Page 42 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

RETHINKING THE MEDIA AS A PUBLIC SPHERE 31

vertical channels of communication between private citizens and
government: they inform individual choice at election time, and they
influence governments by articulating the collective view of private
citizens. In contrast, radical revisionism advances a more sophisticated
perspective in which the media are viewed as a complex articulation of
vertical, horizontal and diagonal channels of communication between
individuals, groups and power structures. This takes account of the fact
that individual interests are safeguarded and advanced in modern liberal
democracies partly through collective organizations like political parties
and pressure groups, and at a strategic level through the construction
and recomposition of alliances and coalitions. The role of the media is
to facilitate this intricate system of representation, and democratize it by
exposing intra-organizational decision-making to public disclosure and
debate.
This can be illustrated by considering the media in relation to one
small aspect of the contemporary system of representation— decision-
making in a trade union. A trade union journal should provide a channel
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of communication between the union’s leadership and rank and file: it
should inform members of decisions taken in their name, reveal the
processes of power broking in the union and relay union members’
reactions. More generally, it should facilitate a debate within the union
about how best to advance members’ broadly defined interests, so that
initiatives and ideas can emerge from the grass roots and be the subject
of collective debate. And since solidarity is vital to the welfare of union
members, the journal should also project symbols of collective
identification. Yet the union journal, along with circulars and union
videos, are only some of the channels of mediated communication
linking membership of the union. Bypassing these are a number of
other, potentially more powerful communications —TV programmes,
radio programmes, newspapers, magazines— reaching different
members of the union and delivering different messages. These
different inputs should provide a communications environment which
adequately represents the wider context and wider implications of union
decisions, and inform the internal debates that determine them.
The divergence of approach between traditional liberal and radical
perspectives also gives rise to different normative judgements about the
practice of journalism. The dominant strand in liberal thought celebrates
the canon of professional objectivity, with its stress on disinterested
detachment, the separation of fact from opinion, the balancing of claim
and counterclaim. This stems from the value placed by contemporary