As audiences, we expect media to keep us connected, informed, and amused. Modern media users also demand immediate access, portability, entertainment value, interactivity, responsiveness, and reliability. We approach media as consumers, often forgetting that our attention is the most valuable commodity in the media market.

Audiences also sometimes forget that we are more than consumers; we are also citizens. Media – news media, in particular – have historically been recognized as a central institution in any robust democracy. Serving audiences as citizens is different than serving them as consumers, and the former function is undoubtedly less profitable than the latter one. However, it is important to know what the democratic function of mass media should look like. This section begins with an overview of an important concept in political communication: the public sphere, an idealized space in which citizens are able to discuss topics and problems of common interest in order to influence political action. While this model is imperfect, it influenced modern understanding about the role of communication in democracy, which has evolved to see the press as the major locus of democratic discourse.

Habermas & the “Public Sphere”

Jürgen Habermas first articulated his idea of a “public sphere” (German: öffentlichkeit) in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962, translated to English in 1989). Describing the öffentlichkeit as “a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed,” and into which “[a]ccess is guaranteed to all citizens,” Habermas established a conceptual ideal space where all citizens would be able to gather and discuss matters of common interest in an “unrestricted fashion” (Habermas, 1974, p. 49). While theoretically innocuous, such a space has never existed in practice because a truly equitable society has not yet been established.

To understand the utility of the Habermasian public sphere model, as well as the common critiques against it, a general understanding of how the model works is helpful. The public sphere is seen as a domain of social life where public opinion can be formed, and it is constituted in every conversation in which individuals come together to form a public. (Habermas, 1991, 398). Habermas saw several necessary conditions for the public sphere to function in a way that meaningfully serves a wide section of a population. First, it needs to be open to all citizens, who assemble freely to express their opinions in public discussions. In this realm they are not acting as or on behalf of a business or any private interests, but rather as an individual who is dealing with common matters of general interest.

Because potential topics of discussion are numerous, the public sphere may be divided into smaller and more cohesive conversations which focus on specific issues. A political public sphere holds public discourse about topics connected to governing and political practice. For example, an environmental or “green” public sphere offers space for citizens to discuss the interests of a range of stakeholders – from activists and experts to corporate interests and elected officials – as individuals. In this space they would be able to share their concerns about environmental issues and to express demands about the crafting or enforcement of relevant regulations (Pezzullo & Cox, 2018). This exemplifies Habermas’s second condition for a functional public sphere: as a realm in which public opinion is formed, it mediates between the state and society.

The Habermasian model of a public sphere holds a normative claim. That is, he describes a space which can only exist in an ideal democratic state, where equal participation and consideration are available to everyone. This condition is a difficult one to fill for many reasons, but primarily because civil rights and political representation have not yet been guaranteed to all citizens in any democracy (i.e. regardless of gender, sexual orientation, ability, race or ethnicity, economic class, education, etc.). Therefore, critics of Habermas’s model have offered several alternatives. The most well-known of these was articulated by feminist scholar Nancy Fraser, who pointed out that it is often difficult – if not impossible – to separate matters of public and private concern, especially for historically marginalized groups. She suggested that such groups in practice formed their own spaces, which she called subaltern counter publics (Fraser, 1992).

Whether an idealized public sphere is possible – or even desirable – has become a rather moot point as nations and populations grew too large for face-to-face communication. Certainly there is utility in single-issue publics and in counter publics, but interpersonal conversations about “matters of common interest” are no longer sufficient to transmit the concerns of citizens directly to their elected officials. Over time, we in some ways shifted our understanding about political discourse to include mass media (specifically news media, or “the press”). But how does the press fit into American democracy, and how should we expect media to serve us as citizens?

Media and Democracy

One key tenet of most modern democratic societies is the separation of government powers into independent branches. In the United States, there are three such branches: a legislature that makes the laws (the legislative branch is further divided into two Congressional bodies, the House of Representatives and the Senate); a judiciary that interprets and applies the law; and an executive that carries out the administration and operations of governing (centered around a Chief Executive – the president – who is surrounded by a group of agencies that support him in the implementation and oversight of public policies).

In the United States, the operation of democracy is also affected by powerful businesses through political donations and lobbying. In 2010, the Supreme Court’s (5-4) Citizens United v. FEC ruling removed constraints on corporate political spending, further amplifying the voice of business in democratic debate. And according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the communication and electronics corporate sector, comprised of internet and telecom service providers, printing and publishing firms, and media content producers, spent over $110 million dollars in 2020 hiring advocates to urge elected officials to support or reject specific legislation.

As the populations of the global democratic powers grew larger, participation in democracy required the dissemination of knowledge to a more diverse and geographically vast citizenry. Mass media developed to meet this requirement, first in the form of print newspapers, followed by radio and television, and the Internet. Ideally, media should act as citizen resources, “provid[ing] citizens with what they need to be active participants in social and political life” (Croteau & Hoynes, 2005, p. 29). To achieve this ideal, two things should be expected of news media: distribute reliable information to as much of the population as possible, and serve as a watchdog to help root out corruption among those in power.

To meet the first expectation, the media should play a basic role as a provider of information that is necessary for rational democratic debate. This idea is so important to the character of our democracy that the people’s right to free press, unencumbered by government censorship, is protected in the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States. A healthy representative democracy is predicated on the electorate (all eligible voters) making informed choices; this in turn rests on the quality and veracity of information that they receive.

The second expectation – that the press should act as a “watchdog,” alerting the public to abuses of power – rests primarily on news media and journalists who monitor the functioning of democracy by exposing excesses and corruption, and holding those in power accountable. Because of this role, the news media have historically been regarded as the fourth estate, supplementing the three branches of government by providing additional checks and balances.

The media, as an American institution, once served as a primary credible source of news and information for U.S. citizens, but many factors (aggressive criticism from the Trump administration, the proliferation of unreliable online news outlets, a tendency to lean on sensationalism to attract audiences in difficult economic times) have recently undercut the trust and respect afforded to them by the American public. Furthermore, as the corporate sector’s power in the democratic process has grown, the watchdog function of the media has been complicated by their own corporate structure.

References

Center for Responsive Politics. (2020). Ranked Sectors. https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/ranked-sectors

Fraser, Nancy (1990), “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy”, Social Text, 25 (26): 56–80, doi:10.2307/466240,

Habermas, J., Lennox, S., & Lennox, F. (1974). The public sphere: An encyclopedia article (1964). New German Critique, 3, 49-55. DOI: 10.2307/487737

Habermas, J.(1991): “The public sphere” In Mukerji, C.; Schudson, M.(Ed.): Rethinking popular culture. Contemporary perspectives in cultural studies. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press. pp.398-404.

Pezzullo, P., & Cox, R. (2018). Environmental communication and the public sphere (5th edition). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.