Media in New Age: The Rallying 4th Estate, Economic Determinism, Micro Politics of Power, Stratas of Race and Gender, Enforced Collective Conscience, Labelled Non Deviance and Affective Social Action

          For long, the Media has been the 4^th Estate that calls out all other estates, a part of civil society that Gramsci noted has the power to hold governments accountable to the people. It would thus be assumed that if Weber were to create an Ideal Type of Media in yesteryear, it would ironically represent Parsonian power system where media becomes a collective faculty of power that is productive and positive for the entire society.

          Yet, media in the post truth world is best characterised by Michael Focault’s micro politics of power. Today, everything is about narrative or discourse, creating perceptions in minds of people, truth coming a far second. Media is everything about this part, about creating a discourse at whatever end of ideological spectrum, knowledge stemming from that and of course power to follow suit.

          Media’s role in the collective conscience of society is paramount especially in today’s age of social and digital media. It is able to create new norms and values with the enormous reach that it has and thus not only sustain collective conscience at times but also transform it and create a new collective conscience through the various discourse or narratives. The former being most recently illustrated through the ground reporting of the Hathras case that had deeply wounded the collective conscience of the nation.

          Media, in such cases becomes a precipitating factor of a social movement. We have seen this in several socio-political movements like the India Against Corruption Movement and the Nirbhaya movement where Media was one crucial resource that mobilized people and created a new value consensus against corruption or crimes against women. It thus fits perfectly into resource mobilization theory as a crucial resource in a social movement.

          That being said, the underlying character of today’s media is the role of social strata- race, gender and foremost of all class in production and consumption of news. The corporate ownership of media houses, the race to TRPs for advertising revenue and full page ads in print newspapers all point to a possible tale of Marxian economic determinism taking over media.          

Naturally what follows would be the leaning over to an Ideological State Apparatus that fosters false class consciousness and perpetuates dominant class ideology and class hierarchy. Yet, several media houses have continued to dwell on the last citizen in the line and social justice, which is heartening. 

           The Class divide in consumption of news overlaps with language too as upper and middle class English speaking citizens watch English channels while working class prefer to watch in local language and given the cheap rate of data in the country, social media is itself a news machine for them. TV media in appearance and presentation also oozes elitism in the way anchors dress and present news. Race also becomes a key stratum here as the number of dark skinned anchors are far fewer compared to fair skinned ones pointing to fact that race may be an entry bottleneck for this profession.

            While media generally has large number of women as active participants, one can notice the glass ceiling that Sylvia Walby noted in her theory of patriarchy in this institution too. The most reputed, famous journalist holding important editorial and ownership positions are inevitably male despite media houses employing such a large number of women. This is one glass ceiling that would hopefully be broken through soon. 

             

            The ironical aspect of media in a polarized world is it has become less and less about rationality and more about emotions. Thus what was once a Zweckrational or Wertrational Action has now become an affective action in the Weberian Thesis as people's emotion has been the fundamental receiving point of most news much less a rational logical analysis. 

             What follows from this is that many things which would have been labelled deviant by media themselves previously whether it is media trials, shouting in newsrooms, fake news reporting have all come to be a norm in this day and age signifying it is all just a matter of labelling as Howard Becker pointed out to Merton. Given the cut throat competition, the sub culture of deviance is also all the more visible to all of us. 

 

            As crowd funded news platforms come up and digital age takes off, media can be partly free of the danger of deviance becoming a norm and economic determinism in general. The 4th estate will undergo a fundamental transformation in times to come and 'We the people' have every power to determine whether for the worse or for the good.