The Media And The Democratic Prosess.

There is five functions of the communication media in ‘ideal type’ democratic societies:
• First, they must inform citizens of what is happening around them (what we may call the ‘surveillance’ or ‘monitoring’ functions of the media).
• Second, they must educate as to the meaning and significance of the ‘facts’ (the importance of this function explains the seriousness with which journalist protect their objectivity, since their value as educators presumes a professional detachment from the issues being analysed).
• Third, the media must provide a platform for public political discourse, facilitating the formation of ‘public opinion’, and feeding that opinion back to the public from when it came. This must include the provision of space for the expression of dissent, without which the notion of democratic consensus would be meaningless.
• The media’s fourth function is to give publicity to governmental and political institutions – the ‘watchdog’ role of journalism, exemplified by the performance of the US media during the Watergate episode and, more recently, the British Guardian’s coverage of the cash-for-questions scandal, in which investigative journalist exposed the practice of members of parliament accepting payment for the asking of parliamentary questions. The post-1997 Labour government of Tony Blair has also seen its relationship with lobbyist and financial backers subjected to critical scrutiny. ‘Public opinion’ can only matter have an influence on ‘objective’ political reality – to the extent that ‘the acts of whoever holds supreme power are made available for public scrutiny, meanig how far they are visible, ascertainable, accesible, and hence accountable’ (Bobbio, 1987, p. 83). There must be, to use Mikhail Gorbachev’s famous formulation, a degree of ‘opennes’ surrounding the activities of the political class if the ‘public opinions’ of the people are to have any bearing on decision-making.
• Finally, the media in democratic societies serve as a channel for the advocacy of political viewpoints. Parties require an outlet for the articulation of their policies and programmes to a mass audience, and thus the media must be open to them. Furthermore, some media mainly in the print sector, will actively endors one or other of the parties at sensitive times such as elections. In this latter sense, the media’s advocacy function may also be viewed as one of persuasion.

For these functions to be performed adequately, and thus for a real ‘public sphere’ to exist (and, by extension, ‘real’ democracy), a number of conditions have to be met. For Habermas, the political discourse circulated by the media must be comprehensible to citizens. Hauser summarises Habermas’s views thus:

[F]irst, the [public sphere] must be accessible to all citizens. ……… Second, there must be access to information must be accessible to those who can be influenced by it …… [and] there must be institutionalised guarantees for [the public sphere] to exist.
(Quoted in Cooper, 1991, p. 32)