Page 29 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

18 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

insight with the polysemic character of media discourses and audience
interpretations has important consequences (cf. Jensen 1990, Streeter
1989) which cannot be explored here. Suffice to say that among the
more challenging questions to which these currents give rise is to
specify the possibilities and limits of the ‘free play’ of sense-making in
relation to the systemic character of social structure and ideology.
These trends—conceptual, theoretical, methodological—within
Cultural Studies (cf. Real 1989 for a useful synthesis) have great
relevance for understanding the dynamics of sense-making in the public
sphere. A problem here has been that most of this work has emphasized
fiction rather than journalism and news, and that while TV news has
been studied rather extensively and the television medium as such has
been ambitiously theorized (cf. Collins 1989), the other media of the
public sphere have been relatively neglected. Traditional empirical
studies of newspapers and their content, for example, have told us a
good deal about their sociology, but have not probed very deeply into
readers’ sense-making processes. The agenda for journalism research
(cf. Dahlgren 1989 for a programmatic statement) needs to be
augmented by insights from Cultural Studies.
In this presentation I have emphasized an understanding of the public
sphere which is at once subtle and ambitious. This requires that we set
our horizons on its intricate institutional nexus and the equivocal
processes of sense-making. Yet our understanding of the public sphere
must also be of a practical nature, atuned to the flow of the relevant
discourses in the media. Close familiarity with what is said and not
said, and how it is said—the topics, the coverages, the debates, the
rhetoric, the modes of address, etc.—are a prerequisite not only for an
enhanced theoretical understanding but also for concrete political
involvement within—and with—the public sphere. Nobody promised
that citizenship would be easy.
The essays in this collection are grouped into three parts: Institutional
Logics, Politics and Journalism and Journalistic Practices. In Chapter 1,
James Curran explores the major problems arising out of the two major
models of the public sphere: the market-based pluralist version and the
state-dominated marxist alternative. He argues for a third path, with
autonomy from both state and market forces, structured by a system of
careful balances. Colin Sparks (Chapter 2) takes up the question of to
what extent the British press has functioned and continues to function as
a public sphere. He argues that not only is the decline of seriousness
widespread and growing, but also that the notion of a single concept of
what is a ‘newspaper’ becomes more untenable as the class character of