Page 105 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

100 Jürgen Habermas

leaders exercise over the dividing line between desired and damaging
visibility. The relentless pursuit of publicity carries with it serious risks:
‘Gaffes and outbursts, performances which backfire and scandals are

some of the ways in which the limits of control are most clearly and
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strikingly manifested.’ This has never been truer than with the rise
of the Internet, which makes the job of information managers harder
(and their salaries higher!) than ever.
This certainly provides an important counterweight to some of
the monolithic excesses which characterise Habermas’s early work.
However, Thompson’s account does little to clarify the distinction
between the ambivalent potential of mediated quasi-interaction,
on the one hand, and the manner in which power holders have
actually sought, with varying degrees of success, to minimise the
risks associated with it. Direct and indirect mechanisms of censorship
and misinformation do not feature strongly in Thompson’s analysis.
Many democrats would vehemently resist, for example, Thompson’s

suggestion that the 1991 Gulf War exemplified the way in which ‘the
exercise of political power takes place in an arena which is increasingly
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open to view’ and ‘global scrutiny’. In the eyes of many, it provided
the occasion for the most cynical and large-scale manipulation of the
Western media ever seen (rivalled only by subsequent instalments).
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This raises the question, ‘What kind of visibility?’ Edward Said,

with some justification, described the Gulf War as ‘the most covered
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and the least reported war in history’. Witnessing the subsequent
drip-feed revelations about the misinformation deployed during the
Gulf War, or sitting in front of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, two
years on from the Twin Towers, one is reminded of the immense
counter-hegemonic struggles that have to be waged in order for the
dominant frames to be unsettled, let alone overturned.
Just how the media construct public discourse – whether they
inform or misinform, whether they contextualise events, and whether
they focus on substantive issues or simply on the cosmetics of public
relations and personality politics – relates to a broader question
about the political system as a whole and constitutes, I suggest,
a second problem with Thompson’s thesis. This stems from the
rather vague notion of ‘risk’ that he employs. That mediated quasi-

interaction creates certain risks for visible public figures is undeniable.
What is less certain is that this somehow endows the public with
greater mechanisms of control with which to hold power relations
and decision-making processes in check. The reason Habermas’s
refeudalisation thesis may be of more value than his critics tend to

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