Page 84 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

Chapter 3
Selling consent: the public sphere as a
televisual market-place

John M.Phelan

PUBLIC SPHERES: JOURNALISM AND THE
MARKET-PLACE
The broadcast system of the United States, of which television is a
principal part, is commercial; it is fundamentally an advertising medium.
Although there are small or seeming exceptions to this systematic
1
characteristic, they are inconsequential. Television news is considered
the primary source of public information about ‘world and national
events’ for the overwhelming majority of Americans. Current events in
2
the American system are packaged in a variety of ways: in straight
newscasts, in talk and discussion shows featuring officials and experts
who discuss pressing issues of the day and in many localized discussion
formats which deal with matters of public concern, such as the alleged
AIDS epidemic, or the mounting death and damage toll from drunken
drivers, or the widespread illegal use of debilitating narcotics and
addictive substances. 3
Although actual policy decisions that form as well as merely affect
the public sphere may be made behind the closed doors of government
agencies and commissions, the board rooms of major corporations, and
the conferences of establishment ‘think tanks’ like the American
Enterprise Institute or the Heritage Foundation, the publication of these
policies and the persuasion, or what Ellul has called the integrative
propaganda, that ensures their legitimacy —all this takes place in the
public sphere created by news media and particularly the dominant
television forms of news and issue coverage. 4
As a result, the public sphere in the United States is overwhelmingly
dominated by the cultural forms of television and those cultural forms
are in turn shaped by the political economy of mass-production-
advertising-consumption; in short, by the commercial system of