Page 89 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

68 Mapping approaches and themes

following its translation from German into English in 1989. Habermas argued
that the eighteenth century bourgeoisie in Britain, France and Germany
engaged in critical discussion through face-to-face communication, in coffee
houses and other shared spaces, and mediated communication, especially
through newspapers and periodicals. For Habermas, this early bourgeois public
sphere provided a space for collective will-formation in which an autonomous
public opinion was created that influenced the conduct of emergent democratic
governance based on multi-party political systems. For Habermas (1989: 36):

Les hommes, private gentlemen, or die Privatleute made up the public not
just in the sense that power and prestige of public office were held in
suspense; economic dependencies also in principle had no influence. Laws of
the market were suspended as were laws of the state. Not that this idea of
the public was actually realised in earnest in the coffee houses, the salons,
and the societies; but as an idea it had become institutionalised and thereby
stated as an objective claim. If not realised, it was at least consequential.

Habermas’s own account has been described as a ‘melancholic historical narrative
in two acts’ (Dahlgren 1995: 7). The public sphere was destroyed by the very
forces that brought it into existence, undermined by corporate and state power,
as commercially driven media came to dominate and the state, political parties
and business organisations ‘used their control of social resources and political
power, as well as the techniques of public relations, to dominate the process of
public communication’ (Hallin and Mancini 2004: 81). For Murdock and
Golding (2005: 77) ‘[t]his general ideal of a communications system as a public
cultural space that is open, diverse and accessible, provides the basic yardstick
against which critical political economy measures the performance of existing
systems and formulates alternatives’.
Garnham (1990, 1992) provided an influential ‘reinterpretation’ of Habermas
(Curran 2004: 18), extracting from the public sphere ideal, and the emphasis on
the material conditions for mediated democratic communication, a principled
defence of public service broadcasting. A model of media citizenship was thus
derived from Habermas’s original account of the public sphere and adopted in
arguments to oppose market dominance and justify expansion of non-commodified
public media. Croteau and Hoynes (2006: 39) organise their critical account of US
media by contrasting a ‘market model’ and public sphere model. The market model
conceptualises media as private companies selling products, success is measured
by profits, the media encourage people to ‘enjoy themselves, view ads and buy
products’, media are ultimately accountable to owners and shareholders and
regulation is perceived as interference in market processes. In the public sphere
model, media are conceptualised as public resources, success is measured by serving
the public interest, the media encourage people to ‘learn about their world and
be active citizens’, media are ultimately accountable to the public and government,
and regulation is regarded as a useful tool to protect the public interest.