Page 80 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

GOODBYE, HILDY JOHNSON 69

has become eroded. In the popular press the ‘news’ is the same thing as
‘entertainment’: one provides the substance for the other and the form
of presentation of even that news which is not, substantially,
entertainment, is that of entertainment itself.
We should beware of overstating the newness of this tendency since
the interpenetration of news and entertainment has been an observable
feature of the press since at least the 1930s. However, in terms of the
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content of newspapers themselves, in terms of the relative weight of
different tasks within the classical newspaper and in terms of the
relative weight of newspaper journalism with regard to the occupation
as a whole, the tendency is clearly towards the dominance of
entertainment both in and over news. This would seem to imply a shift
in emphasis within journalism as a whole towards a concentration upon
the presentation of material, the rewriting, design and layout of the paper
or magazine, rather than the traditional reportorial functions of news
generation and writing. This, of course, has long been the reality of the
popular newspaper press and it is likely to become correspondingly
more a central aspect of other branches, too.
The third feature we may observe is the tendency towards the
fragmentation of the audience. This is often taken as a counter-tendency
to the trend toward internationalization noted above but in fact it is
complementary. Because much of the current debate focuses on
television, this double-sided development is often obscured. If on the
one hand the internationalization of news is creating a new supranational
forum of debate and decision-making, this is going hand in hand with
the destruction of the limited public sphere of bourgeois democracy.
The international order, lacking any semblance of a ‘constitution’, does
not have a public sphere of any kind and the destruction of the national
broadcasting systems tends to erode even those limited forms of national
public spheres which did exist. The same process is true, even more
strongly, for the press, since the high price and complex language of the
international press renders it difficult of access to the mass of the
population, even when they are relatively prosperous native speakers.
On the other hand, this destruction, or at least erosion, of the
constitutive public life of society throws the private sphere into ever-
greater prominence. The disparate pursuits of the individual come to
occupy the space once filled by the citizen. The growing number and
importance of the fragmentary and specialized media of leisure pursuits
are the concomitant of this objective process. In this field, the press and
radio, with their radically different economic logics, are the central
media since television is such a relatively expensive medium that it