ABSTRACT
If advertising has formed a predominant logic of commercial television, a rival logic, much-lauded by many media scholars, and followed in theory by public broadcasting systems, is that of the creation and maintenance of an active public sphere. Jürgen Habermas’ ideal of the media serving as a space where ‘private people come together as a public’ (1989: 27), is well known, and despite the many criticisms of Habermas’ thesis, 1 the notion that the media should serve the public interest is an enduring and noble ideal, at least in theory built into many countries regulatory policies. In recent years, though, the USA’s Federal Communications Commission and other international (de)regulatory bodies have instituted policies that often weaken the media’s ability and producers’ commitment to serve citizens as citizens, not merely as consumers (Bagdikian 2004; Hesmondhalgh 2002; McChesney 2004). As Dahlgren neatly describes it, the public sphere is
a space – a discursive, institutional, topographical space – where people in their roles as citizens have access to what can be metaphorically called societal dialogues, which deal with questions of common concern: in other words, with politics in the broadest sense.
(Dahlgren 1995: 9)