ABSTRACT
Size isn’t everything, of course, and the ‘map’ of the public sphere presented in Chapter 2 is less than sufficient to enable an evaluation of its contribution to the democratic process. The qualitative features of the journalism which that public sphere contains – its priorities and themes, the accuracy of its information, its styles and idioms – are of at least equal importance in assessing the true extent of the ‘crisis of public communication’ outlined in Chapter 1. This chapter thus asks a different set of questions. What is political journalism about? Which aspects of political life does it report? Which kinds of political knowledge does it make available to its audiences? And on the basis of the answers to these questions, how valuable is it as a cognitive resource?
