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There is considerable debate surrounding how media ought to be regulated. While some critics argue that government and other large state agencies have a role to play in maintaining standards, others argue that a self-regulatory model is more appropriate.
Currently, the Canadian media is subject to a variety of governmental rules and regulations to ensure that standards are met. This “co-regulation” model depends upon establishing a dialogue between government agencies, which in democratic societies are meant to adjudicate whether media content is “appropriate”.
The problem with this approach is that it is often very costly to enforce any decision made about content. In Canada, the controversy concerning Howard Stern, a “shock jock” who, according to Gallagher (2001, p. 43) “deliberately provoked woman, ethnic minorities and French Canadians”, caused a public outcry when his show was aired on CRTC in 1999. MediaWatch, a government regulatory organization designed to legislate about public concern over controversial material decided to formally regulate the content of the show. The efficacy of co-regulation is disputable because the show continued to be aired anyway. Gallagher (2001, p. 43) suggests that “the arduous process demonstrates how unequally the odds are stacked in favor of commercial media interests.” However, what this points to is the idea that “commercial media interests” do not represent the consumer's desire for the product.
Howard Stern is popular for a variety of reasons. Some of these are related to the idea of press freedom itself. The deregulation of the media has created significant problems for Canadian companies who operate under co-regulation codes. In short, government organizations who try to determine the moral and ethical content of media are also driven by particular values that may not be relevant in the current media climate. Aside from the expense of intervention due to so-called “public outcries”, the efficacy of the approach is also limited by the emergence of other forms of media communication. The Internet, for example, gives commercial radio and television companies an opportunity to operate outside of the norms and conventions that ordinarily govern mass media.
One of the bonuses of self-regulation is that media companies integrate press standards and do not have to appeal to other government bodies. As Price (2002, p. 103) suggests, self-regulation has “come to mean an approach to centralized standard setting within the corporations that produce or transmit program content.” Given that the internet has the capacity to offer corporations the ability to transmit information without any regard for ordinary governmental forms of press regulation, the argument for self-regulation among the media becomes persuasive. In essence, self-regulation is a more appropriate form of regulation in the modern world. While it may have been more appropriate to regulate the press through the use of state institutions in the past, the advent of new media and modern technology has made that process more cumbersome.
In addition, self-regulation is also more adaptive to changes across cultures. The decision made to prevent Howard Stern broadcasting his radio show in Canada does not appear to have salience across other cultures. As a result, government intervention appears arbitrary and based upon the whims of a few complainants.
Arguably, self-regulatory actions “can be a move to transcend sectarian differences” (Price 2002, p. 103). This is especially true in the case of the internet, where self-regulation has the important role of “substituting for government the administration of standards by large transnational corporations that have a stake in harmonizing and unifying standards across national boundaries” (Price 2002, p. 103). In other words, self-regulation allows news corporations to transcend the moral and ethical limitations of the nation state in order to promote a more transnational ideal.
Overall, self-regulation of the media is better than the alternative models of press regulation because it provides an economical, effective alternative to state intervention without sacrificing media quality. Although there have been many critics of this approach, government intervention fails to appreciate the diversity of modern media.
References
Gallagher, M. (2001). Gender Setting: New Agendas For Media Monitoring and Advocacy. London: Zed Books.
Haenens, L. D. and Saeys, F. (2007). Western Broadcast Models: Structure, Conduct and Performance. New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Price, M. E. (2002). Media and Sovereignty. Cambridge: MIT Press.
