Media democracy

Media and democracy is a liberal-democratic approach to media studies which advocates for reforming the mass media, strengthening public service broadcasting, and developing and participating in alternative media and citizen journalism in order to create a mass media system that informs and empowers all members of society, and enhances democratic values.

A media democracy focuses on using information technologies to both empower individual citizens and promote democratic ideals through the spread of information. Additionally, the media system itself should be democratic in its own construction shying away from private ownership or intense regulation. Media democracy entails that media should be used to promote democracy as well as the conviction that media should be democratic itself; media ownership concentration is not democratic and cannot serve to promote democracy and therefore must be examined critically. The concept, and a social movement promoting it, have grown as a response to the increased corporate domination of mass media and the perceived shrinking of the marketplace of ideas.

The term also refers to a modern social movement evident in countries all over the world which attempts to make mainstream media more accountable to the publics they serve and to create more democratic alternatives.

The concept of a media democracy follows in response to the deregulation of broadcast markets and the concentration of mass media ownership. In their book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, authors Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky outline the propaganda model of media, which states that the private interests in control of media outlets will shape news and information before it is disseminated to the public through the use of five information filters. In this way, the construction of the mass media as a for-profit enterprise behaves in a way that runs counter to the democratic ideals of a free press.

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