ABSTRACT
In a democracy, the legitimacy of a government and its decisions doesn’t just depend on regular elections. It also depends in no small part on how political decision-making responds to the opinions and arguments that citizens voice in political deliberation. Before the rise of social media, the traditional news media – the press, TV, and radio stations – were among the main intermediaries of political deliberation. With the rise of social media, new forums for political deliberation have emerged.
The new digital public sphere has disrupted the established normative models for the news media. In particular, the new public sphere has exposed tensions between a normative model, familiar from the traditional news media, which emphasises the epistemic value of the news media, and emerging models, which emphasise the participatory value of social media. How do these models compare? Is the participatory value of social media ineluctably opposed to the epistemic value of news media, or can we conceive of a form of media that reconciles these apparent opposites? In this chapter, we examine four normative models for the news media, focusing primarily on the political responsibility of the news media. A key question we explore is whether we can imagine a normative model for the news media that respects both epistemic and participatory values.
