The Democratic Potential of Mediated Collective Memory

Abstract

One finds among scholars of media and politics growing despair over the apparent inability of the mass media, and particularly journalism, to hold government leaders accountable for their actions and to aid citizens in reasoned decision-making about public issues. Media are said to ‘echo’ (Domke et al., 2006) or ‘index’ (Bennett et al., 2007) public officials. When officials are united, media are said to be incapable of generating a challenge to the official perspective. Even where there is no official consensus, official perspectives set limits on what Hallin calls the ‘sphere of legitimate controversy’ (1986; see also Bennett, 1990), which can reduce public debate to a set of procedural choices that fails to question underlying assumptions and perspectives. The perceived nature of the controversy in turn helps determine which political actors can gain access to the debate (for a discussion of the struggle over access, see Wolfsfeld, 1997). Regardless of whether subsequent public policy decisions are good or bad, from a communication perspective, this pattern of behavior represents a failure of democracy. For communication to qualify as democratic, there must be a genuine diversity of perspectives in public discussion, and groups not in power must be able to break into the discussion.