Media Sovereignty

Are media today able to maintain their autonomy and independence and contribute to the public sphere, functioning as the Fourth Estate. In the United Kingdom, it was traditionally held that the business of government was carried out by three estates consisting of the Lord's Spiritual (the clergy), the Lord's Temporal (hereditary peers and nobility), and the House of Commons (consisting of the representatives of citizens); the press or journalism was described as the Fourth Estate, with the specific task of monitoring the government and making it accountable—hence, its watchdog function. Theories of media sovereignty deal with the degree to which the media are autonomous and independent in light of government interference, commercial requirements, antiterrorism legislation, and the demands of foreign policy. The gagging of media coverage of the war in Iraq through the institutionalization of embedded journalism and other means illustrates the point.

The concept of sovereignty per se derives from attempts by historians and political scientists to understand the basis of state formation. This basis is often traced back to the Peace of Westphalia (1648) that legitimized the sovereignty of a number of states in Europe after the 30 Years War and specifically legitimized a state's claim to its territorial boundaries and to its authority to rule, claim allegiance, and exercise authority within that territory. This meaning of sovereignty has been contested by the rise of supranational states such as the European Union, multilateral trade and governance institutions such as the World Trade Organization, and entities that are part of the UN system that have increasingly whittled away at state sovereignty.

But can sovereignty be used to describe the state of the media given that media, irrespective of their type, exercise at best power over consumers rather than citizens? One can argue that the media, unlike the state, have at best experienced relative sovereignty, given that state, public, and commercial media have had to compete for audience allegiances and have been restrained by a variety of domestic and international legislations. Although the doctrine of the free flow of information certainly contributed to the globalization of information and media and strengthened the influence of global media cartels, the sovereignty of these organizations derived from the political support that they received from colonial and postcolonial governments, erstwhile and contemporary global hegemons such as the United Kingdom and the United States. The primary issue, then, of media sovereignty is whether sovereignty derived from discourses relating to the state can be applied to an understanding of the media. Should the concept of sovereignty derived from discourses related to the state and used to make sense of the power of the state to maintain its borders, territory, and integrity as a nation be used to understand the role of the media that is primarily one of supporting and extending the public sphere?

Second, there is the issue of whether sovereignty restricts understandings of the role of the media in society today and offers room for both authoritarian and regulatory justifications for media control. There is also the need to recognize the limits to media sovereignty in the light of media diversity, audience diversity, a proliferation of new media platforms, and multiple media roles in contemporary society. Third, there is a need to understand the complexity of media sovereignty in a context characterized by transnational media, increasing international trade in media products, the strengthening of global media governance, the accentuation of global information and communication flows, and in response to all this, varying attempts by nation states to both liberalize and protect domestic and international media markets and flows of information and communications. Furthermore, the satellite and cable revolution, the Internet, global networking, and the accentuation of global flows of information and communication have all contributed to a diminishing of the explanatory potential of the concept. The conceptual frameworks of media sovereignty overlap with and relate to media democracy, media imperialism, the political economy of communications, media ethics, and media identity, to name only a few.

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