Lecture notes for Level 2 undergrad class

1. 1
Television and the Public
Sphere
#MAC201
robert.jewitt@sunderland.ac.uk

2. 2
Overview
1. Jurgen Habermas and the public
sphere
2. Testing the political public sphere
3. Levels of coverage
4. Newspaper discourse

3. Context
• Examine the media’s democratic & civic usefulness
• What is the function of the media in a context of
global news, global markets, global audiences ?
• Do the broadcasters have a responsibility to their
stakeholders, advertisers, or audience?
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4. News & political
responsibility
• To disseminate
accurate information
and political
intelligence that is of
general interest
• To contribute to an
informed political
culture and civic
society
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5. 5

6. 6
1 - Jurgen Habermas
• Internationally renowned
philosopher and social
scientist
• Frankfurt School tradition
• The public sphere
• The realm of our social life
from which “public opinion”
emerges

7. 7
Public sphere
• Civic space in which private citizens could
meet to discuss matters of political
importance
• Work towards the formation of a collective
opinion for the benefit of the citizenry
– ‘communicative rationality’
– knowledge, language and validity claims

8. 8
Conditions for the public
sphere
• Free from the influences of:
– the market place
– the state
– the family

9. 200,000 BCE
Primitive communalism
Slave society
Feudalism
Capitalism
Socialism >> Communism
shared property | hunter/gatherer | no leadership
class | private property | the state | agriculture | authoritarianism
aristocracy | theocracy | hereditary | nation states | merchants
market forces| private property | parliamentary democracy | wages
1750-? CE
900-1750 CE
11,000 BCE
common property >> no property | statelessness | classlessness

10. Primitive communalism
Slave society
Feudalism
Capitalism
Socialism >> Communism
aristocracy | theocracy | hereditary | nation states | merchants
Prior to 18th
century European
culture had been a
"representational"
culture which
dominated its
subjects

11. Early history: Slave
society
• Public life
• Ancient Greece
• The agora
• Open to the ‘free citizens’
to sit in assembly
– Eg Athens: 5% of
population, all adult males
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12. • “The public life ... went on in the market place
(agora), but of course this did not mean that it
occurred necessarily only in this specific locale.
The public sphere was constituted in discussion
(lexis), which could also assume the forms of
consultation and of sitting in the court of law, as
well as in common action (praxis), be it the
waging of war or competition in athletic games.”
– The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere:
An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society,
Cambridge (MA), MIT, 1989, p. 3
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13. Recent history: feudal
society
• ‘bourgeois public
sphere’
• London coffee houses
(mid-17th century)
• Frequented by
aristocrats and
merchants
• Forums for debate
• Emergence of
‘public’ culture
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14. The public sphere
• Active participants met to check powers of
state
• Formation owed much to burgeoning
capitalism and economic freedoms –
‘bourgeois public sphere’
• ‘Notional space’ – arena for public debate
• Lies between ‘basis’ (private lives of citizens)
and ‘top’ (political institutions)
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15. Democracy?
• Public sphere = public opinion?
• ‘the critical state of a democracy can be
measured by taking the pulse of the life of
its political public sphere’
(Habermas, 2004, p10)
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16. 16
Contemporary significance?
• Media become the primary location of public
engagement
• Now, we have a re-feudalised public sphere (i.e.
left with the mass media and its power relations)
• No independence - corrupted by:
– Ownership and control of the media industry
– Advertising revenues
– Public relations and ‘spin culture’

17. The Media as Public Sphere
• Nicholas Garnham
(1992) “The media
and the public sphere”,
in C. Calhoun,
Habermas and the
Public Sphere
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18. The Media as Public Sphere
• Livingstone & Lunt
(1994) Talk on
television: audience
participation and public
debate
• Hartley (1996) Popular
reality: journalism,
modernity, popular
culture
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19. Media sphere:
Negatives
• Habermas is pessimistic
• TV and press most important sources of
information: “extensive reliance on mass
media has been accompanied by an
increase in cynicism and negativism
towards politics” (McQuail, 2000: 158)
• Mass media accused of failing to serve
politicians
• “Entertainers” (Carey, 1999)
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20. Media sphere:
Positives
• Public sphere is a neutral zone where
– access to information for the public good is
widely available
– discussion is free from domination
– and all those participating are equal
• The media facilitate this process by
forming public opinion (Curran, 1996)
• Provide a zone of ‘protection’ for citizens
• Dahlgren (1995) positive political
communication
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21. Ideal?
• The media should inform democratic
decisions by helping ‘citizens learn about
the world, debate their responses to it and
reach informed decisions about what
course of action to adopt’
(Dahlgren, 1991: 1)
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22. Panelists
TV Audience

23. 23
2 - Testing the political public
sphere
• See Higgins, 2006 (on Sunspace)
• Debate surrounding the 1999 election to the
newly formed devolved Scottish parliament.
• Scottish press coverage vs UK coverage

24. 24
Method
Scottish papers UK papers
The Herald The Guardian
The Scotsman The Independent
The Press and Journal The Times
All broadsheet newspapers or ‘quality’ titles
(Bromley: 1998) from 3 day period: 5th-7th of May

25. 25
3 - Levels of coverage
• Scottish papers = 84,160 words
• UK papers = 19,246 words
• ‘The Scottish papers therefore assume
the greater role in the political public
sphere around the election simply by
offering substantially more coverage than
the UK papers’
(Higgins, 2006: 29-30)

26. 26
Distribution of words
33176
5277
29348
8521
21636
5448
0
5000
10000
15000
20000
25000
30000
35000
Election Eve Election Day Results Day
Scottish papers
UK papers

27. 27
4 - Newspaper discourse
4 types:
1. News
2. Feature coverage
3. Opinion
4. Editorial
Informative
Evaluative

28. Types of News Coverage
• There is a greater emphasis on evaluation
and comment when an issue falls within
the remit of a public sphere
– i.e. on matters in which the public should be
informed, the press serves as a means by
which important issues are highlighted.
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29. 29
2 types of coverage
• Informative types
• News to be factual
• Feature articles go
‘beyond the reporting
of facts to explain
and/or entertain’
without being explicit
in offering a
judgement or opinion
(Hicks, 1998: 118).
• Evaluative types
• Offer overtly
subjective appraisal
of current events or
issues
• Heavy use of the
personal pronouns ‘I’
and ‘we’ (Fowler,
1991: 64; Allan, 1999:
92

30. 30
34844
10260
26542
4577
19356
2390 3318
2019
0
5000
10000
15000
20000
25000
30000
35000
News Feature Opinion Editorial
Scottish papers
UK papers
Word count by discourse type

31. 31
The Scottish papers….
1. demonstrate a significantly greater quantity of election
coverage
2. ‘present a pattern consistent with voter deliberation by
providing the bulk of election material when it is able to
inform democratic action’ (Higgins, 2006: 39)
3. attempt to engage via an emphasis on feature and
opinion coverage whereby ‘the greater stress of
informative material [comes] at a time where it can be
used to substantiate voting decisions’ (ibid).
4. place their coverage in the most prominent parts of the
paper.

32. 32
Conclusion
• Democratic society needs some kind of space in
which the important issues of the day can be
discussed so that the public can make informed
decisions.
• Cultural proximity impacts upon how information
is presented to the public
• Higgins suggests that the ‘public sphere’ that
Habermas identifies is manifest in the civil
institution of the press.

33. News as social and political agent?
• Should we think of the business of news as
reporting facts or seeking out and bringing us
material we should know about?
• Is it a role of the news to make us more socially
and politically aware, or to distract and entertain
us?
• Can it do both? (Think of the role of news
values.)
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34. Points for discussion
• In your judgement, is the media as a
public sphere driven by consideration of:
– Political and democratic responsibility on the
part of the media institutions and journalists?
– The need to appeal to a given audience?
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35. Bibliography
• Allan, S. (1999/2004) News culture. Buckingham: Open University Press.
• Bell, A. (1991) The language of news media. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Bromley, M. (1998) ‘The ‘tabloiding’ of Britain: ‘Quality’ newspapers in the 1990s’, in M. Bromley and H. Stephenson (eds)
Sex, lies and democracy: the press and the public, pp. 25-38. London: Longman.
• Curran, J. ((1996), ‘Mass Media and Democracy Revisited’, in Curran and M. Gurevitch, eds. (2000) Mass Media and
Society,
• Dahlgren, P. (1991) ‘Introduction’, in P. Dahlgren and C. Sparks (eds) Communication and citizenship: journalism and the
public sphere, pp. 1-24. London: Routledge.
• Deacon, D., M. Pickering, P. Golding and G. Murdock (1999) Researching communications. London: Arnold.
• Fowler, R. (1991) Language in the news: discourse and ideology in the press. London: Routledge.
• Franklin, B. (1997) Newszak and news media. London: Arnold.
• Franklin, B. (2004) Packaging politics, 2nd edition. London: Arnold.
• Galtung, J. and M. Ruge (1973) ‘Structuring and selecting news’, in S. Cohen and J. Young (eds) The manufacture of news:
deviance, social problems and the media, pp. 62-72. London: Constable.
• Garnham, N. (1992) ‘The media and the public sphere’, in C. Calhoun (ed) Habermas and the public sphere, pp. 359-376.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Habermas, J. (1989) The structural transformation of the public sphere. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Habermas, J. (2004) ‘Public space and political public sphere – the biographical roots of two motifs in my thought’,
Commemorative Lecture, Kyoto, November 11.
• Hartley, J. (1996) Popular reality: journalism, modernity, popular culture. London: Arnold.
• Hicks, W. (1998) English for journalists, 2nd edition. London: Routledge.
• Higgins, M. (2006) ‘Substantiating a political public sphere in the Scottish press: a comparative analysis’, in Journalism, Vol.
7, No. 1, pp 25-44.
• Livingstone, S. and P. Lunt (1994) Talk on television: audience participation and public debate. London: Routledge.
• Negrine, R. (1998) Parliament and the media: a study of Britain, Germany and France. London: Pinter.
• Walzer, M (1995), Toward A Global Civil Society, Oxford: Berghahn Books
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