ABSTRACT
The chapter on media and democracy first defines the media assemblage as a technological-institutional assemblage that produces signifying practices, articulated with audiences. In order to better contextualize the media/democracy nexus, the chapter then provides a brief outline of public sphere theory (combined with related concepts, e.g., civic cultures and public connection). The intersection between media and democracy is further developed in the next section, where five media-democratic roles are discussed: the informational, the watchdog, the forum, the representational and the participatory roles. In the third section of this chapter, five struggles over the media's democratic roles are outlined, namely the political-democratic struggles over the degrees of media pluralism, of media freedom, of pluriform media representations and of participatory intensities. In the fourth section, we can find a discussion on three conditions of possibility for media's democratic roles: resources, a democratic media culture and the legitimacy of state regulation. Finally, the last section describes the threats capable of dislocating media's democratic roles: the lack of economic sustainability, the colonization of the public sphere, disenchantment and lack of trust, the transformation of political knowledge and the presence of symbolic violence and polarization. The chapter ends with a visual representation of all elements.
