Page 62 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

RETHINKING THE MEDIA AS A PUBLIC SPHERE 51

consumer co-ops and stations linked to organized groups. The
Enterprise Board would function not as a traditional regulatory body,
policing programme content, but as an enabling agency assisting
financially the emergence of new voices in the broadcasting system.
These four approaches represent alternative responses to the question
of how a media system can be constructed that enables divergent interests
to be fully represented in the public domain. They all have one thing in
common: they marry a collectivist approach to market processes. They
thus represent an attempt to define a third route which is superior to
failed market and collectivist policies. Their aim is to recreate the media
as a public sphere in a form that is relatively autonomous from both
government and the market.

NOTES

1 An alternative term, perhaps more recognizable in a broad European
context, would be ‘social democratic’. But this has been rejected because
in Britain social democratic has a narrowly denominational meaning,
ever since a right-wing splinter group from the Labour Party formed the
Social Democratic Party.
2 George Boyce, ‘The Fourth Estate: the reappraisal of a concept’, in
George Boyce, James Curran and Pauline Wingate (eds), Newspaper
History: from the 17th Century to the Present Day, London: Constable,
1978.
3 For a gloomy assessment of the role of trade unions in reality, see Tony
Grace, ‘The trade-union press in Britain’, Media, Culture and Society,
vol. 7, no. 2 (1985).
4 In nineteenth-century liberalism there was an important strand which
celebrated advocacy as a means of arriving at the truth, but this became a
much less prominent feature of liberal conceptions of journalism during
the twentieth century. See Fred Siebert, ‘The libertarian theory’ and
Theodore Peterson, ‘The social responsibility theory’, in F. Siebert,
T.Peterson and W.Schramm, Four Theories of the Press, Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1956, and Michael Schudson,
Discovering the News, New York: Basic Books, 1978.
5 These two divergent positions are taken respectively by the first Royal
Commission on the Press 1947–9 Report, London: HMSO, 1949, and the
third Royal Commission on the Press 1974–7 Final Report, London:
HMSO, 1977.
6 Samuel Brittan, ‘The case for the consumer market’, in Cento
Veljanovski (ed.), Freedom in Broadcasting, London: Institute of
Economic Affairs, 1989.