Page 46 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

RETHINKING THE MEDIA AS A PUBLIC SPHERE 35

practice in the Soviet Union and also in terms of traditional marxist
critiques of the media in western liberal democracies.
The radical democratic concept of a public sphere as a public space in
which private individuals and organized interests seek to influence the
allocation of resources and regulate social relations has no place in a
traditional communist conception of society. This assumes that the
common ownership of the means of production has removed structural
conflicts, and created the conditions in which the common interests of
society can be realized through the application of the scientific precepts
of marxist-leninist analysis. The Communist Party as the custodian of
scientific materialism has ‘a leading role’—a euphemism for exclusive
political monopoly—in co-ordinating the different elements of society
in the realization of its common interests. The role of the media is
defined within this framework: it educates people in the tenets of
marxist-leninism; it aids the co-ordination and mobilization of the
people in the tasks that need to be fulfilled; even media entertainment
has an educational role in providing models for emulation and
instruction and is expected not to subvert official definitions of Soviet
society. Only one element of traditional communist theory of the media
—the stress on its function as a safeguard against bureaucratic
distortions of the state—allows it a free-wheeling, campaigning role. But
the way in which the media was controlled before glasnost generally
ensured that this remit was interpreted narrowly. 10
Admittedly, the functioning of the Soviet media before Gorbachev
was at times more restricted in theory than in actual practice (thus
reversing the pattern of the west where the media has long been more
restricted in practice than in theory). When there were tensions and
disagreements within the higher echelons of the Communist Party, the
Soviet media expressed to some extent a diversity of viewpoint. This
11
was particularly true of the early period of Soviet history, when the
Soviet press was also organized and conceptualized in a more pluralistic
12
way than it was to be later. But the communist conception of the
media that took hold in the Soviet Union before the Gorbachev regime
was deeply authoritarian; and the actual practice of the Soviet media
was stunted by the underdevelopment of a civil society independent of
the state. Even after negotiating the rapids of cold war scholarship, it is
clear that the traditional communist approach is far removed from the
radical democratic perspective that has been outlined.
The marxist critique of the media in the west cannot be readily
reproduced as a single set of ideas since Marx himself never formulated
a fully fledged analysis of the capitalist press, and subsequent marxist