Habermas – The Public Sphere

Public Sphere – the central arena for societal communication where different opinions are expressed, problems of general concern are discussed, and collective solutions are developed communicatively

The Printing Press developed by Johannes Gutenburg in 1440 expanded the public sphere due to its positive impact on the price of written materials and effectiveness at producing products quickly, enabling ideas to be spread faster and wider

The Peterloo Massacre in 1819 saw the death of fifteen people when cavalry charged into a crowd of around 60,000 people who had gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation. This outraged public opinion and therefore saw the emergence of the radical press in the UK and after calls for parliamentary inquiry where the Tory government supported the use of force. determined to stop further incidents, the government established a series of legislation, in one of the biggest clampdowns of radical behaviour in history: training prevention act, seditious meeting act, seizure of arms act, misdemeanours act, blasphemous and seditious libels act, newspaper and stamp duties act.

Jurgen Habermas, 1929

• author of ‘Theory of Communicative Action’
• a member of the Frankfurt School
• argues that the ‘development of early modern capitalism brought into being an autonomous arena of public debate’ therefore the public sphere came to be ‘dominated by an expanded state and organised economic interests’
• he defines the public sphere as a virtual or imaginary community which does not necessarily exist in any identifiable space. In its ideal form, the public sphere is “made up of private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state”
• believed emergence of an independent, market-based press, created a new public engaged in critical political discussions

Chomsky – Propaganda Model

• believes propaganda and systemic biases function in corporate mass media –  mass communication media and the government “are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion”
• The Propaganda model seeks to explain how populations are manipulated and how consent for economic, social, and political policies, both foreign and domestic, is “manufactured” in the public mind due to this propaganda
• ‘The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages… to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behaviour that will integrate them into the institutional structures’ and achieve this through ‘systematic propaganda’ – Chomsky and Herman 1988:1
• Chomsky and Herman do not claim that the PM captures all factors which influence mass media coverage of news stories, and do not suggest they are particularly anti-democratic – however, they do tend to produce systematic bias in favour of powerful political and economic actors

structures of ownership	mass media firms are big corporations – often part of even bigger conglomerates Thus, news goes through a process of ‘self-censorship’  news that augers well for the company is encouraged while any news that could harm the image of the company is filtered out
the role of advertising	Revenue generated through advertisements is essential for media outlets to survive revenue earned through advertisements is higher than the revenue earned by subscriptions and sales
links with establishment	media houses cannot afford to place correspondents all over the place so instead they place correspondents and personal at locations where news stories are most likely to break out Hence, they enter into a symbiotic relationship with various sources of information the media does not run any story that might hurt the interests of their informants and runs stories without checking their credibility in some cases
diversionary tactics/FLAK	When the media – journalists, whistleblowers, sources – stray away from the consensus, they get ‘flak’  When the story is inconvenient, the powers can inflict complaints, lawsuits or any disciplinary legislative actions Such complaints or actions can be raised by the government, companies, advertisers or other individuals Flak can be damaging for any media outlet
uniting against ‘common enemy’	to make the public accept authority, oftentimes artificial fears are created for the public most significantly communists, terrorists, immigrants a common enemy to fear, helps corral public opinion