Page 194 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Sabine Lang

CONCLUSION: MEDIA, DEMOCRACY, AND LOCAL
PUBLICS – PUTTING RESEARCH IN
COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE
The local public spheres of late modern societies are strange hybrids. De-
pendingonperspective,theyseemtobeundersiegebycommercialmedia
andpublicrelations–fixatedlocalelitesthatmakethemnotverydifferent
from the worlds of national public spheres. Yet from another view, local-
ities appear to harbor the exciting prospect of invigorating participatory
governance and citizen activism from below. Local publics today expose
some of the worst of globally mediated culture while producing some of
the best ideas about how to strengthen public life and small democracy.
This tension, I claim, informs all four of the initially presented distinc-
tive features of the spatial communication arena of the local – that is,
its cognitive, symbolic, interactive, and participatory uniqueness, and it
makes these features points of continuous contestation.
The cognitive challenge that local publics face can be attributed to two
factors: First, we witness a shrinking media commitment to the delivery
of shared knowledge about the local. Second, continuous urban seg-
mentation and segregation processes encourage the formation of local
subpublics–oftenwithlittlecognitiveawarenessoforconnectionamong
each other. Across societies, we have established that audiences consider
local news to be pivotal for their sense of place and citizenship, and that
they tend to respond positively to comprehensive and in-depth political,
social, and cultural news delivery. Glocalization leaves citizens in dear
needoftheinterpretivepowerofthemediaandtheprocessingofnational
and global news through the prism of the local. Yet commercial or free
media often do not provide adequate information flows and interpretive
schemes, and in many metropolitan areas they are being challenged by
alternative free media sources that often employ in-depth investigative
reporting on local issues with relatively few resources. Cognition about
local publics, while being high in demand, lacks commitment and in-
vestment on the providers’ end. Conversely, neighborhoods, ethnic, or
cultural minorities in larger urban spaces have tended to form their own
public arenas under the umbrella of the local public – sometimes making
adeliberate effort to enhance cognitive awareness in their city of specific
aspects of their space or cultures, but sometimes being just as content
to provide niches for identity production that do not aim at a larger
audience. As a result, the identity of local publics as a relatively unified
cognitive arena is constantly in flux.

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