This weekend I have been at St Antony’s College, Oxford, for a post-election workshop on democracy in Taiwan. My brief was the media, and among the political scientists and Washington hard-heads, I did my usual gesture at epistemological critique. We enjoyed “High Table” in the cafeteria … I mean, college dining hall, as well as St Antony’s very own range of undrinkable wines and sherry. The event was successful and enjoyable and concluded with a very pleasant dinner at a local Italian with academic luminaries and the sparkle of political celebrity in the form of Bi-khim Hsiao, “Taiwan’s Natasha Stott-Despoja“, who was literally and metaphorically on the road to recovery after the unimaginable physical and emotional demands of the presidential election campaign.* I finished the event off British style with an arduous journey back to London through a range of transport failures that took hours.

Here is approximately what I had to say at the conference.

The importance of the media in democracies has long been recognized by essayists, activists and theorists, from Thomas Carlyle to Jurgen Habermas to Samuel Huntington.

The media is part of democratic process, delimiting the power of states and empowering citizens by functioning to produce civil society or the public sphere by mediating between the state and the public.

In Lipsett’s early work, the media are a function of modernization or more properly modernity, which is a pre-condition of democratization – the theme of modernization or modernity is one which occurs again and again with respect to Taiwan, and even the title of this event – “consolidation” alludes to the temporality implicit in the notion of modernity.

Especially through Huntington, the media in Taiwan has been understood as part of a positivist explanatory mechanism of Taiwan’s democratization, what I have referred to an an equation of democratization, in which linguistic categories, like “media”, the “middle class”, the “economy” etc are lined up in logically causal relationships. So the emergence of a newspaper reading middle class in Taiwan through a booming economy in the post-WWII era is understood as a factor to have caused democratization.

In my own work I have been critical of this mode of social analysis. The objectification of socio-political life in this mode of political science implies a political and moral response to that life. Democracy was caused by the struggle by democracy activists, not objective social processes that do not demand a political engagement with that struggle by observers.

In the context of Taiwan, these views about the media present powerful and I would suggest over-determining narratives of Taiwan’s history, especially valorizing the date of 1949 and the start of the so-called “Taiwanese economic miracle” or the Tiger or Little Dragon narrative.

So when we talk about the role of the media in democracy in Taiwan we can be encoding some very strong narratives of history and history-writing which carry certain assumptions about the structure of Taiwan’s history, and the issues of who writes it and why.

These views about democratization and its causes, the role of the media, and the kinds of narratives and epistemologies that are the foundation of these ideas, have come in for some sustained criticism in recent years and it might be fair to say that the simple links between media, literacy, modernity, modernization, development and democracy are largely unsustainable nowadays.

In the last five to ten years, Taiwan’s transformation has come to be understood as very much over the whole 20th century, not merely over the post-WWII decades, in narratives which incorporate the different aspects of modernization under Japan and in the late Qing. Therefore, the links between media, literacy, economic development and so forth are harder to sustain.

Furthermore, the links between media and democracy in these forms of analysis incorporate too many normative definitions of what a “media” is (and indeed a democracy). The Habermassian ideal of the media as a public sphere of rational argumentation and critical discussion in the context of Taiwan becomes a powerful (and unsustainable) value judgement of the state of Taiwan society and the development of the Taiwanese as a people.

But these norms do take us forward into the criticisms of the Taiwanese media that have beset its democratic transition especially in the Chen era.

The key question is whether there is something “wrong” with the Taiwanese media which is preventing the full realization of democracy in Taiwan.

There are many ways we can come at these issues:

In the first instance, are the issues of the “rightness” or “wrongness” of Taiwan’s media.

Criticisms of Taiwan’s media are often around the question of biases or politicization and also its sensationalism – its lack of objectivity.

The Taiwanese media has been criticized for being wholly partisan, especially in the deeply divisive Chen era. The major newspapers are all identified as blue or green and their reporting has been accused of aligning with the political interests associated with each side. So the reporting of the so-called corruption scandals involving Chen Shui-bian and his wife, or the visit by Lien Chan to China to meet Hu Jintao in 2005, have been characterized by a split between the Blue and Green sides of the media that covers these stories very differently.

In this way, rather than reporting information and facts in an objective way, the Taiwanese media are understood as being either political actors themselves or functioning as mouthpieces for the Blues and Greens.

In that context, some of the features of Taiwan’s media can be understood as a failure of democratization and a failure of modernity. So the limits and failings of the Taiwanese media are part of a deeply self-critical socio-political discourse in Taiwan. These are predicated on certain assumptions about the way a media “should” be, which is found in an idealized West, which itself suggests a kind of Taiwan-centric alterity. The Taiwanese “other” themselves.

The problem of the bias or politicization, and also of sensationalism, of Taiwan’s news media assumes that there is a normative standard for democratic media in which the reporting is unbiased or more true, or expresses a greater commitment to truth and objectivity than Taiwan’s media.

This notion is at the heart of the notion of an idealized public sphere, one of “rational argumentation and critical discussion”.

This ideal media is the so-called Fourth Estate, which functions to freely criticize the sites of power – government and business – in order to protect or empower the people against the misuse of power. The media should be objective, reporting facts without bias or partisanship or emotion or in the interests of power.

Therefore, the Taiwanese are unable to draw “objective” apolitical knowledge from their media about their social, political and economic circumstances. They are unable to be rational and modern.

And perhaps, given the intense commercialization of media, one could argue that they do not want to be rational, but are driven by desire, emotion, a pursuit of sensation, rather than rational analysis.

This idealized understanding of the media can and indeed has been subjected to a wide-ranging critique in Western media studies over decades. It can be argued that the media produces ideology around notions like capitalism, patriarchy, ethnicity, etc. In Taiwan, the deep contestation of its politics simply makes the bias visible.

One could argue that in Taiwan it is simply that the divisiveness of the media makes the biases and politicization visible, whereas in more unified media we simply do not notice the biases.

The ideal media also functions on the basis of a crude notion of objective truth that has also been opened up for critique through post-structuralism and the linking of notions of truth with language, knowledge and power.

Furthermore, the norms of disinterested news media suggest a valorization of a certain kind of politics – rational, instrumental, objective, non-ideological, which might be hard to sustain as a credible basis for real politics, especially in Taiwan, where the very nature of the key political problems are in the realm of ideology i.e. the identity issue. An appeal to objective and disinterested media would produce an inadequate media for Taiwan’s political circumstances.

Therefore, the notion that Taiwan’s media fails to live up to an ideal, and that therefore its democracy is wanting can be argued against when the media has long been understood not to adhere to its own ideals.

Nevertheless, the well-known frustration that the Taiwanese electorate have for their media does point to a real issue, one that suggests a challenge to the legitimacy of Taiwan’s democratic system.

One way to explore what precisely the problem is is through the notion of the media as a mechanism for self-representation in Taiwan, as a mechanism through which the Taiwanese know themselves as Taiwanese.

We can recognize that the media are only one site of power within Taiwan and suggest disconnections between socio-political knowledge and politics – disconnections between how people know about themselves and their politics and whether and how that knowledge is expressed in the media.

Therefore, in a media in which notions of truth or meaningful representation are hard to sustain, the Taiwanese suffer from what, in other work of mine, I have referred to as Taiwan’s crisis of representation. The structural problems of the Taiwanese media make it hard to the Taiwanese to know themselves in it.

A dimension to this is the prevalence of opinion over reporting. The political talk-shows and opinion columns suggest a very politically-aware electorate but one in which the public sphere generated by the media, supposedly a site of rational and instrumental debate about the nation’s issues, has become instead a confused discursive space in which the truth of any assertion is impossible to determine because of the competing claims on legitimacy over knowledge.

For example, political opinion is expressed as objective opinion, and legitimized by academic credentials. There is a complex contestation going on in Taiwan over the legitimization of knowledge.

Another dimension might be the intense commercialization of Taiwan’s media, in which sensationalism becomes the currency of media truths, or similarly the ownership of Taiwan’s media, so that views and information conveyed by certain media is undermined by its links to political and state institutions.

Again, it has to be said that this might not be unique to Taiwan. The rise of cable news in the US shows a similar drift towards news as commentary and a failure to be able to determine what the truth might look like when it is presented in the media. Indeed, it has been said the the comedy news programs, such as The Daily Show, are where a kind of truth can now be found.

Another aspect might be the currency of “rumours”, which are extra-media forms of social and political knowledge, operating in parallel to the news media, and ones which are hard to quantify, control, and are operating without much in the way of institutional regulation, or legitimizing practices, unlike other sites of socio-political knowledge like academia, politics, the media.

In Taiwan this means layers of social and political meaning in which tacit knowledge emerges to fill the gaps left by public knowledge in the media.

This points to a certain form continuity between the martial law and democratic periods: the best example is the exhortations to fight communism and recover the mainland that featured as ritual acts of subjection before the power of the KMT party-state under martial law.

So there is a crisis of representation in the media which is what drives the level of anxiety that the Taiwanese have towards politics and civil society, but that crisis does not express and enact authoritarianism as it did in the martial law period.

The media is perhaps just as politicized, but is now pluralistic and deregulated, and yet still fails to represent a Taiwanese social life with which the Taiwanese people can identify.

The current state of the media suggests that the transformation of Taiwan is indeed profound and complete, but that the media continues to exhibit a different kind of representational crisis. The Taiwanese do not know themselves in their own media as a coherent national people and this creates an on-going sense of disquiet and unease about their politics.