Page 52 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

RETHINKING THE MEDIA AS A PUBLIC SPHERE 41

the missing dimension of class struggle in his historical portrayal of
press representation. And it points to his inadequate understanding of
the way in which the market system filtered social access to the public
sphere.
But in some ways, liberal revisionist history has generated a still
more fundamental assault on Habermas’s analysis. A number of liberal
revisionists have criticized the mythic idealization of the ‘independent’
eighteenth-century press. It was caught up, they point out, in an
elaborate web of faction fighting, financial corruption and ideological
27
management —a far cry from Habermas’s idealized portrayal of the
eighteenth-century press as the embodiment of the reasoned discourse
of private individuals.
However, the revisionists’ more important argument is that a
significant part of the press was subject to some form of political
control by organized interests from the eighteenth century right through
28
to the twentieth century. This refutes the contrast made by Habermas
between the early press as an extension of rational-critical debate among
private citizens, and the later press as the manipulative agency of
collectivized politics. Whatever view one takes of this historical
revisionism, it is clear that Habermas’s arguments need at the very least
to be reformulated in the light of the new historical evidence that has
come to light. 29

HISTORICAL ELUCIDATION: (2)
DEVELOPMENT OF BRITISH
BROADCASTING
If Habermas’s account of the development of the early press is
questionable, his characterization of the modern media is positively
misleading. He claims that electronic mass communications were a new
type of media that induced an uncritical torpor:

They draw the eyes and ears of the public under their spell but at
the same time, by taking away its distance, place it under
‘tutelage’, which is to say they deprive it of the opportunity to say
something and disagree…. The world fashioned by the mass
media is a public sphere in appearance only. 30

This view of modern media as a stupefying and narcotizing force is
refuted by numerous empirical sociological and psychological studies. 31
These reveal the variety of filters that limit media influence—selective