Page 437 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

1 | Publ c Sphere

sets out ideals for democratic societies to aspire to, regardless of whether they
have been met in the past. This normative model of the public sphere calls for
the media to involve all citizens in a rational dialogue that is at the heart of all
democratic decisions.
While many of these values—unrestricted access to a public realm that fos-
ters a rational dialogue and informs political decision making—appear desir-
able to most of us, the ideals of Habermas’s work cannot be as easily divorced
from the details of his analysis. His concept of the public sphere is tied to early
modern nation-states and thus to a particular social-institutional context. From
this follows the possibility of multiple public spheres, in the first instance in dif-
ferent nation-states but secondly also within and across different nation-states
following lines such as gender, sexuality, or ethnicity. Yet, the notion of mul-
tiple public spheres not only constitutes a remarkable departure from the term
Öffentlichkeit in Habermas’s original work, which literally translates as “public-
ness” and hence describes the state of being public rather than a given space.
This opposition between public spheres and publicness highlights fundamental
concerns regarding the legitimacy of contemporary political processes and the
effectiveness of contemporary public discourses. Whereas publicness is inher-
ently tied to a given political systems, public spheres (corresponding with dis-
tinct audience groups) lack a clear integration into political systems.
This disjuncture between spaces of debate and realms of political decision-
making creates the democratic deficits in mediated democracies Nicholas
Garnham describes: “The problem is to construct systems of democratic ac-
countability integrated with media systems of matching scale that occupy the
same social space as that over which economic or political decision will im-
pact. If the impact is universal, then both the political and media systems must
be universal” (Garnham 1992, p. 371). Alternative public spheres in the realms
of popular culture, subculture, or transnational communication (see “A Global
Public Sphere?”) thus provide important spaces of debate, but they sever the
fundamental link between citizens’ participation in public debates and gov-
ernance. Yet, as both the early bourgeois and the contemporary public sphere
have failed to accommodate unrestricted, rational debates that translate into
the formulation of laws and government actions, the concept of the public
sphere continues to serve as a powerful reminder to question the working of
contemporary, mediated democracies.

see also Alternative Media in the United States; Bollywood and the Indian
Diaspora; Global Community Media; Government Censorship and Freedom
of Speech; Independent Cinema; Media and Citizenship; Media and Electoral
Campaigns; Media Watch Groups; Nationalism and the Media; Political Docu-
mentary; Political Entertainment; Public Broadcasting Service; Public Opinion.

Further reading: Butsch, Richard, ed. Media and Public Spheres. Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2007; Crossley, Nick, and John Michael Roberts, eds. After Habermas: New Perspectives
on the Public Sphere. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004; Ely, Geoff. “Nations, Publics and Political
Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Habermas and the Public