Page 53 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

42 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

audience attention, comprehension, perception and retention of
information against the wider context of the social mediation of
communications. Audiences emerge as recalcitrant, responding to the
media primarily in terms of the discourses that they bring to their media
consumption. The mass public, in short, is neither as malleable nor as
passive as Habermas feared.
Habermas’s implicit contrast between the demotic manipulation of
the modern media and the ratiocination of the eighteenth-century press
is also difficult to reconcile with historical reality. His conception of
reasoned discourse is closer, in fact, to the practice of British public-
service broadcasting, with its ideology of disinterested professionalism,
its careful balancing of opposed points of view and umpired studio
discussions than it is to that of the polemicist and faction-ridden London
press of the eighteenth century, operating in the context of secret service
subsidies, opposition grants and the widespread bribing of journalists.
The structure of the two media systems also differed in a way that had
wider implications. The eighteenth-century London press was composed
of ‘conflicting public spheres’, which structured reality according to the
views of small, highly differentiated audiences. In contrast, British
broadcasting was, until the rise of satellite TV, a ‘unitary public sphere’
in which millions of viewers with divergent views regularly watched the
same programmes and were exposed to the same corpus of conflicting
evidence and argument. One system fostered ideological reinforcement
and factionalism, the other a consensual, anti-partisan, reasoned public
discourse upheld by Habermas as a model.
A major challenge to Habermas’s pessimistic view of modern media
also comes from historical research into the history of British
broadcasting. This plays Habermas’s own cards against him: it extends
his arguments about the rise of the press to the development of
broadcasting.
Thus, historians have focused attention on the way in which
broadcasting organizations gained an increasing measure of autonomy
from government. Key landmarks in this emancipation are said to be
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the greatly increased independence won by the BBC during the Second
World War, the BBC’s symbolically important defiance of the Prime
Minister during the Suez War, the ending of the fourteen-day rule
(prohibiting studio discussion of issues due to be debated in parliament
during the next fortnight) in 1956, the first so-called ‘TV election’ in
1959 and the lifting of the ban on televizing the Commons in 1989.
Linked to this development was an enormous increase in the volume of
news reporting and analysis. Broadcasting thus became an increasingly