The Media: Less Powerful, But More Important   

The Power of News
By Michael Schudson
Harvard University Press

The Power of News
By Michael Schudson
Harvard University Press
272 pages; $29.95

Michael Schudson is a brilliant thinker and writer, and here he undertakes an extravagant intellectual feat: to argue that the media are less powerful than we think, yet more vital than we realize.

His central proposition is that the news media are less important as influences on public discourse than as carriers and containers framing that discourse. They constitute a form of culture or, as he defines it, "the language in which action is constituted rather than the cause that generates action."

Like the atmosphere, the media are a surrounding and essential presence, defining certain boundaries but causing, alone, very little.

In a series of essays, for example, he attacks what he calls our "telemythology," arguing that television did not turn Americans against the Vietnam War, that television did not singlehandedly bring down Richard Nixon during his 1960 presidential bid, and that Ronald Reagan did not succeed because of special skills as a Great Communicator.

Far from dominating our public and private thought, Schudson contends, the media have "fractional" power over the messages they carry. "There is little a television program or news story has ever done that produces as much direct, manifest, lacerating cruelty as parental acts, school policies and government agency regulations regularly inflict on people."

Yet, if the news media don't have the direct impact we suspect, Schudson maintains that they have paramount roles as the culture in which ideas grow and as keepers of the public agenda.

"The media, I think, are more important, not less important, than popular opinion would have it, but rarely in the ways that popular views assume. The media organize not just information but audiences. They legitimize not just events and the sources that report them but readers and views. Their capacity to publicly include is perhaps their most important feature."

If this seems elliptical, it's because ellipticism is a Schudson specialty. While he has the gift of elegant expression, he also tends to present adroit formulations that, read twice, seem more like circular descriptions than dialectics that push logic forward.

In part, this problem derives from the nature of the book. It consists of a succinct, original introduction, followed by a series of previously published essays. All are thoughtful and relevant. But, written at different times and for different purposes, they don't really build in a linear way to an overriding conclusion.

Still, Schudson raises intriguing issues. Especially so is a strain that runs throughout the book: the problem of media self-absorption. Schudson points out that while the media seem preoccupied with how much power and influence they have, hardly anyone else cares. For example, he writes, "I have reviewed important recent thinking in political science and political theory about democracy. None of it focuses on the media; little of it pays even slight attention to the press."

He also cites the common notion that an "active citizenry" is giving way to indifference and alienation, a democratic lapse for which the media often blame themselves. But Schudson believes that "the first half-dozen reasons, in order of importance, have little to do with the news media."

I suspect other institutions are as self-reverential as the media. No doubt, political science should try to better understand the press. But by publicly exaggerating their influences and failures, journalists probably mislead the public and overlook important interconnections.

Schudson helps illuminate those connections. As a professor of communication and sociology at the University of California in San Diego, he draws effectively on both disciplines to transcend narrow, intra-genre criticism. Though the anthology format obscures his overall vision, his interest is in the big picture, and that gives power to "The Power of News."