Introduction

Abstract

Mass media are an omnipresent element of our everyday life, and the modern world cannot be imagined without them. Watching television, listening to the radio, reading newspapers or magazines and surfing on the Internet are part of the daily routine for most citizens, at least in industrialized countries. Hence, there seems to be a widespread consensus that media are important for democracy, and increasingly so in today’s complex, highly differentiated societies. Media have moved to the center of the social, economic and political life, and they constitute the key carriers of democratic public spheres. Therefore, contemporary democracies are often dubbed ‘media societies’ (Habermas 2006: 419). The cause of this phenomenon is the fact that modern democracies are to a greater or lesser degree based on the principle of representation because they are too big for a large proportion of the citizens to always directly participate in all democratic decisions (Von Rautenfeld 2005: 184). Manin (1995) argues that modern representative democracies have gone through two major phases of transformation since their foundation. First, in the middle of the 19th century, with the ongoing industrialization and the extension of universal suffrage, parliamentarianism was replaced by the party democracy. Parliamentarianism was characterized by a political elite that was mainly elected on the basis of prestige or social status (260).