La democratie et les medias au 20e siecle (review)

La démocratie et les médias au 20e siècle. By Catherine Bertho Lavenir. Paris: Armand Colin, 2000. Pp. 288.

It is too bad that Democracy and the Media is in French, because this very useful book will be inaccessible to those who most need it: historians of technology whose lack of language skills is matched by a provincial focus on national exceptionalism. The book's value rests in Catherine Bertho Lavenir's synthesis of the history of the media and political power in five Western nations over the course of the twentieth century. Her starting point is Harold Innis's observation that the media became powerful forces for historical change in Western nations during the world wars. Since 1914, technologies of communication have been central to the political life of western Europe and the United States. Struggle for control of the media has been a struggle over both the hardware of communication technologies and the messages they transmit.

During World War I, Western nations established institutional precedents for administration, regulation, and ownership of the media that carried over into peacetime. These arrangements varied from country to country, which helps explain differences that arose in how government, military, businesses, and independent groups in each country controlled the media for the rest of the century. The war also turned the press into a national and international institution with significant political clout. The influence of writers, reporters, editors, photographers, and graphic designers who provided the content and formats that made the media effective fluctuated with events, but continued to grow as their ability to engage the public's taste for spectacle increased.

Lavenir covers France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and the United States and examines newspapers, posters, film, radio, and television. Her narrative focuses on the signal importance that the media came to have in the conduct of domestic and foreign affairs, as governments, political parties, and interest groups sought to influence public attitudes and the public responded to these modes of psychosocial control. For example, wartime demand for information and information control turned filmmaking into a major industry and moving images into effective means of propagandizing.

The war stimulated interest in analyzing the physical characteristics of each technology to maximize its communicative properties. Results could be unpredictable. The German government's use of newspapers, posters, and films celebrating the enemy's weakness undermined the integrity of democracy when they lost the war, but official success in influencing public opinion inspired the Nazis to impose total control over these media while changing the message. In the United States, commercial interests benefited from the boost in demand for propaganda and public information, as well as entertainment generated by the war. Save for wartime, they were free to develop most media content from the 1920s on.

Historically, there has been a reciprocal relationship between significant political events and changes in the media. Radio is one example, and Lavenir shows how it was used and censored, and how it helped extend government policy in these five countries from the 1930s into the cold war, when the Voice of America and the BBC served foreign policy by broadcasting into Eastern Europe. The press has benefited from this relationship, particularly in the United States after 1945, with the advent of broadcast television. As Western nations sought to use the media to rebuild their societies, European countries with strong socialist parties opted for nationalizing radio and television. In the United States commercial network television quickly emerged as a politically potent medium, independent of government. Lavenir ends with a question suggested by televised reporting of the Gulf War on CNN and the advent of commercial channels in Europe: have the media become a fourth political power in Western democracies?

This book is intended for classroom use at the college level. It is organized into three chronological sections with a list of questions at the back. Lavenir pairs countries to make comparisons and includes...