News And The Public Sphere

News and the Public Sphere MAC201

Jurgen Habermas and the public sphere

Testing the political public sphere

Levels of coverage

Newspaper discourse

News & political responsibility

To disseminate accurate information and political intelligence that is of general interest

To contribute to an informed political culture

1 - Jurgen Habermas

Internationally renowned philosopher and social scientist

The public sphere

The realm of our social life from which “public opinion” emerges

Public sphere

Civic space in which private citizens could meet to discuss matters of political importance

Work towards the formation of a collective opinion for the benefit of the citizenry

Conditions for the public sphere

Free from the influences of:

the market place

the state

the family

‘ bourgeois public sphere’

London coffee houses (mid-17th century)

Frequented by aristocrats and merchants

Forums for debate

Emergence of ‘public’ culture

Public sphere = public opinion

‘ the critical state of a democracy can be measured by taking the pulse of the life of its political public sphere’

(Habermas, 2004)

Now, we have a re-feudalised public sphere (i.e. left with the mass media and its power relations)

No independence - corrupted by:

Ownership and control of the media industry

Advertising revenues

Public relations and ‘spin culture’

The Media as Public Sphere

Nicholas Garnham (1992) “The media and the public sphere”, in C. Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere

The media should inform democratic decisions by helping ‘citizens learn about the world, debate their responses to it and reach informed decisions about what course of action to adopt’

(Dahlgren, 1991: 1)

2 - Testing the political public sphere

See Higgins, 2006 (on WebCT)

Debate surrounding the 1999 election to the newly formed devolved Scottish parliament.

Scottish press coverage vs UK coverage

All broadsheet newspapers or ‘quality’ titles (Bromley: 1998) from 3 day period: 5th-7th of May Scottish papers UK papers The Herald The Guardian The Scotsman The Independent The Press and Journal The Times

3 - Levels of coverage

Scottish papers = 84,160 words

UK papers = 19,246 words

‘ The Scottish papers therefore assume the greater role in the political public sphere around the election simply by offering substantially more coverage than the UK papers’

(Higgins, 2006: 29-30)

Distribution of words

4 - Newspaper discourse

4 types:

News

Feature coverage

Opinion

Editorial

Informative Evaluative

Types of News Coverage

Evaluative:

There is a greater emphasis on evaluation and comment when an issue falls within the remit of a public sphere

i.e. on matters in which the public should be informed, the press serves as a means by which important issues are highlighted.

2 types of coverage

Informative types

News to be factual

Feature articles go ‘beyond the reporting of facts to explain and/or entertain’ without being explicit in offering a judgement or opinion ( Hicks, 1998: 118).

Evaluative types

Offer overtly subjective appraisal of current events or issues

Heavy use of the personal pronouns ‘I’ and ‘we’ (Fowler, 1991: 64; Allan, 1999: 92

Word count by discourse type

The Scottish papers….

demonstrate a significantly greater quantity of election coverage

‘ present a pattern consistent with voter deliberation by providing the bulk of election material when it is able to inform democratic action’ (Higgins, 2006: 39)

attempt to engage via an emphasis on feature and opinion coverage whereby ‘the greater stress of informative material [comes] at a time where it can be used to substantiate voting decisions’ (ibid).

place their coverage in the most prominent parts of the paper.

Conclusion

Democratic society needs some kind of space in which the important issues of the day can be discussed so that the public can make informed decisions.

Cultural proximity impacts upon how information is presented to the public

Higgins suggests that the ‘public sphere’ that Habermas identifies is manifest in the civil institution of the press.

News as social and political agent?

Should we think of the business of news as reporting facts or seeking out and bringing us material we should know about?

Is it a role of the news to make us more socially and politically aware, or to distract and entertain us?

Can it do both? (Think of the role of news values.)

Points for discussion

In your judgement, is the media as a public sphere driven by consideration of:

Political and democratic responsibility on the part of the media institutions and journalists?

The need to appeal to a given audience?

Bibliography

Allan, S. (1999/2004) News culture. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Bell, A. (1991) The language of news media. Oxford: Blackwell.

Bromley, M. (1998) ‘The ‘tabloiding’ of Britain: ‘Quality’ newspapers in the 1990s’, in M. Bromley and H. Stephenson (eds) Sex, lies and democracy: the press and the public, pp. 25-38. London: Longman.

Dahlgren, P. (1991) ‘Introduction’, in P. Dahlgren and C. Sparks (eds) Communication and citizenship: journalism and the public sphere, pp. 1-24. London: Routledge.

Deacon, D., M. Pickering, P. Golding and G. Murdock (1999) Researching communications. London: Arnold.

Fowler, R. (1991) Language in the news: discourse and ideology in the press. London: Routledge.

Franklin, B. (1997) Newszak and news media. London: Arnold.

Franklin, B. (2004) Packaging politics, 2 nd edition. London: Arnold.

Galtung, J. and M. Ruge (1973) ‘Structuring and selecting news’, in S. Cohen and J. Young (eds) The manufacture of news: deviance, social problems and the media, pp. 62-72. London: Constable.

Garnham, N. (1992) ‘The media and the public sphere’, in C. Calhoun (ed) Habermas and the public sphere, pp. 359-376. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Habermas, J. (1989) The structural transformation of the public sphere. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Habermas, J. (2004) ‘Public space and political public sphere – the biographical roots of two motifs in my thought’, Commemorative Lecture, Kyoto, November 11.