For those concerned with the critical analysis of the media, and in particular with the central role played by various forms of communication in the development of modern societies, the most important parts of Jürgen Habermas’ vast output are those concerned with the public sphere, most notably The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and the eighth part of Between Facts and Norms. As Nicholas Garnham, one of the first to grasp the importance of the public sphere idea to a critical understanding of the seismic changes which began to shake the media landscape in the late twentieth century, put it shortly after the first book’s belated appearance in English: ‘its first virtue is to focus upon the indissoluble link between the institutions and practices of mass public communication and the institutions and practices of democratic politics’ (Garnham 1992: 360) and to draw attention to the fact that ‘the institutions and processes of public communication are themselves a central and integral part of the political structure and process’ (Garnham 1992: 361).
On the other hand, it has to be admitted that there are certain problems with the public sphere idea, particular in its earlier formulation. Firstly, it offers a traditional liberal view of the role played by the media in the development of the public sphere, but when it comes to their part in its ‘refeudalization’ it plunges into Frankfurt School pessimism about modern culture in general. Second, as James Curran has pointed out, Habermas ‘hovers uncertainly between a normative account (what it ought to have been like) and a descriptive account (what it was actually like)’ (Curran 1991: 53). Rather more harshly, although from a perspective which fully acknowledges the relevance of the public sphere idea to debates about the contemporary media, he also contends that the analysis ‘is based on contrasting a golden era that never existed with an equally misleading representation of present times as a dystopia’ (Curran 1991: 46).
Third, there are problems arising from the translation of terms from German traditions of political and social science into English. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is the translation of Strukturwandel der Őffentlichkeit, which was Habermas’ Habilitationschrift (the thesis for the post-doctoral qualification required of German professors).1 Habermas is not the most elegant or pellucid of writers, and the frequently clunky translation makes matters only worse. But a problem for any translator is that Őffentlichkeit can be rendered in several different ways, its most literal translation being ‘public-ness’, although its modern day German meaning is more or less equivalent to what English speakers call ‘the public’. In the English edition it is sometimes translated as ‘publicity’, which formerly referred to the process of making something public and open to view (as in the expression ‘the oxygen of publicity’) but which now, for the Anglo-Saxon reader, generally carries only distinctly misleading connotations of advertising. As John Durham Peters helpfully explains, ‘Őffentlichkeit can mean the political principle of openness or publicity, the means of public-ation (the media) and the sociological groupings which are the object of such publication (the body of citizens or readers)’, although in his view translating Őffentlichkeit as the ‘public sphere’ ‘helps us avoid thinking of “the public” too exclusively as a body of people; it usefully calls attention to the larger political and institutional requirements for such a “sphere”’ (Peters 1993: 543).2
In this chapter I will first summarize Habermas’s ideas on the role of the media in helping to bring into existence and then contributing to the ‘refeudalization’ of the public sphere as these are expressed in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, and to a far lesser extent in his contribution to Calhoun (1992). I will then examine the main criticisms of Habermas’s thesis before going on to show how he reformulated the public sphere idea, partly in response to these criticisms, in Between Facts and Norms. I will conclude by highlighting those aspects of both formulations which are most relevant to critiques of the role of the contemporary media in the era of so-called ‘de-regulation’, globalization, and the Internet.
Before attempting to summarize Habermas’s ideas on the public sphere and the media, however, I would like to suggest that the most productive way in which to conceptualize the public sphere is, as Garnham suggests, as an ‘Ideal Type against which we can judge existing social arrangements, and which we can attempt to embody in concrete institutions in the light of the reigning historical circumstances’ (Garnham 1990: 109).3
According to Habermas the lifespan of the public sphere extended from the seventeenth century through to the first half of the nineteenth century in Britain, France and Germany. Habermas’ explanation of its emergence is neatly summarized by John B. Thompson thus:
Between the realm of public authority, on the one hand, and the private realm of civil society and the intimate sphere, on the other, there emerged a new sphere of ‘the public’: a bourgeois public sphere which consisted of private individuals who had come together to debate among themselves and with state authorities concerning the regulation of civil society and the conduct of the state. The medium of this confrontation was significant and unprecedented: it was the public use of reason, as articulated by private individuals engaged in argument that is in principle open and unconstrained (Thompson 1990: 110–11).
Within this sphere, protected from the power of both Church and State, individuals came together not as equals but as if equals, with actually existing inequalities effectively bracketed off.
The development of early modern capitalism provided the conditions for the creation of liberal democracy. It brought into being a new class, the bourgeoisie, which effectively challenged the old feudal and absolutist order and which had both the time and resources to create a network of new institutions within civil society – newspapers, learned societies, publishing houses, libraries, universities, museums and so on. At the same time, education and literacy were spreading, critical reflection was being fostered by letters and novels, and debate and discussion were flowering in coffee houses and salons. From the aggregation of the personal opinions of private individuals engaged in all these forms of and opportunities for independent, rational-critical debate and discussion there evolved public opinion, not mere opinion, or, as today, the views of press pundits and editors posing as ‘public opinion’, but opinion which represented an ideal of communicative rationality. As Garnham emphasizes, what distinguishes this form of public opinion is that, ‘in the Enlightenment tradition, it obeyed the rules of rational discourse, political views and decisions being open not to the play of power, but to that of argument based upon evidence, and … its concern was not private interest but the public good’ (Garnham 1990: 107).
Critically important to this process was the emergence of a press relatively independent of the state, which provided the main medium through which private opinions were transformed into public opinion, and the principal means by which government was made aware of, and informally subject to, such opinion. Habermas calls the printed word the ‘decisive mark’ of the public sphere (Habermas 1989: 16) and the press its ‘preeminent institution’ (Habermas 1989: 181).
From the fourteenth century onwards, merchants had used letters to communicate information about commodity prices, and about distant events which could impact upon their business. Habermas describes this as ‘a kind of guild-based system of correspondence’ (Habermas 1989: 16) which evolved into newsletter form. It was merchants who organized the first mail routes for the purpose of exchanging this kind of information, and the great trade cities became at the same time centres for the traffic in news. However, a regular supply of news which one might call ‘public’, that is, widely accessible, came into existence only in the mid-seventeenth century, when the first journals, then known as ‘political journals’, appeared, at first weekly then daily. Their contents were news from abroad and the court, and items of more general interest gleaned from the merchants’ newsletters. But as Habermas explains, ‘the traffic in news developed not only in connection with the needs of commerce: the news itself became a commodity’ (Habermas 1989: 21). At the same time, however, the state authorities came to recognize the usefulness of these publications for the purposes of administration, such as promulgating instructions, decrees, proclamations and ordinances. As Habermas puts it, the unspecified addressees of these printed communications ‘genuinely became “the public” in the proper sense’ (Habermas 1989: 21), although in point of fact the readers were less the ‘common man’ than the ‘educated classes’, the new stratum of the bourgeoisie mentioned above. Habermas notes that in the early eighteenth century, journals had strong links to one or other of the major political parties, the Whigs and Tories, but he also argues that the founding of the Craftsman in 1726 and of the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731 marked the point at which ‘the press was for the first time established as a genuinely critical organ of a public engaged in critical political debate: as the fourth estate … From now on, the degree of the public sphere’s development was measured by the state of the confrontation between government and press, as it drew out over the entire century’ (Habermas 1989: 60).
By the ‘refeudalization’ of the public sphere, Habermas means to indicate the process whereby, in the second half of the nineteenth century, private institutions began increasingly to assume public power and to intervene in the political process, whilst at the same time the state progressively entered the private realm and took on ever greater responsibility for managing citizens’ welfare. State and society, once distinct, became interlocked, in a process which Habermas describes as ‘the socialization of the state’ and the ‘state-ification of society’ (Habermas 1992: 432). A new corporatist pattern of power relations was established in which private interest groups bargained with each other and with the state, while increasingly excluding the public. As Habermas himself puts it:
the process of the politically relevant exercise and equilibration of power now takes place directly between the private bureaucracies, special-interest associations, parties, and public administration. The public as such is included only sporadically in this circuit of power, and even then it is brought in only to contribute its acclamation (Habermas 1989: 176).
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the salons and coffee houses declined in significance, and the press was ever more enmeshed within large-scale commercial concerns. Newspapers became increasingly depoliticized, personalized and sensationalized; intent primarily on increasing sales, they treated their readers primarily as customers as opposed to citizens – customers both for news and of the products and services which were advertised in their pages in ever greater numbers. News material was served up as a ‘ready-made convenience, patterned and pre-digested’ (Habermas 1989: 169). What Habermas (following Wilbur Schramm and David Manning White) calls ‘delayed reward news’ (public affairs, social problems, economic matters, education and health) is increasingly displaced by ‘immediate reward news’ (stories about corruption, sport, recreation, social events and ‘human interest’), and ‘the rigorous distinction between fact and fiction is ever more frequently abandoned. News and reports and even editorial opinions are dressed up with all the accoutrements of entertainment literature’ (Habermas 1989: 170). Nor did matters improve with the arrival of the new, electronic media, especially broadcasting. To quote Habermas on this point:
When the laws of the market governing the sphere of commodity exchange and of social labour also pervaded the sphere reserved for private people as a public, rational-critical debate had a tendency to be replaced by consumption, and the web of public communication unravelled into acts of individuated reception, however uniform in mode (Habermas 1989: 161).
In Habermas’ view, ‘the world fashioned by the mass media is a public sphere in appearance only’ (Habermas 1989: 171). Thus the media ceased to be an agency of empowerment and rationality and became a further means by which the public was not simply sidelined but indeed manipulated and duped, not least by various forms of spectacle. Thompson has summarized Habermas’ analysis of this process particularly clearly:
What was once an exemplary forum of rational-critical debate becomes just another domain of cultural consumption, and the bourgeois public sphere collapses into a sham world of image creation and opinion management. Public life takes on a quasi-feudal character. Sophisticated new media techniques are employed to endow public authority with the kind of aura and prestige which was once bestowed on royal figures by the staged publicity of feudal courts. This ‘refeudalization of the public sphere’ turns politics into a managed show in which leaders and parties seek, from time to time, the acclamatory assent of a depoliticized population. The mass of the population is excluded from public discussion and decision-making processes and is treated as a managed resource from which political leaders can elicit, with the aid of media techniques, sufficient assent to legitimate their political programmes (Thompson 1995: 74).
In this respect, Habermas makes a distinction between, ‘critical publicity’ which ‘guaranteed the connection between rational-critical public debate and the legislative foundation of domination’, thus being one of the chief forms in which the exercise of power is legitimated before the public, and ‘manipulative publicity’ which is ‘generated from above, so to speak, in order to create an aura of good will for certain positions’ (Habermas 1989: 177–8). For Habermas, the epitome of manipulative publicity is public relations which, in his view ‘do not genuinely concern public opinion but opinion in the sense of reputation. The public sphere becomes the court before whose public prestige can be displayed – rather than in which public critical debate is carried on’ (Habermas 1989: 200–201). At work here, then, are two quite different conceptions of public opinion, a distinction already touched on in my earlier remarks about the contemporary press:
‘Public opinion’ takes on a different meaning depending on whether it is brought into play as a critical authority in connection with the normative mandate that the exercise of political and social power be subject to publicity or as the object to be moulded in connection with a staged display of, and manipulative propagation of, publicity in the service of persons and institutions, consumer goods, and programmes (Habermas 1989: 236).
Finally in this account of Habermas’s analysis of the role of the media in the refeudalization of the public sphere, it is important to note his argument that, in the changed conditions of late capitalism, the scope of ‘critical publicity’ must be ‘extended to institutions that until now have lived off the publicity of the other institutions rather than being themselves subject to the public’s supervision’, such as special-interest groups, corporations, the media, professional associations, and so on. As ‘societal power centres whose actions are oriented to the state – private organizations of society that exercise public functions within the political order’ (Habermas 1989: 209), their operations should be as open to scrutiny as those of the state itself. In an era in which, particularly in the UK, more and more functions previously carried out directly by the state, at either a national or local level, are being hived off and privatized, this is a topic of considerable contemporary relevance and resonance, to which I will return later.
The public sphere idea has been criticized on various counts – in particular on the ground that the public sphere was actually less than public, in that it excluded women and the working class. A variant of the latter critique accuses Habermas of downplaying the importance of the ‘plebeian public sphere’, seeing it as only a variant of the bourgeois public sphere, in which respect Curran takes him to task for dismissing the nineteenth century radical press in Britain as an ‘ideological pollutant’ (because it deviated from the principles of rational-critical debate) and for failing to understand the mainstream press in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as ‘engines of propaganda for the bourgeoisie rather than the embodiment of disinterested rationality’ (Curran 1991: 40). Nor, in respect of the early UK press as a component of the public sphere, should one forget the law of libel (which severely limited what could be reported), the ‘taxes on knowledge’ such as the stamp tax (which limited both publishers’ ability to produce and readers’ ability to buy newspapers), and the fact that until 1803 it was illegal to report parliamentary proceedings. Calhoun notes that Habermas’ account of the early public sphere,
doesn’t look at ‘penny dreadfuls’, lurid crime and scandal sheets and other less than rational-critical branches of the press or at the demagoguery of travelling orators, and glances only in passing at the relationship of crowds to political discourse. The result is perhaps an overestimation of the deregulation of the public sphere (Calhoun 1992: 33).
These points are well taken. It must also be admitted that Habermas’ account of the public sphere model is heavily logocentric, based as it is on early modern, small-scale print media and face-to-face discussion, making it difficult to apply in any straightforward way to complex modern societies in which so much communication takes place at a distance and is heavily mediated. As Thompson suggests:
Rather than comparing the mediated arena of the late twentieth century with a bygone age, we need to think again about what ‘publicness’ means in a world permeated by new forms of communication and information diffusion, where individuals are able to interact with others and observe persons and events without ever encountering them in the same spatial-temporal locale (Thompson 1995: 75).
It is of course true that in modern politics, stage management, image cultivation, spin and the creation of pseudo-events play an increasingly important role. However, it would be a serious mistake to argue that just because people are frequently treated as passive consumers of images, and as dupes to be lulled and manipulated by the media into unthinking acquiescence of the status quo, then that is what they actually are. There is also a qualitative difference between the forms which modern spectacle takes and the theatrical practices of the feudal courts, the former, unlike the latter, being heavily mediated and addressed to audiences which are spatially and temporarily dispersed. Admittedly the makers of such spectacles can reach far more people than their medieval predecessors could ever have dreamed of, thus greatly increasing the visibility of political figures, but this also increases those figures’ vulnerability, since they cannot entirely control the way in which their all-important image is read by spectators.
Moreover these are spectators who, unlike their feudal predecessors, belong to an information-rich and media savvy society, and thus who, at least in principle, have more opportunities for critical reflection on the spectacles with which they’re presented. Indeed it is a common criticism of Habermas that he under-estimates both the extent to which the modern media do in fact afford opportunities for public debate on serious issues, and to which audiences relate to the media in an active and critical fashion, although it should be pointed out that the extent to which either of these actually happens is a matter of very considerable debate and controversy. It should also be noted that Habermas himself admitted that he had been overly dependent in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere on the research tradition established by Paul Lazarsfeld which, as he observes, was ‘heavily criticised for its individualist-behaviourist approach constrained by the limitations of small-group psychology’ (Habermas 1992: 439).
A further criticism of the public sphere idea is that its focus is too narrow, concentrating only on forms of rational-critical debate in the media and ignoring articulations of social issues in fictional forms, particularly in the field of broadcasting. As the Goldsmiths Media Group (GMG) argue, entertainment media are also ‘essential to a democratically adequate public sphere and fundamentally similar issues of access and participation apply to them as they do more obviously in the area of formal, “rational” debate’ (GMG 2000: 45–6).
However, as already noted, Habermas places broadcasting firmly within the sphere of consumption and uniformity, thus posing problems for those who see public service broadcasting as constituting, in principle at least, one of the foremost sites capable of bringing people together in the kind of rational, universalistic and inclusive form of public debate which Habermas sees as characterizing the public sphere. This is by no means the case solely in the UK – witness, for example, ARD and ZDF in Germany. Thus, for example, Garnham calls the public service model of broadcasting ‘an embodiment of the principles of the public sphere’ in that ‘first it presupposes and then develops in its practice a set of social relations which are distinctly political rather than economic. Second, it attempts to insulate itself from control by the State (which, as is often forgotten, is not synonymous with political control)’ (Garnham 2000: 109). By ‘political’ here Garnham means that,
within the political realm the individual is defined as a citizen exercising public rights of debate, voting, etc. within a communally agreed structure of rules and towards communally defined ends. The value system is essentially social and the legitimate end of social action is the public good (Garnham 2000: 110).
A similar point is made by Curran, who points out that Habermas’s,
conception of reasoned discourse is closer, in fact, to the practice of British public-service broadcasting, with its ideology of disinterested professionalism, its careful balancing of opposed points of view and umpired studio discussions than it is to that of the polemicist and faction-ridden London press of the eighteenth century, operating in the context of secret service subsidies, opposition grants and the widespread bribing of journalists (Curran 1991: 42).
And, one might add, closer than it is to the majority of contemporary British national newspapers, in which the softest of soft news is outweighed only by stories where the distinction between fact and comment has largely collapsed, in which a gallery of vociferous pundits postures as the voice of ‘public opinion’, and in which reigns a particularly virulent form of illiberal, populist demagoguery which quite simply turns the values of rational-critical discourse entirely on their heads.
However, it needs to be recognized (although it all too often isn’t) that Habermas substantially revised his conception of how the public sphere operates in modern societies in Between Facts and Norms (which is also rather better translated than The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere). Here, in answer to some of his earlier critics, he also admits that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the labour movement and feminism were able to ‘shatter the structures that had initially constituted themselves as “the other” of a bourgeois public sphere’ (Habermas 1996: 374). And in this he is following on an earlier revision where he notes, for example, that the culture of the common people ‘was by no means only a backdrop, that is, a passive echo of the dominant culture; it was also the periodically recurring violent revolt of a counterproject to the hierarchical world of domination, with its official celebrations and everyday disciplines’ (Habermas 1992: 427).
According to Habermas, ‘the sphere of civil society has been rediscovered today in wholly new historical constellations’ (Habermas 1996: 366). He also sees it as much more differentiated and pluralist, no longer conceived simply as private individuals coming together to form a single public but as being ‘characterized by open, permeable and shifting horizons. The public sphere can best be described as a network for communicating information and points of view’ which are filtered and synthesized in such a way that they coalesce into bundles of public opinions (Habermas 1996: 360). In this view of things, the public sphere ‘refers neither to the functions nor the contents of everyday communication but to the social space generated in communicative action’ (Habermas 1996: 360).
Furthermore, the public sphere is no longer seen as being co-extensive with the nation state but is represented as ‘a highly complex network that branches out into a multitude of overlapping international, national, regional, local, and subcultural arenas’ (Habermas 1996: 373). There is a ‘substantive differentiation of public spheres’ (Habermas 1996: 373) and a range of publics, such as ‘literary publics, religious and artistic publics, feminist and “alternative” publics, publics concerned with health-care issues, social welfare, or environmental policy’ (Habermas 1996: 374). The public sphere is also ‘differentiated into levels according to the density of communication, organizational complexity, and range’ (Habermas 1996: 374). Thus there are ‘episodic’ publics found in places such as pubs, cafes and restaurants; occasional or ‘arranged’ publics of particular presentations and events (for example concerts, theatres, party congresses, church services); and ‘abstract’ publics of readers, viewers and listeners brought together, albeit at a distance, by the various media. However, their relation to one another is porous and it is possible to build what he calls ‘hermeneutical bridges’ between them.
The key members of the public sphere are civil society groups who identify, interpret and propose solutions to social problems of one kind or another. They act as a form of ‘sensor’, helping to spark off and organize critical debate on matters in the public interest. As Habermas puts it:
Civil society is composed of those more or less spontaneously emergent associations, organizations and movements that, attuned to how social problems resonate in the private life spheres, distil and transmit such reactions in amplified form to the public sphere. The core of civil society comprises a network of associations that institutionalizes problem-solving discourses on questions of general interest inside the framework of organized public spheres (Habermas 1996: 367).
Thus within civil society are found the resources for realizing a form of discursive or communicative democracy, which exerts pressure on the political system to respond to various problems and questions of public concern.
However, Habermas is at pains to point out that ‘public influence is transformed into communicative power only after it passes through the filters of the institutionalized procedures of democratic opinion- and will-formation and enters through parliamentary debates into legitimate law-making’ (Habermas 1996: 371). In order to generate political power, informal public discourses must thus have ‘an effect on the democratically regulated deliberations of democratically elected assemblies and assume an authorized form in formal decisions’ (Habermas 1996: 372). This entails that civil society can never become the locus of political power in itself but can only ever influence the political system, since it is not itself an institution but a loose network of institutions; however, via the public sphere civil society can translate communicative power into administrative power. But it’s important to grasp that, in Habermas’ view, ‘a robust civil society can develop only in the context of a liberal political culture … it can blossom only in an already rationalized lifeworld’ (Habermas 1996: 371), in the same way that ‘there can be no public sphere without a public’ (Habermas 1996: 364). This clearly has serious implications for societies such as the UK in which thirty years of the single-minded pursuit and imposition of neo-liberal objectives has brought about a post social democratic state, one of whose hallmarks is an increasingly atomized, depoliticized population.
As noted earlier, it is obviously extremely important that the ideas, perspectives and analyses of groups in civil society are communicated both to the wider public and to the political system, and here the role of the media is obviously crucial. However, the media operate a process of filtering and selection which is dictated, at least partly, by economic factors and market strategies, a process which, in Habermas’ view, helps to depoliticize public communication. Furthermore, he argues, in line with his earlier ideas about modern forms of spectacle, ‘the image of politics presented on television is predominantly made up of issues and contributions that are professionally produced as media input and then fed in via press conferences, news agencies, public-relations campaigns and the like’ (Habermas 1996: 377). Such a system clearly privileges the dominant political actors, so that,
collective actors operating outside the political system or outside large organizations normally have fewer opportunities to influence the content and views presented by the media. This is especially true for messages that do not fall inside the ‘balanced’, that is, centrist and rather narrowly defined, spectrum of ‘established opinions’ dominating the programmes of the electronic media. (Habermas 1996: 377).
Habermas now admits that the effects of the media is a controversial subject, and indeed acknowledges that:
The research on effect and reception has at least done away with the image of cultural consumers as ‘cultural dopes’ who are manipulated by the programmes offered to them. It directs our attention to the strategies of interpretation employed by viewers who communicate with one another, and who in fact can be provoked to criticize or reject what programmes offer or to synthesize it with judgements of their own (Habermas 1996: 377).
Although Habermas does not consider how the media can best be organized so as to mobilize the public sphere and thus serve the needs of democracy, he does, via Michael Gurevitch and Jay G. Blumler (1990: 270) summarize the tasks which the media ought to fulfil in democratic political systems. These are:
• Surveillance of the socio-political environment, reporting developments likely to impinge, positively or negatively, on the welfare of citizens;
• Meaningful agenda setting, identifying the key issues of the day and the forces which have formed and may resolve them;
• Providing a platform for intelligible and illuminating advocacy by politicians and members of civil society groups;
• Facilitating dialogue across a diverse range of views, as well as between the public and those in positions of power;
• Holding those in positions of power to account;
• Encouraging citizens to learn about and become involved in the political process;
• Resisting all attempts to subvert the independence and integrity of the media and their ability to serve their audiences.
As Habermas puts it: ‘these principles express a simple idea: the mass media ought to understand themselves as the mandatory of an enlightened public whose willingness to learn and capacity for criticism they at once presuppose, demand and reinforce’ (Habermas 1996: 378). However, he also points out that as long as the media ‘prefer to draw their material from powerful, well-organized information producers and as long as they prefer media strategies that lower rather than raise the discursive level of public communication, issues will tend to start in, and be managed from, the centre, rather than follow a spontaneous course originating in the periphery’ (Habermas 1996: 380). Thus because the media fail to live up to the kind of normative expectations outlined above, ‘one will have to be rather cautious in estimating the chances of civil society having an influence on the political system’ (Habermas 1996: 379).
Habermas’ reformulation of the public sphere idea makes its relevance to current debates about the social and political role of the media even more evident, but even the earlier formulation, as many of it critics admit, still has much to contribute to topics such as public service media, public/civic journalism, the media and the public interest, spin and opinion management, all of which draw, whether consciously or not, on the same well as Habermas. Above all, the great virtue of the public sphere idea is that it prompts critical reflection on the role which the media play in society. So, for example, for John Corner it provides ‘an ideal towards which radical change can direct itself, an historical precedent, albeit an “imperfect” one, and a suggestive model by which to guide critique’ (Corner 1995: 42). Thompson argues that it operates as a critical yardstick and calls our attention to ‘the importance of a sphere of social communication which is neither wholly controlled by the state nor concentrated in the hands of large-scale commercial organizations’ (Thompson 1990: 119). The Goldsmiths Media Group (GMG) claim that it ‘provides an indispensable perspective on the operation of media organizations, since it insists that we continually evaluate the media for what they contribute to our lives as citizens, as active participants in the public sphere’ (GMG 2000: 43). In James Curran’s view, it offers,
a powerful and arresting vision of the role of the media in a democratic society, and in this sense its historical status is irrelevant. From it can be extrapolated a model of a public sphere as a neutral zone where access to relevant information affecting the public good is widely available, where discussion is free of domination and where all those participating in public debate do so on an equal basis (Curran 1996: 82).
The idea of the public sphere is especially important to debates about media and politics, in both the broad and narrow sense of the word. Habermas starts from the principle that we need a democratic public sphere, a space of rational, democratic exchange, and insists that we judge the media in terms of whether they enable people to debate and decide on the issues that affect their lives: in other words, of whether they facilitate democratic participation. As Peter Dahlgren puts it, the public sphere,
constitutes a space – a discursive, institutional, topographical space – where people in their roles as citizens have access to what can be metaphorically called societal dialogues, which deal with questions of common concern: in other words, with politics in the broadest sense. This space, and the conditions for communication within it, are essential for democracy … One could say that a functioning public space is the fulfilment of the communicational requirements of a viable democracy (Dahlgren 1995: 9).
If the public sphere is thought of as representing a democratic ideal, as suggested near the start of this chapter, it enables us to ask to what extent actually existing media organizations live up to this ideal and whether or not they contribute to the achievement of a public life which measures up to the ideal of democratic politics. More specifically, do the media give the public access to a wide range of views, values and perspectives, not just in news and current affairs coverage but in fictional and entertainment programmes too? Do they generate what Curran calls a ‘plurality of understandings’ by means of which individuals are enabled ‘to reinterpret their social experience, relate to alternative conceptions of society and human nature, and question the assumptions of the dominant culture’? Are they organized in such a way as to act as ‘an agency of representation’ which enables diverse social groups and organizations not simply to access but to express alternative viewpoints, thus invigorating civil society (Curran 1996: 103).
Furthermore, by distinguishing the public sphere from both the state and the market, Habermas facilitates a critique which understands the threats to democracy and to the public discourses on which it depends as being posed by both state and corporate power. In liberal theory, the state is normally seen as the main enemy in this respect, interfering with the flow of public discourses by censoring and generally interfering with the freedom of the media in one way or another. However, in recent times increasingly dire warnings have been sounded about the dangers to freedom of expression posed by forms of what has come to be called market censorship. This process has been ably summarized by John Keane:
Communications markets restrict freedom of communication by generating barriers to entry, monopoly and restrictions upon choice, and by shifting the prevailing definition of information from that of a public good to a privately appropriable commodity. In short, it must be concluded that there is a structural contradiction between freedom of communication and unlimited freedom of the market, and that the market liberal ideology of freedom of individual choice in the marketplace of opinions is in fact a justification for the privileging of corporate speech and of giving more choice to investors than to citizens. It is an apology for the power of king-sized business to organise and determine and therefore to censor individuals’ choices concerning what they listen to or read and watch (Keane 1991: 89).
However, in this context it would be misleading to make too strong a distinction between the workings of state and corporate power, because what cannot be emphasized too strongly, at least in the case of the UK, is that, since the 1980s, successive governments have played an absolutely key role in ‘liberalizing’ the communications sphere and so transforming broadcasting into a market-driven system. This was done primarily by means of the Broadcasting Act 1990 and the Communications Act 2003, bending over backwards to facilitate the growth of BSkyB, and standing happily by whilst first the Independent Television Commission and then its successor body Ofcom allowed ITV (Independent Television) companies to slough off more and more of their public service obligations; thus was unleashed what is generally known as the ‘de-regulation’ of British broadcasting. However, considering this process consists of replacing regulations which were designed to operate in the public, citizen interest with those which are designed to operate in the commercial, corporate interest, it should properly be called ‘re-regulation’ and needs to be seen, as Garnham presciently argued, as shifting ‘the dominant definition of public information from that of a public good to that of a privately appropriable commodity’ (Garnham 1992: 363). And the fact that the media landscape which has emerged as a result of this process of restructuring is increasingly dominated by a shrinking number of ever-larger companies, in which media barons such as Rupert Murdoch and Richard Desmond predominate, endows the word ‘refeudalization’ with a particularly contemporary resonance.
It is of course important not to romanticize the ‘old days’ of broadcasting, which were far from perfect in public sphere terms. But as Colin Leys has argued, the era before multi-channel television,
may be seen as constituting a unique historical moment in which complex modern societies had for a couple of decades something like a single forum for their most important ‘formative conversations’; not a forum that offered universal or even broadly representative access to the podium, but one that was at least more or less universally attended (Leys 2001: 150).
Equally, however, anybody concerned with broadcasting as a public sphere, however imperfectly realized, has to tackle head-on the profoundly ideological, market-driven rhetoric about ‘consumer choice’ which now entirely dominates discussion about broadcasting at both governmental and corporate level. The proponents of the marketization of broadcasting now appear to be wholly incapable of grasping, or entirely unwilling to grasp, the existence of the yawning chasm between rhetoric and reality, namely the empirically observable fact that the ever-swelling number of channels does not necessarily mean more choice between a more diverse range of programmes – indeed, quite the reverse.
The ways in which the re-regulation of broadcasting have had extremely destructive consequences for broadcasting as a public sphere has been very clearly summarized by Leys in an account which, although actually written before the Communications Act 2003, is the finest analysis of this process, not least because it situates the commodification of broadcasting within a broader analysis of the commodification of public services as a whole:
(1) audience fragmentation; (2) a decline in the volume of programming relevant to making informed decisions about political, economic and social issues, as opposed to programming relevant to coping with life as a consumer; (3) a narrowing of the scope of such political and economic programmes as are made, and – significantly – in the epoch of globalisation – an almost complete absence of foreign topics from current affairs programmes on the most-watched channels; (4) an avoidance of controversial topics or critical analysis that falls outside the narrow political spectrum defined by the main political parties; (5) a decline in the volume and quality of research for current affairs programming, a greatly increased dependence on government and corporate sources of information, and a drastic decline in investigative journalism; (6) the increasing displacement of serious drama by soap operas; (7) the subordination of artistic and creative aims to commercial ones, including a growing standardisation of the product (Leys 2001: 161–2).
To which list one might add: an increasing dependence on bought-in programmes, especially Hollywood feature films; an ever-shrinking sphere of local news on ITV; a situation in which only the BBC is making children’s programmes in significant numbers; and a glut of ‘reality TV’ programmes in which the only ‘reality’ on view is one that has been manufactured simply and solely in order to be filmed and then sold.
Even if one disagrees profoundly with the neo-liberal purposes which all too frequently lurk behind the daily, ritual evocations of globalization by politicians and corporate interests, it would be difficult to deny that in the last thirty or so years the various processes of globalization have intensified, and that this has been particularly apparent in the field of the media. Again, Garnham was particularly prescient in noting the consequences of these processes for debates about the public sphere, noting that:
The development of an increasingly integrated global market and centres of private economic power with global reach are steadily undermining the nation-state, and it is within the political structure of the nation state that the question of citizenship and of the relationship between communication and politics has been traditionally posed. We are thus being forced to rethink this relationship and the nature of citizenship in the modern world. What new political institutions and new public sphere might be necessary for the democratic control of a global economy and polity? (Garnham 1992: 361–2).
And more recently the GMG argued:
The terms of the public sphere are in need of radical renewal to take account of a new media world: of vastly increased media outputs (covering both factual and fictional material), greatly intensified cross-border media flows, and (in the Internet) a decentred, or apparently decentred, communications space different from any that has gone before. But that does not mean that the framework of original public-sphere debates can safely be shelved; on the contrary, the expansion of the media universe makes it all the more vital as a reference point (GMG 2000: 53).
This is all the more urgent given the lopsided, uneven ways in which global communications are developing, which all too frequently consist of one-way flows from the developed to the developing world and all too clearly reflect the growing inequalities of information power and resources which exist within the media ecologies of western societies.
For obvious reasons the Internet has become central to debates about a global public sphere: its technology entails that it is, in principle at least, a many-to-many medium, thus enabling its users to engage in dialogue and to become active producers of media content, its infrastructure is potentially global, and social differences and power relations are said to be undercut by the its ‘blindness’ to identity, allowing people to interact as if they were equals. All of these factors have led some to suggest that the Internet is a genuinely public space of democratic exchange which operates at a distance, a new paradigm of ‘direct democracy’, an electronic agora or coffee house free from territorial, legal and social constraints.
Clearly influenced by Habermas’s later reformulation of the public sphere idea, James Bohman has argued that the Internet is ‘a network-based extension of dialogue which suggests the possibility of re-embedding the public sphere in a new and potentially larger set of institutions’ (Bohman 2003: 135). In his view, ‘the space opened up by computer-mediated communication supports a new sort of “distributive” rather than unified public sphere with new forms of interaction’ (Bohman 2003: 139). By ‘distributive’ he indicates that computer mediation via the Internet is serial and thus ‘decentres’ the public sphere: ‘it is a public of publics rather than a distinctively unified and encompassing public sphere in which all communicators participate. Rather than simply entering into an existing public sphere, the Internet becomes a public sphere only through agents who engage in reflexive and democratic activity’ (Bohman 2003: 140).
Foremost amongst these agents, it could be argued, again following on from the later Habermas, are NGOs which, as ‘knowledge communities’ or ‘epistemic communities’, are today major participants in the definition of issues at national and international levels, making full use of all the opportunities offered by the modern media, and especially the Internet, to attempt to shape popular attitudes and influence not simply states, supranational political institutions and transnational corporations, particularly in areas such as human rights, environmental protection, poverty relief, world peace and global market regulation. In the opinion of the Goldsmiths Media Group it is these organizations ‘which are at present central in any moves towards the construction of an international public sphere’ (GMG 2000: 48). It is largely as a result of their input that new political spaces, ‘imagined communities’ and deliberative publics have developed across national boundaries, greatly extending the range of civil society. And in Bohman’s view, NGOs operating at the global level must now,
understand themselves as responsible for transnational structures of communication and not simply for the particular issue at hand. They can only achieve their goals if democracy is extended in the appropriate ways, and it can be extended only if electronic space becomes a public sphere, a place in which publics of various sorts can emerge and communicate with other publics (Bohman 2003: 145).
In other words, in order to contribute adequately to the public sphere terms it is not sufficient simply to create a website devoted to a matter of public concern; what also needs to be ensured is that ‘sites interact as a public space in which free, open and responsive dialogical interaction takes place’ (Bohman 2003: 144). One might cite here the massive, and highly successful, battle in 1997/8 against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) which was conducted very largely online. Had the MAI been ratified it would have enabled a form of legalized corporate piracy on a global scale and prevented national governments from doing anything about smash-and-grab raids mounted by global corporate raiders on any form of public provision within their jurisdiction. Additionally, it might well have enabled media corporations to argue successfully that public service broadcasting operates as ‘unfair’ competition to commercial broadcasting, and that all forms of public support for such systems should thus be wound up – which is perhaps why, in the mainstream media, there was virtually no discussion at all of the dangers posed by the MAI.
However, as the Internet has developed, the once common idea that it is ‘naturally’ or ‘essentially’ democratic, or that it constitutes an already functioning public sphere which needs no policy interventions to ensure that it lives up to the ideals of its founders, has come to seem increasingly Utopian, even though a certain kind of cyber-libertarian insists on clinging to it. There are numerous objections to such an argument, and they can all be illuminated by reference to the factors which Habermas argues accounts for the public sphere’s weakened state in modern societies.
The first point to note is that the Internet is absolutely not the censor-free zone envisaged by its early pioneers and that states can and indeed do interfere in this particular manifestation of the public sphere. The creation of the ‘Great Firewall of China’ and the routine blocking of the Internet in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea and Burma4 unfortunately give the lie to this libertarian notion, and one of the main reasons why democratic countries do not take greater advantage of the censoring technology available to them (much of which they manufacture) is that to do so would run so obviously counter to the democratic ideals in which they profess to believe as to be internationally highly embarrassing. However, a good deal of self-censorship is practised in democratic states by Internet Service Providers and largely unaccountable self-regulatory bodies (usually at the behest of government), and Australia appears to be determined to introduce mandatory filtering and blocking of pornographic websites. (For further discussion of Internet censorship see Petley 2009: 97–125.)
However, equally important are corporate restraints on the Internet’s ability to function as a public sphere. In this respect, what simply cannot be ignored is its ever-increasing commercialization which, since the mid-1990s, has made the Internet come increasingly to resemble a digital hypermarket as opposed to a latter-day Habermasian coffee house. Not only is it increasingly dominated by corporate interests, but many of these are the self-same interests which dominated, and indeed still dominate, the ‘old’ media and which see the Internet as an unprecedented opportunity for global commercial expansion and gain, thus further accelerating and intensifying already-existing processes of media conglomeration and commercialization. Such processes are as destructive of the ideals of the public sphere in the new media as they were and are in the ‘old’, and thus need to be resisted and challenged at every turn, a task made more difficult by the fact that the old, libertarian idea of the Internet as being somehow ‘inherently’ democratic carries with it an anti-state ideology which chimes perfectly with the corporate desire to ensure that the Internet marketplace remains free from any kind of state ‘interference’ or legislative ‘burden’ (which is how corporations regard all forms of regulation). Thus to insist on the need for a public sphere debate in relation to the Internet involves (just as it has and continues to do in relation to ‘old’ media) contesting head-on the ideological dogmas of market liberalism, and in particular insisting that positive measures need to be instituted in order to foster and protect content which, in a broad sense, serves the public interest, and that where market mechanisms conflict with, and are indeed destructive of, democratic ideals, the former must be regulated in the public interest. A good example here would be fighting to preserve the principle of ‘net neutrality’, whereby all lawful Internet content must be treated alike and move at the same speed over the network, and all ISPs must work together to ensure that this happens. Opposed to this fundamental principle of the Internet are commercial interests such as AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, BT, TalkTalk, Virgin Media and other ISPs which want to create different tiers of online service – at different prices, naturally. In other words, the more you pay, both to send and receive information, the faster and better service you get. Thus emerges the spectre of a two-tier web dominated by big companies which can dictate, to both the providers and users of online content, the terms and cost of using their carriage systems.
As already noted, one of the principles of the public sphere is that, at least in principle, it is open to all. Abandoning net neutrality, as the corporate interests noted above are already energetically lobbying national governments and bodies such as the European Commission to do, would clearly limit access to the Internet on economic grounds. However, we need to note that there is already a significant information gap or digital divide both within and between societies. According to figures compiled by the most authoritative source on this question, the International Telecommunication Union,5 in 2010, 71 per cent of the population in developed countries was online, but Internet user penetration in Africa reached only 9.6 per cent, far behind both the world average (30 per cent) and the developing country average (21 per cent). Meanwhile in the UK, data gathered by the Office for National Statistics6 revealed that 19.2 million households (75 per cent) have a home computer, but 99 per cent of professionals and only 65 per cent of the long-term unemployed possess one. Meanwhile a third of households do not have access to the Internet, and 39 per cent of those without access are over 65. 98 per cent of those earning £41,600 per year have used the Internet, but this figure falls to 69 per cent in the case of adults who earn less than £10,399 per year. 49 per cent of people without access are in the lowest socio-economic groups (DE).
If the Internet is indeed to function as a public sphere, and if the already glaring inequalities in our society are not to be still further exacerbated by the consequences of information inequality, then this situation clearly needs urgent attention. However, providing people with access to the Internet is not the same thing as ensuring that they use it for public sphere purposes, although this applies equally to users in any of the socio-economic groups. Indeed, it may be the case, as suggested earlier, that many people use the Internet primarily for buying goods and services, thereby intensifying the processes of commercialization and consumption which Habermas sees as having weakened the public sphere. Furthermore, it may be the case and that the Internet, along with other new communication technologies, far from creating a new public sphere, have actually hastened the privatization of experience which is such a marked feature of our society, neatly summed up by Luke Goode as a Baudrillardian nightmare marked by,
the proliferation of fractured but self-sufficient simulacra in which, as consumer-citizens logged into our bespoke networks, ears plugged with headphones or glued to the cell phone, eyes trained on ‘me screens’ (whose function is, precisely, to screen), we find ourselves relieved of the requirement to intervene in a putative ‘real world’ that is no longer our ontological centre of gravity (Goode 2005: 109–10).
However, in conclusion I would like to suggest that rather than thinking about any one medium or communications system as being an integral part of the public sphere, it might be more useful to think of certain kinds of media content as performing public sphere functions or, to put it slightly differently, serving the public interest. Thus simply because a particular medium – for example, the national daily press in the UK – may be predominantly vacuous and infected by values entirely inimical to rational-critical discourse, this does not preclude the fact that material which performs public sphere functions appears there, albeit more in some papers than others, but sometimes in the most unlikely and surprising spots. Similarly, just because many people use the Internet to access porn or to froth at the mouth in posts to the Daily Mail website, this most certainly does not mean that sites such as Open Democracy, the Guardian or the BBC, for example, do not perform a genuine public service. The task then becomes one of nurturing the conditions for creating and sustaining this kind of content across the media, ‘old’ and new, and in protecting it from being damaged or destroyed by the depredations of both the state and the market. For this writer at least, these are the main contemporary lessons to be drawn from Habermas’ work on the public sphere, along with the urgent need to counter neo-liberalism’s assault on everything which constitutes people as a public as opposed to an atomized mass of disaggregated consumers.
Bohman, J., 2004. ‘Expanding dialogue: the Internet, the public sphere and prospects for transnational democracy’, in After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere. Oxford: Blackwell, 13–55.
Calhoun, C., 1992. ‘Introduction’, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, C. Calhoun (ed.), Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1–48.
Corner, J., 1995. Television Form and Public Address. London: Edward Arnold.
Curran, J., 1991. ‘Rethinking the media as a public sphere’, in Communication and Citizenship: Journalism and the Public Sphere in the New Media Age, P. Dahlgren and C. Sparks (eds), London: Sage, 27–57.
Curran, J., 1996. ‘Mass media and democracy revisited’, in Mass Media and Society (second edition), J. Curran and M. Gurevitch (eds), London: Edward Arnold, 81–119.
Dahlgren, P., 1995. Television and the Public Sphere. London: Sage.
Garnham, N., 1990. ‘The media and the public sphere’, in Capitalism and Communications: Global Culture and the Economics of Information. London: Sage, 104–14.
Garnham, N., 1992. ‘The media and the public sphere’, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, C. Calhoun (ed.), Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 359–76.
Goldsmiths Media Group. 2000. ‘Media organisations in society: central issues’, in Media Organisations in Society, J. Curran (ed.), London: Edward Arnold, 19–55.
Goode, L., 2005. Jürgen Habermas: Democracy and the Public Sphere. London: Pluto.
Gurevitch, M. and J.G. Blumler. 1990. ‘Political communication and democratic values’, in Democracy and the Mass Media, J. Lichtenberg (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 26–89.
Habermas, J., 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Habermas, J., 1992.’ Further reflections on the public sphere’, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, C. Calhoun (ed.), Cambridge: The MIT Press, 421–61.
Habermas, J., 1996. Between Facts and Norms. Cambridge: Polity.
Keane, J., 1991. The Media and Democracy. Cambridge: Polity.
Leys, C., 2001. Market-Driven Politics: Neoliberal Democracy and the Public Interest. London: Verso.
Peters, J.D. 1993. ‘Distrust of representation: Habermas on the public sphere’, Media Culture Society 15(4): 541–71.
Petley, J., 2009. Censorship: a Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: Oneworld. Thompson, J.B. 1990. Ideology and Modern Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Thompson, J.B. 1995. The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Weber, M. 2007. ‘“Objectivity” in social science’, in Classical Sociological Theory, C. Calhoun et al. (eds), Oxford: Blackwell 2007, 21–17.
1 This was originally intended for submission to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. However, according to Craig Calhoun, they ‘apparently thought it at once insufficiently critical of the illusions and dangerous tendencies of an Enlightenment conception of democratic public life, especially in mass society, and too radical in its politically focused call for an attempt to go beyond liberal constitutional protections in pursuit of truer democracy’ (Calhoun 1992: 4).
2 Significantly, Peters frequently alters the published translation in his quotations from the work.
3 Garnham is here drawing on Max Weber, who defined an ideal type as ‘an analytical accentuation of certain elements of reality’. He also explained that it is ‘formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical concept (Gedankenbild). In its conceptual purity, this mental construct (Gedankenbild) cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality. It is a utopia. Historical research faces the task of determining in each individual case the extent to which this ideal-construct approximates to or diverges from reality’ (Weber 2007: 211–12).
4 For an annual account of the worst ‘Internet enemies’ see http://en.rsf.org/.