The media plays an essential role in democracy by facilitating public discourse and the formation of public opinion. It serves five main functions: monitoring current events to inform citizens; educating the public on issues and their significance; providing a platform for political discussion and dissent; giving publicity to governmental institutions in a watchdog role; and advocating for political viewpoints. The development of concepts like the public sphere and public opinion emphasized the media's role in enabling citizens to freely discuss issues of common interest and influence political decisions through that discussion.
The media plays an essential role in democracy by facilitating public discourse and the formation of public opinion. It serves five main functions: monitoring current events to inform citizens; educating the public on issues and their significance; providing a platform for political discussion and dissent; giving publicity to governmental institutions in a watchdog role; and advocating for political viewpoints. The development of concepts like the public sphere and public opinion emphasized the media's role in enabling citizens to freely discuss issues of common interest and influence political decisions through that discussion.
The media plays an essential role in democracy by facilitating public discourse and the formation of public opinion. It serves five main functions: monitoring current events to inform citizens; educating the public on issues and their significance; providing a platform for political discussion and dissent; giving publicity to governmental institutions in a watchdog role; and advocating for political viewpoints. The development of concepts like the public sphere and public opinion emphasized the media's role in enabling citizens to freely discuss issues of common interest and influence political decisions through that discussion.
the role of media in democracy Introduction “Public Sphere”-Development of concept Role of media in public sphere the media and the democratic process Introduction It is area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. Here, “Public” word stresses related to the notion of the common. In terms of
public health, education, public opinion or ownership.
Definition-
German sociologist Jürgen Habermas has called ‘the public sphere’.
By the public sphere we mean first of all a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. Citizens behave as a public body when they confer in an unrestricted fashion – that is, within the guarantee of freedom of assembly and association and the freedom to express and publish their opinions. Cont.. scholar Gerard A. Hauser defines it as "a discursive space in which individuals and groups associate to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common judgment about them".
Conditions of the public sphere are according to Habermas:
The formation of public opinion
All citizens have access.
Conference in unrestricted fashion (based on the freedom of assembly, the
freedom of association, the freedom to expression and publication of
opinions) about matters of general interest, which implies freedom from economic and political control. General rules for debate “Public Sphere”-Development of the concept
Habermas locates the development of the public sphere in eighteenth
century Britain, where the first newspapers had already begun to perform their modern function of supplying not only information but also opinion, comment and criticism, facilitating debate amongst the emerging bourgeois and educated classes. According to Habermas, In the coffee-house and salon cultures of Britain and France, debate and political critique became, for the first time, public property (meaning, of course, the bourgeois public, which excluded the mass of poor and illiterate underclasses). According to Habermas, the first use of the term ‘public opinion’ was documented in 1781, referring to ‘the critical reflection of a [bourgeois] public competent to form its own judgments Public sphere emerged as a set of institutions representing a sort of buffer zone between the state and private sphere, to protect them from arbitrary decisions that interfered with what they considered private activities in an irrational way. Media role in Public Sphere
the press in particular was to function as an instrument
or a forum for the enlightened, rational, critical, and unbiased public discussion of what the common interests were in matters of culture and politics. In the words of Josef Ernst, in short the public sphere ‘the bourgeois realm of politics’ which has gradually expanded from its elitist beginning to include absolute majorities of the population in modern democratic societies, The public sphere as can be seen, comprises in essence the communicative institutions of a society, through which facts and opinions circulate and by means of which a common stock of knowledge is built up as the basis for collective political action: In other words the mass media, which since 18th century evolved into the main source and focus of society’s shared experience(figure 2.1) The modern concept of ‘news’ developed precisely as means of furnishing citizens with the most of view their political activities and of streamlining and guiding public discussion functions which are taken for granted in contemporary journalism. The media and democratic process There are five functions of the communication media in “ideal type” democratic societies: 1. ‘surveillance’ or ‘monitoring’ – they must inform citizens of what is happening around them. 2. Educate They must educate as to the meaning and significance of the facts. The importance of this function explains the seriousness with which journalists protect their objectivity, since their value as educators presumes a professional detachment from the issue being analysed. Cont.. 3. platform for public political discourse: it must facilitates the formation of ‘public opinion’ and feeding that opinion back to the public from whence it came, this must provide provision of space for the expression of dissent, without which the notion of democratic consensus would be meaningless. 4. Publicity 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 watergate episode and the British Guardians coverage of the cash-for-question scandal, In India 2G scam, allocation of coal mines scam etc. 5. Channel for the advocacy Finally, the media in democratic society 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 endorse one or other of the parties at sensitive times such as elections.