Page 49 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

38 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

HISTORICAL ELUCIDATION: (1) BRITISH
PRESS HISTORY
History illuminates the debate about the role of the media in society.
Indeed, one of the most influential contributions to this debate—
Habermas’s celebrated analysis of the media and the transformation of
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the bourgeois public sphere, first published in Germany in 1962 —took
the form of an historical analysis. Since the British historical experience
loomed large in Habermas’s study, it is worth reviewing his thesis in the
light of subsequent historical research on the British media.
Habermas’s thesis can be briefly stated. In the late eighteenth
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century, the public sphere was composed of elite, private citizens who
were reconstituted as a public body in the form of reason-based, public
opinion. An increasingly independent press was central to this process of
reconstitution: it provided the main medium through which private
opinions were transformed into public opinion, and the principal means
by which government was subject to informal supervision.
But in the era of mass politics, the public sphere was transformed by
the extension of the state and the collectivization of private interests.
Rational public discourse was supplanted by power politics in which
large organizations made deals with each other and with the state, while
excluding the public. The media were an accessory to this
‘refeudalization’ of society. They functioned as manipulative agencies
controlling mass opinion, in contrast to the early press which had
facilitated the formation and expression of organic, public opinion. The
only available solution to this crisis of representation, Habermas argues,
is to purify the channels of societal communication through the
restoration of public reason and open disclosure.
Habermas’s characterization of the early British press was derived
from the traditional Whig interpretation of British press history (for
which there is a well-worn equivalent in French and German
historiography). According to this view, an independent press came
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into being as a result of the evolution of the capitalist market and the
dismantlement of state controls on the press. The new generation of free
papers became, in the words of the New Cambridge History, ‘great
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organs of the public mind’. They empowered the people, acted as a
check on government and provided disinterested information enabling
an expanding electorate to participate responsibly in Britain’s maturing
democracy.
This interpretation has come under attack from two opposed
directions—liberal revisionist and radical historians. Though Habermas