The Bias of Mediatization: Utopia in Charlottesville

Nikola Mlađenović

doi:10.17951/ms.2019.3.69-81

Abstract

<p>The paper reconstructs Harold innis’ idea of media’s bias. It is argued that media construct a view of the future in line with temporalized Platonism that excludes people that belong to the past. The clash of statues and media in Charlottesville presented mediatization as a progressive but not dialectical force. Statues and media did not check each other’s biases. Media embody the confrontation of authority and publicity (Habermas) or the Enlightenment and Absolutism (Koselleck). After the neoliberal commercialization, the Enlightenment acquired the form of utopian future that confronts the media logic against conservative forces. The truth is constructed according to the prescribed future. Trump blamed all, in accordance with the Absolutist principle. Commercial media professionalism stood by its Enlightenment origins and accused Trump of revitalizing forces of the past. Because most citizens were against taking down the statues, commercialized media logic was less receiver steering than the public service media.</p>

Highlights

The paper reconstructs Harold Innis’ idea of media’s bias
Noam Chomsky (1989, p. 227) supported Marcusean views years later: “the media were almost entirely closed to principled critics of the war and representatives of the mass popular movements that spontaneously developed, considerably more closed, than they have been in the 1980s”
U Corporate media are somehow supportive of the Black Lives Matter. This paradoxical co-evolution of neoliberalism and mediatization is the background of the special bias of mediatization

Summary

The counterrevolution

While arguing that populism is a cultural backlash against post-materialistic values, Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris (2016) paraphrased Herbert Marcuse by saying populism is a “counterrevolutionary revolt”. U Corporate media are somehow supportive of the Black Lives Matter This paradoxical co-evolution of neoliberalism and mediatization is the background of the special bias of mediatization. Time bias is a matter of collective identity It drives society’s relationship with past and future. To check this theoretical framework, I will examine the case of clashes over Confederate statue in Charlottesville, that is, a struggle between old, heavy media and the light ones. Monuments are the oldest medium with a conservative time bias, that in Charlottesville was confronted with a light, electronic media with a future-oriented bias This case showed the bias of mediatization that is a matter not just of social construction but of political economy

CS The interplay

Time of the Utopia

Logic of the Enlightenment in Charlottesville

Findings

Conclusions