Page 15 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

4 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

doctrine and the social inequalities generated by market relations, a state
of affairs still very much with us today.
Despite these restrictions on full participation in the public sphere, by
the mid-nineteenth century when laissez-faire capitalism was at its
height, liberal philosophers like Mill and De Tocqueville were already
arguing for the delimitation of the status, role and power of what had
come to be called public opinion. They clearly saw dangerous
possibilities to the prevailing social order if power was to be truly
subordinate to popular will. But it was not so much philosophical
arguments per se which began the disintegration of the bourgeois public
sphere, but rather the rapid social developments which altered its
conditions and premises. In the latter half of the nineteenth century,
industrialization, urbanization, the growth of literacy and the popular
press, and not least the rise of the administrative and interventionist
state all contributed in various ways to its decline. The consequences of
these developments included a blurring of the distinctions between
public and private in political and economic affairs, a rationalization
and shrinking of the private intimate sphere (family life) and the
gradual shift from an (albeit limited) public of political and cultural
debaters to a mass public of consumers.
With the emergence of the welfare state in the twentieth century
Habermas notes the further transformations of the public sphere.
Journalism’s critical role in the wake of advertising, entertainment and
public relations becomes muted. Public opinion is no longer a process
of rational discourse but the result of publicity and social engineering in
the media. At this point in Habermas’s narrative the Anglo-American
reader begins to recognize more familiar intellectual landscape. Indeed,
in the last sections of the book Habermas uses ideas from such
innovative books from the 1950s as Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd and
Whyte’s The Organization Man to support his arguments. In the last
two pages of the text Habermas cites and discusses C.W.Mills’s
distinction (found in his The Power Elite) between ‘public’ and ‘mass’
to highlight his own position. Here we find a helpful bridge. From
Mills’s analysis of power relations in mid-century USA the reader can
then, with whatever modifications may seem necessary, connect with
the various strands of media research which have come to the fore over
the past two decades. And the connections are by no means limited to
research with a neo-marxian profile: a book such as Postman’s (1986)
echoes many of Habermas’s arguments.
Habermas’s analysis is truly ambitious and largely compelling, yet
there remain some areas of difficulty. It might be argued that he doubly