scholarly journals Media discourse and the public sphere

Author(s):  
Lilie Chouliaraki

In this paper, I am attempting to throw into relief significant aspects of the function of television debate as a public sphere. My working assumption is that public dialogue, including its televised versions, involves primarily the establishment of a meaning horizon which delimits what is to be said and known, and which authorises as true certain meanings and knowledges at the expense of others. Put differently, there is a 'politics of truth' at play in every mediated debate which is central in the constitution of the debate as a public sphere. It is precisely this politics that I want to examine in this article. Using empirical material from a prime-time debate programme in Danish television, which is concerned with the right to privacy of public personalities, I analyse the forms of interactional control and dialogic organisation employed in the debate, so as to address the following questions: What are the communicative practices which confer upon the television debate genre the legitimacy of public debate? Which are the principles by which communication is regulated? Which are the domains of meaning construed by this regulation? And which is the potential for democratic deliberation released in these domains?

2017 ◽  
pp. 265-291
Author(s):  
Laima Nevinskaitė

The article deals with one of the features of media discourse connected to conversationalization—speaking at the same time, i.e. speech overlaps and interruptions. The article focuses on overlaps and interruptions in talk programmes in Lithuanian radio and television in 1960–2011. Theoretically, overlaps are treated as an objective (audible) category, while interruptions are regarded as an interpretative category that can be analysed in terms of the talk sequence analysis or from the perspective of participants on the basis of their comments on interruptions (metadiscourse). In the empirical part of the article, the data of radio and television corpus were used to compare the change of overlaps and interruptions over three periods (Soviet, transitional and present-day).The quantitative analysis has shown that the number of overlaps increased considerably with every new period. The analysis also reveals an increased variety of situations where overlaps and interruptions occur. In the Soviet period overlaps and interruptions were associated with neutral and collaborative functions; in the transitional period they started to be used as turn-competitive device; in the present-day period, overlaps and interruptions are strongly competition- and power-oriented and also reflect the commercial nature of the media (entertainment function, interruptions for commercial breaks). These trends are also reflected in metadiscourse. In the present-day period there are relatively fewer apologies for interruptions but more verbal defence of one’s right to speak. This means that the competition for turn and the right to interrupt is taken as a norm. The identified changes should be interpreted not as a shift, but as an increase of variety, since in later periods programmes with many overlaps and new functions of overlaps and interruptions appear as an additional feature, without making the earlier types of programmes and functions of overlaps and interruptions disappear.The change of overlaps and interruptions can be associated with more general changes in media discourse, e.g. increased dialogicality. These changes were brought about by political changes in the public sphere, and changes in radio and television (shift to the commercial model of broadcasting). In the late present-day period changes must be also influenced by global (Western) trends of media development.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 45
Author(s):  
Cristina Lafont

In this essay I address the difficult question of how citizens with conflicting religious and secular views can fulfill the democratic obligation of justifying the imposition of coercive policies to others with reasons that they can also accept. After discussing the difficulties of proposals that either exclude religious beliefs from public deliberation or include them without any restrictions, I argue instead for a policy of mutual accountability that imposes the same deliberative rights and obligations on all democratic citizens. The main advantage of this proposal is that it recognizes the right of all democratic citizens to adopt their own cognitive stance (whether religious or secular) in political deliberation in the public sphere without giving up on the democratic obligation to provide reasons acceptable to everyone to justify coercive policies with which all citizens must comply.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Yener Bayramoğlu

Abstract This article explores how hope and visions of the future have left their mark on media discourse in Turkey. Looking back at some of the events that took place in the 1980s, a decade that was shaped by the aftermath of the 1980 coup d’état, and considering them alongside what has happened since the ban of Istanbul’s Pride march in 2015, it examines traces of hope in two periods of recent Turkish history characterized by authoritarianism. Drawing on an array of visual and textual material drawn from the tabloid press, magazines, newspapers, and digital platforms, it inquires into how queer hope manages to infiltrate mediated publics even in times of pessimism and hopelessness. Based upon analysis of an archive of discourses on resistance, solidarity, and future, it argues that queer hope not only helps to map out possible future routes for queer lives in (and beyond) Turkey, but also operates as a driving political force that sustains queers’ determination to maintain their presence in the public sphere despite repressive nationalist, militarist, Islamist, and authoritarian regimes.


Al-Ulum ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 459-480
Author(s):  
Sulaiman Ibrahim

This paper explores al-Zamakhshari's thoughts on women's leadership in the public sphere in tafsir al-Kasysyaf's . Islam does not require the wife to submit to her husband as he is obliged to submit to God. On the contrary, with the existence of rights that must be fulfilled by the husband towards the wife, then as reciprocity of Islam gives the right for the husband to be obeyed as long as it does not conflict with the teachings of religion. However, in terms of leadership in the public sphere, az-Zamakhsyarîy is more likely to place the position of women under men. This is evident in his expression when interpreting the word فضل الله بعضهم علي بعض that leadership is given by Allah to men because of its advantages in several respects, even az-Zamakhsyarîy considers men to have many advantages over women


2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 57-81
Author(s):  
Oriol Poveda

Through a case study of the Facebook page of a Jewish Orthodox environmental project based in Germany, this paper explores the ways in which religion and modernity might be made compatible and what role digital media plays in such interaction. On the basis of the empirical material gathered for this paper, the author presents a typology of religious-environmental processes of hybridization. The analysis draws from the concepts of multiple modernities, public religions and religious branding in order to discuss whether the combination of religion and modernity is enabled or compromised by the collapsing of boundaries between the public sphere and the marketplace in late modern societies. The findings suggest that Facebook and its affordances make possible the particular intersections of religion and environmentalism, of public sphere and marketplace, that are characteristic of the case under study.


2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michal Tamir

The phenomenon of social exclusion in Israel is a vivid demonstration of the Basic Laws' failure to fulfil their integrative role. Despite the ‘constitutional revolution’ and the Supreme Court's ongoing endeavour over the last two decades to instil a bill of rights through its jurisprudence, Israeli society has failed to fully internalise values of equality. In terms of legal jargon, individuals continue to claim and exercise ‘sole and despotic dominion’ over their private property in order to avoid contact with individuals belonging to certain minority groups. In many cases, such behaviour in the private sphere results in exclusion from the public sphere.This phenomenon is especially astonishing considering the fact that many laws in Israel apply the right of equality to the private sphere. Furthermore, the Israeli Supreme Court has developed comprehensive human rights jurisprudence applicable to the private sphere. The gap between the law in the books and the law in action illustrates that effective implementation of human rights in the private sphere cannot be achieved solely by specific legislation or by jurisprudence that is sensitive to human rights. This argument is backed by several recent bills which preserve and enforce the exclusion of minorities, particularly of Arabs, from the public sphere. These bills illustrate that exclusion is indeed a growing phenomenon in Israeli society that cannot be overlooked. Moreover, they underscore the urgent need to entrench a direct obligation to apply human rights to the private sphere at the constitutional level. This will be achieved only when Israel adopts a full constitution.


2004 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 439-446 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Phillips

Evidence of ‘dissemination’ is now seen as part of research delivery by grant-giving bodies such as the ESRC and Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Drawing on the growing body of research into media sources (Manning 2001, Davis, 2000) and relating it to debates on the public sphere (Habermas 1989), the paper will ask what (if anything) researchers have to gain from involvement with the mass media and whether specialised help can assist in bringing social policy research from the margins into the mainstream of media discourse. It will look in particular at the special difficulties of disseminating ‘fuzzy’ qualitative research findings which do not lend themselves to obviously eye-catching headlines. The paper will draw on an ESRC funded experiment at the University of Leeds as a case study with which to explore these issues.


2008 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine A. Snyder

ABSTRACTFocusing on events in a rural village in Tanzania during 2001–02, this paper examines the changing nature of state/society relations in Tanzania. Drawing on experience from previous years of fieldwork in the early 1990s, it becomes apparent that villagers are beginning to change the way they engage with the state. These new approaches are framed in part by the discourse of democracy, with which Tanzanians have become familiar since the economic and political liberalisation policies of the 1990s. These events reveal a new sense of the right to participate in decision-making on how to use key development resources. They also illustrate how local elites can threaten to capture benefits for their own gain. As Tanzanians begin to demand more rights to participate in the public sphere, their achievements enlarge our understanding of what might constitute civil society.


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