Monday, August 10, 2009

On the other hand.......

Media consolidation and convergence enhance the capacity of the media serve as a guard to help hold down disagreements and criticism through lack of resourceful accesses within the media. However, it may not benefit a country that depends on a diversity of opinion from the media sources. The main reason is that the quality of democratic decision-making is closely linked to the quality of information provided by the media as the media serves two different roles, in terms of the media-forum and information provider. It is impossible to have the exact definition of “information provider” as every individual of the public has different needs and interpretations abilities based on the news contents. This shows that comprehensiveness will be the core element in such case and interpretation of issues from the public are of equally important as well in the ever-increasing complexity of political issues selectivity in the society. One way of reducing the complexity viewpoint of the political world will be biasness information given from the media as it will definitely lead to ongoing debate on a particular value preferences and beliefs among the public. Thus, information quality and the need for orientation are vital in a country on starting their new democracies, especially during the period of following the breakdown of the old ruling systems as people need information for their decision-making process and to reach a fair decision as well.

Therefore, McQuail had included ‘social order’ alongside ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ in his theory of media performance that these are the three basic communication values that are necessary to be implemented in a media organization and on the journalistic practice of a country. The debate topics between freedom and public interest can be expected to be the main conflict in a country with new democracies, deep social divisions, unfinished nation-building, making integration (McQuail, 1992).

These also bring up the possibilities on the changes of aggressive reporting on the practical effect of this consolidation and convergence within newsrooms, such as bringing in harder and more sensation questions and harsher criticism of the government and other elites in the news reporting. The reason is that the media is not just a mass medium for conveying messages to the public, they are also active participants in the creation of political messages and have significant impact on what is being communicated to the people of the public sphere as well. For Apple Daily, the editors and publishers viewed dramatization personalization and eye-catching business strategies and publications are examples of what journalists regards as the good sources in making of an interesting story to attract more readerships and also serve as chances to portray greater opinion from the public.

In conclusion, there is a distinctive bottom-up two asymmetrical flows of communications with feedback loops between the Apple Daily and its readers, whereby the readers provide feedbacks to the print media, and they accept these feedbacks and publish them to make known to the rest of general public. Thus, a credible public sphere was created through the online communication network adopted by the Apple Daily. However, the current status of Taiwan’s democracy still faces unknown challenges in the coming years even though significant changes had take place in the country before.

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