Page 63 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

52 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

7 Cited in Richard Sparks and Ian Taylor, ‘Mass communications’, in
Philip Brown and Richard Sparks (eds), Beyond Thatcherism, Milton
Keynes, Open University Press, 1989, p. 59.
8Jay Blumler, Multi-Channel Television in the United States: Policy
Lessons for Britain, Markle Foundation Report (mimeo), 1989.
9 Melissa Benn, ‘Campaigning against pornography’, in J.Curran, J.
Ecclestone, G.Oakley and A.Richardson (eds), Bending Reality, London:
Pluto Press, 1986.
10 Mark Hopkins, Mass Media in the Soviet Union, New York: Pegasus,
1970; Gayle Hollander, Political Indoctrination in the USSR, New York:
Praeger, 1972.
11 Ellen Mickiewicz, Media and the Russian Public, New York: Praeger,
1981; Ellen Mickiewicz, Split Signals: Television and Politics in the
Soviet Union, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
12 Brian McNair, Glasnost, Perestroika and the Soviet Union, London:
Routledge, 1991.
13 Louis Althusser, Essays in Ideology, London: Verso, 1984.
14 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,
Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990. This has inspired numerous
commentaries, of which two are particularly interesting for our purposes
since they focus on the media. Frands Mortensen advances what is in
some respects a similar critique to what follows but in the context of
Danish history in ‘The bourgeois public sphere—a Danish mass
communications research project’, in M.Berg, P. Hemannus, J.Ekecrantz,
F.Mortensen and P.Sepstrup (eds), Current Theories in Scandinavian
Mass Communication Research, Grenaa, Denmark: GMT, 1977. For an
interesting ‘alternative’ take, which seeks to divest Habermas of his more
questionable historical assumptions but rehabilitate his central analysis as
a justification for public-service broadcasting, see Nicholas Garnham,
‘The media and the public sphere’, in Peter Golding, Graham Murdock
and Philip Schlesinger (eds), Communicating Politics, New York:
Holmes & Meier; Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1986.
15 There is a basic ambiguity in what Habermas himself calls his ‘stylized’
historical analysis. It hovers uncertainly between a normative account
(what it ought to have been like) and a descriptive account (what it was
actually like). Thus, his portrayal of the early press is presented in
normative terms; his critique of the modern media in descriptive terms;
and, to confuse things further, this critique contains references back to an
idealization of the early press as something approximating to descriptive
reality.
16 For representative versions of this view, see Arthur Aspinall, Politics and
the Press, c. 1780–1850, London: Home & Van Thal (Republished
Brighton: Harvester, 1973), and Ian Christie, Myth and Reality in Late
Eighteenth Century British Politics, London: Macmillan, 1970.