Public Sphere And The Media Research Paper

In recent years, the public sphere perspective has become dominant in thinking about the media and their political role, by providing, in a return to the central questions of enlightenment political thought, a bridge between Marxist theories of ideology and the liberal ‘free press’ tradition. It provides a critique of Marxist theories of ideology by revalidating the specificity of the political, by giving due weight to the emancipatory potential of liberal bourgeois concepts of free assembly and debate, and by shifting attention from worker to citizen. On the other hand, it provides a critique of an abstract, property-based ‘free press’ model by stressing both the systemic social barriers to entry and the manipulative distortions to which its discourse is subject.

This return has focused on concepts of the public sphere, civil society, citizenship, and identity. It has in particular pitted those, such as Habermas, who see the emancipatory project of the enlightenment as unfinished business and wish, in a movement of immanent critique, to hold liberalism to its emancipatory ideals, against a range of communitarians and postmoderns. The latter, in the name of various versions of identity politics, see liberal, rights-based political theories as inherently repressive and their emancipatory and universalizing tendencies as bogus (Gray 1995).

The public sphere approach has provided, against the background of the turn away from Marxism associated with the collapse of ‘actual existing socialism,’ an alternative to theories of dominant ideology or hegemony as an explanation for the coincidence, within what used to be called ‘bourgeois democracies,’ of growing social inequality and political apathy on the one hand with the relative stability and increasingly consensual, nonideological nature of representative party politics on the other. Its emphasis on discursive practices and on communicative action as central to democratic practice and legitimization fitted well with the wider ‘linguistic turn’ in the human and social sciences. At the same time, its use of the spatial metaphor of sphere, and its stress on the necessary institutional foundations for the realization of those citizen rights to free expression and debate central to democratic theory, addressed the questions arising from both the perceived empirical reality in the mature democracies of an increasingly media-saturated, image-driven, public relations-oriented politics and the task of constructing democracy in both state and civil society in newly democratized countries with little or no historical traditions of democracy to call upon.

The concept of the public sphere was introduced into media analysis by Jurgen Habermas (1989) in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. In Habermas’s original formulation, the term was designed to describe a historical process whereby in the shift from premodern feudal, absolutist rule to forms of modern representative democracy public opinion, based upon publicly available information and debate, developed as both a check on, and as a source for the legitimacy of, government.

The public sphere was both a set of institutional spaces—newspapers, lecture halls, coffee houses, etc.—and a set of discursive rules. Drawing upon a Kantian heritage that links freedom to a personal autonomy grounded in the exercise of public reason, Habermas and his followers have stressed the role of the public sphere as a site within which the formation of public opinion, and the political will stemming from and legitimized by such opinion, is subject to the disciplines of a discourse, or communicative ethics, by which all views are subjected to the critical reasoning of others. At the same time, a democratically legitimate public sphere requires that access to it is open to both all citizens and all views equally, provided only that all participants are governed by the search for general agreement. This general model is then applied as a normative test against which the performance of contemporary media, in terms of political effects and democratic potential, can be judged in terms of either the critical rationality of their discourse or in terms of the range of views or speakers granted access.

The public sphere is added as a fourth sphere to Hegel’s tripartite division of society into family, civil society, and state. The public sphere is distinguished from the family, the sphere of intimate privacy, although it is the creation of this sphere, particularly under the influence of the literary public sphere that creates both the norms of noncoercive, literate, interpersonal discussion and the associated subjectivities that form the foundation of the public sphere. The public sphere is distinguished from civil society, and especially the market, where, following Hegel, citizens pursue their private interests, since although the private economy provided the resources for the public sphere, and citizens participated in the public sphere as private persons (i.e., access was not governed by socially conferred status or the possession of public office), the purpose of debate within the public sphere was common agreement on matters of general interest. On the other hand, it is distinguished from the state since it was there that citizens held the state to account and guided its actions.

Habermas then argued, following in part the general Frankfurt School argument of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, that there was a pervasive crisis of democratic legitimacy in the modern world because public spheres had been squeezed almost out of existence by both market and state. On the one hand, the market had increasingly come to dominate the institutions and practices of public communication through the commodification of information and opinion for sale on a mass consumer market and through the associated manipulative use of advertising. On the other hand, the state, ironically in response to political pressures from below, had become increasingly both economically interventionist and manipulative of public opinion. The result was a public opinion and related politics increasingly dominated by advertising and public relations, what Habermas termed the refeudalization of the public sphere—a shift back from a politics of rational, participatory debate to a politics of display.

The public sphere approach has been criticized on three main grounds. First that its procedural rules are too rationalist—that the persuasive use of rhetoric can never, and indeed should never, be excluded from political communication—and that to impose such discursive norms in practice excludes from the public sphere as illegitimate not just a range of culturally specific discursive forms but those who do not possess the cultural capital required to mobilize those discursive forms. Here we find the criticism that the model of procedural rationality being deployed is in fact a model of a certain intellectual practice and thus excludes, in a movement of symbolic violence, those who are not members of the social group who are the carriers of that practice, whether conceived as intellectuals or as the white male bourgeoisie, and that it leads to a privileging of certain genres of media. These rationalist assumptions may take news and overt political coverage to be ‘serious’ while taking entertainment-oriented programs to be a sign of ‘dumbing down’ or ‘refeudalization.’ This neglects the role that entertainment plays in the formation of publics and as a site for the development of an understanding of issues of public importance.

Second, the public sphere model of procedural rationality is criticized for drawing the distinction between public and private in such a way as to exclude both key groups of citizens, e.g., women, or key matters of potential public political concern, e.g., the regulation of domestic, intrafamilial, or sexual relations. It is in this sense that the famous slogan ‘the personal is political’ mounts a challenge to the way in which public sphere theory has drawn the distinction between the private and public spheres. And this in turn will affect the ways in which we think about the ethical issues relating to invasions of ‘privacy’ by the media and to what is or is not an appropriate matter for public discussion in the media.

Third, it is criticized on the grounds that it has valued general agreement around a set of universal values or norms, however rationally discursively arrived at, which, its critics argue, derive in turn from a liberal model of proceduralism, abstract individual rights, and ethical neutrality which prioritizes the just over the good and thus denies difference and thus the inevitability of perpetual normative conflict within modern societies. This in its turn, so critics argue, leads to an overcentralized model of the public sphere incompatible with the politics of identity in multicultural societies, whereas what is needed is a decentralized model of multiple public spheres expressive of each distinct collective identity, culture or form of life.

This debate concerning the proper relationship between social communication and politics can be traced back to the Enlightenment and the basic paradox that modernity posed; the paradox of what Kant called the ‘unsocial sociability’ of human beings. We might think of this as the inherent tension between liberty and fraternity. In essence, modern democracy is about how we handle the relationship between individual freedom and moral agency on the one hand and the necessary and unavoidable social norms and structures within which alone such freedom can be exercised on the other. As Rousseau put it in The Social Contract, ‘the problem is to find a form of association … in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.’

The political problem to which the public sphere tradition of analysis addresses itself is then two-sided and much of the problems with current uses of the term public sphere, and criticisms of it, derive from a confusion about which of the two sides of the dilemma are being addressed.

Here we are brought back to the Hegelian concern for Sittlichkeit and to critiques of Habermas’s public sphere approach from a communitarian and neoAristotelian perspective. Here the debate over the public sphere has to be seen as part of the wider debate between advocates and defenders of the theory and practice of rights-based liberalism and the various proponents of communitarianism and identity politics (Benhabib 1992, Guttman 1994).

The communitarian critique leads to the opposite solution to that of social contract theory and the liberalism based upon it. Now political values are social before they are individual. Politics is embedded in, and ideally expresses, a set of pre-existing social values, or a way of life, and the role and legitimacy of the state, or the public realm, is then to foster and uphold those communal values and defend that way of life. The citizens find their identity in, and give their loyalty to, not a set of abstract rights, but to a way of life, an ethos, that embodies a set of moral values. From this perspective liberalism, and the particular forms of democracy that it supports, is but one way of life among many possible alternatives. From this perspective, the role of the media is then to foster and defend this shared way of life, sometimes described, in the nationalist model of communitarianism, as national identity or culture, rather than to serve as a value neutral space for the critical rational debate over values.

The communitarian position on the public private divide, and the approaches to both politics and the media that stem from it, is in a sense contradictory. The core of identity politics is the call for the recognition in the public realm of values hitherto deemed private, both in the sense of being excluded from the public gaze and from public debate, but also in the sense of stemming from private group interests and identities rather than from a generally shared interest and identity, and thus for the acquisition of rights that recognition of these values as public entails, while at the same time drawing for its evaluative arguments upon a range of sources which must exclude the very concept of the public, and its liberal valuation of rights and the recognition and equal treatment of the diversity of private interests, that they are demanding.

Following Benhabib, we can distinguish between the integrationist and participatory versions of communitarianism. The integrationist strand seeks Sittlichkeit in an attempted return to the moral certainties and social unities of traditional societies. Here everything is in a sense public; the values that motivate people and give them their social anchorage are derived from and shape a whole shared way of life. In a theocracy there is no room for the individual or the private. Indeed, this strand in communitarianism criticizes the liberal tradition precisely for creating, and philosophically justifying as the highest good, social arrangements that separate political or public spheres of action and value on the one hand from private spheres of action and value on the other, to the impoverishment, in their view, of both (Macintyre 1998).

On the other hand, the participationist strand wishes to build its way out of the alienation and formalism of liberalism by both accepting the conditions of modernity which are liberalism’s starting point—namely post traditional societies and reflexive individuals— while at the same time arguing for a refounding of political communities on the universalization of the discourse ethic and its practices. The more postmodern end of communitarianism, which links to so-called new social movements and the politics of identity, makes this attempt by, in effect, advocating the fragmentation of societies into small-scale or specialized communities of interest or identity, each with its own public sphere. They tend to see more universalistic and unified definitions of the public sphere as repressive of difference and thus antidemocratic. What is at issue here is both whether within a polity we should be looking at one or multiple public spheres and how we think of the relation between public and private. An integrationist communitarianism and the politics of recognition that stems from it demand a unified public sphere and place continuous pressure on the existence of a meaningful private sphere. Its aim is a one- to-one fit between a unitary set of values, a single public sphere (if this term any longer has meaning here) and a single polity. If diverse communities exist within a single territory or polity, the aim becomes one of political and cultural fragmentation, not co-existence and the toleration of diversity. It is clearly incompatible with the exercise of public reason in the Kantian sense and with media practices and institutional forms in harmony with such an ideal.

The case of participatory communitarianism and the identity politics that stems from it is more complex. Here the problem arises from the ambivalence of the liberal value of tolerance vis-a-vis the public private divide. On the one hand toleration can be taken to mean the acceptance by public authorities of a range of practices and beliefs by defining them as private and outside the realm of public regulation, e.g., religious observance. Such toleration rests, as the communitarian critics rightly point out, on a prior judgement that the practice or belief in question is not in any sense a threat to the public weal or interest. This form of toleration can be rejected by certain advocates of the politics of recognition because, it is argued, it implicitly downgrades, and thus in some sense fails to recognize fully, the importance or centrality of the practice or beliefs in question. On the other hand, we can also understand toleration as giving public recognition to and bringing into the public realm people, practices, or beliefs to which by so doing we signal that we give equal value to those already so recognized and with which we are prepared to live and argue within a shared culture and polity. Thus we need to distinguish between two kinds of demands for recognition and for multiple public spheres. One set of demands seeks to extend the private, so that their group identities remain unthreatened by the risk of corrosion that participation in the critical discourse and compromise of the public sphere carries.

The second set demands a widening of the definition of what is public to let them into what remains a common arena for critical public debate and decision making with the acceptance of the duties and risks that such entry carries with it. In the former case, what is being demanded in the name of difference is the dissolution of any shared culture, polity, and set of rights and associated obligations. Here the question is how much of such private fragmentation can any society or polity sustain while remaining viable, and whether in fact we will only regard such demands as democratically legitimate where the group identity claimed is itself subject to the disciplines of the discourse ethic. In the latter case, the liberal polity is being asked, rightly, to live up to its ideals and to accept that those values that it considers central to its way of life must always be held provisionally and be subject to the review of critical discourse. Here we need to distinguish between a truly private realm, the irreducible site of individual autonomy, and the multiple public spheres within which we necessarily live and have our being, defined by Benhabib as any occasion or situation where people share views on matters of common interest, multiple public spheres that all contribute to the formation of our identities and which may be more or less democratic in the sense of meeting the requirements of the discourse ethic. The media, ranging from the small-scale, special-interest media of magazines, newsletters, Internet bulletin boards up to the space for public debate and exposure of views offered by the mainstream mass media, are integral to these multiple public spheres and should be judged in each case on the basis of the identities and practices that they foster. However, these multiple public spheres then need to be distinguished from the political public sphere where discussion is necessarily aimed at the common agreement necessary for concerted action within a unified polity. Research and debate within and around the public sphere perspective now focuses on three issues. The first is the institutional question of the relationship between the political public sphere and the nation-state. Both the actual institutional development of the modern mass media, the public sphere, and representative democracy, and thinking about them, have taken place within a nation-state framework. It is argued that current globalizing trends, both within society at large and within the media, are undermining this nation-state foundation of both democratic politics and its associated political public sphere. The question then is whether this is a process of cultural and discursive emancipation and the beginnings of the construction of a global public sphere or, on the contrary, is a further tightening of the screw of refeudalization which places the key centers of power outside the structures of democratic accountability and rational critical debate. On the one hand, the trends towards globalization within the media can be exaggerated. For reasons of audience taste and interest, most media output, and the organizations that provide it, remain obstinately linked to local, often national, markets, cultures, languages, and political structures. There are few examples of successful transnational newspapers or broadcasting news services. Even in the field of entertainment their spread is limited. This is itself, as the example of the European Union shows, a major barrier to the construction of a transnational public sphere. On the other hand, it can be argued that current developments on the World Wide Web, particularly its use for mobilization, debate, and advocacy by NGOs, are a welcome start in the construction of a global public sphere. The question here is how representative and how public these new Net-based interest groups and associated debates are. What certainly is the case is that the development of global media has begun to create a situation where nation-states, both within their own borders and in their inter-State relations, are having increasingly to take account of global public opinion (e.g., the cases of Tienanmen Square or the Balkans).

Second is the discursive question of how we can both analyze and normatively judge from the perspective of democracy the wide range of rhetorical forms used and identities appealed to within the range of modern media. Here the debate around the public sphere reprises an older debate about mass culture. The question at issue is whether current developments in media forms, genres, and their associated audiences/publics is a liberatory process of demassification and cultural pluralism on a global scale or, on the contrary, whether it is a process of ‘dumbing down’ which, in its appeals to irrationality and social fragmentation, undermines the rational/universalistic norms upon which citizenship, and thus democracy, rest. In the press, attention is focused on tabloidization, i.e., the stress on the scandalous and the sensational and the coverage of politics according to the norms of show business; in broadcasting on the shift in the balance of the programming mix in favor of entertainment at the expense of news, current affairs, and political coverage and debate, a shift associated, at least in Europe, with the retreat of public service broadcasting in the face of increasingly intense commercial competition for audiences and revenues. Analysis and debate have focused in particular on the spread of audience participation shows of the Jerry Springer type, of ‘docu-soaps’ and of a general soundbite coverage of politics and public issues. In this debate there are no easy answers. First, empirically the trends are by no means as clear cut as many critics claim. It is as easy to argue for a rise in standards. Second, it is all too easy to fall into familiar elitist or populist stances, neither of which take due account of the complexity, both actual and historical, of the construction of the identity of citizens or of the rhetorical problems of communicating with the generality of such citizens. There is also often a danger of stretching beyond breaking point the proper and necessary boundaries of politics and the public sphere.

Third, there is the question of the role of the mediators. Public sphere theory finds it difficult to break free from a participatory model of direct democracy. Representation always introduces a potentially distorting element into the communication process between the private citizen and political whole. The public sphere is conceived as a structure for the aggregation of the opinions of individual private citizens through a public debate to which all have equal access. The ideal model is the Athenian agora. The scale, social complexity, and specialization of the modern world make such a model unrealistic. It has clearly never fitted the actual forms and practices of the mass media. It therefore leads to unrealistic demands being made upon them and to an excessively dismissive critique when these demands are not met. It has in particular led to exaggerated claims being made for the democratic potential of the Internet on the grounds precisely that cyberspace is a new agora without mediators or mediation. The challenge, therefore, is to think of a legitimate role for mediators within the public sphere—for journalists, TV producers, bulletin board moderators, etc.—which is neither one of pure transparent ‘objective’ mediation nor one of the mere pursuit of instrumental professional or economic self-interest. This in its turn links to the wider question of the social and political role of intellectuals and experts within modern democratic polities.

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