Page 25 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

14 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

While one has seen how the movements can at times skilfully make use
of the dominant media (e.g. Greenpeace), a new pattern or phase may
now be emerging where the movements’ own media can increasingly
come to serve as news source organizations for the dominant media. In
other words, movement media begin to compete with other, more
established source organizations (see Schlesinger 1990), lobbying for
time and space in the major media via ‘news-promoting’ activities.
Perhaps this is the first sign of a new, two-tiered public sphere, where
the alternative movement media, with their stronger link to the
experiences and interpretations of the everyday lives of their members,
have a growing political capacity to transmit their versions of political
reality to the dominant media. This serves both to diffuse and legitimate
a wider array of viewpoints and information.
If this interpretation is accurate, it would suggest that we may be
approaching an historical development which parallels the one
Habermas described. For him the political struggles of the emerging
bourgeois classes against state powers resulted in the creation of a new
public sphere, which in turn began to decay and finally disintegrate
under what he terms the refeudalization of social power under the
welfare state. While the new movements are not likely to dissolve or
supplant the prevailing state-corporate-media power nexus, their
alternative media may be ascending to a much larger complementary
role vis à vis the dominant communications system. If such is the case, a
new, more solidified two-tiered public sphere would at least be a
reflection of altered social relations of power.
As a coda to this discussion I would call attention to the recent
unprecedented historical events in Eastern and Central Europe. Though
viable oppositional public spheres may not be able to flourish in
situations where state repression is thorough and systematic, e.g.
pre-1989 USSR, Czechoslovakia or Romania, a relatively benign (by
comparison) repressive apparatus as found in Poland in the 1980s was
sufficiently porous to allow an oppositional public sphere to function.
Its relation to the dominant media was complex, as Karol Jakubowicz
points out in his contribution to this volume. Where the more repressive
apparatus is suddenly relaxed, we saw a veritable explosion of
alternative media (e.g. the Baltic republics), despite having little of the
financial and technological resources available to movements in the
west. With a sort of political stability—though perhaps temporary—now
emerging in, for example, Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia, the
high intensity politicization of society reaches a watershed. A
‘normalization’ is achieved. Yet the turn to versions of western style