ABSTRACT
In recent years, research on public communication has shifted its focus away from the study of propaganda towards a concern with civil society and the public sphere. While Habermas insisted that the development of the bourgeois public sphere was a crucial event in the history of democracy, he also worried that the democratic potential of public communication had become significantly reduced throughout the twentieth century. As the public sphere has come under closer critical scrutiny, an increasing number of scholars have begun to question whether rational-critical discourse can really provide the organising framework for democratic spaces of communication. Of all the features of narrative that influence public sphere communication, perhaps the most important is plot, which refers to the selection, evaluation and attribution of differential status to events. As events become emplotted into narratives, they shape the symbolic relationships between the different characters in a story.
