Author: Václav Štětka Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan ISBN: 9783031544880 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
This open access book provides the first systematic analysis of the role of the media in the rise of illiberalism, based on an original theoretical framework and extensive empirical research in Eastern Europe – a region that serves as a key battleground in the global advance of illiberalism. Liberal democracies across the world are facing a range of challenges, from the growing influence of illiberal leaders and parties to deepening polarization and declining trust in political elites and mainstream media. Although these developments attracted significant scholarly attention, the factors that contribute to the spreading of illiberalism remain poorly understood, and the communication perspective on illiberalism is particularly underdeveloped. Štětka and Mihelj address this gap by introducing the concept of the illiberal public sphere, identifying the key stages in its development, and explaining what makes illiberalism distinct from related phenomena such as populism. Their analysis reveals how and why the changing communication environment facilitates selective exposure to ideologically and politically homogeneous sources, fosters changes in normative assumptions that guide media trust, increases vulnerability to disinformation, and goes hand in hand with growing hostility to immigration and LGBTQ+ rights. The findings challenge widespread assumptions about digital platforms as key channels of illiberalism and suggest that their role shifts as the illiberal sphere progresses. The arguments presented in this book have important implications for future research on challenges to liberal democracy, as well as for journalists, media regulators and other professionals committed to rebuilding media trust and containing the forces of polarization.
Author: J?rgen Habermas Publisher: John Wiley & Sons ISBN: 0745692338 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 328
Book Description
This major work retraces the emergence and development of the Bourgeois public sphere - that is, a sphere which was distinct from the state and in which citizens could discuss issues of general interest. In analysing the historical transformations of this sphere, Habermas recovers a concept which is of crucial significance for current debates in social and political theory. Habermas focuses on the liberal notion of the bourgeois public sphere as it emerged in Europe in the early modern period. He examines both the writings of political theorists, including Marx, Mill and de Tocqueville, and the specific institutions and social forms in which the public sphere was realized. This brilliant and influential work has been widely recognized for many years as a classic of contemporary social and political thought, of interest to students and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities.
Author: Publisher: GRIN Verlag ISBN: 3638219933 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 16
Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject Communications - Media and Politics, Politic Communications, grade: A-80, University of Canterbury (Department of Mass Communication and Journalism), course: Political Economy of Communication, language: English, abstract: The role of the media in democracies is to connect decision makers and voters. The media should thus fulfil a basic position and serve as a foundation for the democratic process. In Rich Media, Poor Democracy R.W. McChesney argues that the media, far from providing a bedrock for freedom and democracy, have become a significant antidemocratic force in the United States and, to varying degrees, worldwide. The variables that have caused this development are the corporate media explosion and the corresponding implosion of public life and culture. M.C. Miller (2001) even states that “the generated monoculture, endlessly and noisily triumphant, offers, by and large, a lot of nothing, whether packaged as ‘the news’ or ‘entertainment’”. Whereas the major beneficiaries are wealthy investors, advertisers and the few leading media conglomerates, this concentrated corporate control is disastrous for any notion of participatory democracy. The text contrasts the two fundamentally different positions of the media’s role in democracy, which are the media in the desirable position as provider of a public sphere in a Habermasian sense, and the media’s role in a liberal theory understanding. By focussing largely on the US media, the prototype of privatization, section two names the most influential corporate powers and presents the influence they exert. Following the description of their independence from any controlling instances, such as the FCC, the text finally points out alternatives which are basically derived from D.W. Mazzocco.
Author: Craig Calhoun Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 9780262531146 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 516
Book Description
In this book, scholars from a wide range of disciplines respond to Habermas's most directly relevant work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. The relationship between civil society and public life is in the forefront of contemporary discussion. No single scholarly voice informs this discussion more than that of Jürgen Habermas. His contributions have shaped the nature of debates over critical theory, feminism, cultural studies, and democratic politics. In this book, scholars from a wide range of disciplines respond to Habermas's most directly relevant work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. From political theory to cultural criticism, from ethics to gender studies, from history to media studies, these essays challenge, refine, and extend our understanding of the social foundations and changing character of democracy and public discourse. Contributors Hannah Arendt, Keith Baker, Seyla Benhabib, Harry C. Boyte, Craig Calhoun, Geoff Eley, Nancy Fraser, Nicholas Garnham, Jürgen Habermas, Peter Hohendahl, Lloyd Kramer, Benjamin Lee, Thomas McCarthy, Moishe Postone, Mary P. Ryan, Michael Schudson, Michael Warner, David Zaret
Author: Noel O'Sullivan Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317996054 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 231
Book Description
In its political form, the existence of a public realm is the basis of a shared relationship between rulers and ruled which makes politics more than mere power or domination. How to construct and maintain a public realm in the political sphere is, however, a matter of especial dispute at the present day, due partly to the increasing difficulty of making the distinction between public and private spheres which has been the basis of Western liberal democracy; partly to the tendency of public concerns to be identified with economic interests, which transforms citizens into consumers; partly to pressure for the acknowledgement of diversity of every kind, which creates the danger of fragmenting the public realm; and partly to globalization processes which have undermined the traditional identification of the public realm with national political institutions. Globalization has, in addition, raised the question of whether there can be a supra-national public realm and, more generally, of what form it is likely to assume in non-Western cultures. These are amongst the fundamental contemporary issues addressed by contributors to the present volume. This book was published as a special issue of the Critical Review of International, Social and Political Philosophy.
Author: Harry Browne Publisher: Síreacht: Longings for Another ISBN: 9781782052432 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
This book is a critique of the public sphere, both as the centrepiece of some liberal theory about political communications, and as a description of actually existing media practice in Ireland and beyond - in traditional commercial news media and in social media. Written in an accessible style, but with endnotes as necessary, it is a call to more and deeper critical thinking about media, old and new, as well as a consideration of the communicative needs of a present and future movement for transformative political and economic change. The book introduces the public sphere as an historic idea and ideal, a place where democratic subjects deliberate and ensure civil society has a voice at the table of state. It challenges that idea, both in terms of its limitations in a globalised economy and its ultimately technocratic-consensual model of politics, its evasion of what Laclau and Mouffe call 'the ineradicability of antagonism'. It also begins a political-economy critique of the media, the presumed home of the public sphere in the post-18th-century-coffeehouse era. What we can and can't learn by looking at media behaviour through the lens of its proprietors' commercial interests is discussed. The biases of broadcasters and newspapers in the recent economic crisis are considered, along with the pressures and consequences of declining print circulation and migration of advertising online, as well as some initial questions about pluralism and the continuing important role of the public service media, in Ireland and elsewhere. This chapter includes an extensive review of previously unpublished results of a study into newspaper coverage of the Irish movement against the Iraq war. Public Sphere also moves the discussion online, where, though nearly infinite pluralism appears to rule the day, power and freedom are more elusive. Under the regime of 'communicative capitalism', we are all 'content providers', generally without remuneration. The continuing centrality of advertising and corporate power in digital media underlines the need to keep our eyes on the money even when talking about a networked information environment. The familiar question of whether online engagement acts as a substitute for 'real world' politics is supplemented, in this chapter, with an examination of the 'real' content of virtual politics, and of whether we can explain some of the weirdest recent turns in the global political journey in light of special features of the online world, such as the 'fake news' that is widely supposed to have elected Donald Trump. Finally, we look at media alternatives, if any, to the corporate control of potentially transformative communications. Although I regard the concept of the public sphere as hopelessly inadequate at best, I do, in keeping with the theme of the Sireacht series, seek to imagine a healthier environment for public communication in the context of a better Ireland and a better world.
Author: Ari Adut Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 131685079X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 221
Book Description
The public sphere is the realm of appearances - not citizenship. Its central event is spectacle - not dialogue. Marked by an asymmetry between the few who act and the many who watch, and subjecting all its contents to visibility, the public sphere can undermine liberal democracy, law, and morality. But the public sphere also liberates us from the burdens and bondages of private life and fosters an existentially vital aesthetic experience. Reign of Appearances uses a great variety of cases to reveal the logic of the public sphere, including homosexuality in Victorian England; the 2008 crash; antisemitism in Europe; confidence in American presidents; communications in social media; special prosecutor investigations; the visibility of African-Americans; violence during the French Revolution; the Islamic veil; contemporary sexual politics; public executions; and pricing in art. This unconventional account of the public sphere is critical reading for anyone who wants to understand the effects of visibility in urban life, politics, and the media.
Author: Michael Hofmann Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1611479894 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 287
Book Description
Habermas’s Public Sphere: A Critique analyzes the evolution of Juergen Habermas’s social and political theory from the 1950s to the present by focusing on the explicit and on the tacit changes in his thinking about The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, his global academic bestseller, which has been translated into 30 languages. Integrating “public sphere,” “discourse,” and “reason,” the three categories at the center of his lifelong work as a scholar and as a public intellectual, Habermas’s classic public sphere concept has deeply influenced an unusually high number of disciplines in the social sciences and in the humanities. In the process, its complex methodology, whose sources are not always identified, can be perplexing and therefore lead to misunderstandings. While Habermas’s “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere” (1992) contain several far-reaching clarifications, they still do not identify a number of the most important sources for his methodology, above all Herbert Marcuse and Ernst Bloch. Hence, a key purpose of this study is to thoroughly analyze the Marxist critique of ideology that Habermas uses in dialectical fashion for his theory reconstruction of Immanuel Kant’s liberal ideal of a rational-critical public as the organizational principle of the constitutional state and as the method of Enlightenment. Such dialectical thinking allows him to appropriate the structure of Reinhart Koselleck’s Critique and Crisis and of Carl Schmitt’s writings on the modern state while simultaneously upending their conservative critique of Liberalism and of the Enlightenment. However, this strategy restricts the application of his concept to his stylizations of the French Revolution and of his British “model case.” This critique reinvigorates Habermas’s seminal distinction between the purely political polis of antiquity, which excludes the private economy from the res publica, and the modern public sphere with its rational-critical discourse about commodity exchange and social labor in the political economy. At the same time, it identifies the crises of seventeenth-century England and the Dutch Republic as the origins of the new channels of public communication used to constantly evaluate the role of state power as political facilitator and regulator of an increasingly complex, dynamic, and crisis-prone market economy.
Author: Václav Štětka
Author: J?rgen Habermas
Author: 
Author: Craig Calhoun
Author: Noel O'Sullivan
Author: Václav Štětka
Author: Harry Browne
Author: Ari Adut
Author: John Trelawney Hoal
Author: Michael Hofmann