Abstract
In the accusations of being ‘fake news’ to which the mass media are currently exposed, and in their defence by representatives of the mass media, we witness a moralisation of the mass media: namely as the ‘lying press’ or, on the contrary, as guardians of truth. The actual political function of mass media, however, resides rather in political deliberation, which cannot be reduced to information. The article examines the consequences of a moralizing valorization of ‘truth’ as the actual business of the mass media for the processes of political deliberation, which find their adequate type of validity not in morality but in normativity. Finally, a diagnosis of the present is sketched that identifies not postfacticity but postnormativity as the core problem of contemporary political communication.
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Notes
- 1.
I would like to thank Jürgen Schraten and Doris Schweitzer for insightful comments and helpful suggestions on an earlier version of this essay.
- 2.
Through his journalistic practice, Habermas himself gave an example of what is typical for the mass-media constellation of political deliberation, namely the parallel or also interlinked construction of different stages on which certain aspects and registers of political claims to validity can be brought to bear: The Habermas of the Kleine politische Schriften (‘Small Political Writings’) brings other things to (politically) bear than the Habermas of the Theory of Communicative Action (although both were published by the same publisher). This also makes him a theorist of political deliberation in times of mass media, who is aware that ‘communicative rationality’ comes in many varieties, each of which entails different registers of communicative rationality, including different norm violation dynamics, and which are publicly displayed in the mass media.
- 3.
In particular, Habermas is concerned with demonstrating that societal modernization processes can be understood as forms of communicative rationalization reflecting on the symbolic structure of language, i.e. that the unity of normative claims to validity in the ‘sacred’ is broken down in the course of societal differentiation into different spheres of value, which increasingly expose the normative logic of linguistic communication in the lifeworld (Habermas 1987: 43–76).
- 4.
“If, then, when it [crime] is committed, the consciences which it offends do not unite themselves give mutual evidence of their communion, and recognize that the case is anomalous, they would be permanently unsettled. They must re-inforce themselves by mutual assurances that they are always agreed.” (Durkheim 1964 [1893]: 103).
- 5.
I take this term from David Scheller’s dissertation thesis on “Für ein Recht auf Stadt! Urban space and modes of association in urban social movements. A hegemony-theoretical case study on Berlin and New York City” (Justus Liebig University Giessen).
- 6.
This applies explicitly also to the deviation from the norm, which is punished with severe penalties: the penalty “does not serve, or else only serves quite secondarily, in correcting the culpable or in intimidating possible followers. From this point of view, its efficacy is justly doubtful and, in any case, mediocre. Its true function is to maintain social cohesion intact, while maintaining all its vitality to the common conscience.” (Durkheim 1964 [1893]: 108).
- 7.
Goffman (1963: 169) points out that under certain circumstances (“small family-like groups”) even permanently deviant individuals are not excluded from the group.
- 8.
Durkheim speaks of the difference between “organized repression” and “diffuse repression”, which corresponds to the difference between a strongly anchored collective consciousness” harmed by a strong in contrast to a weak expression of both (Durkheim 1964 [1893]: 103).
- 9.
Penal norms “attach the particular conscience to the collective conscience directly and without mediation; that is, the individual to society.” (Durkheim 1964 [1893]: 115).
- 10.
I refer in this section to Langenohl (2014), where this argument is unfolded in greater breadth.
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Langenohl, A. (2023). Information Versus Fake News. On the Post-Normative Moralization of the Mass Media. In: Joller, S., Stanisavljević, M. (eds) Moral Collectives. Springer, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-40147-4_4
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