Social Capital and the News Media

Abstract

Many writers have long emphasized the importance of civic society and voluntary associations as vital to the lifeblood of democracy. Interest in this perennial topic has been revived by Putnam’s theory of social capital, which claims that rich and dense associational networks facilitate the underlying conditions of interpersonal trust, tolerance, and cooperation, providing the social foundations for a vibrant democracy. Groups and new social movements have traditionally been regarded as agencies for expressing and aggregating interests. But what is most striking about modern theories of civic society is the claim that typical face-to-face deliberative activities and horizontal collaboration within voluntary associations far removed from the political sphere, such as sports clubs, agricultural cooperatives,or philanthropic groups, promote interpersonal trust, fostering the capacity to work together in the future, creating the bonds of social life that are the basis for civil society and democracy. Organized groups not only achieve certain instrumental goals, it is claimed, but in the process of doing so they also create the conditions for further collaboration, or social capital. For Putnam (2000), social capital is defined as “connections among individuals—social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them” (p. 19). Most important, this is therefore understood as both a structural phenomenon (social networks) and a cultural phenomenon (social norms). But what is the relationship between social capital and the news media? In particular, in Bowling Alone, Putnam (2000) presented the most extensive battery of evidence that civic society in general, and social capital in particular,has suffered substantial erosion in the postwar years in America. Putnam considered multiple causes that may have contributed toward this development, such as the pressures of time and money. But it is changes in technology and the media, particularly the rise of television entertainment as America’s main source of leisure activity, that Putnam fingered as the major culprit responsible for the erosion of