1. The Public Sphere Jűrgen Habermas (Frankfurt’s 2 nd wave)

2. Background Jűrgen Habermas was credited with coining the ‘Public Sphere’. A member of the Frankfurt school of critical theory. Despite being a media related term – this was not his preferred discipline. He only produced a single work on the media.

3. Why, where and how we have come across the term At the beginning of the twenty-first century most news agendas were dominated by ongoing stories. - War in Iraq - The environment – global warming and natural disasters. - Poverty and unrest in Africa - … and obesity

4. Relationships Links between the debates, discussions and comments about such issues. Invoke the ‘Public Sphere’ Albeit, not always referred to in this way.

5. Three ways of invocation (1) The first involves a range of ‘voices’ that are allowed, or invited, to participate in such debates. Traditionally, politicians, policymakers, prominent journalists and academics that tend to dominate news and current affairs. In parallel they have been eager to establish an online web presence. However, these traditional commentators have been joined in this ‘new’ media by ‘celebrities’. These ‘celebrities’ have sometimes initiated debates hoping to impact on politics and government on local and global levels.

6. ‘Celebrities’ - Examples Radiohead’s – Thom Yorke on the environment. U2’s – Bono on dept in the developing world. Ms Dynamite on gun crime Bob geldof on poverty in Africa George Clooney and other American music acts such as the Dixie Chicks, on war in Iraq.

7. Three ways of invocation (2) The second way relates to what we understand by ‘public opinion’ (previous lecture) Questions:- - How often do we read or hear that the public thinks this, or the public thinks that? - Where does this public view come from; who has participated – and who hasn’t – in discussions that lead to what is referred to as public opinion? - Is it just the traditional media voices, or this small, but increasingly vocal, group of celebrities, or the now numerous PR professionals that are responsible for generating public opinion?

8. Three ways of invocation (2) continued - Or does public opinion actually come from wide- spread participation of ‘ordinary’ people? - To what extent does opinion polling and its almost immediate transformation into ‘headlines’ by the electronic and print media reflect, or influence, public opinion? Habermas’s work on the public sphere provide a way of thinking about and responding to such questions.

9. Three ways of invocation (3) Finally, the third way in which the concept of the public sphere is formed arises with increasing tendency to use the term ‘dumbing-down’ as a way of describing contemporary media. The implication here, is that the quality, diversity and quality – generally – of news and current affairs broadcasting have diminished. These have been replaced by ‘reality’ and ‘make- over’ programmes – in broadcast media. TV – dumbing-down = increased ratings Press – celebrity stories/gossip = more papers sold (tabloids predominantly).

10. Dumbing-down argument The media and television are seen as the greatest ‘sinner’. …and have targeted, or ‘constructed’ its readers, listeners and viewers primarily as consumers, or buyers, rather than citizens. Overall, dumbing-down is a process that results in a poorly informed and only partial public sphere. The act and process of citizenship is undermined. An alternative conceptualisation is that dumbing- down would be to suggest that the public sphere has been assimilated into the capitalist system.

11. Habermas’s conception The fascination of his concept drawn from British, French and German society in the seventeenth century, is it can relate and mirror the twenty-first century. It provides a unique way of examining the relationship between the media, the state, business and ‘ordinary’ people, while providing the scope to imagine or envisage how these relationships might be withdrawn in the interests of a more democratic society.

12. The Reading Habermas’s one major media work was The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An inquiry into category of bourgeois society (STPS). First published in Germany in 1962, but not translated until 1989. The reason for this was the ‘new way of media thinking’ at a time of collapsing communism in eastern Europe and capitalism thriving in the U.K. and U.S. because of pro-market policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan (Boyd- Barrett 1995a: 231). While encouragement of reading STPS in full, the excerpt is a very brief synopsis, ‘The Public Sphere: an encyclopaedia article’.