Page 239 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

228 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

assertion that although intimate modes of address can invite
identification with media personalities such as politicians, they do
deflect attention from the substantial issues concerned.
Such critical comments of journalists and intellectuals tend to
reconstruct rigid divisions between discourse appropriate for the public
sphere (analytical and detached) and discourse appropriate for the
private sphere (emotional and involved). Thus the transference of
private sphere values to the public world of television news hardly
modifies beliefs about the legitimacy of private sphere topics, values
and behaviours for the public sphere, as liberal feminists would have us
believe. The opposite happens instead: it is argued that because TV news
is permeated with private sphere values it has lost its traditional social
and political functions. The intimacy of TV news results in its
discursive expulsion from the public sphere.

BEYOND THE BOURGEOIS PUBLIC SPHERE
PARADIGM
The Dutch case suggests that feminist perspectives on journalism and the
public sphere are caught in a two-faced trap from which there seems to
be no escape. On the one hand, women can opt for full integration in the
public sphere on present conditions: they thus become the same as men
and equal. Some highly esteemed private sphere values will be lost in
the process. On the other hand, women can choose to maintain their
private sphere values in public sphere conditions, aiming in the long run
at a modification of the public sphere. They will remain different from
men.
This dilemma is another expression of the ‘sameness-difference’
debate which emerges recurrently in the feminist movement and
feminist theory. Summarized in an almost intolerably simplified
manner, it pertains to the question: are women essentially the same as
men but ‘made’ different by culture and history, in which case ‘only’ a
reversal of culturally and historically defined roles would be necessary.
Or are women essentially different from men and oppressed by
masculine culture and history, in which case a total revision of the
existing social set-up would be needed. In other words, is femininity an
essential or a cultural feature of women? (Note that both positions
assume unambiguous and stable meanings of ‘femininity’, a point to
which I will return later.)
The question whether women are ‘simply’ the same, or ‘obviously’
different has driven much feminist theory into academically interesting
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