Page 36 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

POLITICS, DEMOCRACY AND THE MEDIA

as a whole, which may be reflected in voting patterns, and treated as
advice by existing political leaders. Public opinion, in this sense, is
formed in what German sociologist Jurgen Habermas has called ‘the
public sphere’.

By the public sphere we mean first of all a realm of our
social life in which something approaching public opinion
can be formed… Citizens behave as a public body when
they confer in an unrestricted fashion—that is, within the
guarantee of freedom of assembly and association and
the freedom to express and publish their opinions.
(Quoted in Pusey, 1978, p.89)

Habermas locates the development of the public sphere in
eighteenth-century Britain, where the first newspapers had already
begun to perform their modern function of supplying not only
information but also opinion, comment and criticism, facilitating
debate amongst the emerging bourgeois and educated classes.
Quoting Thomas McCarthy, Habermas shows how these new
social forces gradually replaced a political system ‘in which the
[autocratic] ruler’s power was merely represented before the people
with a sphere in which state authority was publicly monitored
through informed and critical discourse by the people’ (quoted in
Habermas, 1989, p.xi). In the coffee-house and salon cultures of
Britain and France, debate and political critique became, for the
first time, public property (meaning, of course, the bourgeois
public, which excluded the mass of poor and illiterate
underclasses). According to Habermas, the first use of the term
‘public opinion’ was documented in 1781, referring to ‘the critical
reflection of a [bourgeois] public competent to form its own
judgments’ (Ibid., p.90).
Gripsund notes that the public sphere thus emerged as ‘a set of
institutions representing a sort of “buffer zone” between the state/
king and private sphere, to protect them from arbitrary decisions
that interfered with what they considered private activities in an
irrational way’ (1992, p.89). The press in particular ‘was to function
as an instrument or a forum for the enlightened, rational, critical,
and unbiased public discussion of what the common interests were
in matters of culture and politics’ (Ibid.).
For Josef Ernst, the public sphere is that ‘distinctive discursive
space’ within which ‘individuals are combined so as to be able to
assume the role of a politically powerful force’ (1988, p.47). It is, in

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