Page 27 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

16 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

affairs output, but with their overall logic and strategy. Journalism is
embedded in and largely contextualized by the other media output with
which it appears. The public sphere, in other words, is enmeshed with
discourses from entertainment and advertising; the maintenance of
boundaries becomes somewhat artificial, not least when the media
themselves are so adept at blurring them. This is very important in
understanding the media-based conditions of sense-making in the public
sphere.
While the loosening of the boundaries between journalism,
entertainment, public relations and advertising is precisely the type of
trend which Habermas lamented, he may have overlooked the
importance of the general media culture in providing shared interpretive
frameworks. It may often be that the social bonds between members of
the public sphere and their overall interaction fall short of the ideal of an
active polity, yet, for better or worse, the media themselves are an
important factor in creating the shared cultural perceptions which do
exist. Whether such ‘communities’ are ‘authentic’ or not is another
matter, but media-based interpretive communities are a precondition for
sense-making in a modern public sphere. One may be critical of the
meanings which are shared, but a model which would strive for a public
‘uncontaminated’ by media culture is both illusory and counter-
productive. Analysis must begin with the realities of the contemporary
situation.
To note one important trend in this regard: one can see how
especially commercial broadcasting has traditionally created ‘markets’
which did not necessarily coincide with the political boundaries within a
nation. Today we witness how satellite TV may be generating
international communities. If audience segmentation within nations is
contributing to differentiated interpretive communities, the
internationalization of TV news production is perhaps helping to
construct inchoate international networks of shared meaning, as
Michael Gurevitch and his colleagues describe in this volume. While
such constellations have no formal political base, they may well be of
significance for international opinion formation.
If publics emerge in the discursive interaction of citizens, then
audiences (that is to say, the position of being an audience member)
should be realistically seen as a moment, a step in the process of being a
member of the public. It constitutes the encounter with media output
within the immediate social ecology of reading/viewing/listening. The
‘publicness’ can be said to emerge in the social practices which emanate
beyond that interface. Recent debates have brought to the fore the