Can the Mass Media Deliberate?: Insights from Print Media and Political Talk Shows

Abstract

One of the most important values of a democratic public sphere lies in its capacity to facilitate public deliberation. Public deliberation, broadly speaking, transforms social and political conflicts into argumentative debates in which claims are not just made but can be problematized and discussed. Such debates are public to the extent that they are openly accessible to citizens. Public deliberation, then, is an open, collective process of argumentative exchange about issues of societal relevance. In modern societies such a process will necessarily rely mostly on the mass media (see Page 1996).