ABSTRACT
This chapter provides discussions of high German theory, on the one hand, and the more modern encounter with racism, classism, sexism, transphobia, and the ways these have implicated the press, on the other. Most commentary on Habermas, in discussing his intellectual background, tends to focus on his apprenticeship under Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, the two most important members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Habermas’s theories of the public served as a negative theoretical example in another major intellectual debate that dominated the American intellectual scene in the 1990s and early 2000s, namely the debate over questions of universals. There is little doubt that in the last decade, journalism has faced a reckoning, with citizens criticizing the overwhelmingly white-centric framing of most news coverage, and scholars critiquing the largely hegemonic normative focus of much journalism studies.
