Page 45 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

34 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

conservative, common-sense view in which social action is explained
primarily in terms of individual psychology and elemental human
emotion, or it can offer a potentially more radical perspective in which
social processes are explained primarily in structural terms. Some
seemingly apolitical material also embodies ethical codes or expressive
values that lie at the heart of political creeds (egalitarianism, mutuality
and a belief in human perfectibility in the case of traditional social
democracy, or possessive individualism, self-reliance and social
pessimism in the case of neo-liberal conservatism).
This sensitization to the ideological meanings embedded in
entertainment also has programmatic implications. If the role of the
media is to be conceived in terms of representing adequately different
social interests, its entertainment needs to give adequate expression to
the full range of cultural-political values in society. Unlike the
traditional liberal approach, therefore, which is silent or disapproving of
media entertainment or defines it solely in terms of satisfying consumer
demand, radical democrats make certain prescriptive demands in
relation to entertainment. There is, however, an implicit tension between
the demand for the promotion of feminist or humanist values and the
demand for the representation of cultural diversity (including anti-
feminist and anti-humanist values). This is, in effect, a repeat of the
division between those who seek to make the media a representative
agency and those who seek to make it a progressive, countervailing one,
noted earlier.
The divergence between liberal and radical approaches is even more
marked when it comes to a debate about how the media should be
organized. This is something that will be discussed more fully later. It is
sufficient, here, to signal one important difference. Traditional liberals
believe that the media should be based on the free market since this
guarantees the media’s independence from the state. Radical democrats
usually argue, on the other hand, that the free market can never be an
adequate basis for organizing the media because it results in a system
skewed in favour of dominant class interests.

RADICAL DEMOCRATIC AND
TRADITIONAL MARXIST/COMMUNIST
PERSPECTIVES
Although the radical democratic approach owes a considerable debt to
marxism, it can be differentiated from it both in terms of stalinist