The Media and the Public Sphere

A Deliberative Model of Democracy

Thomas Häussler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351394567
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

At the heart of modern democracy lies the public sphere, which is most centrally shaped by those actors that integrate it discursively: the mass media. The media draw together the different strands of political debates; they grant access to some actors and arguments while excluding others and thus decisively mould the political process.

In this book, Thomas Häussler examines how the media reflect and react to the wider context in which they are embedded. More specifically, he focuses on whether their discourse demonstrates systematic differences with regard to the two main public sphere types that they co-constitute, according to deliberative theory, focussing in particular on the work of Jürgen Habermas.

The Media and the Public Sphere promotes a deeper and more detailed understanding of the political process by foregrounding the complex relationships between the media and the public discourse they constitute. It examines how the media co-create relationships of power, analyses the structure of these discursive networks and illuminates the effects that different deliberative coalition types have on political debates.

1 Introduction

He was probably nervous when he got out of the car, and he must have known that his presence would not open everyone’s hearts, but he certainly did not anticipate what followed. When Tom King, the Conservative Government’s Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, arrived in Belfast on 20 November 1985, five days after Margaret Thatcher and the Republic of Ireland’s Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald had signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement, he got a small foretaste of loyalist anger as The Sun reported (21.11.1985, p. 7):

‘Ulster supremo Tom King was attacked yesterday by an egg-throwing mob. The Loyalist demonstrators scuffled with Mr King’s bodyguards when he arrived for a luncheon in Belfast. The jeering crowd, led by the Reverend Ian Paisley, were protesting the new Anglo-Irish Agreement, which gives the Dublin government a say in running Ulster. Mr King escaped unhurt as the mob smashed a headlight on his car.’

While politicians of all parties were quick to condemn the attack, Paisley was rather unrepentant, warning King that ‘[h]e should only to go [sic] those places where he is welcome, but he should not go out on to the streets of Northern Ireland, where the people look upon him as a traitor’ (The Daily Telegraph, 22.11.1985, p. 19). Other loyalist politicians went as far as saying that they would ‘follow Mr King around the province and give him a rough ride’ (The Daily Telegraph, 22.11.1985, p. 19).

The Agreement proved to be an important milestone in the Northern Ireland peace process, leading eventually to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, which set out the terms for devolved, power-sharing institutions and addressed the relationship between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. But at the time, the reactions to it were fierce, particularly in the unionist camp, and King’s skirmish outside Belfast’s City Hall was just the first sign of a broad and sustained opposition to any Irish involvement in matters they felt pertained to the Crown. The Anglo-Irish Agreement resulted from consultations between the British Government and the Government of the Republic of Ireland that were held in near secrecy, the results of which ensured that the Republic had, for the first time, a role to play in the affairs of Northern Ireland as part of the newly founded Anglo-Irish Intergovernmental Conference. The Conference’s scope extended to legal, security and political matters, as well as to cross-border co-operation between the two governments, although its role was to be purely consultative.¹

Still, this did little to appease the unionists’ hostile stance towards the Agreement and the newly founded Conference. Protests, strikes and rallies; acts of civil disobedience; as well as the mass resignation of all unionist Members of Parliament (MPs) from the House of Commons followed. A petition against the Agreement collected 400,000 signatures, and unionists started the ‘Ulster Says No’ campaign. Two days after the Belfast City Hall incident, unionists organised a mass protest on the same spot, where Ian Paisley held his pugnacious speech: ‘Where do the terrorists operate from? From the Irish Republic! That’s where they come from! Where do the terrorists return to for sanctuary? To the Irish Republic! And yet Mrs Thatcher tells us that that Republic must have some say in our Province. We say never, never, never, never!’ (Tonge et al., 2014, p. 10).

In one of his less blustering moments, Paisley said ‘Everyone recognises that talks between Governments should be confidential, but these talks about Northern Ireland are only confidential as far as the majority population there are concerned’ (The Daily Telegraph, 7.11.1985, p. 10). As much as unionists were disaffected by the results of the talks, the way the process had been structured was the real issue – Paisley bemoaned a lack of inclusiveness, as none of those affected had been heard during the negotiations. This points to an important and equally intuitive aspect of political legitimacy: the acceptability of political decisions is tied to the process by which they come about. And this process reaches clearly beyond the arcane dealings in the back room talks between heads of states and votes taken in parliaments – in fact, it extends to society as a whole. In the case of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, both unionists and republicans felt that the British Government had ignored their voices, although both sides were equally affected by the accord. For unionists, any say the Irish Republic would have in matters of Northern Ireland, even if it was merely consultative, was an unacceptable infringement of a foreign power in domestic politics: ‘“The Province” inhabitants can now justifiably consider themselves second class citizens, since no other part of the Kingdom is subject to legalised interference by a foreign Power’, as Lord Monson wrote in The Daily Telegraph (20.11.1985, p. 18). Republicans took the opposite view, as, for them, the Agreement cemented Northern Ireland’s status as part of the UK and foreclosed any possibility of an Irish reunification.

Yet, inclusion in the political process alone does not guarantee that the parties involved agree on an outcome or accept it as legitimate. Thus, while being an important dimension, it has to be supplemented by others. In recounting his version of the events in front of Belfast City Hall, Tom King gives us an important clue in this respect: it all ‘started with 30 to 40 people, a number of them elected representatives, and some were quite clearly beside themselves and beyond rational thought at all. I am prepared to engage in discussions and sensible consultations with anybody as long as it is done constitutionally and without violence. I will not get involved with people who behave that way’, King told reporters (The Daily Telegraph, 22.11.1985, p. 19). In other words, King was open to discussions, even contentious ones, as long as they were held within rational boundaries. This, it appears, is a second basic dimension of the political process. Taken together, inclusion and rationality are the main components of a deliberative model of democracy that spells out ‘the intuitive ideal of a democratic association in which the justification of the terms and conditions of association proceeds through public argument and reasoning among equal citizens’, as Cohen (1989, p. 21) states.

Deliberative democracy is one of the most productive areas in political theory (Dryzek, 2007). The deliberative approach sees the communicative process in which decision-making procedures are embedded as the primary source of political legitimacy. As political decisions are informed by the preceding discussions and debates, the attention shifts accordingly to how these are structured. Importantly, this includes the informal, extra-institutional space occupied by civil society and other actors, and the deliberative perspective therefore allows for a more comprehensive – and, as we will see, more critical – analysis than those approaches that restrict themselves to the actual decision-making stage alone. In other words, if the quality of political decisions is only as good as the preceding discussions allow, then investigating these communicative processes and the standards by which they are governed becomes central to any analysis of the political process.

While the field of deliberative democracy comprises different definitions of deliberation and directions of research, the general idea is that it is the discussions among free and equals that confer legitimacy onto political decisions. At its most basic level, deliberation thus allows the parties in a political conflict to solve their differences without having to resort to violence (e.g. the cases of deliberation in divided societies discussed in Steiner, 2012). More than this, however, deliberative democrats claim that with respect to preference formation, negotiating the common good, decision-making and the political process as a whole, their models better capture the normative theoretical and empirical essence of politics than do the established alternatives. Unlike rational choice models, they do not take individual preferences as a given and can shed light on their genesis, their articulation and transformation through the public use of reason. Similarly, the common good as the object of political conflict is not an obvious, invariant a priori of politics, but rather the product of the deliberative process itself, which can therefore help to reduce the conflict between multiple notions of the common good that are characteristic of pluralistic and multicultural settings. Deliberation does so not by aggregating individual preferences in one way or the other, but through the co-operative search of the most convincing position governed by the ‘unforced force of the better argument’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 306). It conceives of politics as a communicative process that reaches beyond brick and mortar institutions and their formal procedures of decision-making by connecting them to the informal public sphere, sustained by civil society and ‘challengers’ (Kriesi, 2004) quite generally, comprised of all those actors without formal and routine access to political decision-making bodies. On this view, political institutions are embedded in networks of communicative flows, and their decisions can only claim legitimacy to the extent that they maintain the connection and remain responsive to the impulses from the informal sphere. Clearly, this is not the case in the process that led to the Anglo-Irish Agreement, nor were those critical of the result compelled by the reasons given for the secrecy of the negotiations.

As the deliberative perspective extends the theoretical focus of the political process to encompass the whole public sphere, those actors who have an intermediary position and connect the ‘weak publics’ of civil society (see below) to the strong ones of the political institutions – the media – become particularly important. In fact, Habermas speaks of ‘a public sphere dominated by the mass media’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 379) and identifies a new sort of power with them, the power of the media to select and process information and thus to set the political agenda – both on the demand side of the audience as well as the supply side of all those who seek to have their voices heard (Habermas, 1996, p. 377). Modern, post-traditional societies are increasingly integrated and shaped by mass communication and competing terms such ‘mediation’, ‘mediatisation’, ‘mediasation’ and ‘medialisation’ have all tried to capture the extent to which our lives are permeated and interconnected by old and new forms of media (see Livingstone, 2009 for a critical assessment of the different concepts). Mass media play a pivotal role in these processes, for rather than being replaced by new technologies and concepts of interactive communication, they are at the very heart of those transformations that are leading toward digitally expanded public spheres (Bohman, 2004) and more complex ‘hybrid media systems’ (Chadwick, 2013). Despite accompanying changes in gatekeeping roles, which journalists now partly share with bloggers and other online actors, they still dominate the public sphere, not so much because they exclusively decide what comes on the political agenda as to what stays on it (Jarren, 2008). Put differently, while the role of who generates the impulses for public discussion certainly has been enlarged, and the mass media may no longer be alone in setting the timing, they do still set the pace of much of political communication.

The critical potential of public discourse to take up and articulate different positions, particularly those that are usually marginalised, to integrate the argumentative strands between civil society and the political centre and to hold those in power accountable thus crucially depends on the role the mass media play in this process. Yet, Habermas makes the point that:

[e]ven if we know something about the internal operation and impact of the mass media, as well as about the distribution of roles among the public and various actors, and even if we can make some reasonable conjectures about who has privileged access to the media and who has a share in media power, it is by no means clear how the mass media intervene in the diffuse circuits of communication in the political public sphere. (Habermas, 1996, p. 377)

This is where the present study ties in, as it assesses from a deliberative perspective the role the media play in establishing the political public sphere. Deliberative theory, particularly in the Habermasian version, spells out in great detail the conditions of an ideal deliberative process, which we can use to develop an analytical instrument that allows us to analyse the political discourses around specific issues as they are refracted through the lens of the media. We thus follow the insight that ‘[t]he “quality” of public opinion, insofar as it is measured by the procedural properties of its process of generation, is an empirical variable. From a normative perspective, this provides a basis for measuring the legitimacy of the influence that public opinion has on the political system’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 362).

Such a task, however, is faced with the fact that for some time, the complexity of the theoretical framework has impeded a straightforward application of deliberative models in real-world contexts: Delli Carpini et al. state, for instance, that ‘[u]fortunately, empirical research on deliberative democracy has lagged behind theory’ (Delli Carpini et al., 2004, p. 316), and one year later, Ryfe still assessed that ‘[t]he literature on deliberative practice is still in its infancy, and its answers to these questions are by no means definitive’ (Ryfe, 2005, p. 50). A further three years later, however, Thompson concluded that political scientists had realised that deliberative democracy had advanced to the most active area of political theory, the result being ‘a profusion of empirical studies, now more numerous than the normative works that prompted them’ (Thompson, 2008, p. 498). While this is a welcome development of the field, those approaches that explicitly endorse a deliberative view are, on the one hand, based in political science and focus on the formal part of the public sphere, i.e. parliaments or more restricted venues such as committees (Bächtiger et al., 2010; Steiner et al., 2004), and, on the other hand, explicitly non-public settings such as focus groups (Caluwaerts & Ugarriza, 2012; Fishkin & Luskin, 2005; Jaramillo & Steiner, 2014). Steiner et al. (2004) are acutely aware of the analytical constraint posed by their institutional focus when they state that ‘it will also be necessary to investigate debates in the wider public sphere, which is so important for deliberative theorists’ (Steiner et al., 2004, p. 6). Communication scholars, on the other hand, have largely concentrated on the deliberative potential of the internet (Albrecht, 2006; Kies, 2010; Weger Jr & Aakhus, 2003; see also White, 1997 for an early approach) and left the role of the mass media and its agenda-setting role in political discourse (Cobb et al., 1976; Habermas, 2008; Kriesi, 2004; McCombs & Shaw, 1972) as an area that awaits more intense scrutiny. Furthermore, those studies that have explicitly addressed the question of deliberative quality in mass media discourses have sometimes done so from a framing perspective (Ferree et al., 2002; McAdam, 1996; Simon & Xenos, 2000), and while they have generated important insights, their results can only be connected indirectly to deliberative theory, as framing approaches do not capture the essence of the deliberative process. Much of the work so far has consisted of single case studies (Parkinson, 2006; Pilon, 2009), and when research has taken on a comparative perspective, it has done so mainly by contrasting different venues (Halpern & Gibbs, 2013; Hart, 2000; Kies, 2010), news stories and issues (Costain & Fraizer, 2000; Page, 1996) or different countries (e.g. Ferree et al., 2002). However, so far, we lack a systematic assessment of the most basic category in the political processes from a deliberative perspective, namely, the public sphere type; therefore, we have no knowledge of how different forms of public spheres affect the role of the media and the deliberative quality of their discourses.

This is what this study attempts to do. As we have seen in the introductory example, the public sphere structured by the Anglo-Irish Agreement is one that is initiated by the political centre, which seeks to confine most of the deliberative process to itself. Only in the last stage of the political process is the result of the deliberations between Britain and the Republic of Ireland related to the larger public – prompting the mentioned protests. This corresponds to one typical public sphere structure, which is anchored in the political–administrative centre, and where the informal part of it is either merely informed through the media of the results of the deliberations, as in the present case, or political actors strategically try to mobilise parts of civil society – and the media – to gain the upper hand in the debate over a policy issue. It is intuitively clear that despite its prevalence, this is not the type of public sphere favoured by deliberative theorists. As we will see, the only real deliberative alternative to these two variations of centre-initiated public spheres comes from that type that describes the reverse flow of communication: here, issues, grievances, demands and criticism are first uttered in civil society and then via the media find their way into the political centre, which responds to the deliberative stimulus in the form of policy proposals. The unanswered question so far is how the media tie into these public spheres that they co-constitute; and, more precisely, whether there is a difference in terms of the deliberative quality between those media discourses that are part of the first, centre-initiated type and those where the public sphere originates in the periphery of civil society. If, as the example and deliberative theory suggest, the structure of the public sphere is so centrally important for the political process and the legitimacy it generates, then investigating the role of the media and the discursive quality of the discourses it co-creates becomes a central task of empirical communication research.

We will examine the role of the media in s...