Page 242 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

A TYRANNY OF INTIMACY? 231

gendered subtext of the bourgeois public sphere model leads feminist
evaluations of journalism straight into the tentacles of the ‘sameness-
difference’ dilemma. Therefore I join feminist political philosophers
who suggest replacing the universalist morality of the bourgeois public
sphere model with more particularist and contextual evaluations of
public life. I shall briefly address the question as to what such
particularist and contextual evaluations of journalism would amount, in
the final section.

WHEN WOMEN WATCH THE NEWS
Arguing for a contextual instead of a universalist evaluation of
journalism raises the question as to which context should be taken into
account. The bourgeois public sphere concept is very much focused on
the institutional context of journalism, e.g. the theoretical and practical
autonomy of news media vis-à-vis the political system, the professional
performance of journalists, the democratic potential of commercially
produced news media. In so far as the audiences or readers of the news
(‘publics’) receive attention, they are often seen as mere aberrations
from the ideal civic public, since much research shows that actual
publics do not behave and react as ideal citizens are supposed to. People
spend less and less time reading newspapers, are not highly motivated to
watch the news, have a relatively brief attention span and forget the
items presented in the evening news within minutes (cf. Graber 1988).
Often, researchers are so concerned (sometimes even indignant) with
publics not fulfilling their democratic duties as citizens, they forget to
ask what people do with the news instead. I propose to take such
concrete experiences as a starting-point for developing critical
alternatives to the anachronistic bourgeois public sphere model. This
would mean a shift from institutional contexts to reception contexts.
What would such a contextual and particularist feminist evaluation of
the intimacy of Dutch television news amount to? I can only tentatively
answer that question for Dutch audience research is minimal in this
respect. Surveys carried out in other countries usually do not reveal
great differences in the numbers of women and men watching news
programmes but evidence from qualitative data does show gendered
ways of relating to news and current affairs programmes. ‘Masculinity
is primarily identified with a strong preference for factual programs
(news, current affairs, documentaries) and femininity identified with a
preference for fictional programs’ (Morley 1988:43). Several reasons
are offered for such a difference.