Page 238 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

A TYRANNY OF INTIMACY? 227

it reproduces traditional gender identities (cf. Van Zoonen 1988). I will
elaborate this point later.
More pragmatically, it seems a little naïve to assume that a simple
transference of private sphere values to the public sphere will prove
their appropriateness for it. As the professional and critical reception of
the transformed Dutch television news suggests, transporting private
sphere values to the public sphere is more likely to result in concerned
discourses about the devaluation of the public sphere, which in the end
reconstruct the gendered public-private division.
The intimization of the Journaal has met severe criticism from print
journalists in particular, but from its own staff as well. The two major
building blocks of the intimate news—human interest topics and an
intimate mode of address—encounter most attacks. Under the headline
‘Journaal on the decline’ a Dutch TV critic laments ‘the populist
selection from possible news events with disproportionate attention for
the obvious and the expected’ (Volkskrant, 1 August 1989). Nor does
this critic appreciate the ‘snug domesticity’ created by informal chats
between anchor, correspondents and the weatherman.
Critical comments of journalists are hardly ever part of a well-
formulated argument referring explicitly to the norms and values the
Journaal is supposed to live up to. However, the underlying discourse
can be reconstructed from the work of several authors (e.g. Bennet 1988,
Elliott 1986, Meyrowitz 1985, Postman 1984).
They express genuine concern that the ‘intimacy’ of television news
prevents an understanding of public life that is analytical, historical and
critical. The invasion of the public arena by topics, values and actions
once belonging exclusively to the private sphere is said to erode the
adequacy of the public sphere and to endanger effective public
discourse. Sennett (1974:5), for instance, talks about the ‘tyranny of
intimacy’ that transmutes political categories into psychological ones:
‘As a result, confusion has arisen between public and intimate life; people
are working out in terms of personal feelings public matters which
properly can be dealt with only through codes of impersonal meaning.’
Kress (1986:397) argues that the operation of personalized language—
letting the individual instead of the institution speak—assigns public
events to the private sphere. ‘It is to offer an account of that event which
says that there is no account other than individual action and
expression.’ The viewer is positioned as an individual guided by
common sense, while a public mode of address would position the
viewer as a public citizen aware of the operation of institutional
processes. Dahlgren (1981) entertains a similar argument in the