Page 22 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

INTRODUCTION 11

affairs become more and more subordinate to audience-attracting and -
maintaining commercial logic (cf. Todd Gitlin’s chapter in this
volume).
These developments essentially only intensify the import of
Habermas’s arguments concerning the modern media’s contribution to
the decay of the public sphere; in fact such has been the basic message
from critical media research over the years. The fundamental logic of
the media’s political and cultural significance is quite recognizable. One
could say that what was true in the early 1960s is still true today, only
more so; all that is required is the ongoing updating of the specifics
regarding media structures, discourses, audiences and so on. Yet there is
a risk that such a totalizing move can create a distorting lens if it is not
complemented with a perspective on the tensions, cracks and
contradictions within the media and, perhaps more significantly, society
at large. In other words, in solely emphasizing the monolithic
compactness of the communications sector of society, coupled with the
power nexus of state and capital, we may lose sight of other
configurations which also condition the public sphere but which may be
functioning to pull it in other directions. I would point to a nexus
comprising four key intertwined areas to illustrate this point: the crisis of
the nation-state, the segmentation of audiences, the rise of new political
and social movements and the relative availability of advanced computer
and communication technology to consumers.
It was within the framework of the nation-state that modern
democracy had its theoretical origins. Today, the nation-state as a
political entity is in deep crisis, beset not only with fiscal dilemmas but
also with problems of legitimation. This crisis of course goes in tandem
with the transnationalization of capital and the dispersion of production
within the international economy. Economic control of the economy
within the nation-state’s borders increasingly resides outside those
borders. Internally the state is facing a stagnation of national
parliamentary politics, where the margins of administrative and political
manoeuvrability are contracting and the consequent political
programmes of the established parties are tending towards
dedifferentiation.
Where major political initiatives have been successful, e.g. in Reagan’s
USA and Thatcher’s Great Britain in the 1980s, the resultant social
dislocations have generated still more political stresses at the popular
level. Here particularly we see the emerging contours of the ‘two-thirds
society’—a form of societal triage where the system can seemingly
provide for the well-being of approximately two-thirds of the populace