4 Pragmatic analysis Pragmatism: an overview - Pragmatism: the branch of philosophy that assesses truth in terms of effect, outcome, and practicality - Claim that truth depends on the degree to which a concept or theory provides us with useful results in the process of solving problems - Argue that believing or not believing in them has no real bearing on one’s daily life, instead the truth of an idea or course of action should be based on tangible results and the possible consequences of supporting or disregarding it - The only significant American contribution to world philosophy, and the connections between pragmatism’s emphasis on practicality and the American protestant work ethic are not difficult to see - Charles saunders peirce ` William james and john dewey Richard rorty - Relativism: the belief that diverse approaches and theories related to a given subject are all equally correct - No consistent truth to act upon A pragmatic approach to the government regulation of media - Standards for evaluation within a pragmatic approach to media- consequences and contingencies - Consequences: the clear effects of a given regulation on society at large - Consequences must be beneficial to society if we are to deem the regulation a good one - The fact that we only make judgements about consequences as historical individuals speak to the second standard, contingencies, or the factors a regulation should address as a result of context and situation - Contingencies: the unique and historical factors that influence regulatory decisions - A quality regulation must adequately take into account and respond to the socio historical factors in play during its creation - The best regulatory solutions are those that have beneficial consequences according to the contingencies of their historical moment - Regular in their presence but contingent upon one another at any given time (government regulation must always respond to these particular factors, and the best regulations balance them, but the degree to which one is valued over the other varies from moment to historical moment - Second set of regular contingencies is the interplay between government regulation and media self regulation, and extension of the public interest focus Issues in the regulation of American media - The six themes are combating monopoly, protecting intellectual property, maintaining national interest, promoting diversity, managing morality, and ensuring accuracy Combating monopoly - Focused historically on limiting the amount of a given market that any one company can own
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Work toward the practical goal of ensuring that healthy competition remains a vital part of the American media landscape Financial interest and syndication rule To break the perceived monopoly of the major networks by limiting the networks financial control over their programming Syndication, generally speaking, refers to the process of producing and selling programming Decreasing ownership barriers would in fact spur competition, increase content quality and lower prices for consumers Free market approach to the media is often used to justify acts of deregulation in the American context
Protecting intellectual property - Policies and technologies in this area establish clear parameters regarding what work can be protected, how it should be protected, and any limits placed on that protection - Stipulate the ways in which creative work can be legally disseminated and used in the media - Copyright: the granting of exclusive control of a creative work to that work’s creator - Lifetime of creator plus 70 years - Fair use, material expression - Digital rights management: any number of different software programs that media industries employ to control the distribution and use of digital intellectual property - Both copyrights and DRM work toward correcting issues of free speech and the public interest Maintaining national interest - Media regulations with the goal of maintaining national interest are concerned primarily with American domestic infrastructure and global image - These regulations ensure that media technology and practices do not compromise national security and the government’s ability to protect the public - Encryption: the process of scrambling important digital messages by software so only those who possess a complementary decoding program can read them - Escrow encryption standard to provide the federal government with a way of gaining access to encrypted messages sent over telephone wires that they felt posed a national threat - One way the federal government has tried to regulate media in relation to foreign threats - Pragmatic failure because it didn’t make much of an impact at all, failed to gain public support because it neglected to adequately address the contingency of the American right to privacy Promoting diversity - The fairness doctrine was an fcc policy that urged broadcasting stations to air programming on controversial issues and fairly represent both sides of the issues to viewers - Violated the first amendment rights by dictating what material they had to cover - All ideas and perspectives on an issue are equally good, something not always true in the real world - Equal time rule, a flexible system of encouraging equality without specifying or restricting content
Managing morality - Offer general guidelines rather than definite understandings of issues related to morality - Restrict access and consumption of questionable texts rather than their production - Obscenity, profanity, indecency - Obscenity: illegal, sexually explicit material that lacks literary, artistic, politic or scientific value (not protected by freedom of speech) - Miller vs. California p.86 - Profanity: an utterance that is abusive, irrelevant, or vulgar - Indecency: any material that is morally unfit for general distribution or broadcast, and indecent material most often depicts sexual or excremental activities - Safe harbor rule - The regulation of morality through obscenity, profanity, and indecency is more contingent on socio historical factors than almost any other form of regulation Ensuring accuracy - Regulations aimed at ensuring accuracy primarily deal with the news broadcast and print industries - These regulations concentrate on ensuring that journalists and news reporters use media forums to responsibly report the truth to the American public - Slander: publically spoken, untrue, and defamatory statements - Libel: false printed statements that similarly damage a person’s character - Legal definitions of slander and libel are like definitions of obscenity in that they regulate primarily by guiding the informal decisions made about news content- industry workers avoid discriminating content that is slanderous or libelous - If a statement is true, no matter how damaging it is to the character of an individual, then it is not subject to slander or libel laws - Fair comment - Code of ethics: a self imposed set of rules that outlines the ethical strivings of a particular media outlet (goals which typically revolve around notions of truth and fairness), and they often stipulate the particular ways that those within the organization should handle conflicts of interest, ethical dilemmas, and other problem areas - Pragmatic lens, regulations directed toward ensuring accuracy in the media are relatively effective ones Violence in the media: a closer look at pragmatic regulation - Perceived - Historical violence: representations of violence that invite self reflection and social consciousness - Ritualistic violence: representations of violence that are spectacular, gory, exaggerated, hyper-masculine, and adrenaline pumping - Hyper-real violence: representations of violence that are stylized and appeal to hyperrealism but are shorn of any critical reflexivity - Aggressor, victim, bystander, catharsis effects - Aggressor effect: exposure to media violence triggers arousal and promotes aggressive behaviour - Theory of disinhibition posits that the consumption of media violence undermines the social norms and sanctions against violence that individuals would otherwise abide by - Enculturation theory speculates that long term exposure to media violence constructs violence as the norm and thereby encourages aggressive behaviour
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Imitation maintains that some audiences will mimic the aggressive behaviour they observe in media Victim effect: people develop and experience a heightened fearfulness of violence George gerbner A process of mainstreaming in which they begin to view mediated images as accurate representations of reality Bystander effect: holds that media violence fosters increased callousness about or insensitivity toward violence directed at others Desensitization is the idea that repeated viewing of media violence leads to a reduction in emotional responses to violence and thus an increased acceptance of violence in real life Catharsis effect: the hypothesis that repeated exposure to representations of violence functions as an outlet for pent up aggressive drives in the individual V chip technology