Market-oriented Journalism

While CPEC provides a solid base for the macro-level analysis, it is inadequate to explain the impact of global capitalism at the micro-level of journalistic production. Michael Schudson (2000) argues that a political economy approach can work well to explain sociology of news production and its institutional circuit (p. 177). Yet the

discursive realm of journalism needs an anchor to explain its production processes. To complement this analysis, the study engages the critiques of Market-oriented

Journalism, primarily building on the works by James Curran and John H. McManus.

James Curran explains how neoliberal globalization encourages media to expand as ‘increasingly big business’ (Curran, 2002, p. 149), and it stimulates ‘market-oriented

journalism (also, similar to market-driven journalism) emerged as a macro-

socioeconomic trend since the 1980s that attracted critical investigation from theoretical, quantitative, qualitative, and even from semiotic perspectives. While there is a presence of both market-oriented and market-driven journalism in Bangladesh, there is some difference between these two theoretical constructs. For example, Randal Beam (2003) offers a liberal view on market-oriented journalism that differs from John McManus’ (2005) critical view on market-driven journalism. However, researchers have also used these two constructs interchangeably (see Curran, Iyengar, Lund, & Salovaara- Moring, 2009). From the perspective of media in Bangladesh, the difference between market- oriented and market-driven journalism is marginal in the case of television journalism because these trends are still emerging and being subsumed by the political affiliation of the media owners and advertiser relations, defined as a ‘politico-commercial nexus’.

In an era of neoliberal globalization, the potential public role of television news has been increasingly challenged on grounds of economic rationalization and the commercialization of news. Thus, in most parts of the world, the news media have become more market-driven and entertainment-centered (Curran et al., 2009; McManus, 2005; Underwood, 1993). Market orientation, which is the key principle for market-driven journalism, is considered to be one of the principal dimensions of journalism culture everywhere (Hanitzsch, 2007). In the liberal view, market orientation calls for more efficiency and professionalism in journalism; as Randal Beam defines it, “a market- oriented organization assumes that its long-run success depends upon identifying the customers that it wants to serve, determining what those customers want with respect to the organization’s products, and developing a coordinated program to meet those customers’ wants and needs” (Beam, 1998, p. 4). In theoretical neoclassical economics, market oriented journalism gives people what they want. However, there is a difference between how market-orientation works in theory and how it is exercised in practice. In practice it encourages more commodification of news as a substitute to standardizing journalism. In practice, this type of journalism problematizes media’s democratic potentials in two major ways:

First, it considers the target audience as consumers instead of citizens

McManus, 2005, p. 224). As a result, news organizations compete ‘to offer the least expensive mix of content that protects the interests of sponsors and investors while garnering the largest audience advertisers will pay to reach’ (McManus, 1994, p. 85). This study, especially chapter 5, carries forward this critical view of market-orientation.

Second, consumers can only value what they are offered. Media markets may ‘give the people what they want’ but will do so strictly within the limited range of offerings that can generate the greatest profits (McChesney, 2004, p. 199). More importantly, media can manipulate public preference, and promote alternative tastes (McManus, 2005). Chapter 5 shows that such manipulation is visible in Bangladesh in the practice of branding news items with names and logos of a sponsor/branding corporation or its product. An actual example is, if there is a news item on Channel i television that BATA Shoes is giving a 1 per cent discount on every purchase you make, it would be news not because the audiences (or let’s say “customers”, in Beam’s view) want to hear it or they need to hear it, but precisely because the Sales and Marketing Department of Channel i specifically asked the newsroom to send a camera man to cover BATA Shoes’ product promotion as news. It would also be news because BATA is a premium advertiser that

Channel i cannot afford to lose.

Chapter 5 demonstrates that the market-orientation of television journalism in Bangladesh is corrupt, and that this has unmistakable consequences on television news production and for the democratization of public spheres as it makes the subaltern counter publics invisible. The notions of public sphere and subaltern counter publics are significant to understand the relationship between television, state, and the prospects of media democratization. While I refer to the Habermasian “public sphere,”21 _{I depart from}

its Eurocentric orientation.22 _{Instead of advocating for a nation-state centric single and}

unitary composition of public sphere, this study assumes a plural conception of public spheres, which are comprised of multiple publics with contending views and resultant

21 _{In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989) Jurgen Habermas traces the} genealogy of public use of reason and charts the emergence of a “new space for opinion-making”. Habermas argues that a variety of social changes in early modern Europe (Germany, France, and Britain) gave rise to bourgeoise public sphere. In salons and coffee houses, private people like merchant capitalists, bureaucrats and intellectuals left behind the status of their wealth, authority and private connections to “come together as public” to discuss serious political issues (p.27). 22 _{Gunaratne (2006) argues that the Habermasian public sphere, along with his theories of civil} society and rationality suffers from the weakness of ‘Eurocentricism’ leaning solely on the

unfolding struggles at the macro level of national politics as well within the micro level of journalistic productions. In line with Fraser (1992) 23 _{and Zhao (2008a),}24 _{I acknowledge}

the exclusionary and class-dominated nature of the “bourgeois public sphere” and its potentially antagonistic relationship with “subaltern counterpublics”. Subaltern

counterpublics is defined as the formation of counter-discursive ideas, opinions, and identities that exist and develop in parallel to hegemonic and class-dominated public spheres and “where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (Fraser, 1992, p. 123). Fraser warns that not all counterpublics are virtuous, on the contrary, some of them can be explicitly anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian. This critique is pertinent to the contradictions between counterpublics in Bangladesh. 25

As discussed earlier, Bangladesh still carries a postcolonial split-identity between a pre-partition Bengali identity and a post-liberation Bangladeshi identity, which continue to shape the nature of party politics, cultural politics, as well as the politics of media representation in contemporary Bangladesh. This dissertation presents television as a mediator of cultural politics in its projection of a national public sphere—which is class- biased, male-dominated, urban-centric and driven by a hegemonic market-oriented ideology—marginalizing any contending voices against excessive commercialization, displacement of rural population, extraction and environmental pollution, and industrial labor exploitation embedded in neoliberal economic growth. I argue that television at large in Bangladesh has failed to accommodate any subaltern counterpublics, especially, leftist and progressive discourses.

23 _{Fraser coins the term from Gayatri Spivak’s “subaltern” and Rita Felski’s “counterpublic”, arguing} that counterpublics are formed as a response to the exclusions of the dominant publics and that their existence better promotes the ideal of participatory parity under systemic social inequalities. 24 _{In Chinese context, the supposed “national bourgeoisie” is continuously challenged with a variety} of “counter-bourgeois publics” including peasants, workers, women, ethnic groups, nationalists, as well as socialists and communists (Zhao, 2008, p. 13-14).

25 _{In the context of Bangladesh, some of the counterpublics can be quite contradictory and} disruptive to democratic norms. An example of such contradiction is the rise of a new wave of Islamists groups in Bangladesh in this decade, named Hefajat-e-Islam, who uses mass support of the rural and sub-urban population to demand Shariah Law and Islamist Blasphemy law in Bangladesh. Although the moderate Awami League-led government is against implementing