Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND DEMOCRACY
presentation of a ‘war almost without death’ (Knightley, 1991, p. 5). It has to be
said that the ‘perception management’ of the Kosovan War, waged in the spring
of 1999, was by no means so successful. The NATO allies were too divided, the
conflict continued too long, and many journalists were too sceptical to present
a straightforward snow job. Perhaps most important, there were information
sources within Serbia, notably Western journalists (estimates were that there
were over 2,000 journalists in the war zone), and e-mail reports from within the
nation which countered the propaganda machine. Nonetheless, the weight of
reporting remained favourable to the Western point of view.
During the Afghanistan campaign of 2001, and even more during the
Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, media management was a priority of
the military and its political directors. However, success in this was not easily
achieved, the plethora of alternative news sources and the sheer volume of
reportage, combined with lightweight communications technologies and the
availability of the Internet, made it difficult for the military to ensure passage of
its preferred messages (Tumber and Webster, 2006). However assiduously
prepared are the military plans, the information environment in most conflict
zones nowadays makes it extremely difficult for them to be effected with total
success, something we discuss further in the following chapter.
The threat of war and insurgency is not an exceptional condition of liberal
democracy, but rather it is a routine feature. Because of this, preparedness for
such circumstances is characteristic of our age, a key consideration of which is
public opinion since this can be crucial in the success or failure of any conflict.
This preparedness necessarily results in systematically distorted information,
information dissemination not to provide knowledge but to advance the interests
of military combatants and politicians. As such it joins with broader patterns of
information management to denude the public sphere, thereby to narrow the
range of public discussion and debate, even if its goals are difficult to fulfil.
Objections
The foregoing has described an apparently inexorable spread of information
management by politicians, government and business interests. When added to
the well-documented pressures operating on public service institutions, it might
appear that there is strong reason to concur with Habermas’s pessimism: the
public sphere is being denuded by professionalised ‘opinion management’ and
the partisan forces of commercialism. However, attempts to cast all of this in
terms of the public sphere concept encounter several objections. The first
concerns the point of comparison from which one contends there has been a
decline. If our starting point is the 1880s, then we must surely arrive at different
assessments were we to begin with 1980. Moreover, casting a backward glance
over virtually anything but a generation or two, initially at least it does seem odd,
even bizarre, to suggest that a public sphere in, say, the late nineteenth century
could be somehow superior to the situation pertaining today, since then the
majority were disenfranchised and huge numbers even lacked the literacy to be
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