Page 85 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

74 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

advanced capitalistic communications. News and views, to use the
cliché, are commodities, to use another cliché. 5
The agora, the Greek market-place, where the few free like Plato and
Socrates met to discuss the politics of their polis, was at the narrow
beginning of the western tradition of democracy. Bacon called the
received public wisdom of his time, ‘the idols of the market-place’.
John Stuart Mill conceived of the free discussion of ideas in an
enlightened public realm as ‘the market-place of ideas’.
In this chapter I propose to follow this tradition by examining how:

• new technologies of communication affect the market-place of
television;
• news and ‘journalism’ play a central role in the market strategies of
American television entities;
• a special cultural form of packaging news and views in a consciously
integrative propaganda form, the public service/ community
campaign, shapes the public consciousness and the public agenda:
the public sphere.
Finally, I will indicate why these campaigns, which usher in an era of
unabashed ‘activist television’, are an inevitable result of the political
economy of the advertising market-place, the cultural diction of mass
media and the determining conditions of advanced industrial
technology.

TECHNOLOGY AND THE PUBLIC MARKET-
PLACE
Technology has radically altered the roles of major players in the
television world. Networks are steadily feeling the pressures brought
about by cable and satellite access, with a number of alternative paths
being opened for national distribution of programming, their former
oligopoly. At the same time, the replacement of film with videotape
6
and ever smaller instruments for live on-the-spot coverage have made
the production of local news much more attractive for affiliate stations
and independents, lowering the need for ‘clearance’ of network offerings
further.
These same technologies of accessible and affordable production
have added new encouragement to local stations to produce shows of
such caliber that they can be sold to or otherwise shared with other
outlets. 7