Abstract

Donald Trump skillfully exploits the growing inability of all commercial media to provide American citizens with the investigative reporting and news analyses necessary to conduct the public discourse of an informed electorate in times of military, economic, and political crises. Against the background of the insufficient information used to justify America’s entrance into World War I, Walter Lippmann’s modern classic “Public Opinion” (1922) offered the first systematic analysis of the structural weaknesses inherent in the role that democratic theory ascribed to the news media regarding the daily gathering, evaluating, and contextualizing of increasingly complex domestic and foreign intelligence. John Dewey’s famous rejoinder “The Public and Its Problems” (1927) started a debate in public philosophy whose relevance has grown exponentially due to the tragic consequences of the Vietnam and Iraq Wars. Significantly, the Lippmann/Dewey debate is not included in Juergen Habermas’s global academic best seller “The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere” (1962/1989). Only recently did the eminent Habermas scholars Richard J. Bernstein and Craig Calhoun address this omission. This paper presentation will continue where Calhoun’s Tanner Lecture “The Problematic Public: Revisiting Dewey, Arendt, and Habermas” (2013) left off.

Presenters

Michael Hofmann
Professor, School of Communication and Multimedia Studies, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida, USA, Florida, United States

Details

Presentation Type

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

Theme

2018 Special Focus: Alt-Media - The Shifting Tide of Political Communication

KEYWORDS

"Political Communication", " Public Sphere Theory", " Media and Democracy"

Digital Media

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