Page 436 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Publ c Sphere | 1

English-speaking world. Despite its popularity, however, it has attracted a sub-
stantial body of criticism. Much of the scrutiny has centered on the historical
details of Habermas’s account of the early public sphere. It is now widely ac-
cepted that the early bourgeois public sphere Habermas depicts is an idealization
that fails to account for a number of historical realities: Habermas underplayed
the significance of state institutions in the early bourgeois public sphere (see Ely
1992; Price 1995), and while he acknowledges the role of the development of
capitalism and industrialism in the rise of the bourgeois public sphere, he fails
to account that they also inevitably led to the formation of media industries and
thus the monopolization of public debates. Most importantly, however, Haber-
mas has come under attack for his failure to acknowledge the profound social
barriers excluding vast sections of the population from participation in the early
bourgeois public sphere: circles of discussion and debate in Europe’s early mod-
ern coffee houses were not only limited to those who through their social status
and economic capital could frequent such places—thus excluding a wide sec-
tion of the population on the basis of class alone—but also discriminated on the
grounds of gender, age, class, ethnicity, and/or nationality. The early bourgeois
public sphere was hence far from the ideal communicative environment Haber-
mas originally suggested.

aLTErnaTivE PuBLiC sPhErEs

It is this criticism on which many media and communication scholars have
focused in coming to a more optimistic assessment of the current state of
the public sphere. If the early public sphere in fact excluded large sections of
the population, the contemporary public sphere with different print, broadcast,
and online media at their heart appears as relative progress and comparatively
more democratic than its predecessor. Studies of different media, genres and
texts such as television news, talk shows, or the Internet thus suggest that mass
media, rather than exercising monopolistic control over public debate, offer op-
portunities of engagement and participation to many citizens while being widely
and openly accessible. Researchers focusing on popular media content in par-
ticular have contrasted Habermas’s notion of the bourgeois public sphere with
a “post-modern public sphere” that expands far beyond the traditional realm of
political debate, eroding boundaries between the private and the public, between
politics and entertainment (see Hartley 1997; McKee 2005). As John Hartley, a
leading proponent of this position, argues, “The major contemporary political
issues, including environmental, ethnic, sexual and youth movements, were all
generated outside the classic public sphere, but they were (and are) informed,
shaped, developed and contested within the privatized public sphere of subur-
ban media consumerism” (Hartley 1997, p. 182).
Habermas has in turn responded to particularly the feminist critique of his
original work (see Fraser 1992) by conceding the inaccuracy of his historical
analysis and acknowledging its limitations. The significance of The Structural
Transformation thus does not lie in being a historical study: rather, it derives its
value from offering a model of public debate and political communication that