Page 21 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

10 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

the dramatic developments in their ownership, control and political use.
The trends of privatization, conglomeration, transnationalization and
deregulation have amplified and broadened the mercantile logic of
media operations, to the increasing exclusion of other norms (cf.
Murdock 1990a). Public broadcasting in the USA has always been a
minor voice in the otherwise fully commercial system. In Western
Europe public-service broadcasting has seen the historical conditions
for its existence rapidly dissolving, forcing it to capitulate further to
commercial imperatives, with the state contributing to, rather than
struggling against, these developments (cf. Keane 1989, McQuail and
Siune 1986). The modern public sphere seemingly recalls the
representative publicness of the middle ages, where elites display
themselves for the masses while at the same time using the forum to
communicate among themselves, as Paolo Mancini’s chapter in this
book argues.
The progressive political struggle is not one to defend the present
form of state-financed monopolies, which have shown themselves often
to be elitist, moribund and susceptible to state intervention. Rather, the
goal is to establish structures of broadcasting in the public interest, free
of both state intervention and commodification, which optimize
diversity in terms of information, viewpoints and forms of expression,
and which foster full and active citizenship (cf. Chapter 4 by Porter and
Hasselbach in this volume; also Murdock 1990b).
In another domain, the much-heralded information society is
decidedly not about to make politically useful information and cultural
expression more available to more people (cf. Schiller 1989, Garnham
1990, Melody 1990). On the contrary, while technological advances
have generated new interfaces between mass media, computers and
telecommunication and satellites, market forces coupled with public
policy have tended to opt for private gain over the public interest. From
the standpoint of the citizen, access to relevant information will cost more
and more, augmenting differentials in access and further eroding the
universalist ideal of citizenship (Murdock and Golding 1989).
Within journalism we also find a growing class-based segmentation of
the press (see the chapter here by Colin Sparks; also Sparks 1988),
further accelerating the distance between the informed elite and the
entertained masses. While the press accommodates its structures and
operations to the imperatives of commercial logic, it does not turn a
deaf ear to the wishes of the state (cf. Curran and Seaton 1989 for a
discussion of the British case). In TV journalism, it would be difficult to
argue that rational public discourse is enhanced as news and public