone, any undeserved inequality of capacity (strength, intelligence, mental illness, for example) or past background (say an impoverished childhood or historic group wrongs) comes to justify a demand for special or preferential treatmentÑi.e. Ôpositive discriminationÕÑin the present. Sometimes this includes forms of compensation or elaborate measures, at cost to innocent others, to alleviate the inequality or misfortune.

Progressive thought, victims and the media

The project of institutional transformation promoted by the prevailing intellectual culture and the search for perfect justice or Ôcosmic justiceÕ (Sowell 1999) which lies at the heart of the demand for social justice needs examples of injustice in order to put established institutions and history in the dock as a prelude to demanding admissions of guilt, reparations and change. So we find ourselves living in a climate of unceasing preoccupation with alleged injustices of various kinds driven by an antipathetic intelligentsia and an intellectually sympathetic media.

This preoccupation typically focuses upon injustices identified as inequalities of outcome or instances of supposed oppression or discrimination. Additionally, there may be demands that guilt for past wrongs committed by individuals long dead or acting within the law as it stood at the time be retrospectively de-legitimised, collectivised and visited upon ÔusÕ or ÔsocietyÕ. This is followed by claims for compensation or collective acts of symbolic expiation.

Accordingly, the study of history is politicised and the past is dredged for examples of injustice, especially group injustice, and put to use for political ends. The Australian historian Henry Reynolds, for example, has recently spoken of the Ôpolitical potency of historyÕ and the need to use it as Ôa weapon within the reach of the poor, the oppressed and the disregardedÕ (The Australian 2000: 34).

The search for oppressed groups is essentially a search for victims. And there is no shortage of them, whether they be women, the homeless, Aborigines, farmers, trade unionists, refugees, drug addicts, university students, homosexuals, sole parents, ethnic groups, or textile workers.

Victims, by definition, are always innocent. And group victimhood is much more interesting than mere individual misfortune or injustice because it points to a systemic failureÑsomething necessarily generated by the malevolent workings of Western institutions.

Above all, group victimhood plays well in the media. It offers human interest, accusations of villainy, unrivalled opportunities for moral preening, huge scope for opinionated blaming, and a chance to put governments and institutional authorities desperate to recover themselves on the back foot. For those interested in the destabilisation of existing institutions and extending the power of government, the tactic is invaluable. In accommodating an endless cavalcade of victims, the state extends its grip more and more into the details of daily civil life.

God forbid that our media should ever cease to be free, probing and critical. But in performing that role when various controversies arise, one cannot help noticing how journalism, again with some important qualifications, has become ever more saturated with the opinions of reporters and opinion pieces by staff journalists more politically engaged and zealous for change (Minogue 1997).

In social and cultural matters, the various media provide the main platforms of debate, and their choices of subjects, participants and opinions shape the agenda and much of its content. Many voices are given a go; we certainly are not confronted by a deliberate exclusion of different views or a monolithic journalistic culture.

But I would suggest that the choices made reveal, on balance, a preference for promoting an intellectual culture which is statist and social democrat in inclination, institutionally restless, interventionist and postmodernist in social and cultural affairs, and contemptuous of the vernacular culture when it indicates resistance to their favourite projects, such as republicanism and multiculturalism. Victimhood is the vehicle that carries the influence of such a worldview into pressure group politics.

Managerialist government and policy incoherence

For governments confronted by press campaigns orchestrated around supposedly oppressed and victimised minorities or groups suddenly disadvantaged by economic changes, and harassed by opportunistic Oppositions, it is not difficult to understand why principles and reform may be abandoned as the members of the political class seek votes, office and power.

The result, for a reform-minded government, is frequently oscillation between genuine reform on the one hand and submission, for vote-catching reasons, to the dominant intellectual culture and to the self-serving demands of interest group pressures on the other.

Some examples come to mind. In February this year, in the midst of extensive media coverage of the issue, the Federal government bailed out the collapsing National Textiles company and provided millions of dollars of taxpayersÕ money in payments for retrenched workers who had lost deferred entitlements. That decision was widely denounced as a dangerous precedent for any company in similar circumstances in the future.

This case followed the similar Oakdale minersÕ case where the Federal governmentÕs response has been to propose that federal and state taxpayers should pay workersÕ entitlements lost by the collapse of an enterpriseÑbut not creditorsÕ entitlements, no matter what their circumstances might be. In other words, while the right hand of government commits itself to curtailing the welfare state, the left hand proposes selectively and unfairly to enlarge it.

Such instances are symptomatic of the growth of unprincipled government and the hasty abandonment of established rules and practices in the interests of populism, regional vote-catching, and ad hoc responses to intense media coverage driven by a sub-text of enacting Ôsocial justiceÕ. This begins to entrench expectations of swift government action whenever ÔvictimsÕ or misfortunes are identified and publicised. At both federal and state levels the consequence is government micro-managerialism and policy-on-the-run.

When government is seen as universal therapist, there is no hesitation by political parties in fulfilling that role and accepting the power that necessarily accompanies it. This is revealed in its more trivial but irritating form in constant television and radio hectoring about not driving too fast, not eating too much, getting more exercise, following safe work practices and so on, ad nauseam. The price of such power, such detailed intrusion and vote-catching, is public cynicism and contempt for politicians and, more dangerously, for the institutions and processes of democratic government.

Conclusion

At the present time in Australia the prevailing intellectual climate in our major educational and professional groups, and among the intelligentsia, is essentially social democratic-postmodern. Its influence over the direction of public affairs, government and the institutions of civil society is often overlooked by those who hope for continued economic and social reform.

In a lively democracy, public opinion has always been a crucial factor in the success or failure of political initiatives. In this age, the ubiquity of the media and ready and cheap access to them by an almost universally literate public has enhanced media influence and power. Two centuries ago, Edmund Burke foresaw that the press might become Ôas important as ParliamentÕ (Johnson 1991: 949). That has come to pass, and the power of the written word has since been reinforced by the spoken words and images of radio and television.

In standing between the voter and the political process itself, what the message-makers of press and electronic media believe, and the assumptions and opinions they hold, therefore assume considerable significance. What they have learnt from the institutions which have socialised and educated them will largely determine the content of their beliefs and opinions. In the last generation, these institutions have become repositories, in the main, of the prevailing politico-intellectual culture of social democratic-postmodernism.

Ideologically, this intellectual culture is inimical to Western scientific and political traditions of objectivity, detachment and restraint. Temperamentally, it is antinomian, cynical and overbearing. This gives it a polemical character that is bitter, rancorous and contemptuous of those who disagree with it.

The outcome is a certain cast of public discussion in this country, which goes beyond frank and tough criticism or satire to become at times quite savage and uncivilised. One does not need to be a defender of the current Prime Minister, for example, in order to deplore the insensate derision and hatred which is commonly directed at him by journalists and cartoonists.

The combination of media with such predominating opinion and ever-present interest groups seeking privileges and threatening electoral blackmail, delivers to us much of the present climate of public debate. When interest groups assume the status of victim, they commonly enlist enthusiastic media support. This may put governments under almost irresistible pressure to react in ad hoc fashion, to hastily recast established policies, to add to a mounting burden of regulation and to undo or weaken previous reform.

When governments themselves also behave proactively in wooing special interests, as they regularly do, this further muddies the picture. The outcome is a public and political process where attention is constantly distracted from a balanced, factually accurate description and discussion of public issues by a daily drama of contest and division consisting in large part of shadow plays and Ôbeat-upsÕ which debauch the capacity for serious thinking and reflective political attention.

This phenomenon is not confined to Australia; it is common in the West, particularly, it would seem, in the English-speaking countries. It is a cultural phenomenon whose interactions with, and influence upon, politics, economics and social matters cannot be ignored.

References:

Johnson, Paul. 1991, The Birth of the Modern, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London.

Minogue, Kenneth.1997, The Silencing of Society: The True Cost of the Lust for News, Social Affairs Unit, London.

Murray, Les. 1999, The Quality of Sprawl: Thoughts about Australia, Duffy and Snellgrove, Sydney.

Scruton, Roger. 1998, An Intelligent PersonÕs Guide to Modern Culture, Gerald Duckworth and Co., London.

Sowell, Thomas. 1999, The Quest for Cosmic Justice, The Free Press, New York.

The Australian 2000, ÔHistory a weapon for oppressedÕ, 4 April.

Author

Barry Maley is Senior Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) and Director of the Taking Children Seriously programme. This article is based on a presentation he gave at Consilium, CISÕs public policy conference held 18-20 May.

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