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Notes
Elitist democracy, the term also used by Baker (2002) corresponds to Ferree et al.’s (2002) “representative liberal” model. “Deliberative” corresponds to Baker’s “republican” and Ferree et al.’s “discursive” model, both of which are closely aligned with Habermas. My “pluralist” model brings together Ferree et al.’s “participatory liberal” and “constructionist” models, the latter based in the feminist critique of Habermas; while there are some differences between participatory liberal and constructionist, both stress broad inclusion and acceptance of diverse discursive styles (not just rational argumentation).
Despite its avowed interest in movement success, by emphasizing the almost complete power of the mainstream commercial media to either discredit or at best tame activist causes this U.S.-centric literature has produced its own brand of fatalism. These scholars have never considered the possibility of achieving change by changing the media system itself!
A recent survey of Amazon.com listings shows a flurry of recent books with Public Sphere in the title: Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere (Meyer and Moors 2006), Media and Public Spheres (Butsch 2007), Heisenberg in the Atomic Age: Science and the Public Sphere (Carson 2009), The Arab Public Sphere in Israel: Media Space and Cultural Resistance (Amal 2009), and Mediating Europe: New Media, Mass Communications and the European Public Sphere (Harrison and Wessels 2009), to name just a few. On another level, Al Gore (2007) extensively cites Habermas in his recent book, The Assault on Reason.
In a spirited exchange between Keane and Nicholas Garnham (Keane 1995a, b; Garnham 1995), normative arguments related to a “strict” interpretation of what is or is not a public sphere undermine the empirical utility of the concept. As an example of a micro-public sphere, Keane cites inter-familial discussions about children’s use of video games. The use of public sphere in this context earns Garnham’s sharp rebuke, on the grounds of the de-politicized triviality of such discussions and their lack of any connection to the common national policy-making realm. Garnham is certainly right to question whether these micro-spheres meet the normative test of “deliberative” democracy, while Keane is clearly correct that forums of mediated information and social intercourse are multiplying and becoming more complex. The problem, it seems to me, is the equating of the term “public sphere” only with deliberative democratic ideals. As we will see, in his more recent work Habermas himself seems to be moving to a more expansive understanding of the term to encompass the actually existing ensemble of communicative practices, dominated by the mass media, which serve as “intermediaries” between the peripheral lifeworld and the core state apparatuses, and which may or may not achieve deliberative or other democratic normative ideals.
Habermas (in Wessler 2008a: 255, Forward, fn 2) acknowledges “the inspiration which I gained … from working closely with Bernhard Peters” (see also Habermas 1996: 330, 354 for further acknowledgements). Peters’ first outline of this new empirical model appeared in his book Die Integration moderner Gesellschaften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1993), whose shortened versions of sections 9.1 and 9.2, pp. 322–52, are translated as “Law, State and the Political Public Sphere as Forms of Self-organization” in Wessler 2008a: 17–32.
Arena theory, whose chief proponents are Jürgen Gerhards in Germany and Kurt Imhoff in Switzerland, bears some resemblance to this new public sphere theory (see also Koller 2006). In Ferree et al.’s (2002; of which Gerhards is a co-author) Shaping Abortion Discourse, the public sphere is portrayed as the set of multiple arenas of debate and deliberation (social movement, religious, political party, scientific, and legal), with the “mass media forum” characterized as the central or “master forum” (Ferree et al. 2002: 11). Influenced by Hilgartner and Bosk (1988), this arena theory offers a useful visual representation of a complex, multi-tiered public sphere; however, as deployed, it tends toward an overly pluralistic, voluntaristic model of power, over-stating the power of social movements to shape and reshape public discourse and policy—in a sense, the mirror image of the largely pessimistic analyses of Peters and Habermas.
For examples of the growing use of Bourdieu for the sociology of media, see, e.g., Davis (2002), Couldry (2003, 2007), Hallin and Mancini (2004), Benson (1999, 2004, 2006, 2009b), Benson and Neveu (2005), Benson and Saguy (2005), Townsley (2006), Bennett (2006), Rohlinger (2007), Baisnée and Marchetti (2006), Russell (2007), Glevarec and Pinet (2008), and Dickinson (2008).
Public journalism, as promoted by Jay Rosen and others, is of course not the only way to promote deliberative democracy and it can perhaps be justly criticized for promoting “community” without adequately taking into account the very real power dynamics that serve to stifle truly free and open debate. “Traditional” journalists, however, tended to oppose public journalism on the basic grounds that it was effectively a form of “advocacy” journalism and thus eroded the sacred principle of separating fact and opinion. See, e.g., Mark Fitzgerald, “Decrying public journalism,” Editor & Publisher, November 11, 1995, p. 20; Michael Gartner, “Public journalism—Seeing through the gimmicks,” Media Studies Journal, Winter 1997, p. 69–73; Mohamed El-Bendary, “Enough feel-good journalism,” Christian Science Monitor, November 4, 1999, p. 11; E.F. Porter, “Rosen’s civic journalism counter to good journalism,” The St. Louis Journalism Review, December 1999/January 2000, p. 18. Despite withdrawal of funding support by the Pew Center for Civic Journalism in 2003, the public journalism “movement” has endured and continues to be controversial within journalistic circles.
There are exceptions, of course, from this tendency toward narrow symptomatic news coverage: for example, multi-article series in The New York Times on such complex topics as class, race, and immigration.
I do not think that this problem is inherent in field theory, as Gisele Sapiro (2003) clearly shows in her analysis of the literary field “between the state and the market” (see also Benson 1999, 2004, 2006). It should also be emphasized that even at the emergence of a semi-autonomous journalistic field in France in the 1870s and 1880s, state laws and regulations played a role in limiting direct political intervention and legitimizing the professional role of the journalist.
Because Peters (1999: 185) sees “a collective idea of belonging to a public discussing common themes and problems” drawing on “general cultural interpretations and self-understandings” as an important precondition for the existence of an effectively operating public sphere (setting aside the question of whether it achieves various democratic normative goals), he is skeptical of the possibility of an international or even European-wide public sphere. However, see Calhoun (2002), for a thoughtful analysis of a potentially emerging “European” public sphere, and Serra (2000), for a fascinating portrait of the formation of an international public sphere in response to human rights protests in Brazil during the early 1990s.
In his 2006 Communication Theory essay, Habermas seems to also have been influenced by Bourdieu when he analyzes forms of power as forms of “capital,” even specifically referencing “cultural capital” (418–419). While Habermas’s flexibility and openness are admirable, it is not enough to simply expand one’s conceptual vocabulary. The sum of these “ad hoc” adjustments doesn’t quite yet add up to a coherent model.
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Benson, R. Shaping the Public Sphere: Habermas and Beyond. Am Soc 40, 175–197 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-009-9071-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-009-9071-4