Page 192 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

DISCOURSES ON POLITICS 181

The government is really—(pause) I see it as a gigantic foot, just
stepping on them and keeping them down.

God

In the American interviews, God was seen as quite powerful, especially
with regard to AIDS. God was seen as punishing and correcting the
evils of man. ‘I think that the good Lord is doing this to stop all the
living—the way people are living today,’ said one 65-year-old man. A
woman admitted, ‘I think that, I hate to say this, but maybe God decided
to bring it to scare people with their loose morals.’ A young woman said
that ‘someone told me once that it’s God’s way of controlling the
population. If they control AIDS, He’s just going to throw something
else out, so it’s never going to end.’ The Americans using this theme
accepted the relative powerlessness of man especially in relationship to
an omnipotent God. Although God and religion were not themes used to
describe news stories in the Danish study, nature and the environment
were seen as powerful, controlling agents.

Environment/nature

Whereas the environment is not an individual or institutional social
agent, it emerged in the Danish sample as a major factor affecting
people and their quality of life. The environment may thus be thought of
as a powerful other in that it represents relatively fixed natural limits to
social enterprise and existence. While the environment was certainly on
the journalistic agenda in two stories about a recycling plant and about
Danish environmental policy respectively, some respondents further
introduced the theme when talking about a nuclear test by France at
Mururoa and a story about east-west relations in general. Environmental
pollution may be both related to and comparable with war in its
implications. Moreover, some viewers talked at length about their own
experience with shortages and recycling during the Second World War,
thus pointing to the environmental theme as a relevant means of
understanding several types of public issues.

Class
One noticeable feature of the Danish sample is a number of references
to class as a powerful other. This occurs with reference to two stories
about geographically and culturally distant events as well as in a feature