Page 41 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

30 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

facilitate their participation in the public domain, enable them to
contribute to public debate and have an input in the framing of public
policy. The media should also facilitate the functioning of
representative organizations, and expose their internal processes to
public scrutiny and the play of public opinion. In short, a central role of
the media should be defined as assisting the equitable negotiation or
arbitration of competing interests through democratic processes.
However, there is a basic ambiguity within the radical democratic
tradition. The less radical strand argues that the media should reflect the
prevailing balance of forces in society: a ‘representative’ media system
is tacitly defined in terms of existing structures of power. This has led to
the construction of broadcasting systems which, in different ways, have
sought to reflect the balance of social or political forces in society. In
Sweden, this has taken the form of incorporating representative popular
movements into the command structure of broadcasting; in Germany
and Finland, a system of making broadcasting appointments informed in
part by the principle of proportional political representation; in the
Netherlands, allocating airtime and technical facilities to representative
organizations; and, in Britain and elsewhere, imposing a public duty on
broadcasting to maintain a political balance between the major political
parties.
But there is another strand within the radical democratic tradition
which believes that the media should be a ‘countervailing’ agency
(though within a framework that ensures representation of all interests).
This is sometimes articulated in politically neutral, ethical terms: the
media should expose wrongdoing, correct injustice, subject to critical
public scrutiny the exercise of power (whether this be by trade unions
or business corporations). Alternatively, it is formulated in more overtly
radical terms: the media should seek to redress the imbalance of power
in society. Crucially, this means broadening access to the public
domain in societies where elites have privileged access to it. It also
means compensating for the inferior resources and skills of subordinate
groups in advocating and rationalizing their interests by comparison
with dominant groups. Although this formulation can be made to sound
elitist and opposed to a ‘representative’ media system, it has an
underlying rationale. Since no ‘actually existing’ liberal democracy is a
polyarchy in which power is evenly diffused or in perfect equipoise, it
is legitimate for the media to function as an equilibrating force.
The radical approach also differs from the traditional liberal one in
the way it conceptualizes the role of the media in modern democracies.
In traditional liberal theory, the media are conceived primarily as