Information, democracy and media manipulation – CBS and the US election

Properly informed citizens are perhaps the most important requirement for a democracy to function properly. If the political system is dependent on the votes of the people, then the people need to be knowledgeable about what and for whom they are voting for. Dictatorial regimes may get by merely by repression of those who would oppose the governing authority- though even in such systems controlling information and using propaganda can play a major role in controlling and subduing the masses.

A democratic system may still function if the people in power control information and educate the people about the issues at hand as they see fit. But that is not how we wish for the system to function- and neither is it the way democracy was conceived of functioning. We expect democratic systems to arrive at conclusions of the true will of the people, on real issues, based on real information, not on imaginary issues based on propaganda spread by those in power.

I have thought of this, and of the role of the media in informing, after catching an incident that occurred in US politics. Presidential candidate John McCain was interviewed by the network CBS, and on a particular question regarding military operation in Iraq, he gave an answer that betrayed a misunderstanding of the timeline of the war. Yet that answer was never aired. Instead the network edited the interview, putting a different answer he had given to another question in its stead, but making it appear that the candidate had given that answer rather than the one he truly had, to the particular question.

The particulars of the question are not important, it is not that which is striking. The important bit is the editing act itself. One would probably claim that media manipulation today is far lesser than what it used to be in decades past when the nations of the world constantly and freely engaged in propaganda and manipulating what their citizens knew without check. And media manipulation in the developed world is probably lesser than what one might expect to see in autocratic regimes in developing nations. But that does not make things any less important.

This is an act of obvious propaganda, and an attempt to fool viewers into misunderstanding the true views of a candidate. All the worse that it has been carried out by a media network whose job is supposedly to inform and educate citizens, and all the worse that it influences election in the most powerful nation on earth. Such phenomena make democracy meaningless. What is the point of people voting for their leaders, if they do not know what they are voting for?

Which brings into mind two questions:

1) How often do media networks engage in this sort of editing?

2) Should there be an outside agent that oversees and punishes networks for such actions?

It is perhaps impossible to truly know the answer to the first question. But the second is interesting to contemplate on. Would a government wish for such an agency to exist, if it meant losing its power to (mis)inform through the media? And if an agency with real power to severely punish existed, it would be controlled by whom? The last one is a very important question. If the power to control what is propaganda and what is not rest on a single actor, that raises great potential dangers for the future- and of one form of information control being exchanged for another.

Perhaps the internet is the answer. The incident was quickly spread through websites, internet forums and youtube. And unlike any outside agency, the internet is not centralized, and not controlled by any single person. Millions of people can monitor the information they get and easily inform others when an obvious falsehood is reported. Yet how much does the internet influence the average voter who may not be familiar with blogging and newsfeeds? Perhaps more people will be influenced by what CBS had originally broadcast, than by the fact that it was proved a lie. And how can one ensure that this type of clever ‘editing’ will be found out- unlike outright lying, there is no outside source of facts to check that what the media presents is the truth.

What I feel will be the solution is when the media is afraid to ‘edit’ the truth for fear of being caught, as has happened with CBS. Right now, the amount of people who will learn of this and be outraged will be small, since so few so closely follow politics through the tools the internet has given us. So there is little for CBS to fear. When more people use the decentralized internet to inform themselves, then will the media be more afraid of distorting. But that requires that the people themselves care enough to inform themselves. Unfortunately informing citizens properly is not the only requirement for well functioning democracies. The citizens need to care about informing themselves first.