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JUNE 2011
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ARTICLES
Lars Nyre
The Broadcast Public and Its Problems 5
Kristoffer Holt Michael Karlsson
Edited Participation: Comparing Editorial Influence on Traditional and Participatory Online Newspapers in Sweden
Leena Ripatti-Torniainen Jaana Hujanen
Cultivating the Democratic Mind: The Understated Adult Educational Characteristic
of Public Journalism
Hong Zhang
The Internationalisation of Chinese Television: Manifestations and Power Interplays, 1978-1991
Robert E. Babe
Media Studies and the Double Dialectic of Information
Yong Jin Park
Market Philosophy and Information Privacy
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POVZETKI ABSTRACTS IN SLOVENE 101
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THE BROADCAST PUBLIC AND ITS PROBLEMS
LARS NYRE
Abstract
It was a loss for Western democracies that wireless transmission technologies, which were discovered and invented from around 1900, became broadcasting and not something more democratic. Transmission acquired a centralised structure, an expert-oriented journalistic ethics, and a relatively passive domestic culture of reception. This was good, but not good enough. In strictly technical terms, the new transmission technologies could have been constructed as a participatory public platform. Transmission could have become an everyday realisation of John Dewey's democratic vision, but it ended up as one-way media in the spirit of Walter Lippmann. Much has happened in radio and television since then; there has been a slow and determined increase in audience activity and user-generated content from the 1990s, and television has been rejuvenated with reality TV and talent shows, and other things. However, transmission still does not support participatory communication to the extent that it could technically have done. This article critiques the Western broadcast media industry and its scholars for being too complacent about radical change in a participatory direction. By appealing to the political energies of the "Lippmann-Dewey debate," the article pits the dominant paradigm of broadcasting against a participatory communication ethics that has not yet had a chance to prove itself technologically and socially. It deals with three interrelated problems of the broadcast public: (1) an elitist rationale for the construction of a oneway technological infrastructure, (2) a lack of social equality between professionals and amateurs, and (3) a commercial rhetoric of the media empowered citizen. If these three problems were solved or at least countered more robustly by a participatory communication ethics, the live transmission of sounds and images might finally realise their public
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Lars Nyre is Associate Professor in the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen, Norway; e-mail: Lars.Nyre@infomedia.uib.no.
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Two-way Radio: A Historical Impasse
An interesting alternative to the idea of broadcasting can be found in The Public and its Problems (1927), where Dewey formulates a communication ethics that could clearly have been constructed as an electronic medium different from the emerging radio. Dewey argues that the citizen is required to be acutely aware of his social surroundings, and must be prepared to speak up in public about what improves and impedes the life of his community. Life in a democratic public requires people to act in ways that will maintain its success, and be of benefit for its continued existence, Dewey insists. The public therefore has to consist of large numbers of citizens who argue for, and act in ways that will presumably have good consequences for their community. At the time of Dewey's writing, radio was one of the most obvious technical opportunities for experiments with this kind of public communication.
And this is where Walter Lippmann enters the scene. During the First World War Lippmann lost faith in the "omnicompetent" citizen capable of making reasoned judgments on public issues when presented with a case. Instead, he came to believe that the public is a "pseudo-environment" constructed by propaganda, manipulation and stereotypes (Lippmann 1922/1997, 16). The free press is an important positive force in this environment with its reporting and trustworthy news, and Lippmann believed that a machinery of public knowledge should be created through "intelligence bureaus" staffed by objective experts (Steel 1997, xiv). Experts will check the facts, make the phone calls and find new sources, and one should not ask too much of the average man (Steel 1997, xv). Public Opinion helped decision-makers to rationalise and describe a centralised public system for radio, and developments in America and Europe were in line with its expert regime. Gripsrud (2009, 8) confirms that there is "quite a strong tradition more or less in accordance with Lippmann's view." Michael Schudson (2008) claims that Carey "invented" Lippmann as an anti-democrat, and portraits the latter as an y upstanding political theorist dedicated to representative democracy and an expert regime of the people for the people.
Returning to the historical impasse of two-way radio, it must be noted that Dewey himself had by 1927 put radio on the list of centralised means of communication. Its communicative function is to "divert attention from political interests," he writes (1991, 139). Interpreting commercial American radio as part of a propaganda machinery, Dewey criticises the conditions of the present just as harshly as Lippmann. "The essential need," Dewey says, "is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion. That is the problem of the public" (1991, 208). According to Dewey, the best form of communication for
he did not more clearly advocate voice transmission as a democratic tool. Dewey's requirements for democratic speaking were more or less perfectly contained in the raw, pre-institutionalised medium of transmission, but this technological set-up did not emerge in European or in American publics.
A formulation of a concrete technological set-up was made by Berthold Bre-cht in Weimar Germany. As part of his socialist optimism Brecht was also quite medium-optimistic, and in 1932 he wrote the article "The Radio as a Communica-

tions Apparatus." His manifesto can be read as a practical application of Dewey's participatory ethics in the live transmission medium.
Radio is one sided when it should be two. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organise its listeners as suppliers (Brecht 1932/2001, 23).
This is a cry for action more than a technical specification. It would have been difficult to construct true symmetry of participation on the air, both because of accumulated noise levels and the difficulty of organising a timely hook-up for large numbers of participants. It would also have been challenging to produce content without constant political controversy. Nevertheless, two-way live speech was technically possible, and the transmission medium could in practice have followed another technological trajectory, resembling telephony, except that the speech would be heard in various public settings. After some decades there would have been cameras, microphones and low-power transmitters in every living room, and millions of signal streams would have been criss-crossing the air, connecting and hooking up in various ways that would probably have resembled the present day internet.
This scenario was suppressed by the burgeoning professions of the broadcast institution in the crucial 1920s and 1930s. Gripsrud (2010, 6) confirms that "Broadcasting media arrived at a time when political and economic power and resources were concentrated and centralised more than ever before." In the mid-1930s Goebbels' propaganda system colonised public life in Germany and the Dewey/Brecht ideal remained just a dream. Democratic spirits like Rudolf Arnheim analysed the narrative and aesthetic possibilities of radio at great length (Arnheim 1936/1986), and the BBC was run in a paternalistic ideology of "uplift," where it was soon impossible for journalists and editors to put their wills behind a more amateur-oriented setup of the medium. Winston's (1998) notion of "the law of the suppression of radical potential" comes to mind. After World War II million-viewer public service and commercial broadcasters consolidated television as an apparatus of distribution, and the Dewey/Brecht platform for transmission appeared increasingly ludicrous. With the rise of hi-fi audio, multicamera video production and advanced production values no ordinary person could create content for broadcast media. The standards were raised above people's heads, and a centralised colossuses of communication emerged. By 2011 broadcast media are so embedded in asymmetrical communication values that it is too late for it to change into a participatory set-up.
Participatory Communication Ethics
What would the alternative be? John Durham Peters (1999, 19) sums up Dewey's ethics with the slogan "communication is participation in a common world." If the main purpose of communication is to allow people to participate in a common world, it follows that delegation of communication to an expert regime will only weaken the level of participation, and it is therefore not an option.
Dewey was driven to formulate his participatory communication ethics out of concern for the public in the USA in the 1920s. He wanted the alternative to be practical, and realisable in American and other societies in his own time. It should make use of a new technological set-up, an alternative social organisation, and it should proceed by interpreting the expert knowledge in different ways than what the centralised forces of the public would do.
Dewey's argument is strikingly different from Lippmann's, except that they both formulate a communication ethics of a quite formal sort: a set of norms about how to communicate. A famous example in our field is the rational discourse ethics of Jurgen Habermas, which prescribes that public discourse should be motivated by a concern for truthfulness, sincerity and acknowledgement of the better argument (Wuthnow 1984).
Dewey's basic definition of the public is bound by the face-to-face level of communication, and his playing field is that of the home, the various religious congregations, the common green, the city square and the congress/parliament.
If it is found that the consequences of conversation extend beyond the two directly concerned, that they affect the welfare of many others, the act acquires a public capacity, whether the conversation be carried out by a king and his prime minister or by Cataline and a fellow conspirator or by merchants planning to monopolize a market (Dewey 1991, 13).
In modern societies the number of conversations that have an influence beyond those directly concerned is so large, and the interests crossing each other are so many, that the extent of the public really coincides with that of the state, Dewey says. The public encapsulates that which is commonly known about the state and that which must be commonly known about the state in order for it to function democratically. He explains that "the state is the organisation of the public effected through officials for the protection of the interests shared by its members" (Dewey 1991, 33).
Already there is a problem. Because the bodies of the state will be filled with representatives who are in effect experts and elites in society, Dewey stresses how important it is that public arenas are open to the population in general, and are filled with the activities of ordinary citizens (Dewey 1991, 207-208). Dewey stresses that every citizen has the right to express herself in public. Sometimes it is even a duty to speak up, for example if you discover abuse of power among the representatives of the state. Dewey expects citizens to behave like the watchdogs of the press, but
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without the institutional character that the "fourth estate" has acquired. They can be watchdogs of all kinds of disparate and incommensurate interests.
The ethical starting point for Dewey is that public communication must have the shared interests of the members of the state in focus. He calls this the community-building quality of communication, and he describes the citizen's gravitation towards it like this:
Whenever there is conjoint activity whose consequences are appreciated as good by all singular persons who take part in it, and where the realisation
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of the good is such as to effect an energetic desire and effort to sustain it in being just - because it is a good shared by all, there is in so far a community 00	(Dewey 1991, 149).
Dewey states that it is a moral responsibility to create and sustain just activities. In the best case everyone in a group benefits from reinforcing each other's efforts ^ instead of counteracting them. In Dewey's perspective the attempt at reinforcing the good reasons for being together is a prerequisite for democratic behaviour. However, most societies will have social conflicts about identity, status and power, and these will in effect make it impossible to succeed with community-generation on a large scale. But Dewey knew very well that antagonistic behaviour will always be a part of communication. For him the fundamental community-building characteristics are the rituals of argumentation, discussion and disagreement. To learn to be human is to develop through the give-and-take of communication an effective sense of being an individually distinctive member of a community; one who understands and appreciates its beliefs, desires and methods, and who contributes to a further conversion of organic powers into human resources and values (Dewey 1991, 154).
Dewey describes the motivation for political activity in the broadest sense, and does not stress rationality as much as he stresses beliefs and desires. To be human implies reflexive consciousness about goals and values, and this Dewey calls intelligence. He uses the term in a moral and not psychologist way. Intelligence is "conduct in which the individual thinks and judges for himself, considers whether a purpose is good or right, decides and chooses, and does not accept the standards of his group without reflection" (Dewey 1908/1960, x).
Clearly, Dewey formulates an action program for the "omni-competent citizen," who Lippmann had stopped believing in years before. As a member of the public you have a role in maintaining and revising the norms that the representatives in congress and parliament should act from. But this revision process cannot be expert-driven, since ordinary people are not equipped or trained to reveal wrongdoings in the same way as a journalist working for Sixty Minutes on CBS, or making programs with the production quality of Mad Men on HBO.
Local communication is weighted heavily in Dewey's political philosophy. The relationship of proximity that all humans have with others is not a simple fact about human existence; it is the locus of a moral and political responsibility that is far from simple. As suggested in relation to radio, the best form of communication for this purpose is live speech." The winged words of conversation in immediate intercourse have a vital import lacking in the fixed and frozen words of written speech" (Dewey 1991, 218). It is by speaking with others about matters of vital import that the individual learns to be a distinctive and intelligent member of the public.
Dewey is an optimist. He believes that the Dewey/Brecht device can actually be constructed, or rather, that progressive education and intelligent interaction with the technological environment will allow the omni-competent citizen to eventually rise. Michael Schudson (2008) considers this a charming but ultimately impotent "utopian yearning," and in practical fact he is right. Even though Dewey was future-oriented and patient, his vision has not materialised as a medium in the ninety years since he formulated it, and it is still a utopian yearning.
Problem No. 1: One-way Technological Apparatus
The biggest issue in the Lippmann-Dewey debate is whether the one-way set-up that defines broadcasting is good or bad. Lippmannians promote its centralised,
expert-driven programming because of some convincing virtues, chief among them high-quality content (information, education and entertainment), universal access to programmes and fair representation of social, religious and political groups.
Broadcasting allows freedom of mind in the form of "diverse responses to a uniform event," Peters states (1999, 53). He argues that Jesus' parable of the sower is the founding metaphor of broadcasting. The sower "sends messages whose interpretative cues are hidden or missing, to be provided by those who have ears to hear" (1999, 53). The sower doesn't know in advance who will be receptive "leaving the crucial matter of choice and interpretation to the hearer, not the master" (55). Egalitarian access to TV has a democratising effect, states Katz (2009, 15), and Gripsrud (2010, 7) agrees: "Broadcasting produced the cultural conditions for a civic culture, i.e. semiotic and emotional conditions for citizens' active, informed participation in democratic processes." Jauert and Lowe (2005) consider the "Enlightenment Mission" of traditional broadcasting to be of great public value also in the future.
Their zest for public service is partly motivated by social histories like Douglas (1991), where wonderfully detailed and colourful histories emerge, dealing with the social and aesthetic dimension of production, institution, reception and technology, and they more or less inadvertently paint a picture of a well-meaning, middle class meritocracy of Western democracies. Journalists like H. V. Kaltenborn and Walter Cronkite are imbued with iconic stature in the annals of American broadcasting, and each country has its own gallery of radio and television personalities.
Broadcasting obviously has great cultural standing. But while this quality is valuable for the education and uplift of citizens it is at the same time fundamentally elitist, since professionals control almost all aspects of the communicative relationship. Broadcast media constitute the largest public arenas in modern states; both in terms of the number of audience members and the size of the geographical coverage area. It is no wonder that such attention is felt to require thorough preparation, natural talent and professional expertise. One would have to imagine ^	a less imposing public in order to imagine less professional producers of content.
The technological set-up of broadcasting has in practice, if not in theory, denied the citizens the right to express themselves in the broadcast public. There is a good practical explanation for this. The listeners could not stay in direct contact with the broadcasters and hence it was no wonder that the editorial content was created without their contribution. However, if the medium had been two-way there would have been continuous contact and less need for pre-contributed content by experts. The production values of "mature broadcasting" (Ellis 2000) might never have come about. Another significant feature of broadcasting is that service providers could not register who are listening to the programs. The anonymity of the yj listener was a side effect of the broadcasting infrastructure, but it became one of the medium's greatest assets, vacating personal responsibility for communication among millions of people, and freeing them from autocratic control measures that would otherwise have appeared. The internet and mobile phone all have advanced tracking and registration features, and this is a high price to pay for a more symmetrical platform for public life.
Broadcasting's established technological asymmetry is rigorously defended also in the 21st century. It is remarkable that the foremost digital initiatives taken
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by the industry are one-way solutions like DAB radio and digitalised television for terrestrial or satellite tuners. These are clearly the least interactive of all digital platforms (Nyre and Ala-Fossi 2008). It means that there will for the foreseeable future still be two separate platforms; the centralised production platform and the individual, distributed reception platform. This is clearly not innovation towards democratic access to the means of production.
The problem is that people cannot do anything about this inequality of expression, because it is technologically determined. The structures are so big and so well-sedimented that individuals and pressure groups cannot hope to change anything about them. The preference for professional production and audience reception is built into the system. Albert Borgmann explains how a system often produces this kind of powerlessness for users. He argues that large-scale, 20th century electronic technologies basically consist of two elements: the concealed machinery and the fore-grounded commodity (Borgmann 1984). In central heating systems the concealed machinery is the radiator, the tubes, the circulating water and the power source, while the fore-grounded commodity is simply the warmth that is generated. He calls the combination of machinery and commodity a "device."
In the use of modern devices there is a tendency for users to be ignorant of the machinery. For example most users of central heating will be almost completely ignorant of how the machinery produces this comfortable experience. Broadcasting is based on electronic technologies, and their machinery is more thoroughly black boxed than older mechanical technologies, while admittedly less black boxed than digital technologies. The citizen's opportunity to understand how communication works is reduced with each new layer of complexity that is added, for example with multi-channel sound editing and multi-camera shooting in the context of broadcasting.
Broadcast media do not encourage interrogative behaviour among their users. On the contrary what is fore-grounded in television is perceptual ease, or in the critical language of Borgmann: comfort and light weight attention. The simplicity of function "is just the mark of how wide the gap has become between the function accessible to everyone and the machinery known by nearly no one" (Borgmann 1984, 47). This is true for television, since for decades the only thing the audience could do was changing channels and regulating the loudness.
Problem No. 2: Lack of Social Equality
In the broadcast public there are two very different forms of communicative behaviour, associated with the production and reception environments, respectively. There is a significant social and economic difference between these two groups. Journalists, camera crews, celebrities and administrators all have an interest in editorialising as a way of earning their living. Lay users do not have the same vested interest, and might benefit from an organisation that was social instead of editorial. School children and their parents watch and listen in domestic settings, and broadcasting does not have any immediate implication for their income and self-esteem (of course it doesn't). They would have more to gain and more to loose if they were participating in a community-building public.
There is a deep-seated difference between the conception of the user among Lippmannians and Deweyans. Carey (1989) interestingly reads the two thinkers
in terms of eye versus ear. While Lippmann favours the statistical aggregation of printed facts, Dewey favours the closer and more emotional sounds of speech and song. Arguing against Lippmann's position, Carey writes that "we associate knowledge with vision to emphasize that we are spectators rather than participants in the language game through which knowledge is made or produced" (1989, 82). Lippmann views the citizen as a "second-order spectator" a spectator of spectators like the press, science and literature, and here he is in the most acute conflict with Dewey, according to Carey (1989, 82).
Media theorists often analyse the high quality cultural products of professional broadcasting without contemplating the ethical implications of this mode of production. Roger Silverstone (1994, 83) evocatively says that television "draws the members of the household into a world of public and shared meanings as well as providing some of the raw material for the forging of their own private, domestic culture." Paddy Scannell says that broadcasting addresses "anyone as someone;" meaning that programmes facilitate an intimate sense of involvement for each individual by herself, while extending exactly the same invitation to everyone (Scannell 2000). These descriptions are sensitive, but they do not address the domination of broadcasters over all the "any ones." It is not a problem that audience members are positioned as relatively passive recipients of messages, it is just one ontological characteristic among others. Viewers can have many shared positive experiences of broadcasting, watching favourite soap operas together and discussing the episode afterwards, but they lack the opportunity to express themselves in the same medium on the same terms as the professionals. They cannot formulate their own judgments about public issues, in the broadcast public. They are "living someone else's story" (Morrison and Krugman 2001), or with a much older term they are engaging in "para-social behaviour" (Horton and Wohl 1956/1979).
As I am arguing in this article, this can be interpreted as a lack of editorial and social equality in the broadcast paradigm. It exists at all levels of the medium, not just in the technological set-up, but also in the social organisation of production and reception. At heart the social control of the professionals is secured through the aptly named control room. Almost everything is planned, pre-recorded and edited before it is put on air, and these advanced processes are crucial to the audiovisual impact of broadcasting. There has been a mentality of complete aesthetic and journalistic professionalism from the very beginning. Broadcasters have a problem in relation to a participatory communication ethics for the simple reason that they have too much control over their own and other people's public behaviour.
You might protest that there is a long tradition for interactivity in radio and television, and phone-in programs, song requests, talent shows and other formats have always engaged members of the public in the programs (Livingstone and Lunt 1994). Also public access television and community radio are based on grassroots editorial units established in small towns and among various interest groups. But although one could suspect a "democratisation" taking place in program formats with the rise of interactive television, increased participation has not led to institutions losing economic power, or power of definition in public life (Gentikow 2010). Rather, broadcasters are developing new ways to shape, direct and profit from interactive output. Maas0 et al (2007) argue that the creation of brand loyalty is the primary reason why broadcasters invest in participatory formats. This has little or nothing to do with a participatory communication ethics.
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The values of the broadcast paradigm are being built into the backbone of the revised, more participatory version of broadcasting. This is not a radical recon- CO struction in the direction of a Dewey/Brecht device, it is a prolongation of the old 1 regime by new means. The ordinary user is still in the weakest position, and with it the lack of social equality is prevailing. Erving Goffman (1981) distinguishes between three degrees of enunciation of a message. Imagine a BBC news bulletin from Afghanistan. In juridical and economical terms it is ultimately the eighty year old institution "The BBC" which speaks, and this is the address of the institution behind the manuscript. During the airing of the show the news anchor reads out his own manuscript, with a news priority that he has himself influenced, and is in this case the author of the manuscript. A translator will read the English language version of a Pashtuni interviewee's statement, and is as such a mere animator of the manuscript. In the context of participation, the audience members' message is always included in the institution's address, and they cannot be more than animators or occasionally authors of what is ultimately the station's own message.
Behavioural control is secured by semi-automated functions in interfaces that audiences have to relate to in order to get on air. A show like Pop Idol allows tens of thousands of audience members to vote for or against the contestants by the use of SMS. This is a new form of multi-platform programming that combines texting, web browsing and broadcasting, described by for example Enli (2005), Frau-Meigs (2006) and Kjus (2009). In these cases audiences only interact with technical functions, and do not occupy a visible and audible role in broadcasting. Diverse discussions, competitions and opinion polls can be arranged in this way, and there is a moderate allowance of dialogic communication in that texters can respond to each others' messages by submitting a new one. However, this form of audience participation is based on a very narrow window of opportunity, without allowance for follow-ups or contact between the texters, and typically everybody remains anonymous throughout. It would be absurd to analyse this kind of programming as affording omni-competence for the on-air speakers, even though they are actually participating. A crucial aspect of communication is delegated to technology in the form of a prescription: "do this, do that, behave this way, don't go that way, you may do so, allowed to go there" (Latour 1992, 157). Certain habits of editorial treatment of participation are irreversibly built into the broadcast system
The station's editorial sociability is also enforced more informally in the norms and rules of different programmes, some of which have been aired for decades. All the guests and listeners know from before what should be said and done, and inappropriate behaviour will be sanctioned by the other participants. The participants share the situation of speaking live with the hosts and other participants, and the sanctions on behaviour are social only. These indirect restrictions on behaviour are used quite brutally in the genre of phone-in programmes on radio. For example in a quiz show about soccer the caller may be given five questions that must be answered in forty seconds, and if the caller tries to talk about anything except the quiz she will immediately be cut off (Nyre 2008, 86-87). The listener is expected to know how to go along with the mood of the program, its slogans and lingo. Callers are screened and coached to conform to the show's speaking style before getting on air. This is a play of genre conventions and does not tell us much about the talent and personality of the caller. It has nothing to do with Dewey's participation
ethics. The strict formatting of talk radio programmes rarely allow callers freedom to play out their own rhetorical strategies in their own time. As suggested, callers are not allowed to speak to each other on air, and they are typically not allowed to answer back the opinions of others. In sum formatted participation presents the individual with a flattened character. The caller is basically one item among all the others needed to make an attractive and enjoyable programme.
The problem is that the broadcast paradigm doesn't need participation by ordinary people in order to function according to its own ideals, and therefore it is not considered problematic that participation has acquired a mainly entertaining and therapeutic function. Carpentier (2009) argues that participation in its raw form is not enough. His focus group-informants said that they want participation to be packaged in exceptional aesthetics and a good, socially relevant narrative. Otherwise they wouldn't care about it, is the implication. From a Deweyan perspective this old-style professionalism towards the new interactivity is problematic. These editorial norms construct an audience participant that is almost without obligations or responsibility for consequences, and they will not sustain the public in being just, as Dewey (1991, 149) requires. The formats almost inevitably objectify the listener, or more precisely, they objectify the dialogue he listens to and takes part in. By objectifying dialogue "one attacks the other's freedom. One makes the other into a fact, a thing in one's world. In this way one can dominate the other" (Skjervheim 1996, 75). There is an editorially constructed social inequality between the parties involved, and seen in light of a participatory ethics the audience-oriented programs are a somewhat humiliating practice for everyone involved.
Problem No. 3: Rhetoric of the Media-empowered Citizen
The problem to be addressed does not pertain to the broadcast media as such, but to widespread ways of thinking about what it means to be an electronic media user in our time. I am in particular thinking of the stereotypes in newspapers, radio and television, social media and the internet in general. This corresponds to what y	(Chatman 1993) calls the "implied reader," a position that is written into the text in
order to invite real people to take it up during their reception and interpretation of £	the text. Public service ideals don't have enough force to present a strong implied
position for its home-bound, willing-to-learn citizen. Instead of these citizens gathering as a family there is now an overwhelmingly commercial position for the citizen, where he comes across as a self-made, individualistic communicator. This user doesn't really care about the Lippmannian ideal of information, education and entertainment, because he knows he can get whatever he wants for himself.
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The individualist rhetoric is strengthened with the great variety of social media that have grown up alongside the traditional media, for example Facebook, You-
there is often little or no point in talking about an editorial unit or a broadcaster in the traditional sense. The "empowered user" is celebrated in advertisements for electronic appliances like the iPhone and iPad, and she is hotly debated in newspapers, actuality programmes and political talk shows. Empowerment implies that citizens can write and publish anything they want at any time, and also that they all have a potential public arena and potential influence on their peers and the larger society. It also implies that audience members are highly sophisticated
in their appreciation of media materials, whether it is from newspapers, TV, the movies or the internet itself, and they know the narrative palette so well that they LO can always make themselves understood in this complex public. It seems that audi- ^ ence members are always able to add another layer of complexity to their media literacy. PR for the "empowered user" is a natural corollary of a marketplace where any kind of user-generated content generates income for the service providers and media outlets alike. Strictly speaking there is no purpose to social media, there are only empty intentions to be filled in by the user. The individualist rhetoric hinders the rise of more political, group driven public. It is an ideological construct that happens to fit the current interests of large-scale media businesses just fine.
The consumer obviously has to purchase new media equipment quite frequently. PR and advertising has it that new media technologies will enable us to master our domestic and/or work-related surroundings more effectively, accurately and safely than we would with the old equipment. The new appliance always has greater efficiency, larger storage capacity, higher quality and easier access than those currently dominating the market. This rhetoric of technological empowerment is meant to make people perceive themselves as continuously strengthened individuals who are in ever-better control of their lives. You signal to yourself that you are free from trusting the social institutions and the media, and it signals to others that you have the money, equipment and intellectual resources to do what you like, travel where you like, enjoy what you like in the world. This mentality is perfectly illustrated by those who approve of the L'Oreal advertisement where the American actor Andie McDowell says "Because you're worth it!" The image of gain without responsibility flies in the face of Dewey's communication ethics.
It is important to consider that the propositions of advertisers, PR companies and the broadcasting stations may be purposefully unrealistic. In the article "The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution" (1970/1989), James Carey and John Quirk argue that there is an idealising rhetoric embedded in the very fabric of electronic communication, and they call it "the rhetoric of the electrical sublime." This is, they say, an ethos "that identifies electricity and electrical power, electronics and cybernetics, computers and information with a new birth of community, decentralisation, ecological balance, and social harmony" (Carey and Quirk 1989, 114). In their view technological life includes a clever ideological and commercial staging of roles for people to believe in, where the various appliances are seen as necessary for succeeding in ones life-involvements. Carey and Quirk refer to this as an ethos that goes like this: "Everyman a prophet with his own machine to keep him in control" (Carey and Quirk 1989, 117).
The exaggerations of the marketplace are important in relation to Dewey's communication ethics. A democratic public cannot rely on images of omni-competent citizens, it must rely on effective intelligence among its members. The hardships and difficulties of real democratic participation are forgotten because of the successful staging of a media- empowered citizen in advertising and commercial programming. What happens is that the ideals of empowerment are associated with communication behaviour that in essence includes the same procedures as before (profitable), and this allows everybody to not push for maximally democratic procedures. Although the assignment of democratic value to new technologies may reflect an honest desire for communication to be improved, the rhetoric does not in itself make this value operational.
An added problem is that the Lippmannian scholar does not really want to be normative. He tries to be value-neutral in relation to all the economic and political interests that are involved in the international broadcasting business, and he aids the representative decision-making process by delivering expert analyses of the status of a market, a company, a program format or an audience segment. In this way scholarship becomes apologetic, and instead of vigorously investigating the available options for good communication, it administers the joint interests of the media industry, whether it is represented by the BBC, the DAB consortium, or the global television industry. The status quo of American and European media business thereby appears perpetually normal and desirable, and the media-empowered individualist grows to maturity without thinking that anything could be wrong with his communication apparatus.
A Foregone Conclusion
I have argued that the lack of democratic participation in the broadcast public of the 2010s is as severe as when Lippmann and Dewey pointed it out during the heyday of film and newspaper propaganda in the 1920s. The enduring nature of this problem indicates that it will be difficult to create participatory transmission also in the future. Maybe broadcasting will never be overtaken by a more democratic audiovisual platform?
The most solid reason for believing so is that the broadcast industry will be hesitant to explore truly symmetric redirections of their programming, whether it is in the TV studio, on the Internet, through mobile phone interfaces or other platforms. It would have been a suicide mission. The media professionals have hierarchical positions that they will not allow to be threatened by democratic experimentation. Calls for greater participation from the general public will therefore be restaged in idealised versions rather than being realised in full. Dewey's communication ethics is simply not in the interest of broadcasters because it would cost a lot of money, and it would empower users indiscriminately with great risk to the established y procedures of programming.
Brian Winston's "law of suppression of radical potential" accurately sums up the consequence of the forces I have been analysing in this article: little or no change. "Constraints operate to slow the rate of diffusion so that the social fabric in general can absorb the new machine and essential formations such as business entities and other institutions can be protected and preserved" (Winston 1998, 9). Q Along the way good potentials are peeled off, and the public is left with poorer ^ participation than it needs in order to function democratically. Broadcasting no longer has radical potential, and the future of transmission lies on the internet and ^ the mobile phone.
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EDITED PARTICIPATION
COMPARING EDITORIAL INFLUENCE ON TRADITIONAL AND PARTICIPATORY ONLINE NEWSPAPERS IN SWEDEN
Abstract
Although participatory journalism involves publishing content created by users, editorial influence is an important aspect of participatory online media. Editors shape the conditions under which user generated content is produced, the context of publication and the perceived prominence of the content. It is still unclear how this influence manifests itself, and how it can be related to the discussion about participatory media's potential for revitalising democracy. In this paper, three online news media in Sweden are analysed comparatively: Sourze - the first Swedish participatory newspaper; Newsmill - a social media focusing on news and debate; and DN - the online version of the largest Swedish morning paper Dagens Nyheter. The question is how participation is affected by editorial influence. The findings suggest that participatory arenas are constrained by the logic of their context of production.
People from different categories in society participate on different terms. Furthermore, editors influence the agenda by suggesting topics, and by rewarding articles that follow their suggestions. These findings do not challenge assumptions about participatory newspapers as more accessible channels for citizens and therefore interesting as possible means of allowing a more democratically involved citizenry, but it challenges assumptions about freedom from constraints related to traditional mass media, such as agenda setting, gate-keeping and media logic.
KRISTOFFER HOLT
MICHAEL KARLSSON
Kristoffer Holt is Research Associate and Senior Lecturer in Department of Information Technology and Media, Mid Sweden University; e-mail: kristoffer.holt@miun.se.
Michael Karlsson is Assistant Professor in Department of Media and Communication, Karlstad University, Sweden; e-mail:
michael.karlsson@kau.se.
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Introduction
Research on public participation in the creation of news has focused on the central question of how new ICTs may facilitate and increase civic participation in political discussions by making it possible for users to actively take part in discussions and publish or react to already published content. (Papacharissi 2002; Rheingold 2002; Downey and Fenton 2003; Lawson-Borders and Kirk 2005; Dijk 2006; Jenkins 2006; Deuze et al. 2007; Paulussen and Ugille 2008; Wojcieszak and Mutz 2009; Rebillard and Touboul 2010). The rise of new communicative tools - often commonly referred to as the "web 2.0" has sparked hopes about new levels of participation and many have predicted a communicative shift away from dis-seminatory mass media, to the sharing of content among citizens and their digital networks. However, the large amount and the differences between these new participatory media makes it impossible to lump them all together and treat them as one and the same - in order to make sense of the changing patterns of participation, it is necessary to look at specific aspects and attributes of participation at individual digital media outlets (Witschge 2008). Furthermore, in order to grasp the participatory features of these new media channels, it is necessary to look closer at the conditions under which participation occurs - conditions that may be very different from one case to another.
The possibilities of social media have been the subject of much idealistic discourse that hail the dawn of a new age - blurring the border between what is actually happening, and what many hope, or think ought to happen (Van Dick and Nieborg 2009; Rebillard and Touboul 2010). In spite of much rhetoric surrounding the web 2.0, the most noticeable of the participatory, or social, media (i.e. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter etc.) cannot be considered idealistic projects, aimed at increasing citizens' involvement in the democratic process, but are rather lucrative businesses with other main purposes. But some commercial social media explicitly state as an aim to improve democracy by providing a public platform for online deliberation y and for participatory journalism. In many cases, news media that publish user-generated content are run by professional editors. Sites like Ohmynews in Korea, Newsvine in the USA, Janjannews in Japan and Newsmill and Sourze in Sweden - who mainly publish articles written by their users - are often presented as enterprises that stem from visions about a better democracy (Janjannews; Newsmill; Newsvine; Ohmynews; Woo-Young 2005). This is visible on their homepages in the way they describe themselves. Janjannews calls itself the "Japan Alternative News for Justices and Newscultures," and Newsmill invites writers to participate in an effort to create a "better and more democratic" public discourse (Holt 2009). At the same time, ^ anyone involved in news media will find themselves facing established notions of journalism, institutionalised ways of operating media organisations and a need to find a policy for what is suitable to publish or not. Consequently, the potentialities of ideal participation must be understood and investigated in the everyday operation of news media restrained by local and global economical, political and cultural realities (Shoemaker and Reese 1996; Schudson 2003). For instance, in order
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to be successful financially and by means of reach and influence, the editors have to take into account issues that have to do with click-through traffic and therefore 2 find themselves in a position not remarkably different from that of editors of tradi-
tional mass media - competing for the audience's attention by available resources. This is an important part of the context that surrounds participatory journalism. It challenges assumptions about how participatory media bypass the mechanisms of journalistic exclusion associated with mass media like media logic, gatekeeping and agenda-setting (Meraz 2009). Furthermore, it places emphasis on looking into how the editors of such sites operate and in what ways they influence the production and publication of content.
This study addresses the question of how editorial involvement affects processes of publishing in different participatory journalism outlets. More specifically, it explores a) who the producers of content are b) how editors influence the content by inviting contributions on specific subjects and c) how they attribute salience to different texts by the way they present them when they are published (editorial embedding). In addition, we d) compare the editorial embedding of texts that are written by different author categories and are written on editorially suggested topics or not.
Web 2.0 and Collective Intelligence. Participatory media are often described as having a potential for revitalising democracy by serving as remedy for what has been called a democratic deficit - the lack of active, present and visible "ordinary" citizens in mediated political and cultural debates (Coleman and Blumler 2009). One of the early visionaries about the Internet's possibilities is Pierre Levy. Levy's notion of "collective intelligence" - characteristic of the emerging digital "knowledge space" - is one important idea behind the concept Web 2.0 (Levy 1997; O'Reilly 2005). Levy envisioned a future, in which citizens participated in the political communication-process in other ways than merely as voters. The "virtual Agora" would help individuals in tailoring their political identities by allowing plurality and independence from party-identities. Political identity would be shaped by "contributions to the construction of a political landscape that was perpetually in flux" and by support for various problems, positions and arguments, rather than identification with a specific party, ideology or politician (Levy 1997, 65). To many who formulated this kind of hopes, the development online was disappointing. The internet was originally intended to serve mankind as a free and open "universe of network accessible information" (Berners-Lee 2006). Instead, it became increasingly exploited by commercial enterprises, the interactive possibilities were not taken advantage of. Web 1.0 did not live up to the expectations of interactivity, participation and democratic development. Web 2.0 is often described as a grassroots reaction against this tendency.
Levy's and Berners-Lee's ideas continue to have a significant impact on the academic interpretation of the development since. Jenkins (2006), Deuze (2007) and Bruns (2008) draw on Levy's ideas about collective intelligence in their attempts to explain how culture in general and journalism in particular is being changed by the increasingly participatory nature of media production and consumption. Jenkins, following Levy's assertion that collective intelligence is a "realisable utopia," calls himself a "critical utopian": someone who identifies the participatory aspects of Web 2.0 as "possibilities within our culture that might lead toward a better, more just society" (Jenkins 2006, 258). The development and restructuring of the media-landscape, therefore has both political and cultural implications (Jenkins 2006). According to Deuze the emerging participatory media culture is possible only through
the "flourishing of a 'collective intelligence' particular of cyberculture" (Deuze 2007, 39). For Bruns, Levy's notion of collective intelligence is central for his argument about the changing nature of content creation and publishing, "produsage," that is based on "access to public participation" in journalism. This access will lead to a "more profound transformation of journalism, enabling a greater focus on public deliberation in and through its coverage" (Bruns 2008).
Participatory Media = Strukturwandel 2.0? The structural change of the public sphere that Habermas described concerned the shift from a culturally involved public, that took part in the political and cultural debates as citizens - to an increasingly passive mass-audience (Habermas 1989). The shift was a result of the growth and commercialisation of disseminatory mass media. As Dahlgren (2005) points out, mass media are considered by many to have failed in the task of providing a forum for participation in the ongoing debates: sitting at home consuming media products is not enough to be considered participation (Dahlgren 2005; Bruns 2008). Furthermore, the hierarchical structure of mass communication (from one to many) has some inherent problems, such as commercialisation, the unavoidable occurrence of framing, media logic and the privileged position of journalists as producers of commentary and opinions, rendering traditional, "industrial" journalism "entirely insufficient to support the functioning of complex modern societies and democracies" (Bruns 2008). Different phenomena, like blogging, have given reason to suggest that the old order is no longer functioning and that citizens are now taking it upon themselves to interpret news and share views. Kahn and Kellner (2004) show how blogging can have an impact on society and lead to "a reconfiguring of politics and culture." The shift from web 1.0 (that was mainly used as a complementary publishing tool) to web 2.0 (where the interactive and social potential of internet communication is being exploited more fully) - certainly justifies the thought that if the public space on the Internet also contains public spheres it might again be going through a major structural change - in reverse. The explosion of new, internet-based media provides arenas for public communication that lend themselves to specula-y tions about a return of a Habermasian public-sphere (Papacharissi 2002; Dahlberg Q 2004; Habermas 2006). Big media are challenged by citizens who have the means to £ create and "co-create" media content as well as disseminate it to larger audiences;
issues are debated in new contexts where the audience have a greater possibility of both participating and dissenting publicly, in front of audiences of a different fabric than of traditional mass media (Boler 2008; Van Dijck and Nieborg 2009). As well as opening up new arenas for public-formation, political participation and civic deliberation, the internet also provides the means to form "counter-public spheres" (Downey and Fenton 2003). Public discourses are created, shared and stored in new ways. Traditional journalism is getting competition from "citizen journalism" and "participatory journalism" - where the audience is invited to produce journalistic material themselves as well as to interact with the journalistic products of others, submit content and have a say in the interpretation of news events (Domingo et al. 2008).
This development may reshape the conditions for the production of culture
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and public discourse essential to any democratic society (Dahlberg 2004; Jensen et al. 2007). Accordingly, some theoreticians herald a new age of audience participation, a boost for democracy worldwide and a shift from traditional hierarchical
one-way dissemination of content to a media-environment characterised by interaction, dialogue, participation and equality, resonant of Levy's vision ( Jenkins fO 2006; Bruns 2008). In the culture of participation that is supposedly emerging, one ^ thing is constantly pointed out: The audience no longer tolerates being passive receivers - they want to interact and be taken seriously. They want to have a say and be able to influence, and they can pool their resources in collective efforts to promote change (Jenkins 2006; Bruns 2008). There is, according to Bruns, a strong desire "by citizens to engage significantly more actively in politics and society," and a dawning awareness of the fact that "the more passive role bestowed on audiences by the mass media was never a conscious choice" but a "by-product of the predominant media technologies of the day" (Bruns 2008, 92).
The term "participatory journalism" can be used in slightly different ways - but is generally understood as the increasing amount and various ways in which what Jay Rosen has called "the people formerly known as the audience" actively contribute to journalism by submitting texts, images and film or by interacting with news in various ways like, for example commenting or recommending it to others (Bruns 2005; Deuze et al. 2007; Domingo et al. 2008; Paulussen and Ugille 2008). Journalistic practice is no longer limited to the work of professional journalists, but is becoming participatory in that it is increasingly open to "non-professional expression" (Rebillard and Touboul 2010, 328). Most research that has been done about participatory journalism has focused on the way in which user generated content is dealt with in the newsrooms of traditional mass media and the way that this material is valued, treated and presented (Deuze et al. 2007; Domingo et al. 2008; Paulussen and Ugille 2008; Rebillard and Touboul 2010). Deuze points out that participatory news sites often emerge from organisations "with a strong public service agenda or a strong connection to clearly defined local or interest communities, or are set up by commercial news organizations" (Deuze et al. 2007). Participatory journalism is a concept that indeed evokes notions both of how the idea of collective intelligence is realised in practice in the web 2.0-context and how the Habermasian ideal of dialogue and citizen participation in the public use of reason might be possible to realise. Bruns points out that news is "inherently social" and "requires broad societal participation" which "been missing from public involvement in the news debate for some time" (Bruns 2008).
However, many researchers are sceptical about the actuality of this participation: contemporary theories "express a demanding 'ought' that faces the sobering 'is' of ever more complex societies" (Habermas 2006, 411). There is a risk that the ideals and wishes will dictate the interpretation of the communication in new media forms. Assuming that citizens will decide to participate on a large scale is not supported by empirical evidence, and the opportunities for participation still rest, to a high degree, at the mercy of editors (Rebillard and Touboul 2010). Furthermore, empirical research also indicates that most users are still passive consumers and those active are not representative of the population or driven by an urge for a common good (Dijk 2006; Bergstrom 2008; Chung and Yoo 2008; Chung and Nah 2009; Hindman 2009; Van Dijck and Nieborg 2009; Chu 2010; Rebillard and Touboul 2010).
Dialogue or Dissemination? In history, we have the problem of finding accurate manifestations of an existing public sphere that corresponds to Habermas' model (Habermas 1989). In theory, the concept has been somewhat overused, creating
confusion about what is actually meant by it (Hacker and Dijk 2000). Nevertheless, it captures something essential about the function of media in democracy and contains a necessarily normative definition of what good democratic communication should look like. The seemingly trivial dictionary-distinction between discourse as either dialogical communication, or one-way communication brings us immediately to one of the core questions about public discourse and the hopes that are expressed about the democratic potential of participatory media. Good, democratic communication, is as good as always described as "dialogue" in contemporary democratic society (Peters 1999). It is valued higher than its counterpart: dissemination, the hierarchical, one-way-communication of radio, TV and newspapers. Dialogue - by virtue of its reciprocity, mutuality and interactivity — is the very essence of "participatory democracy" (Peters 1999, 33). Theories about deliberative democracy imply that it is in dialogue — not dissemination — that the foundation of democratic society is to be found (Dewey 1991; Habermas 1991, Dahlgren 2005). However, Peters' argument is more intended as a "rehabilitation of dissemination" as a communicative form (Peters 1999, 35). He believes that the celebration of dialogue as a superior communicative form, is often uncritical, and that dissemination has qualities that are sometimes overlooked, when the key to improve democracy is described solely as increasing dialogue among the citizens. This point, we argue, is relevant also in discussions about the dialogical qualities of participatory media. Especially when discussing social media, the dialogic potential is sometimes overestimated. After all, what most social and participatory media do, is to create spaces where the users can make their own (or someone else's) content available to others. And this does not automatically lead to increased levels of dialogue among the content producers and consumers.
This distinction points to the object of study: the most interesting thing about participatory media, when it comes to determining whether or not it holds any potential to revitalise democracy, is perhaps not what is being said, but the new context it constitutes for the dissemination of texts — and the increased availability ^ of these texts to the general public (Witschge 2008). Furthermore, the way that participatory media let everyone have a say, might not automatically create better public discourse. In his later work, Habermas emphasises the function of "filtering" that should result from mediated political communication — in other words, the "public sphere forms the periphery of a political system and can well facilitate deliberative legitimation processes by 'laundering' flows of political communication through a division of labour with other parts of the system" (Habermas 2006, 415). In traditional mass media, this "filtering" was performed by editors and journalists at the gates. In participatory media, where the threshold to publicity is lower, this privilege is not necessarily exclusive to journalism professionals (Deuze et al. 2007). However, we argue that editorial influence is an important aspect of participatory journalism as the threshold to participate is lowered rather than abolished. Consequently, there is still a role for editors to sift out information and decide the relative importance of contributions — not all can occupy the most attractive spots simultaneously.
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Therefore, it can be misleading to direct the major focus towards the dialogical aspects of participatory media when discussing democratic gains. In participatory newspapers, articles are disseminated much like in an online version of a
traditional newspaper. The commentary function is there, but what makes them participatory, is the fact that the articles are written by, or linked to by, the read- LO ers/users/"producers," and not by journalists (Bruns 2008). However, the format ^ resembles traditional online-newspapers. Important in this discussion is the question about how the conditions for publishing content are shaped by editors. Even if "the lowered threshold for citizens to enter the public sphere" means that new channels are now available for citizens to publish their own material, these texts are still published in editorially controlled contexts (Deuze et al. 2007, 323). The question of how editorial considerations matter for the shaping and publication of online news, is therefore relevant to the discussion about participatory media's potential as remedy for the democratic shortcomings of mass media.
Shaping the Content of News in Different Media. Editors are important in deciding what shall be published but they do not operate in a vacuum, rather they are guided and constrained by several conditions such as; audience demand, legislation, advertising, technological infrastructure, sources, news agencies, ownership, culture in the editorial office and by widespread notions of what news and journalism is ( Shoemaker and Reese 1996; Schudson 2003). Taken together it can be argued that these factors contribute to shape a more or less articulated policy of what the news organisation should publish. Since every news organisation work within somewhat different conditions it can be expected that the published content of each media outlet will have a fairly distinct accent. Traditionally it has been understood that the news sources has had the largest external influence over news and that these news sources reside in or close to political and economical power (Bennett 1990). With the advent of participatory media it is suggested, as the above literature review illustrate, that citizens will gain power and elite holds will lose theirs. On the other hand these new interactive possibilities must be implemented in already existing structures. Or as Pablo Boczkowski puts it "... new media emerge by merging existing sociomaterial infrastructures with novel technical capabilities and ... [this] ... evolution is influenced by a combination of historical conditions, local contingencies and process dynamics" (Boczkowski 2004, 12).
In this study we compare similarities and differences in editorially attributed salience to news items on the front page on three rather diverse Swedish media outlets. Sourze - one of the first Swedish sites that invited citizens as primary contributors and says that it is written by and for ordinary people (ranked as number 3968 in Sweden by Alexa.com in September 2010). The editorial office sees its primary concern to market the content making it meaningful for writers to contribute. Newsmill (ranked as number 252) is a social media stemming from Bonniers, one of largest media corporations in Sweden, focusing on news and debate. Newsmill runs "Our readers know more than we do" as their slogan. They have been remarkably successful in Swedish journalism, especially by attracting celebrities to write articles, and by impact on traditional media. DN (ranked number 14) - the online version of the largest Swedish morning paper Dagens Nyheter thus running a traditional news business but in a digital environment. These sites all face the issue of participation but approach the matter with their different institutional identities and backgrounds. We are looking at four different, but correlating, aspects of editorial influence on participatory journalism: Different categories of authors, editorial embedding, editorially attributed salience and editorially suggested topics.
Different Categories of Authors. In journalism, it is not only important to determine the newsworthiness of topics - there is also a difference between how different people are valued as sources and writers. The journalistic profession is partly built on the exclusive access to write news stories (Singer 2003). In other words, people who already have a reputation, celebrity status or influential position in society, are traditionally regarded as more newsworthy than the Average Joe. Indeed, this is where traditional journalism most obviously collides with ideals of collective intelligence and participatory culture. An important question, therefore, is if the editors maintain traditional journalistic valuation principles even in these new participatory media-forms, or if people are valued more on the merit of the strength of their contribution than on the merit of who they are. In this study, we investigate who the participants are by dividing the authors of the articles into four different categories:
1.	Journalists. Even though most of the articles are written by non-journalists, some professional journalists write articles for this kind of media. When they present themselves as journalists, this places them in a different category than "ordinary citizens," because being a professional journalist entails experience of writing awareness of journalistic principles.
2.	Spokesmen for organisations. Not all authors write articles simply as concerned citizens, but as spokesmen for different organisations (companies, political parties, NGO's etc.). These people address their audience from a different rhetorical platform than other categories. They enjoy an exclusive closeness to the organisation they represent and can therefore claim expert knowledge of things related to the organisation. Furthermore, it is arguable that they also represent specific interests. Speaking as a representative of an organisation is also indicative of an important position in society.
3.	Publicly known personalities. This category includes celebrities, cultural personalities or otherwise famous people i.e. musicians, athletes, actors, artists and writers etc. This group is characterised by the fact that all included are persons
^ that most people know who they are. Admittedly, it is difficult to define exactly who would be eligible for this category, but nevertheless it is important to analyse if fame is rewarded with editorially attributed salience.
4.	Ordinary people. Authors who do not present themselves as journalists or spokesmen or who cannot be considered famous or publicly known, have been placed in a category of ordinary people. Again, this category is hard to define, but
Q is central to the discussion about participatory media and democracy. The other three categories already enjoyed access to the public arena in the age of mass media. The hopes of realising a society in which collective intelligence can be harnessed, rests on the assumption that "ordinary people" step up and contribute to public discourse by making their voices heard. What is of interest here is if this category is treated differently than the other categories, by the editors.
Editorial Embedding and Editorially Attributed Salience. In all journalism, some texts are considered more important than others. In newspapers, some articles are advertised on the front page, and some appear in the paper without
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getting advertised. Some articles get big headlines while others don't. Some texts get published others don't. These are manifestations of editorial considerations about what is significant, entertaining, commercially attractive or appealing in
other ways. The research on how the media works in this way, is extensive and shows that the format of news, as a part of "media logic" plays a significant part for the reception of news, because "it refers to the rules or 'codes' for defining, selecting, organising, presenting, and recognising information as one thing rather than another" (Altheide 2004). In this, the role of the editor is crucial, because they make the decisions about the format and context of the news item. These decisions affect the reader's perception of the news item as for example important, or not important. Therefore, one way to approach the question of editorially attributed salience to news articles in participatory journalism is to look at how different texts are published. Initial observations from Swedish participatory media revealed that some articles, but not all, receive extra attention from the editors when they are published on the site, in the form of small texts that introduce the topic of the article, texts that present the author or pictures that accompany the article (Holt 2009). The news items were therefore editorially embedded in different ways. This difference is construed as an indicator of attributed salience. The question we want to answer is if there is a detectable pattern behind the differing ways in which different news items, written by people from different categories, receive editorially attributed salience in the form of extra embedding.
Editorially Suggested Topics. Another way of editors' influence is by requesting texts on specific subjects. This can be done in many ways, more or less explicitly, either by asking people to write something for the publication, or by posting clear suggestions for the writers directly on the start-page of the website. The latter is customary at Newsmill, where three "daily topics" are announced on a daily basis (Holt 2009). At Sourze, the editors sporadically signal that they want debates about specific themes. This is done partly by inviting people (for example politicians) to write, and partly through creating headlines on the front page with special graphics for each debate (Sourze). Where the editors are actively placing focus on events that receive much attention in the traditional news media, it can be argued that they are also imposing the logic of traditional journalism on the participatory news media. What is important to find out in relation to this, is if this matters for the way the editors attribute salience to different texts.
Research Design
For this study we chose to do a content analysis to investigate how the different dimensions of participation outlined above manifested in the end product of news - the content published on the respective news site.
Content on the Internet is especially challenging to research since it changes constantly and allows archiving huge amounts of information. Online newspapers like Dagens Nyheter simultaneously publish hundreds of thousands of news items and more are added every hour. Thus, any study approaching content on the Internet needs to be profoundly restricted. The method utilised in this study is a content analysis of the news items of the front page of the three websites. The front page was chosen as this is the place where the news sites place their most recent and important items (Bucy 2004; Karlsson and Stromback 2010). The sample consists of a constructed week and the front pages were downloaded each day at 12.30 during the spring of 2010 utilising download software, pdf prints and screen shots. A total of 675 articles were analysed (Newsmill: 164, Sourze: 137 and DN: 374).
Two coders (the authors) performed the content analysis. The code scheme was tested and slightly changed before a Holsti test was performed on 30 percent of the Sourze sample with satisfactory results (0.95). Firstly, the population of contributors was categorised in order to distinguish between different kinds of authors (coded as either "Journalists," "Publicly known personalities," "Spokesmen" or "Ordinary people"). Secondly, the articles were categorised according to the nature of subject (i.e. is the article written on a topic that has been editorially suggested or independent of editorial requests).1 Thirdly, the frequency of editorial embedding was measured (coded as either embedded or not). Lastly, it was measured how different types of contributions were editorially embedded.
Who Are the Authors? The data gives us an interesting view of the distribution of authors in the different categories (see Table 1).
Table 1: Authors According to Category (percentages of articles written by different categories of authors)
Authors according to Category	Newsmill	Sourze	DN
	% (n=164)	% (n=137)	% (n=374)
Journalists:	9 %	9 %	96 %
Publicly Known Personalities:	10 %	1,5 %	0,50 %
Spokesmen:	62 %	27 %	3,50 %
Ordinary People:	18 %	63%	0 %
Total:	100 %	100 %	100 %
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In the traditional newspaper, DN, almost every article is written by a journalist (96 percent). The remaining 4 percent is divided between "Spokesmen" (3.5 percent) and "Publicly Known Personalities" (0.5 percent). Consequently, there are no articles in DN written by "Ordinary people." In both of the participatory journalism sites (Newsmill and Sourze), "Spokesmen" and "Ordinary people" dominate, accounting together for 89.5 percent of the articles at Sourze and 72 percent at Newsmill. Interestingly, the amount of "Spokesmen" at Newsmill is roughly the same as the amount of "Ordinary people" at Sourze - just over 60 percent of the articles. Likewise, the amount of articles written by "Spokesmen" (27 percent) at Sourze is comparable to that of "Ordinary people" at Newsmill (18 percent). Journalists account for 9 Q percent of the articles at both sites, and "Publicly Known Personalities" 10 percent at Newsmill and 1.5 percent at Sourze.
Editorially Suggested Topics. The second string of results concerns to what ^ extent editorially suggested topics get published (see Table 2).
In DN all of the articles were coded as "Not editorially suggested," because this variable is not relevant in a traditional newspaper. When it comes to the two participatory newspapers, the image is rather complex and reveals differences between Newsmill and Sourze. At Sourze only 17 percent of the articles were explicitly dealing with editorially suggested topics, while the number for Newsmill is 55 Q percent (inlcuding the "sponsored seminar").
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Table 2: Editorially Suggested Topics (percentages of articles written on a subject that has been suggested by the editors in advance)
Editorially suggested topics	Newsmill	Sourze
	% (n=164)	% (n=137)
Editorially suggested:	55 %	17 %
Not editorially suggested:	45 %	83 %
Total:	100 %	100 %
Note: Articles from Newsmill include those coded as "Sponsored seminar" (10 percent of all the articles).
Editorial Embedding. The final parts of the results involve editorial embedding. First the overall editorial embedding is presented (Table 3), then editorial embedding according to author category (Table 4) and finally the relation between editorial embedding and editorial suggested topics (Table 5).
Starting with the overall percentage of editorially embedded articles in the participatory newspapers, Newsmill and Sourze are presented in Table 3. DN was excluded from this and the following tables as news items by definition are editorially embedded on a mainstream news media and the media outlet does not claim to provide anything else either. Again, as in the previous cases, Sourze and Newsmill differ substantially from each other.
Table 3: Editorial Embedding (percentages of editorially embedded articles)
Editorial embedding	Newsmill	Sourze
	% (n=164)	% (n=137)
Editorially embedded:	55 %	22 %
Not editorially embedded:	45 %	78 %
Total:	100 %	100 %
At Newsmill, 55 percent of the articles were found to have received extra attention from the editors in the form of embedding explained above, while the same can be said of 22 percent of the articles at Sourze. Thus, the editors are active at both the participatory news sites but differ in their intensity.
Editorially Embedded Articles According to Author Category. Going deeper into the results and investigating how the editorially embedded articles in the participatory newspapers related to different categories of authors, both similarities and differences were found (see Table 4).
Table 4: Editorial Embedding and Authors
Embedded articles and author category	Newsmill	Sourze
	% (n=90)	% (n=30)
Journalists:	13,5 %	3,5 %
Publicly Known Personalities:	13,5 %	7 %
Spokesmen:	64 %	77 %
Ordinary People:	9 %	13,5 %
Total:	100 %	100 %
Table 4 shows the percentages of the editorially embedded articles written by different author categories.
In Newsmill, 13.5 percent were written by "Journalists," 13.5 percent by "Publicly known personalities," 64 percent by "Spokesmen" and 9 percent by "Ordinary people." Of the few embedded articles found in Sourze, 3.5 percent were written by "Journalists," 7 percent by "Publicly known personalities," 77 percent by "Spokesmen" and 13.5 percent by "Ordinary people." A similarity between the sites is that a majority of the editorially embedded articles were written by "Spokesmen." They obtain similar numbers regarding the embedding of articles written by "Ordinary people": only 9 percent at Newsmill and 13.5 percent at Sourze.
Editorially Embedded Articles and Editorial Suggested Topics. Finally, Table 5 presents the proportions of embedding the editorial suggested articles was compared to the embedding of non-editorial suggested articles.
Table 5: Editorial Embedding and Suggested Topics
Embedding and suggested topics	Newsmill	Sourze
	% (n=90)	% (n=30)
Editorially suggested:	60 %	60 %
Not editorially suggested:	40 %	40 %
Total:	100 %	100 %
Table 5 shows the percentage of the editorially embedded articles that are written on topics suggested by the editors in advance. The articles from Newsmill include those coded as "Sponsored Seminar" (13.5 percent of the embedded articles).
0
Among the editorially embedded articles, a majority were written on an editorially suggested topic: 60 percent of the articles on both Newsmill and Sourze (see Table 5). Thus, it seems that the editors on both news sites were more likely to give the extra attention that embedding entails to articles that responded to their calls for topics compared to those that did not.
Analysis: Contested Participatory Arenas
In the literature concerning participation there is often an emphasis on the in-J teractive possibilities of Web 2.0. The findings in this study show in various ways that user participation is conditioned by the circumstances and context in which it is produced. The differences between the compared sites regarding author category, editorially suggested topics and editorial embedding reveals substantial differences. Some of these differences can be explained by the different nature of the compared media. At a traditional newspaper like DN, almost all of the articles are, as can be expected, written by journalists. The only ones who break that mo-^ nopoly are representatives from organisations and on one occasion publicly known personalities (a former prime minister writing without explicit connection to his political party). Also there are no attempts to suggest topics as users have little role in the production of the actual news stories (commenting on them after the fact is, however, a different issue not covered in this paper). Thus, in the case of DN, journalists are still in control of the production (all other things being equal)
_______________________________________________________________________„,_______„,.,.....,
despite that the production takes place in an allegedly participatory environment. The promise of participation is quenched by professional, economic and other 3 constraints surround the production of news - well documented within journal-
ism studies. While this is far from surprising in a traditional outlet like DN there are some other interesting observations at Newsmill and Sourze that both claim to offer an arena for the common user.
At Newsmill the items on the frontpage to a large extent stems from organisations. Thus, Newsmill is an example of how organised interests, rather than citizens, move in when institutionalised journalism moves out. The average user has a role as a producer but it is restricted to about one in five news items. Ordinary people play a more active part on Sourze where they contribute with nearly two thirds of all news items.
One dimension is who gets to produce news items; another is the prominence of each contribution. Overall the findings in this study suggest that users are participating in the production of news. But it also shows that users do not equal citizens or ordinary people and that some contributions are valued more than others. Ordinary citizens far less well than corporations, political parties and other organised powers - at Newsmill only 9 percent of the contributions that are given an extra push by editorial embedding stems from ordinary people while they contribute with 18 percent of the overall content. The three other categories of contributors, journalists, famous people and spokespeople from organisations all have higher shares of embedding than their actual contributions.
The arena in which ordinary people have the greatest access is the one with least connection to commercial interest but also with miniscule traffic. But even at Sourze the contributions from spokespersons are valued higher in terms of editorial salience than those from ordinary people. Here ordinary people contribute with 63 percent of the content while getting roughly one eighth of the editorial embedding. Conversely spokesmen produce about one quarter of the content but have 77 percent of the embedding. Consequently, all across these participatory news sites it seems that the social status of authoritative sources trumps the participation of the common people. Thus, traditional patterns from analogue mass media are to some extent reproduced in all of these new and allegedly different participatory arenas.
Although previous research is split over the extent to which users demand to participate in the creation of content this study indicates that it is not only a question of wanting to or not but, more importantly, to be allowed to participate and to do it on equal terms. In this context the "sponsored seminar" on Newsmill is an interesting phenomena as it places further emphasis on, not only cultural but also, monetary capital as a leverage to participate.
The results reflect that editors do have an active and important role. But the results also show that the outcome of the editorial decisions differs from one media organisation to another and that the adaptation of user participation is indeed a process shaped by sociomaterial infrastructures. In a big media corporation like DN journalists are in almost total control while this is not the case in the other two. Newsmill is marked by its commercial origin and seeks to publish and promote items that contribute with social status and monetary capital arguably aiming at generating traffic and creating a position within the journalistic field. While the editors at DN can simply decide what to publish the editors at Newsmill resort to softer techniques of funnelling what should be published by being very active in embedding articles and suggesting topics. The editors at Newsmill are suggesting
topics in over half of the items that are published on the frontpage and are equally active in embedding the items. Sourze — without origin or major support from a media conglomerate and with a policy of being by and for the common people — have the fewest signs of editorial intervention in different forms suggesting topics in seventeen percent of the news items and embedding news items in similar numbers. However, articles on editorially suggested topics are rewarded with editorial embedding in 60 percent of the cases.
Conclusions: Editorial Influence Prevails
In this paper we have been exploring how editors shape the content of news on three different Swedish online news sites: one traditional newspaper and two with an explicit participatory agenda. More specifically, in order to answer this question, we have attempted to shed light on a) the distribution of authors from different categories, b) to what extent these authors write articles about editorially suggested topics, c) the frequency of editorial embedding and d) patterns of editorially attributed salience through embedding.
The mapping of the population of contributors revealed that a large portion of those who publish content through participatory media consist of representatives for different organisations. This is relevant from a democratic perspective, because it gives further reason to question assumptions about large-scale civic participation. The tendency that spokesmen also receive privileged treatment compared to ordinary citizens, uncover traditional journalistic valuation principles about relevance in the editorial approach to contributions from different groups.
Our analysis suggest that depending on how active the editors are in suggesting topics, they influence what users choose to write articles about. A strategy for a common citizen to increase the chances to be heard would be to contribute to issues deemed desirable by the editors. Another strategy would be to speak freely about issues but be prepared to reach a lesser audience. Consequently, the role of the editors serves to bring conformity to these potentially deliberative arenas. This y problematises the view of participatory media as venues for alternative perspectives and as breeding grounds for diversity and pluralism in the news coverage. Surely, alternative perspectives do get published in these forums, but it is clear that the editors are setting the agenda, either by being very active in suggesting topics (Newsmill), or by rewarding articles on suggested topics with attributed salience through embedding (Sourze).
Regarding editorial embedding in participatory newspapers the results suggest that: a) texts written by ordinary people are less likely to be editorially embedded than texts written by publicly known personalities, journalists and spokesmen for organisations; b) texts submitted independently of editorial suggestions are less likely to be editorially embedded than texts that address topics suggested by the editors.
Taken together the findings suggest that these new and allegedly participatory arenas do not automatically foster an equal or uncontested discourse but are constrained by the underpinning logic of their context of production. The choices
......................t.........„..,,......................t.............................
that editors make shape the conditions under which user generated content is produced, the immediate context of publication and the perceived prominence fv^ of the published content. The content of different participatory media is shaped
by different levels of editorial involvement in the publishing process. The role of the editors is central for the understanding of participation in participatory online fO news media. From the perspective of participatory media's potential to revitalise ^ democracy by involving citizens actively in the public discourse, the results point at two important facts: Firstly, that participation is not the same for everyone, people from different categories in society participate on different terms. Secondly, editors significantly influence the agenda by suggesting topics, and, in various degrees, by rewarding articles that follow their suggestions.
Therefore, editorial influence is an aspect of the emerging participatory online mediascape that needs further consideration and research. If participatory journalism is indeed reshaping the mediatised public spheres, then more attention needs to be directed towards those who stipulate the conditions for them. But attention should also be directed to the conditions under which the editors' work as these conditions seems to guide editorial decisions.
Having said this, there are reasons to apply caution in viewing these results as universal; the study is limited by being a small sample from small country that may or may not provide special conditions for participation. Further research is recommended to increase the sample; a longitudinal approach would allow us to see if there are changes over time and comparing the results with functionally equivalent media in other countries would strengthen the analysis. In our view the results are encouraging enough to further investigate the role of editors and the conditions under which editors operate in participatory journalism.
Note:
1. At Newsmill, a special feature called the "sponsored seminar" complicated the coding of articles as either editorially suggested or not. The sponsored seminar is a service that lets different actors (i.e. unions, NGO's, companies etc.) pay for discussions about a topic of their own choosing. The discussion is open to all authors, and occupies a fixed spot in the upper region of the frontpage, where it remains for an agreed length of time. The problem is if the articles that appear in the sponsored seminar should be considered as responses to suggestions by the editors or as independent contributions? Since this feature means that editorial space is for sale, it can be argued that the editors are in fact paid to suggest to their readers that they should write articles about specific topics. Therefore, we decided to include those articles in the category "editorially suggested topics."
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CULTIVATING THE DEMOCRATIC MIND
LEENA RIPATTI-TORNIAINEN
THE UNDERSTATED ADULT EDUCATIONAL CHARACTERISTIC
OF PUBLIC JOURNALISM JAANA HUJANEN
Abstract
The article analyses formative texts of public journalism, written in the USA in the 1990s, by constructing comparisons to adult education. The article initially introduces the rationale of paralleling public journalism with adult education by discussing the congruence of aims, methods, and definitions of professional roles between public journalism and American pragmatist adult education. The authors use the methods of intellectual history to analyse the intervention in the public conduct of citizens, which the leading early proponents of public journalism, Jay Rosen and Davis Merritt, constructed. The article demonstrates that Rosen and Merritt's idea of intervention consists of two distinct elements. First, Rosen and Merritt urge journalists to animate social association and thus create prerequisites for citizens to recognise their public and political agency. Second, they suggest journalists to promote inclusive and solution-oriented public discussion among the citizenry. Adult education recognises both elements, yet the purpose Rosen and Merritt articulate for intervention is abstract and instrumental, compared to adult educational purposes, and their view on citizen empowerment is more restricted. The abstract ideal of public life, as opposed to the emancipation of persons, is at the centre of Rosen and Merritt's argument.
Leena Ripatti-Torniainen is Junior Researcher at the Department of Communication, University of Jyvaskyla; e-mail:
leena.ripatti-torniainen@jyu.fi.
Jaana Hujanen is Professor at the School of Communication, Media and Theatre, University of Tampere; e-mail: jaana.hujanen@uta.fi.
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Introduction
A radical definition of the task of professional journalists emerged in the USA in the late 1980s and 1990s as public (civic) journalism developed. Developers of public journalism based their approach on the claim that the public, the body of public-oriented and civic-minded citizenry, had dispersed as a consequence of the increasing withdrawal of citizens from collective and political life (Rosen 1991a; 1993b; 1993c; 1995; Merritt 1994). Public journalism was an intellectual and practical experiment of seeking ways to reconstruct the public, an effort which sometimes meant beginning from the initial prerequisites of togetherness. Advocates of public journalism, such as Jay Rosen and Davis Merritt, argued a change of orientation was necessary across society from private to public life, from political apathy to engagement, from detached advocacy to public discussion and collective problem-solving. Rosen and Merritt argued that journalists should be the initiators of this change (Rosen 1991a; 1994a; 1994b; 1995; Merritt 1994; 1995; Merritt and Rosen 1994), thus considerably extending the task of professional journalists. Merritt suggested journalists should step from newsrooms and press boxes to the "swamps" of civil society (Merritt 1995, 72-74) and those arenas, in which private individuals have the opportunity to join the public realm as citizens.
The seminal texts of public journalism promote a cultural and political change in the USA by promoting a change in people's minds. In this article, we analyse the formation of public journalism by constructing comparisons to adult education. We argue that aims, methods, and journalists' roles in public journalism manifest concepts of adult education. We argue, further, that the argument of the purpose of public journalism differs from the concepts of adult education and that the developers of public journalism did not adequately discuss the concept's purpose.
The intellectual context, in which public journalism formed, provides the connection to adult education. The ideals, practices and organisations of adult education informed the emerging concept of public journalism implicitly through the legacy y of John Dewey and through the close association of public journalism developers with civil society agents, many of whom operated within the field of adult education. Public journalism comes particularly close to the pragmatist tradition of American adult education, which influenced by Dewey, has pursued progress and democracy through the development of cooperative and problem-solving skills of citizenry (e.g. Stewart 1987; Kett 1994; Elias and Merriam 2005). Public journalism not only shares these aims with pragmatist adult education but also the method of organised collective discussion. Pragmatist adult educators believe approaches of collective discussion are the primary method, through which adults learn democratic skills, such as public speaking and listening and collective planning and group work (Lindeman 1926/1989; Stewart 1987; Brookfield 2005). All these elements are articulated in the formative writing of public journalism.
How adult education could enhance our understanding of public journalism has nevertheless remained unarticulated. The leading advocates do not discuss the issue in the formative texts and the affinity to adult education has remained almost unrecognised in the otherwise intensive scholarly interest in the concept and practice of public journalism. An explicit link has been argued by Perry (2003; 2004) fv^ who equates "civic journalism" with "continuing adult education" (Perry 2003, v,
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77) and suggests the role of "civic journalists" is parallel to the role of participatory teachers (Perry 2003, 38). Despite these arguments, Perry's focus is elsewhere C^ and consequently he does not proceed to a thorough analysis of the overarching 3 features of public journalism and adult education.
A comparison of public journalism with adult education is, however, worthwhile because it reveals the incoherence in the argumentation of public journalism, thus opening up opportunities of renewal. While a comparison with adult education helps to understand the logic between the aims and methods of public journalism, the process immediately brings out any flaws in the argument concerning the purpose of public journalism. The decisive difference is that the argumentation of adult education centres on living persons, whereas the argumentation of public journalism centres on the abstract concept of public life.
Outlines of citizenship reform similar to public journalism can be found in the writing of several scholars of adult education (e.g. Lindeman 1926/1989; Korsgaard 1997; Welton 2002; 2005; Brookfield 2005). All these scholars, like the architects of public journalism (Rosen 1991a; 1992; 1993b; 1999b; Merritt 1994; 1995), raise visions of citizens who participate in rational and inclusive discussions about public issues and deliberate over solutions to common problems. The scholars of adult education, however, consider the emancipation and equality of persons as the purpose of advanced participation and deliberation. The purpose that public journalism offers to participation and deliberation derives, in comparison, from the desire to consolidate the prerequisites of public life.
The centrality of an abstract idea of public life contributes to an instrumental conceptualisation of the purpose of public journalism as citizenship reform. Public journalism's view of citizen empowerment is limited, which may have hampered the progress of the movement.
In the remainder of this article, we introduce initially the rationale of parallelling public journalism with adult education. The focus is on adult educational ideals, practices and organisations that were present in the contexts, in which public journalism gradually developed, and which thus implicitly facilitated the formation of public journalism. We then analyse the intervention in the public conduct of citizens, which the leading early proponents of public journalism, Jay Rosen and Davis Merritt, constructed. We suggest the idea of intervention manifests the underlying, though implicit, influence of adult education on public journalism. Comparisons with adult education scholars enable us to discuss the aim of the intervention, the role Rosen and Merritt reserved for journalists and the purpose they offered for the intervention.
We use the term public journalism because it was Rosen's and Merritt's choice. They did not draw distinctions between public journalism and parallel emergent terms, such as civic journalism and community journalism (Rosen 1994b; 1999b; Merritt 1995).
The analysis covers a series of texts written in the formative era of public journalism by Rosen (1991a; 1991b; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1993c; 1994a; 1994b; 1995; 1999a; 1999b), Merritt (1994; 1995) and Merritt and Rosen (1994). The 1990s was the period, during which public journalism gradually formed from various emergent ideas and practices through conscious co-operation between American scholars and journalists. Rosen, Professor of Journalism at New York University, aspired to
include journalists' views in the dynamic academic discussion that surrounded the concept of the public. Rosen argued the theoretical discussion covered issues that were urgently relevant in newsrooms but needed to be conceptualised in terms that would make sense among journalists (Rosen 1991a; 1994b). Merritt, a journalist for over thirty years and editor of the Wichita Eagle newspaper became Rosen's fellow advocate after Merritt had launched reforms that became classics of the field. Public journalism, according to Rosen (1994b, 377) "took shape in large measure around Merritt, who assumed the role as the original public journalist." The 1990s texts of Rosen and Merritt are of particular relevance as they had a major influence on how public journalism was understood both in the USA and elsewhere.
The analysis draws on methods of intellectual history (Collingwood 1946/1994; LaCapra 1980; Hyrkkanen 2009) which is a hermeneutic process of inquiry. Intellectual history seeks to interpret complex texts in order to both understand the thinking of writers and to enact a dialogue with the texts beyond their conventional reading and the historical moment of writing (LaCapra 1980).
The method of intellectual history involves examining the networks of problems and solutions writers weave in their texts (Collingwood 1946/1994; Hyrkkanen 2009). The analysis of introduced problems and proposed solutions may show that writers, while developing solutions, transform their initial thought of the nature of problems. Both proposed problems and solutions are further perceived as intellectual choices writers have made within particular contexts. Hence it is essential that researchers pursue comprehension of the contexts yet try to eschew context dominating reasoning (LaCapra 1980). The interest of intellectual history is to understand how writers conceived those contexts and what they made intellectually out of them (Hyrkkanen 2009).
An Adult Educational Solution to a Journalistic Problem
The overriding problem Rosen and Merritt introduce is a sense of twin crises: anxiety in American journalism intertwined with a notion of failure of the US y political system. Amidst alarmingly declining readership rates and the increasing withdrawal from political life of citizenry, journalists seemed to lose both their £	audiences and their belief in the democratic purpose of the profession (Merritt and
Rosen 1994; Merritt 1994; 1995; Rosen 1994b; 1999b).
Also the relationship between journalists and their employers was unsettled. The tacit contract between journalists and publishers that used to guarantee newsroom autonomy had now ceased to protect journalists (Rosen 1993a). The craft was under commercial pressures and strained to cut the costs of newsgathering.
Moreover, the pride and commitment of journalists to keep citizens informed about formal politics seemed to have been turned against the profession as citizens displayed disgust towards political elites. Journalism had become part of the establishment, which citizens now disregarded (Merritt 1994; Rosen 1994b). "Journalists in the United States are at a critical point in the history of their craft," summarised Merritt and Rosen (1994, 3). "[T]he conditions that once gave their work its central importance change drastically or disappear" (Merritt and Rosen 1994, 4).
Since Rosen and Merritt intertwine the troubles of journalism and democracy, the solution they introduce aims to relieve the predicaments of both. The solution is the revival of citizens' participation in public life. Strategies to attract journalism
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audiences will fail "unless readers also want to be citizens" (Merritt and Rosen
1994,	4). Citizens who engage with public life will have an interest to stay informed, which in turn consolidates the operational preconditions of journalism (Merritt
1995,	114). Persuading and equipping citizens to engage with public life becomes the primary task for journalists.
The task that Rosen and Merritt propose for journalists means intervention in the public conduct of adult citizenry. We argue the intervention manifests two underlying contexts that implicitly contributed to the development of public journalism both as a concept and as a variety of practices. The first contributor is American pragmatism and the thinking of the key pragmatist philosopher John Dewey (Perry 2003). The second contributor is the explicit civic educational agenda of many of the foundations and organisations whose visions and rhetoric Rosen and Merritt adopted for their texts and whose practices were espoused to guide public journalism practices.
Rosen (1999a, 24) states the shortest definition of public journalism is "what Dewey meant." The keyword of public journalism, the public, is a concept Dewey used to refer to individuals who join together to discuss and experiment with solutions for commonly experienced problems and identify themselves as a politically viable group (Dewey 1927/2003; Heikkila and Kunelius 1996; Coleman 1997; Rosen 1999b). Dewey's concept (1927/2003) involves a definition of citizenship, in which there are four particular characteristics: First, citizens orientate towards public issues voluntarily and willingly; secondly, they use their experiences as material, and discussion as the method of examining the world; thirdly, they have an ability to pool their individual capacity and tackle the problem they have faced and fourthly, they are conscious of the interrelatedness of problems and seek free interplay with other citizens and publics. Dewey's concept, in other words, presumes a variety of abilities that are not self-evident but have to be learned.
Dewey's public became an influential ideal in American pragmatist adult education, with Eduard Lindeman, his friend and colleague (Stewart 1987), being the "chief interpreter" (Brookfield 2005, 63). In accordance with Dewey's concept, Lindeman (1926/1989) argues the crux of democracy is citizens' ability and willingness to apply democratic principles in everyday social life. In order to advance the development of such ability in citizenry, Lindeman (1926/1989, 7) suggests adult educators should perceive experiences as a "living textbook" of adults. Lindeman argues the real experiences of life are adults' greatest source of learning. Collaborative and problem-solving discussion is learnt in situations in which people speak about and solve problems collaboratively and, in which the discussion is deliberately organised to encourage increasing participation and interaction. The tasks of adult educators are to provide for such situations and to lend support to adults as they consider their concerns and observations in a larger context of the changing society. Teachers should not pursue directive roles but facilitate learning by assisting adults to reconstruct experience (Lindeman 1926/1989, 109-123; Stewart 1987, 153-169).
It is striking how literally Rosen (1994a; 1999b) and Merritt (1994; 1995) transfer this idea to journalism even though they never mention either Lindeman or prag-matist adult education. Rosen and Merritt initially propose making the concerns and realities of citizens the starting point for news coverage. If this proved to be an
appropriate device of journalists to initiate public discussion, Rosen and Merritt go further and urge journalists to create opportunities of assembly, discussion and problem-solving in homes and neighbourhoods. In this vein, journalists should not only invite citizens to bring their mundane experiences and observations to public discussion but also to facilitate citizens in the connecting of concerns and observations to more generally shared public problems. The role Rosen and Mer-ritt reserve for journalists is congruent with pragmatist adult education as Rosen and Merritt suggest journalists should facilitate but not direct citizens' assembly and discussion.
Rosen and Merritt are directing journalists towards an arena not conventionally included in the scope of professional journalism. The unfamiliarity becomes visible when Rosen (1991a; 1993c; 1994b) struggles to apply Dewey's vision to the actual working contexts of American journalists. "Dewey's faith in public capacities was inspiring," Rosen (1999b, 67) writes, "[b]ut he did little to specify how his dream could be made to work." How journalists could actually push through a qualitative change in people's public conduct remains rather vague in Rosen's and Merritt's texts. The methods had to be found from beyond the borders of journalism and journalism research. A variety of American organisations did contribute to the entrenchment of discussion groups as a characteristic method of public journalism.
One of the major forces behind the development of public journalism was the Kettering Foundation, a research institute with an explicit civic educational agenda. Established in 1927 to promote scientific research, the foundation shifted its focus in the 1970s to "democracy and what makes it work as it should, which led us to pay particular attention to the role of citizens" (Kettering Foundation n.d.). The Kettering Foundation was involved at the outset in public journalism with the Foundation's involvement in the initiatives in the 1980s at the Ledger-Enquirer newspaper (Rosen 1999b), which are regarded as the first examples of public journalism (Rosen 1991a; 1993b; Haas 2007). In 1993-1997 the Kettering Foundation operated The Project of Public Life and the Press, which enabled the evolvement of ^ public journalism as a concept (Rosen 1994b) and put large numbers of American journalists in touch with the idea (Rosen 1999b).
A further civic educational affiliation came in the figure of Daniel Yankelovich, social scientist and chairman of the research and public engagement organisation Public Agenda. Yankelovich had co-founded the organisation in 1975 "to re-engage the public on important public matters, to allow different groups to be heard and work together on solutions" (Public Agenda n.d.). Yankelovich's book Coming to Public Judgment was published in 1991 on the threshold of the formative era of public journalism. The way Yankelovich (1991) models citizens' opinion formation through discussion was "particularly effective" (Rosen 1994b, 380) as public journalism entered American newsrooms. Merritt and Rosen refer to the model repeatedly (e.g. Merritt 1994; 1995; Rosen 1994a; 1994b).
Yankelovich (1991) argues that journalists understand public opinion too narrowly and measure the quality of public opinion as an equivalent of being well informed. As the quality is defined as factual mastery, citizens do not have, in contrast to experts, any real chance to impact on public discussion and political choices. Yankelovich, writing from long experience within public opinion research, argues citizens have an alternative type of solid judgement to make, value judg-
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ments. Yankelovich guides journalists to cultivate citizens' judgment via a model involving the three stages of "consciousness raising," "working through" and CO "resolution." Yankelovich emphasises the "working through" stage, which he ar- ^ gues was largely missing in American society and culture (Yankelovich 1991, 65). The "working through" stage means that citizens, while discussing together about a variety of alternative choices to a current political issue, confront the full consequences of their views and re-evaluate their views from this perspective.
By the time public journalism began to take shape, Yankelovich's Public Agenda and the Kettering Foundation had already developed discussion techniques and programmes to enhance the "working through" stage (Yankelovich 1991, 237-255). Among the methods that were adopted for public journalism were National Issues Forums, in which citizens considered problems of national importance by discussing alternative solutions with help of guide books.
The Study Circles Resource Center is another example of an organisation whose expertise on discussion methods was used in public journalism initiatives (Charity 1995). The centre, established in 1989, and now known as Everyday Democracy, has designed and conducted hundreds of community initiatives in the USA (Everyday Democracy n.d.).
The overarching element linking these organisations' approaches is the emphasis on ensuring each discussion is simultaneously inclusive and ambitious. The approaches combine the endeavours of inviting citizens to come and speak together with the effort of seeking to address solutions to significant problems at local and national levels through these discussions.
Inclusive collective discussion is a classical adult educational method, which has been widely employed as a means of societal reform, for example, in the Nordic countries (e.g. Korsgaard 1997; 2002; Rinne, Heikkinen and Salo 2006). The notion of discussion groups as an adult educational method helps to understand the relevance of Rosen's and Merritt's proposal, as they suggest-journalists should initiate collective discussions in homes and neighbourhoods. While discussions were of occasional importance to public journalists who used them as material for news coverage, the ultimate relevance of the discussion method lies far beyond the sporadic stories of a newspaper. The relevance is the learned habit of the adult population of discovering the world in thoughtful, respectful, and public-oriented interplay with each other.
We proceed now to discuss more specifically the reconstructing of the public, at which Rosen and Merritt aimed through the intervention they proposed in the public conduct of citizenry. We separate the intervention analytically into two distinct elements, both of which are known in adult education. We argue that Rosen and Merritt consequently blended into one approach the two distinct roles for professional journalists. First, they suggested that journalists should perform as animators of social association, thus aiming to create the social prerequisites for the public to emerge. Secondly, they suggested journalists should act as cultivators of the discussion in which the emergent public engaged.
Journalists as Animators of Social Association
The mental landscape, in which Rosen and Merritt situate the emergence of public journalism, depicts a gloomy picture of American communities weighed
down by pervasive long-term problems and ineffective politics. Voter turnout is low and citizens "isolate themselves in their own narrow concerns and seek safety and solace in insular communities and activities" (Merritt 1995, 3). A large proportion of the population has stopped caring about politics and withdrawn from public life, thus making irrelevant "one of the traditional demand factors in journalism - information upon which you can act" (Rosen 1993a, 52).
This is the contextualisation Rosen and Merritt make, as they introduce the rebuilding of social and communal ties and a sense of togetherness, which we call the first element of the reconstructing of the public in public journalism. The objective is that individuals shall awake in their isolated privacy and join together to seek solutions to common problems as citizens. Rosen writes about the need to face the challenges of "public time" (Rosen 1991b, 22-23; 1993b, 10) and "public work" (Rosen 1993c, 27-28). Dwelling in public time and doing public work mean that people, instead of being ignorant of their circumstances, voluntarily choose to confront the problems of the political present.
The role of public journalists is therefore to persuade people to make this voluntary choice. Journalists are suggested to make politics matter and "civic life a compelling alternative" (Rosen 1992, 30) and create "a climate in which the affairs of the community earn their claim on the citizen's time and attention" (Rosen 1993b, 3). The task of journalists is thus to contribute to "what had earlier been a premise for the daily newspaper - the existence of a public attuned to public affairs" (Rosen 1993b, 5).
Rosen (1991a; 1992; 1993b) and Merritt (1994; 1995) urge journalists to leave newsrooms and go out into society and support face-to-face discussions at locations both domestic and public. Informal get-togethers organised by public journalists were manifestations of this role, as well as citizen assemblies, some of which gathered hundreds of citizens.
In the footsteps of John Dewey, Rosen and Merritt thus turn towards publics that are "in eclipse" (Dewey 1927/2003, 304-325), believing that journalists can assist ^ their audiences to recognise their agency as citizens (Rosen 1991a; 1993b; 1994a; Merritt 1995). The names of early campaigns manifest the effort to claim citizens' influence over issues already seen beyond citizens' control: "Your Vote Counts," "Solving It Ourselves" and "Taking Back Our Neighborhoods" (see e.g. Merritt 1995, 80-87; Rosen 1999a, 43-55; Sirianni and Friedland 2001, 193-217).
Perry (2004) refers briefly to a partial congruence between public journalism and the ideas of adult education philosopher Paulo Freire. The reconstructing of the public through the animation of social association indeed resembles Freire's approach in that it is a grassroots approach, which aims to evoke a sense of agency amongst people who do not yet identify themselves as political actors. Freire preceded public journalism initiatives in emphasising the thorough acquaintance of educators with communities, in which they work. His approach also highlights the time-consuming and delicate character of community projects.
The most apt of Freire's concepts in the context of reconstructing the public is that of "generative themes" (Freire 1972/1990, 68-95). Freire employed multidis-ciplinary research groups that, by collaborating with people and spending long periods in communities, gathered concepts and meanings that dominated people's ^ lives. Generative themes thus captured the situation as described in the people's
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own words and comprehension and subsequently formed the bases for situation specific adult education programmes. These programmes aimed, through dia- LO logues, to contribute to critical consciousness about the possibilities of influencing ^ and changing the difficulties that confronted people.
Rosen and Merritt certainly encourage journalists to listen to the people, follow the citizens' agenda and to contribute to awareness about citizens' possibilities of bringing about change. There is correlation between Freire's quest for generative themes and "community conversations," a public journalism initiative used, for example, by the newspaper Virginian Pilot. Journalists employed community conversations to discover how citizens named and framed issues; journalists, then, used citizens' frames as the basis of the newspaper's political reporting (Rosen 1995; 1999b).
We nevertheless hesitate to construct a straightforward link between Rosen and Merritt's public journalism and the thinking of Freire who was far more politically oriented than Rosen and Merritt and consequently far more explicit in his criticism towards the existing political systems.
Other than Freire, who developed his philosophy in Latin America, grassroots and community approaches of adult education have been developed in many countries and cultures. Developers of public journalism have an opportunity to seek cooperation with culturally specific adult educational approaches that aim to animate citizenship at a collective level by starting with the interests, cultural traditions, and needs of local people.
Our view is that Rosen and Merritt's initial assignment for journalists tries to nourish the domain of social relationships, through which experiences about common ground with others do emerge. For Dewey, such experiences were a necessary conditional premise if a notion about engaging oneself in a political public sphere was to develop in a human being (Honneth 2007).
Journalists as Cultivators of Inclusive and Solution-Oriented Discussion
Our second element in the reconstructing of the public and the consequent role for journalists in public journalism represents a more detailed ideal about public life. Political apathy and social disengagement of citizens are no longer the primary concerns. The focus is now on the formal modes of public discussion and on the ability of journalism to support procedures, through which citizens can arrive at public will.
The objective is a particular form of public political talk. Rosen writes about a "meaningful public discussion" (Rosen 1991a, 268), "useful discussion" (1993b, 9) and a "reasoned debate in the public sphere" (1991b, 23). Both Rosen and Merritt write in abundance about a discussion that would solve problems. Although the definitions for discussion, dialogue and deliberation remain unspecified, the pursuit of Rosen and Merritt is clear. They aim to provide for those public conditions, in which citizens with varying backgrounds can talk thoughtfully about their views concerning political issues and consciously and responsibly choose their common future. Rosen and Merritt thus repeat the early 20th century ideal of the advocates of deliberation. The ideal was that citizens learn to test their view in reciprocal reasoned discussions similar to discussions of formal deliberative bodies (Gastil
and Keith 2005). Citizens' opportunities to come together and discuss the issues of the day in open-minded and reasoned circumstances were enhanced in nationwide campaigns in the USA (Gastil and Keith 2005, 10-13). The ideal was revived in the USA at the end of the 20th century, and the simultaneously developing public journalism was occasionally attached to the initiatives now referred to as deliberative democracy initiatives (Rosen 1999b, 10-16).
Deliberative discussion sets expectations on citizens. While describing the responsibilities of every citizen, Rosen (1992, 32) lists the responsibilities of paying attention to important issues, listening especially to differing views, acknowledging inconvenient facts, and regarding the truth as well as evincing civility and mutual respect in public speech.
Rosen thus addresses an issue declared by some contemporary adult education scholars as a decisive learning challenge of adulthood (e.g. Welton 2002; 2005; Brookfield 2005). The challenge, congruent with ideals of deliberative democracy (Miller 1992/2003; Gutmann and Thompson 2004; Held 2006), introduces a citizenship aim more delicate than the mere coming together of citizens. The challenge refers to the readiness to consider one's values, opinions and aspirations with relations of those of others, and to adjust one's view in a manner that does justice to those whose views differ. Where Welton (2002; 2005) and Brookfield (2005) define the challenge as an assignment for adult educators, the same task occurs thus in public journalism and is reserved for journalists.
The deliberative ideal receives a functional manifestation in both Rosen's and Merritt's texts. The focus is set on the means to enhance the ability of citizens to proceed in a search for political solutions. In other words, Rosen and Merritt were interested in channelling citizens' discussions and deliberations into solving current political problems. Here Yankelovich's model about coming to public judgement (1991) had "a special place" (Rosen 1994b, 380). When many scholars discussed communicative or deliberative ideals at an abstract level, Yankelovich was able to offer a concrete model that steered journalists step-by-step.
^	In his book, Yankelovich (1991) makes a conceptual separation between "public
judgment" and "mass opinion." Mass opinion is an aggregate of individual opinions gathered through opinion polls and routinely reported by the media. Public judgement, by comparison, is a conclusion from thoughtful processes, in which people work together through their conflicting emotional and ethical positions and finally formulate legitimisation for political choice. This process may take years, Yankelovich (1991) argues, but when citizens have worked through it, they have dealt with the consequences of their views and are ready to decide between political options.
Especially Merritt (1994; 1995) makes the point of introducing Yankelovich's model as an assignment for journalists. This means that journalists, while covering a relevant political issue, display the distinct standpoints and alternative options that emerge from citizens' discussions, consolidate the information base and clarify the rationalisations and probable consequences of options. Merritt (1994; 1995) argues journalists can in this way assist the public on its journey towards a conscious and rationalised choice.
Yankelovich (1991) stresses that moving from mass opinion to public judgement does not mean moving from being poorly informed to being well informed. Public
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judgement moves beyond the "information-absorbing side" of opinion formation to "the emotive, valuing, ethical side" (Yankelovich 1991, 59). Since people filter information through their value systems, journalists must develop the skill for dealing with values (Merritt 1995). Writing clearly about beliefs and priorities becomes a major objective for journalists (Merritt 1994; 1995).
Adult education scholar Welton (2005) considers mass media as one of the greatest obstacles to public cultures that nourish the learning of deliberative democracy. It is remarkable, therefore, that Rosen and Merritt direct journalists' attention towards the deliberative ideal and orient journalists to experiment with the materialisation of that ideal. American public journalism initiatives enabled large numbers of citizens to experience events consciously designed to support the deliberative model of discussion. Citizens had opportunities to practise public speaking, listening and collective decision-making in the contexts of real and current issues.
The Missing Purpose
The separation in this essay of the two aims of the reconstruction of the public and the consequent two journalist roles is analytical, whereas Rosen and Merritt present them rather in the same sentence. A combination of social togetherness and deliberative procedures of problem solving exists in Dewey's thoughts (Honneth 2007). Analytical separation illuminates that public journalism operated in two challenging fields. While, Rosen and Merritt suggest journalists should start from the beginning by creating prerequisites for a sense of social belonging and citizenship; they also suggest journalists should contribute to an advanced form of civic conduct, which presumes that citizens are willing to question their own views and to do justice to those who think differently.
One could assume that, after expecting so much from citizens, Rosen and Merritt would rationalise the purpose of the change they propose from a citizen-centred perspective. Such a rationale is missing, however, as Rosen and Merritt direct their rationale to support the vision of a dynamic public life. The focus is, thus, on the abstract concept of public life and not on the living persons whose conduct will define whether or not the vision will materialise. Dewey (e.g. 1888/1997; 1916/1955; 1927/2003) and all the other adult education theorists present in this article differ from Rosen and Merritt by situating humans at the centre of their theories.
The abstract view on the purpose is thus setting public journalism apart even from the scholar most cherished in the intellectual development of the movement. John Dewey not only pursues an overall orientation to public discussion of society but through the discussion the freeing of individual capacity and personal growth, the widening of understanding and discernment, and the directing of these achievements to social aims. There is thus a very clear sense of purpose, and a definition of purpose, in Dewey's thought. Dewey's citizens recognise their mutual interests as human beings, respect the equality of each other as persons and use their intelligence in joint action for the creation of a more human and equal world (Dewey 1888/1997; 1916/1955; 1927/2003).
As the person-centred articulation of the purpose is missing, Rosen and Merritt's insistence on the active participation of citizens acquires a surprisingly instrumental tone. Rosen and Merritt address neither the varying resources for participation of citizens nor structural inequalities, such as unequal distribution of welfare, which
may exclude large sections of citizenry from public life. They also ignore the complexity and extensiveness of the human processes their citizenship ideal presumes. For some adults, the development from political indifference to tolerant public citizenship would presume a profound change of habits. Mezirow refers to such a process via his concept of transformative learning, which enables individuals to become critically aware of the presuppositions that guide their habits of perception, thought and behaviour (Mezirow 1990a; 1990b; 2009). A desire to contribute to such a profound change in another person is not a trivial wish and would require some ethical reflection, yet the need for such reflection is not evident in either Rosen's or Merritt's writing.
Addressing social justice and unequal distribution of welfare might have been assignments of too political a nature for public journalists who already ran the risk of condemnation by their colleagues. Texts that aim at convincing large journalist audiences (Merritt and Rosen 1994; Merritt 1994; 1995; Rosen 1994a) display clear negotiations on the limits of appropriateness of journalists' assignments. The fear of overtly political assignments does not, however, explain the absence of ethical justification for the intervention in adult citizens' conduct. This absence suggests that citizens as human beings, living unique and vulnerable lives, were not that central in the formative thought of public journalism. Rosen and Merritt retained instead the attachment between journalism and the functioning, though democratic, of the formal political system.
Discussion
We have, in this article, analysed the intervention in the public conduct of adult citizenry, which Jay Rosen and Davis Merritt introduced, by constructing comparisons to adult education. We have argued that Rosen and Merritt's idea of change reflects the ideal of the public of the pragmatist tradition of American adult education. We analytically separated Rosen and Merritt's idea of intervention into two elements, which enabled us to demonstrate that Rosen and Merritt had two y	aims. First, they wanted to evoke a sense of togetherness and agency amongst
people who had not yet identified themselves as public and political actors; sec-£	ondly sought to advance inclusive and solution-oriented discussion amongst the
public that now existed.
Rosen and Merritt, in other words, suggested journalists should initially create the social prerequisites for the public to emerge, after which they would cultivate the public discussion, in which the emergent public engaged.
This article demonstrated that also the primary method of public journalism, organised collective discussion, is congruent with the pragmatist tradition of American adult education. Adult educators have employed approaches of discussion as methods, through which adults learn to practise democratic skills, such as public speaking and listening, equality, respect, and tolerance, as well as compromise and collective problem-solving (e.g. Lindeman 1926/1989; Korsgaard 1997; Welton 1997; 2002). By learning these skills in the micro-settings of discussion groups, adults gain capabilities for political participation, the orientation of which they define on their own. The discussion method thus emphasises the self-direction of adults and limits the role of educators to facilitating the process and guaranteeing inclusive ^ procedures (Larsson 2001). The role Rosen and Merritt introduced to journalists
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is congruent with this concept as Rosen and Merritt suggested journalists should facilitate but not direct citizens' assembly and discussion.	^
The adult educational perspective views the crux of public journalism as the ^ willingness to use journalism in stimulating circumstances, in which individual adults began to consider what democracy could mean in their social relationships and how they could actualise citizenship in problems they confront. Public journalists used their professional skills, networks and technologies with a view to inviting people together, and with a view to organising and designing inclusive and thoughtful discussions, which enabled adults to articulate concerns, listen to others and strive for resolution.
The congruence of aims, methods, and professional roles within public journalism and adult education notwithstanding, we have revealed in this article that the argument of the purpose and the lack of ethical justification separate Rosen and Merritt's public journalism from the counterparts of adult education. The purpose and justification Rosen and Merritt offer is not the emancipation of persons, through the inclusive and problem-solving discussion, but the blurred ideal of dynamic public life. This shortcoming in Rosen and Merritt's argument weakens public journalism as a citizenship reform. Rosen and Merritt, as the architects of public journalism, by refraining from articulating their purpose in terms of emancipation and social equality, have declined to refer to public journalism's most powerful source of legitimacy.
Yet Rosen and Merritt did manage to draw attention to an issue which, almost twenty years after they introduced public journalism, is increasingly relevant. The issue is that efforts to revitalise journalism as a democratic arena are meaningless unless human beings want to be citizens and consciously choose democracy to be a guiding principle in their life. Rosen and Merritt remind us that journalists cannot presume people evince a democratic and public orientation unless that orientation has first been learned.
The notion that journalism can initiate this type of learning is inherent in the key scholarly literature (e.g. Carey 1987; Glasser 1991) that surrounds public journalism, yet the issue of public journalism's educational capacity remains shallow until it is conceptualised in terms of educational philosophy or research.
Adult education deserves thus to be incorporated into the research and practice of public journalism. Adult education can enhance public journalism's understanding of the necessity of ethical reflection, offer culturally sensitive methodical support and clarify the understanding of the purpose of public journalism. Adult education can prevent public journalism from narrowing into a market-driven attempt at exploiting citizens' discussions for news-benefiting ends. Adult education can, instead, reveal the genuine prospect of a societal and cultural change, which Rosen's and Merritt's texts suggest.
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INTERNATIONALISATION OF CHINESE TELEVISION: MANIFESTATIONS AND POWER INTERPLAYS,
1978-1991 HONG ZHANG
Abstract
This paper analyses the main features and power factors of the initial stage of television globalisation in mainland China. Based on document researches in three Chinese television stations of different administrative levels and in-depth interviews with television managers, producers and scholars, it argues that China's television was internationalised between 1978 and 1991. Television interna-tionalisation was defined as a process driven by the party-state of adopting and reinventing the television cultural forms that were spreading internationally in order to build up national media and dominant ideologies in China. The argument is in three parts. I show first how the party-state relaxed its extreme anti-foreign stance in Chinese television as part of the national modernisation project within a modified party control system. Secondly, I show how these policies introduced international television flows and the transformation of some key aspects of television activities, in particular management practices, production values and program content. Thirdly, I show how the party state and its relations with Western states and international organisations were the primary influence on Chinese television, despite the rising influence of technologies, market forces and liberal intellectuals during the 1980s.
Hong Zhang is a lecturer in College of Media and International Culture, Zhejiang University; e-mai zhangh2009@zju.edu.cn.
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Introduction
The evolution taken place in mainland China's television sector has drawn unfailing interests from researchers and policy makers. This interest is due to the unique development model of Chinese television after the reform - business-like operation with party-state ownership and ideological control.1 One major approach to decipher the changes, often associated with the terms "internationalisation," "transnationalisation" or "globalisation," stresses the influence of Western cultural forms on Chinese television (e.g. Chan 1994, 1997; Curtin 2007; Hong 1998, 2009; Weber 2003). Scholars in this approach have two major perceptions through their empirical discoveries. First, the Chinese party-state is able to resist, absorb and reinvent the foreign media influence in its own interests, thus far more active than a passive receiver of Western influence as media imperialism theory has assumed. Second, market factors, emergent during the process of reform and opening-up as a dominant force for shaping Chinese television, have hardly subverted the party-state's television control system. Their findings of the persistence of Chinese party-state policies works in tandem with the renewed interests in the role of "nation-state" in academic discourse since more than a decade ago (e.g. Held et al. 1999, Waisbord and Morris 2001, Price 2002). Indeed, numerous empirical studies demonstrate that states are able to update their way of media governance in order to promote national production and fend off unregulated external influence both in developed countries and "Third World" countries (e.g. Straubhaar 2001, Keane 2002, Rantanen 2007, Hafez 2007, Chan 2009). To Price (2002) and Zhang (2011), pointing out the pertinence of states in the age of globalised communication is just the first step. Moreover, one needs to find out how the (transformed) states have influenced the media and why states have transformed policies in the light of the rise of other power factors. In this way, one can catch the specific configurations of globalisation under different historical and social context.
The key question is thus not whether there is a role for the Chinese party-state y as China's television gradually increases its contacts with the outside world, but in what way? And what's the relationship of the Chinese party-state with other power factors? Informed by these two questions, my enquiry starts from the changes of the party-state television governance since the reform era. I approach it as a sub-branch of public policy that will be examined in terms of policy objectives, policy institutions, and policy instruments (Hills 2005). I then look into how the changes in television policies have impacted the different spheres of activity in the television sector, namely, ownership, market structure, management, production logic and content. The analysis of the (di)synchronisation of the policy objectives and ^ the transformations actually taken place (policy outcome) will provide insights for the role of other power dynamics of Chinese television globalisation.
This paper seeks to map out the manifestations and power interplays of the initial stage of Chinese television globalisation. It also aims to illustrate how this process should be brought in to enrich our understanding of globalisation through the critique of dominant theories such as media imperialism. Based on document researches at China Central Television (CCTV), Zhejiang Provincial Television (ZJTV) and Wenzhou Municipal Television (WZTV) together with semi-structured ^ interviews on Chinese television producers, managers and scholars between 2005
and 2007, I argue that the party-state and its relations with the Western states and international organisations were the primary influence on the globalisation of LO Chinese television during 1978-1991. This pattern of power relations is remarkably ^ different from the later stages, when the market forces play an increasingly critical role. I thus identify the initial stage of Chinese television globalisation as television internationalisation.
CCTV, ZJTV and WZTV are selected as major case studies for the paper based on the consideration that China's television has been structured according to administrative levels. Thus, comparing the influence of globalisation on stations at different levels enabled me to examine the whole picture of Chinese television from the national to the provincial and local.2 The interviewees included in the study are either deeply involved in or knowledgeable about the Chinese television reforms in the 1980s. Interviews data, used to triangulate the documentary results are cited anonymously to respect the desire for confidentiality of informants.
The Transformation of Party-state Television Governance
Before the late 1970s, the revolutionary party-state in China had adopted a rigid television control system inherited from the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War, which bore a number of features. First, television stations in China were not granted autonomy, but were highly integrated into their regulators-broadcasting bureaus and under the ultimate control of the party (Qian 2002, 59). Second, the majority of television policies were manifested as directives in the form of "redheaded" documents, internal bulletins, short notices or verbal messages from senior officials and party leaders (Huang 1994, 236). Given the small number of television stations, these policies were always implemented efficiently. Third, cultural protectionism had been adopted as an indispensable part of the television control system (Chan 1994, 70). As other Communist countries, the Chinese television was virtually insulated from influences of the non-Communist west.
Besides, China's television control system had its own characteristics. First, the Chinese system was less centralised and vertical than that in the Soviet Union. It acknowledged the differences between and the autonomy of provinces, as a result of the decentralisation wave in the Mao era (Qian 2002, 52). While the Central Broadcasting Bureau (CBB) managed broadcasting at the national level, the main responsibility for maintaining provincial television stations rested on provincial governments. Second, China's television system was more isolated than the Soviet model. The Soviet Union was an exporter of television systems, programs and production values to Soviet Bloc countries (Rantanen 2002, 22). China, however, cut off its contacts with other Communist countries after its break up with the Soviet Union in the early 1960s. Therefore, the period of Communist television imperialism/ internationalism (Lee 1980, 55-7; Rantanen 2007, 170) was very brief in China.
Following the party-state's economic reforms and introduction in 1979 of an open-door policy to tackle serious economic problems and a crisis of political legitimacy after the Cultural Revolution, the 1980s witnessed reforms of China's television system. The following focuses on how the party-state changed its television governance in terms of policy objectives, policy institutions and policy instruments.
Policy Objectives. According to Price (2002 32, 39, 239), media policies in most countries aim to reinforce a political status quo by justifying the sale to the rest of society of a set of ideologies in favour of the dominant power. While this ultimate goal of media policies remains intact in China, the justifications had transformed as the party-state shifted its orthodoxy from class struggle to economic construction in the late 1970s. The party-state thus encouraged the Chinese media, especially television to promote the economic reform under the rubric of the "four modernisations," that is, the modernisation of industry, agriculture, science and national defence (Deng 1994, 4). But Chinese television was hardly able to shoulder this responsibility after the disruption of the Cultural Revolution. "Television reform" was then put forward by the party-state at the 11th national radio and television conference (NRTC) in 1983, aiming to establish a modern television system in China (CRTHEC 2003, 214).
As for other aspects of Chinese society, modernisation required that the previous anti-foreign stance be relaxed. Despite resistance from the party hardliners, Deng Xiaoping adopted an open-door policy and launched diplomatic visits to developed countries. For the television sector, China signed agreements with the US and Japan on technological and cultural cooperation (Guo 1991, 127-8). This opening up was said to pave the way for international flows to China during the 1980s of modern television technologies, as well as programs and values (e.g. Guo 1991, 128; Chan 1994, 70; Hong 1998, 94-6).
Nevertheless, unlike Soviet's perestroika, the objective of "opening up" was to strengthen television's role as a mouthpiece and eventually the power of the party. Initiated by the hardliners, the party-state had launched three campaigns against the inflows of Western culture during the 1980s. Even top party leaders of the reformist fraction (e.g. Zhao Ziyang and Hu Yaobang) were committed to the party leadership of television (CRTYEC 1988, 3). However, since the reformist faction had reduced socialism largely to a matter of economic growth, in their view the propagation of economic achievement would reinforce the party's legitimacy (Kelly 1998, 60-1). Thus, during most of the 1980s, when the reformist fraction dominated the CCP politburo—the core of the CCP Central Committee, the focus of ideological work was on the promotion of economic reform.
Policy institutions refer to the structure of the media system, within the limits of which (party) state policy makers take decisions and also strive to change those limits in their own favour (Majone 1989, 95-6). The party-state carried out a number of institutional reforms to accommodate its new policy objectives in the 1980s. Besides the replacement in 1982 of the CBB by the Ministry of Radio and Television (MRT)3 as the national regulator, other changes are as follows:
First of all, the party-state decentralised the main responsibility for managing television stations further to the county level governments in order to activate local resources (Figure 4.1). While the MRT maintained its power to license all broadcasters, decide on technological standards, direct international television flows and distribute important party propaganda issues on behalf of the Central Propaganda Department (CPD), local governments were responsible for policy enforcement and
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modification via local broadcasting bureaus (CRTYEC 1989, 131). They were also concerned with the finance, employment and propaganda work of local television
^ stations (CRTHEC 2003, 351).
Second, the 1980s witnessed the delegation of some autonomy in financial management from the MR(F)T and its local bureaus to television stations at various levels (CRTYEC 1989, 129). Consequently, there emerged a few television sta- ^ tions/channels with autonomous financial departments.
Nevertheless, the party maintained ultimate authority over MR(F)T and Chinese television (Figure 1). Therefore, the tug of war between the party fractions also reflected in media policies. Moreover, many important policies with ideological implications were stipulated by the Central Party Committee and the CPD or jointly stipulated by party organisations and government regulators (e.g. CCP, 1983).
Figure 1: The Control Structure of China's Television System
* • • Municipal level
* • • Country level
Many other party organs or government institutions
Ideological control
Administrative control
Source: Combined Data of Pan and Chan (2000, 238) and CRTHEC (2003, 349-56).
Policy Instruments. In China, as elsewhere, policy instruments or the means by which policy makers choose to distribute and implement policies (Hills 2005, 140) depend not only on the technical properties of the approaches, but also in large measure on the institutional framework of the state, since policy instruments are seldom ideology-free (Majone 1989, 117). During the 1980s, leaders' speeches, conference reports and political campaigns still dominated the Chinese television regulatory system (CRTYEC 1986-1992). But those administrative orders could hardly deal
with emerging issues such as the import or co-production of television programs, and copyright disputes that need to be standardised in content and form.4
This, together with the nationwide legislative reform waged by the party-state to construct a "rule by law" society in the mid-1980s, compelled the MR(F)T to establish a legal department and classified the legal framework of Chinese television into three tiers: (1) the broadcasting law promulgated by the national people's congress; (2) administrative regulations proclaimed by the State Council; and (3) regulatory documents issued by the Ministry (CRTYEC 1988, 179). By 1990, the State Council and the MR(F)T had promulgated three administrative regulations and 66 departmental rules (CRTHEC 2003, 358).
However, the introduction of legal documents into the Chinese television regulatory system by no means reversed China' party controlled television structure. First, legal documents touched primarily on a small number of issues concerning China's international television inflows.5 Second, while the Soviet Union issued its press law in 1990, the drafting of the Broadcasting Act was deferred in 1991 after numerous revisions (CRTHEC 2003, 358). By 1991, all legal documents concerning Chinese television were stipulated by government administrations rather than by the National Congress, and were thus vulnerable to the party's interventions.
How did television internationalisation take place within such a limitedly modified television system?
The Impacts of Party-state Policies on Chinese Television
This section assesses the impacts of party-state policies on the main dimensions of the transformation of Chinese television, i.e. ownership, market structure, management, production and content. It explores how party-state policies have influenced the inflows and the reinvention of Western television cultural forms in Chinese television. I analyse first party-state policies in the context of each dimension and then the transformation, with evidence focusing on CCTV, ZJTV and WZTV.
Ownership. Modelled after the Soviet system, all television stations were party-state owned public units (shiye danwei) following its launch in 1958, operat-£ ing under state budgets and shouldering all responsibility for content production and distribution. No private or foreign investment was permitted to flow into the Chinese television sector.
This unilateral party-state ownership system continued during the 1980s. At the 10th NRTC in 1980, the top policy makers maintained that Chinese television was owned by the party-state and should serve the party and the working class (CRTHEC 2003, 190). The conference report of the 11th NRTC confirmed that only governments above county level were entitled to establish television stations in China (CCP, 1983).
In practice, party-state ownership was realised through subsidies from various levels of governments to television stations. Commercial funding by means such as (foreign) advertising, sponsorships and (international) co-productions was permitted, but these only accounted by 1990 for one third of all operating costs (Chan 1994, 81). For a national service like CCTV, the huge cost of whose distribution system, development and maintenance fees was primarily covered by the central Ljq government.6
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Moreover, most television stations in China did not directly manage their own commercial revenues in the 1980s. For instance, ZJTV had to submit commercial C^ revenues to the Zhejiang bureau and WZTV to the Wenzhou bureau. These broad- ^ casting bureaus then established annual budget plans and reallocated the revenues to television stations in a way similar to state subsidies.7 Thus, indirect capital flows such as those from advertising did not bring about returns in the form of "ownership," that is, they did not bring advertisers the power to influence how resources were used and allocated. The ownership of Chinese television remained in the hands of the party-state, without direct challenges from private or foreign capital.
Market Structure. Before the 1980s, a rudimentary two-level, national and provincial monopoly television structure was established.8 Except for CCTV, which covered the whole country, each province had just one television station. Competition was not allowed either within or between provinces. At the 11th NRTC, the party-state introduced a four-tier television system, aiming to harness material resources at the municipal and county level to improve the coverage rate of CCTV (CCP, 1983).
The four-tier television policy aroused enthusiasm for the establishment of television stations. Transmission infrastructure, such as microwave circuits and satellite systems, was imported from Western countries such as the US and Japan and installed around the country. Indeed, local governments welcomed the launch of television stations because these were effective for local propaganda (Qian 2002, 136). Between 1982 and 1990, the number of Chinese television stations increased from 47 to 509 and television signal coverage among the population increased from 57.3 pecent to 79.4 percent (CRTHEC 2003, 328; CRTYEC 1991, 521). All television stations were obliged to transmit CCTV programs so as to maintain the party-state's ideological dominance. Further, all programs made by lower level stations could only reach their prescribed administrative areas (MRT, 1984).
This four-tier monopoly structure was evident during the 1980s. Table 1 shows there was one broadcaster at each administrative level. Television broadcasting did not go beyond administrative areas. Nor was there any transnational broadcasting except in part of Guangdong and Fujian provinces, where terrestrial signals spilled over from Hong Kong and Taiwan (Chan 1994, 72).One could argue that the creation of city and county level television stations also provided a mass platform for the dissemination of counter messages, including those of international programs. Indeed, most local stations served as relay stations for CCTV and provincial television during the 1980s thanks to the lack in both channel spectrums and resources to obtain alternative programs.9
Table 1: Channels Received in Wenzhou City and Ruian County (Wenzhou Municipality) in 1986
	Wenzhou City	Ruian county
National Broadcaster	CCTV	CCTV
Provincial Broadcaster	ZJTV	ZJTV
Municipal Broadcaster	WZTV: occasionally inserted city news	WZTV news
County Broadcaster	N/A	Ruian County Television: Occasionally inserted county news
Source: Archive of WZTV, Accessed in Wenzhou, March 2006.
As Table 1 indicates, WZTV and Ruian county television occasionally inserted local news into channels designated for CCTV or ZJTV. My archive research of Wenzhou Radio and Television Newspaper (1988-1991) found that in most cases, these replaced ZJTV because of the policy priority for CCTV. Therefore, CCTV was the biggest beneficiary of the four-level television policy.
Management. Before the economic reform, China's television services were totally dependent on state subsidies. Television stations had no autonomy in terms of financial management. From the late 1970s, advertising along with program sponsorship and co-productions was allowed on Chinese television in order to supplement the deficiency of state subsidy (CPD 1979; CRTHEC 2003, 513). These, together with the approval of the party-state for the delegation of some autonomy to television stations (CRTYEC 1989, 129) contributed to the emergence of experimental reforms in the financial system of Chinese television stations.
One significant reform initiated by CCTV was its launch of the economic channel (CCTV 2) in 1987 (CRTHEC 2003, 235). The channel was different from Western commercial channels because it was owned by the party-state and operated according to state budgets. But CCTV 2 had adopted a more flexible financial system than CCTV 1. Guo (1991, 276-7) found that, after submitting its quota of advertising revenue to the state, CCTV 2 was able to retain a small proportion of the revenue. Indeed, during its first years of operation, CCTV 2 allocated part of its advertising revenues to local television stations as a strategy, for encouraging these stations to transmit its programs. A CCTV research director confirmed that this pattern of operation followed the practice of major Western commercial networks such as the Columbia Broadcasting system (CBS) and Independent Television Networks, as a consequence of early state level contacts with these television stations.10
Soon after the launch of CCTV 2, many television stations in economically developed areas such as Shanghai, Guangdong, Zhejiang and Tianjin followed suit. For instance, ZJTV established a second channel in 1988, which concentrated on business news and entertainment. This channel went further than CCTV 2 in financial reform because it linked commercial revenues to staff salaries. After submitting 55 percent of its commercial revenues to the Zhejiang Broadcasting Bureau, it allocated the remaining revenues to staff welfare and incentives.11
Although Western experience did not directly influence the financial reform of ZJTV2, several domestic pioneers inspired this reform. One prominent example, as a senior manager of ZJTV pointed out was the highly successful Pearl River Economic Q Radio in Guangzhou, which modelled on the practices of Hong Kong commercial radio.12 As noted elsewhere, Hong Kong media made its impact felt in the daily operation of Chinese television, especially in Guangdong (Chan 1994). Since Hong Kong radio and television are highly westernised, the reform could be regarded as an indirect influence of Western patterns. However, while advocates of the media imperialism theory (Boyd-Barrett 1977, 119; Kivikuru 1988, 13) argue that there is no real choice for developing countries but to absorb Western cultural forms, the
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remodelling in China involved an active reinvention of international models.
Production. Influenced by the Soviet Union, early television production in China overemphasised propaganda, often telling empty stories to mobilise class struggle. After the inception of economic reform, Chinese media circles, with the (jq support of the party-state, initiated discussion of "respecting news values" to regain
authoritative status for the news media (CRTHEC 2003, 215). At the 11th NRTC in 1983, the then MRT Minister, Wu Lengxi, proposed the truth principle - recording society in an objective way and the party principle - serving the Communist party as the two guidelines for television programming in China (CCP, 1983).
Consequently, China dispatched delegations of producers to visit and receive training at Western and international organisations. China also invited foreign professionals to give lectures on production techniques (CRTYEC 1988, 625). For instance, Chan (1994, 79) found that since the reform a great number of media personnel had visited Hong Kong, which offered them a space on how media worked in a freer system. Guo (1991, 158) observed that these, combined with early program imports and international co-productions had an "eye-opening effect" on domestic producers who had long been isolated from the outside world.
In terms of news reporting, Chinese journalists modelled themselves after the Western news providers, such as Visnews and United Press International Television News (UPITN) to reflect diverse aspects of society in a timely fashion. CCTV even introduced field journalists - a feature previously condemned as highly bourgeois in its weekly news magazine Observation and Thoughts to strengthen the "objective" flavour of the programs. In parallel to changes in practice there were changes to values or assumptions about what constitutes a good piece of news. A survey conducted in the mid-1980s found that few Chinese journalists accepted a sheer propaganda role for the news media; instead, they preferred a certain degree of autonomy and "objective reporting" (Polumbaum 1991, 63).
New production values also diffused into documentaries. One telling example was Silk Road, a co-production by CCTV and the Japanese company, Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK) from 1980 to 1983. During the making of this documentary, different production values caused tensions. It was said the Chinese producers, influenced by the Soviet "special topic program" (zhuanti pian) had a tendency to make the program as an illustrated lecture, focusing on beautiful things such as women and flowers on the road, while the Japanese producers favoured natural settings, such as peasants on the barren land.13 They ended up with two versions and the NHK version was more successful in terms of audience ratings (Guo 1991, 258). A participant in this co-production said:
This experience had made us jump out of our old lecture style and learn to judge things from a foreigner's perspective. We gradually became aware that the flavour of propaganda was too strong in our previous documentary making.14
The following years witnessed the updating of production values in Chinese documentaries. From The Yangtze River to The Great Canal and later River Elegy, Chinese documentaries started to reflect things in a more objective and balanced way. The popular Great Canal in 1986 not only documented the canal's achievements in history, but also its current backward situation (CCTVTEC 2003, 112).
As regards to television dramas, a discussion sponsored by People's Daily in 1983 suggested that the quality ones should depict realistic subjects such as rural or industry reforms (Yu 1991, 81). Lin (2004, 1) points out that the success of ZJTV in television drama production during the 1980s largely relied on its reflection of a transformed society and of people during the economic reform, such as the Voiceover of a Female Journalist and News Revelation.
Nevertheless, the internationally prevalent production values such as "objective reporting" did not replace the Communist propaganda values in program production during the 1980s. While Golding (1977, 306) argued in accordance with media imperialism theory that Western production values are imposed on developing countries, a former producer at CCTV pointed out:
In most cases, the government required us to integrate objective reporting techniques into the promotion of its socialist modernisation. We were not given tangible autonomy and freedom for objective reporting ... the party principle was always the touchstone.15
As discussed, the party-state did not issue a Broadcasting Act for fear of losing its ideological control once producers' professional autonomy was legalised. In the late 1980s, when the party's propaganda machine was paralysed by the conflicts between party hardliners and reformists, many Chinese television producers took to the street, demanding media freedom. They also covered the student demonstrations in 1989 with a great deal of sympathy.
Content. Before the economic reform, Chinese television was full of political propaganda with few imported programs. After the reform, the party-state encouraged television producers to diversify program genres under the policy of program reform. This policy also permitted television stations to exchange programs with foreign media (e. g. MRT, 1985; MRFT, 1990). As a result, there was an increase in imported programs and a diversification in domestic programming.
The Increase of Imported Programs on Chinese Television. Despite several short "down" periods caused by the party-state's campaigns against Western culture, the 1980s witnessed an overall increase in imported programs on Chinese television screens. For instance, there was only 2 percent foreign programs on CCTV in 1980, but by 1991 that figure had risen to 12 percent (Hong 1998, 71). Nationwide, it was estimated that by the same year around 20 percent of television programs originated from abroad (Lynch 1999, 111). y	In terms of television dramas (including plays, series and serials), the share of
imported dramas with Chinese subtitles or dubbings of the total dramas "made in China" had risen from 16 percent in 1985 to 34 percent in 1990. The great majority of imports were originated in a small number of developed Western countries that China had normalised diplomatic relations, they were, the U.S, Japan, the UK, France, West Germany etc. (CRTYEC, 1986-1991). Hong (1998, 69) found that China also imported dramas from Third World countries to show its support of anti-colonialism, such as the Brazilian soap opera Slave Girls. However, since audience preference was not a major consideration for program imports during the 1980s, the so-called regionalisation of program trade (e.g. Straubhaar 2007, 171) was not evident in China although imports from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore did exist.16
News imports increased dramatically too. It was reported that China stopped its news imports after its split with the Soviet Union during the pre-reform era (CRTYEC 1986, 1043). But from 1979, not only did CCTV start to receive the in-
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ternational news via satellite communication, but also its range of providers had widened to include Visnews, UPITN, Worldwide Television News (WTN), Brit-^ ish Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Asian Broadcasting Union (ABU) and news
agencies in the Soviet Union (CRTYEC, 1986-1991). The dramatic increase in the sources to provide international news had enabled CCTV to telecast international fO news daily since 1980.	^
Imports also included documentaries, cartoons, sports and educational programs. A television anchorperson turned-into scholar used the word "exotic" to describe Chinese television screen in the 1980s.17 This exotic characteristic was reinforced by my archive research, suggesting that quite a few of flagship programs during the era consisted of foreign program materials such as World Sports and One World (documentary introducing world cultures and scenery) on CCTV and Around the Globe, Sports Sights on ZJTV.18
The Diversification of Programs with Focus on the Reform. With the inflows of foreign programs, Chinese television producers started to imitate the genres and themes of imported programs. There emerged prototypes of "critical news" dealing with official corruption, "societal news" concerned about ordinary people's daily life, "bad news" such as natural or artificial disasters, and "development news" recording the economic progress of the country. As for entertainment programs, there was a rise in television dramas, variety shows and various festival galas. Meanwhile, different types of documentaries emerged, from those introducing history, scenery and cultural heritage, to those with strong political connotations.
One major feature of the diversified television programs was its focus on the economic reform. For example, the news magazine Observation and Thought on CCTV commented on both malpractices of official corruption and new phenomena of a private market development (CRTHEC 2003, 234). In 1988, ZJTV received the "top programme prize" for its in-depth news report on the Zhejiang salt industry (ZJRTYEC 2004, 699-700). The report pointed out that the slow development of the industry was caused mainly by the high price of the raw salt.
Discourse about the economic reform also influenced television dramas, demonstrated by the popularity of political dramas such as News Revelation and New Star. The latter told a story about the struggle between local bureaucrats and a young reformist in county-level government. It was reported that in Beijing around 73.8 percent of the audience watched New Star when CCTV 1 broadcast it in 1986 (Guo 1991, 235).
Probably no media text more forcefully expressed the aspirations for reform than documentaries. Silk Road, Great Canal and Great Wall all promoted a patriotic attitude towards the country's modernisation. In 1985, CCTV and ZJTV co-produced China's first political documentary, Facing Challenges (CCTVTEC 2003, 115). This documentary drew upon historical sources and images, arguing that China needed to learn from history so as to achieve success in the current economic reform.
The above analysis reveals party-state policies have causal efficacy for the shape and influence of international television inflows in China (e.g. Chan 1994, 80; Price 2002, 29). In a sense, television technologies, management practices, production values and content were imported from the Western countries because policy makers considered them a strategic priority for the development of Chinese television. Largely as a result of the country's party controlled regulatory system, international television flows did not transform party-state television ownership and the monopoly market structure. Even in those aspects with greatest penetration by international television flows, such as production values and content, the transformation manifested
strong Chinese characteristics, rather than homogenisation with Western television.
This dominant role of the Chinese party-state presented a strong counter argument to the media imperialism theory (e.g. Kivikuru 1988, 13; Boyd-Barrett 1998, 157) on the defencelessness of developing countries against developed Western states in the international television flows. However, the internationalised Chinese television had not only promoted the Chinese party-state's modernisation project, but also challenged its ideological control, manifested by the rise of programs like River Elegy, which, as Zhao and Guo (2005, 525) argued, critiqued China's river-based agricultural civilisation and expressed an aspiration for the modernisation and global integration of Chinese society. Hong (2002) thus interprets the post-reform Chinese television system as a hybridised developmental-type television model, characterised by a mixture of elements of the authoritarian, the communist and, to a lesser degree, the libertarian media model. As will be analysed, a variety of power factors emergent during the reform contributed to such a transformation.
The Interplays of Party-state Policies with Other Power Factors
During Mao's socialist heyday, the party-state influence pervaded every domain of social life. Deng's regime transformed Mao's totalitarianism into a more flexible authoritarianism, permitting the emergence of other power factors on society. For Chinese television, I argue that the reform policies resulted in the rise of technologies, market forces, Western states and international organisations, and liberal producers as four power factors in its transformation. This section explores how these interacted with party-state policies in the initial stage of Chinese television globalisation.
Technologies. Since the reform, the Chinese party-state had encouraged inflows of television transmission technologies from the West. By the end of the 1980s, China had established its national television transmission network, expanding y television coverage to 79.4 percent of total population (CRTYEC 1992, 671). China had also become one major producer of television sets in the world by 1989 thanks to imported television sets manufacturing assembly lines from Japan and the US (Huang 1994, 217). How had these technologies impinged on Chinese television?
Above all, the rapid development of infrastructures and the high penetration of television sets had enabled the establishment of sub-provincial level television stations in the 1980s. Second, the upgraded transmission networks proved effective for transmitting domestic programs. For example, by the end of the 1980s, television viewers in Wenzhou city started to watch ZJTV via microwave circuits and almost simultaneously CCTV via satellite earth stations.19 Even the most remote parts of China, such as Tibet and Xingjiang, could receive CCTV signals via Chinasat 2. In addition, technologies had facilitated international program flows. CCTV used
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satellite communication to pick up news materials from a number of foreign news providers via Intelsat's Indian Ocean Satellite and Pacific Ocean Satellite (CRTYEC 1991, 547).
However, as Straubhaar (2001, 138) found with regard to their role in television globalisation in Brazil, technologies alone could hardly have enabled change had ^ they not been accompanied by other developments in China. First, the party-state
introduced advanced Western television technologies to China. Second, China impressed the world in the 1980s with the average annual increase in gross domestic LH product of 9.8 percent and annual per capita wage growth of 12.38 percent from ^ 1981-1989 (NBSC 1990, 42). Had there been no rapid economic growth, there would have been no huge investments from the state and non-state sectors (e.g. advertising revenues) on television infrastructures. Nor would the rapid penetrations of television sets into ordinary Chinese households have been possible.
The subsidiary role of technologies was also shown by the way in which, during the 1980s, satellite communication did not lead to the direct reception by Chinese individuals of outside channels. An equipment manager pointed out that in the 1980s few individuals in China could afford satellite dishes. Moreover, no transnational television channels were specifically targeting the Chinese television market with mandarin broadcasting.20 This also explains why few subnational television stations retransmitted transnational satellite signals to audiences in the 1980s, in sharp contrast to that in the 1990s. In sum, technologies development was in line with the party-state's policies for the modernisation of Chinese television. It was not, in the 1980s, a direct force for challenging the party-state's ideological dominance.
Market Forces. In the decade following party-state approval of the commercial funding of Chinese television in 1979, commercial revenues had become an indispensable source of finance for the operation of Chinese television stations. Accordingly, market forces - mainly refer to the economic interests of domestic television stations and transnational media corporations in this paper, started to play a role in the internationalisation of Chinese television.
First of all, economic interests resulted in financial reforms of Chinese television. As discussed, the second channels of CCTV and a few provincial television stations borrowed successful managerial experiences from Western commercial media in order to expand program coverage or to motivate workers. However, these reforms did not challenge the party-state ownership because state subsidies remain the major finance for all Chinese television stations. Meanwhile, since Chinese television stations had to remit (part of) their commercial revenues to broadcasting bureaus, they lacked an economic impetus to strive for private status.
Commercial activities also contributed to the diversification of television programs in China. Advertising revenues, sponsorship had become an important source for program making although domestic programs in the 1980s were hardly determined by commercial interests thanks to their focus on the economic reform. In terms of program imports, affordability had been the primary consideration except the criterion of acceptability, that is, no explicit sex, violence and anti-government messages involved in the programs (Hong and Deng 2009, 35). Therefore, US programs dominated imports at the early stage of reform because of their low prices.
The role of the market forces was also demonstrated by the fact that a few transnational corporations had started to place economic stakes in China's television market in the 1980s. Lull (1991, 151-2) found that companies such as CBS, Twentieth Century Fox and Paramount made profits from selling advertising time on CCTV to big-name companies such as IBM, Boeing, Procter & Gamble etc. In 1987 alone,
American advertisers had put about $16 million-worth of advertising on Chinese television. However, those companies should not be regarded as the major vehicle for Chinese television globalisation during the 1980s. The reason can be understood from the following statement of a Beijing-based scholar:
Before the 14th party congress in 1992, China was a planned economy despite the introduction of market mechanism as supplement (...) Many foreign companies, including large transnational firms, were hesitant to do business with China because they were not familiar with the system and worried about the volatile economic and political environment.21
Indeed, political forces played an upper hand, for most companies cut off contacts with Chinese television in line with their governments' sanction policies after the Chinese party-state's crackdown on student demonstrations in summer 1989.
Political Forces. Thompson (1995, 15) argued that the primarily institutions of political power in modern history is nation-states. In this paper, besides the Chinese party-state, other political factors include Western states and international organisations, whose major members are nation-states. How did they influence Chinese television in the 1980s?
Since the early 1970s, the strained relations between China and the Soviet Union had made the former move toward the US-led Western Bloc. Soon after the famous "Pingpong diplomacy" and Nixon's visit to China, the People's Republic of China (PRC) replaced Taiwan at the United Nations and the PRC begun to normalise its relationship with key Western countries. During Mao's era in the 1970s, this shift of diplomacy was mainly motivated by international geo-politics, attempting to constrain the expansion of the Soviet Union (Gong 2005, 6).
Deng Xiaoping's regime was more interested in economic development and his foreign diplomacy aimed to create a favourable international environment for the country (CCP Archives Research Office 1986, 218). As a result, by the end of 1985 China had signed contracts/memoranda of television cooperation with 42 countries y (CRTYEC 1986, 1046). By 1987, CCTV alone had conducted television exchange activities with media organisations in 84 countries (CRTYEC 1988, 637). Archive research found the majority counterparts of Chinese television were Western national or public organisations such as NHK in Japan, the Missouri Journalism School in the United States, the British Council in the UK and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) in West Germany (CRTYEC, 1986-1991). Meanwhile, a dozen of international organisations accepted China as a member. Among these the most important were the UNESCO, the World Telecommunication Union (WTU) and the ABU, which provided China with the benefits of free technological consultations, professional training and program exchange with other member states (CRTYEC 1986, 1051-2; CRTHEC 2003, 305-6). In a sense, Western states and international organisations had facilitated the modernisation of Chinese television.
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However, as Price (2002, 52) argued, "external support is not a lottery, but a strategy to establish a particular cartel or to ensure a specific voice." This was true during the 1980s when Western states had made great efforts to publicise ideals of freedom
and democracy, known as "peaceful evolution" or "psychological warfare" (Thussu 2006, 18-26). For instance, it was reported that the sympathetic coverage of the 1989 (^q student demonstration by major Western television was crucial for the spread of
the movement in China (Zhao 2004, 207). However, while foreign media in general and television in particular were acknowledged as contributing to the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and the CEE countries (Rantanen 2002, 26; Hu and Wu 2005, 138), they did not have similar effects on China during the 1980s.
First, while in the Soviet Union ordinary people had access to Western film and music through video and audiocassettes during the 1980s (Rantanen 2002, 26), in China these were confined to the urban rich because ordinary citizens could not afford the equipment (Lull 1991, 28-9). Moreover, the party-state banned private trade in cassettes under the banner of anti-pornography campaigns (e.g. MRFT 1986, 1987). Moreover, from the mid-1980s, Soviet perestroika provided a more relaxed control on foreign programs. For instance, in 1987 Soviet television showed a live ABC broadcast of the Satellite Space Bridge, entitled "capital to capital" that transmitted discussion between American and Soviet citizens (Rantanen 2002, 26). Paasilinna argued that this program contributed to a positive attitude toward the US citizens among the Soviet citizens (Quoted in Rantanen 2002, 26). In contrast, the Chinese party-state resorted to a strict preview and censorship system. As stated in a normative document published by the MRFT, even for entertaining dramas, cultural and artistic considerations should be subordinate to issues of China's international relations (CRTYEC 1991, 75). Thus, the 1980s witnessed ups and downs in program imports in accordance with the political climate.
The above analysis demonstrates the power of Western states and international organisations, but challenges the argument of media imperialism on the dominance of external dynamics in media internationalisation (Schiller 1976, 9). During the 1980s, the Soviet Union enfranchised political power to citizens and lowered the wall between the country and the West. The Chinese party-state introduced Western technical accomplishments within the framework of party control. Therefore, Western media had less formidable effects on the wider public and the communist regime in China, although they had considerable effects on Chinese intellectuals and producers.
Cultural Forces. Cultural or symbolic power "stems from the activity of producing, transmitting and receiving meaningful symbolic forms" (Thompson 1995, 16). For television, Straubhaar (2001, 2007) identifies producers and audiences as two major forces of cultural power. As discussed, in the 1980s, television audience preferences in China had not been counted as an important consideration for programming. Television producers, many of whom influenced by liberal ideals thus played an important role. How?
During the 1980s, Chairman Mao's class struggle had been replaced by a devel-opmentalist orthodoxy based on Deng Xiaoping's theory of "socialism with Chinese characteristics." While Mao launched mass campaigns one after another in pursuit of his ideological vision, Deng preferred to maintain his regime by means of economic growth and a certain degree of ideological diversity under the premise of the party's monopoly of power (Kelly 1998, 57). This diversity was demonstrated by Deng's tolerance of different fractions within the party system, the hardliners most concerned about the party's power and reformists most concerned about the modernisation reforms. Before 1989, Deng tilted the balance toward the reformists, giving them his support of progressive reforms (Lam 1998, 22-3).
After the reformist fraction took an upper hand in the Politburo during the 1980s, there was arising of reform-minded intellectuals (e.g. Wang Ruoshui, Yan Jiaqi, Hu Jiwei) who overwhelmed the orthodox Marxist intellectuals in public discourse (Fewsmith 1994, 135-44). My interviews discovered that television producers, especially those at CCTV and provincial stations, formed a strong force in the liberal camp.
Some producers I interviewed attributed this influence of Western media practices to the exchange program and on-the-job training offered by international and Western organisations.22 Others attributed this influence through university education, for most Chinese journalism departments introduced Western journalism theory and practice during the 1980s. The universities also invited foreign experts from prominent institutions such as Columbia Journalism School, Missouri Journalism School in the US and BBC in the UK to give lectures.23 Chang (1989, 244-6) found students' graduation papers in the 1980s indicating a broad range of interests, especially journalism values in Western countries.
These, together with exposure to the products and practices of Western media organisations through imported programs or co-productions, helped to disseminate program genres, production techniques and principles of "objectivity" to Chinese producers. With the support of the reformist fraction in the Party, television producers incorporated some elements of Western production ideologies into their "objective" depiction of the reform process in line with the grand modernisation project.
However, Chinese television in the 1980s had also become a forum for debate on problems in the modernisation process, the direction of Chinese society and aspirations for Western modernity. Were television producers powerful enough to challenge the country's party-controlled television system?
Above all, most of the so-called liberal intellectuals were merely enthusiastic about a new knowledge system that could be used to critique the conservative orthodoxy that they thought would otherwise hinder reform and economic devel-^ opment.24 According to Pan and Lu (2003, 222), for media and television producers the Western ideals of journalistic autonomy and editorial independence were easily accepted because they bore partial similarities to the grander intellectual mission of enlightening the public through truth inherited from the Confucian tradition. However, their original aim, according to a participant of River Elegy, was to express aspirations to rapid reform that could bring wealth and power to China rather than subvert the Communist leadership.25 The study by Lull (1991, 143) reinforces my finding that River Elegy did not decisively question China's political system. This contrasted markedly with Soviet television in the 1980s which provoked discussions in favour of Western democracy.
Moreover, unlike the Soviet leaders in the 1980s, the reformist leaders (e.g. Party Secretaries Hu Yaobang, Zhao Ziyang) who nurtured the liberal intellectuals in China wished to carry out reforms within the framework of the party leadership (e.g. CRTYEC 1986, 5-17; 1988, 1-4). Thus, despite divisions between the conservatives and reformists about the extent to which China should reform and open up,
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for most of the 1980s a compromise standpoint had been reached that media such as television must be controlled in order to protect the party's monopoly power. 6 Thus, television programs on the economic reform, though not necessarily in line
with socialist propaganda, were not allowed to challenge the party-state.26 Discussions about Western democracy and freedom only appeared in restricted academic C^ spheres such as elite newspapers, academic journals and books.	^
However, in the late 1980s the party control of television was relaxed. Party conferences and student demonstrations were fully covered on Chinese television. The controversial documentary River Elegy was broadcast twice on CCTV. Indeed, it was reported that Party Secretary Zhao Ziyang supported the relaxation of news censorship in May 1989. He even presented the videotapes of River Elegy as a gift to Premier Lee Kuangyao in Singapore (CRTYEC 1990, 119-21).
On the surface, he was conducting media reforms similar to those in the Soviet Union. But an official of SARFT, the current incarnation of MRFT argued that Zhao's view of media reform in 1989 was as a means to win public support for his own political survival.27 His remarks were reinforced by the study of Shirk (1993, 37, 74), who contended that in the late 1980s Zhao Ziyang's status in the party was challenged because of Zhao's political mentor Deng's advanced age and of economic inflation. The party hardliners seized the opportunity to critique Zhao's fast pace of reform for causing public confusion and frustration. Nevertheless, Zhao's loosening of media censorship did not turn things around, but caused a loss of effective ideological control. In the latter part of the student demonstrations in 1989, the demand for Western freedom and democracy replaced slogans against official corruption, which worried not only conservatives, but Deng himself (CRTYEC 1990, 119). The political drama ended in June 1989 when martial law was imposed on the student demonstrations at the Tiananmen Square and Zhao was put under house arrest. Soon afterwards, the party leadership re-emphasised the role of media in maintaining ideological control. Consequently, the Chinese television was filled with news and documentaries that glorified the party and its crackdown on student demonstrations, such as the famous documentaries Truth of the Demonstrations, Summer of Beijing and One hundred Mistakes of River Elegy (CRTHEC 2003, 317-9). In fact, before the redefining of the mass media as a tertiary industry in 1992, the development of Chinese television stagnated with sluggish contacts with the outside world and positive propaganda of the party-state.
Liberal television producers seemed to play an important role in adopting Western production ideologies and disseminating alternative ideas in the late 1980s. But as Curran (2000, 134) argued with regard to the rise of media diversity in Western societies, the initial impetus comes not from the "people" but from within the power structure. In China's case, the findings suggest that Chinese producers' rare autonomy in the late 1980s owe much to the then international and domestic political environment, in particular the divisions between party hardliners and reformists.
Conclusion
After thirty years of isolation, the Chinese party-state relaxed its anti-foreign policies in the late 1970s. As a result, Western television cultural forms flowed to China. First, there emerged second channels within CCTV and a few provincial television stations, whose financial management was influenced by Western commercial television. Second, the reform introduced inflows not only of Western production technologies, but also of production values such as "objective report-
ing." Third, there was an increase in imported programs and a diversification of domestic programs modelled on Western program genres and themes.
The influence of foreign television on Chinese television during the internation-alisation process reinforces the argument of media imperialism on the asymmetrical television flows between the Western centers and the peripheries of the East (Boyd-Barrett 1977, 1998). However, it did not suggest the concept of Westernisation proposed by media imperialism (e.g. Hamelink 1983; Kivikuru 1988), for the foreign cultural forms have been "glocalised" by important internal power factors, in particular the power of the party-state. For instance, Western management practices were applied to the party-state owned television stations that still received state subsidies. Western production techniques and genres were also adopted in domestic programming, especially those engaged with the economic reform. The national service CCTV played a key role in the internationalisation process while most local television stations remained relay stations.
Moreover, the party-state resorted to strict program censorship, prevented direct investment from private and foreign capital and ban competition both within and between administrative levels in Chinese television to hold its ideological control.
Nevertheless, the party-state was no longer the monopoly power as it was before the 1980s. It decentralised its power in television regulation and operation to local broadcasting bureaus and television stations. It also introduced legal provisions to legitimise and regulate international television flows. Unlike the Soviet Union, the reforms of the party-state's television governance aimed to reinforce the Communist party's legitimacy, but they had made room for a variety of power factors too. For instance, imported technologies contributed to the expansion of television networks. Commercial funding had inspired television stations to improve their revenues. It also became an important way of finance in domestic programming and programs imports.
In contrast to popular assumptions, market factors were not the primary forces for the television globalisation process at this initial stage. Television ownership remains in the hand of the party-state. Imported programs were selected not to contain anti-government messages. Domestic programs were politically oriented, often depicting the economic reform.
Meanwhile, a number of Western television organisations and international organisations, rather than transnational corporations, were the main vehicles for Chinese television's contact with the outside world. They speeded up Chinese television modernisation through various technological and cultural exchange activities. They also played an important role in diffusing Western values such as ^ freedom and democracy to television producers who in the late 1980s demanded more media autonomy and produced programs critical of the economic reform. However, this powerful influence of Western and international organisations does not support the argument of media imperialism that external forces have the say in the process of media globalisation in developing countries (Schiller 1976, 9). The unique democratising performance of Chinese producers in the late 1980s was conditional on a lack of unified internal ideology within the party leaders. As Chan (2001, 113) noted, the roles of the media in a society varies with its power structure. Once the party hardliners defeated the reformists, Chinese television swung back to glorifying the Communist party-state.
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To conclude, television internationalisation during the 1980s had largely modernised Chinese television and was determined by the interplays between the party-state, the Western states and international organisations. But this process had also challenged the party-state's tight ideological control, for the internationalised Chinese television had evolved from the mere party propaganda machine to a multi-faceted social institution, the forum for debating the country's reforms included. Kelly (1998, 58) and Young (1998, 118) argue that reducing socialism to economic goals rendered the mainstream ideology of the party-state irrelevant to political leadership. After the suppression of the1989 movement, the party-state started to rebuild its ideological dominance with the concept of "spiritual civilisa-tion,"28 which emphasised the importance of traditional Confucian values and socialist ethics in China's economic reform. This, combined with the party-state's media commercialisation policy as part of its accelerated economic reform in 1992, resulted in the rise of market forces as the major competing forces of party-state power, and different patterns of television globalisation in China after 1992.
Acknowledgement:
The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for the helpful suggestions on the paper.
Notes:
1.	In China's political system, the party leads the work of the government/state via its authority to promote government officials, generating general policy lines and conducting ideological education and evaluation. This paper thus uses the term party-state to represent the Chinese version of nation-state.
2.	CCTV is the only national television service in China. One could be critical of my choices of ZJTV from over 30 provincial television stations and WZTV from around 300 municipal television stations, since they are located in one of the richest provinces and cities in China. However, largely because of their strong economic capabilities, they are also at the forefront of the transformation of Chinese television under globalisation. Many state television policies have started with these television stations as pilots. In a sense, ZJTV and WZTV are highly representative of the trend of development of Chinese television stations at their respective administrative levels. Wenzhou is a municipality locates within Zhejiang Province.
3.	The Ministry of Radio, Film and Television (MRFT) replaced MRT in 1986.
4.	Interview with a Scholar. 2005. Chinese University of Communication, Beijing, April, 1.
5.	Ibid.
6.	Interview with a Senior Manager. 2005. CCTV, Beijing, May, 31.
7.	Archive of Zhejiang Broadcasting Bureau, accessed in Hangzhou, August 2005; Archive of WZTV, accessed in Wenzhou, March 2006.
8.	Monopoly market refers to the situation that a single media firm has absolute control over a relevant market (Kranenburg and Hogenbirk 2006, 333). However, in the 1980s in China, the situation was not determined by the market economy, but dominantly by politics. It was called as "the administrative monopoly television structure" within the Chinese media circle (Qian 2002, 155).
9.	Interview with the Research Director. 2007. WZTV, Wenzhou, May, 18.
10.	Interview with a Senior Researcher. 2005. CCTV, Beijing, May, 31.
11.	Archive of Zhejiang Broadcasting Bureau, accessed in Hangzhou, August 2005.
12.	Interview with a Senior Manager. 2005. ZJTV, Hangzhou, September, 12.
13.	Interview with a Scholar. 2005. Qinghua University, Beijing, April, 8.
14.	China Sociology and Anthropology. 2006. New Weekly's Interview with Chen Duo. <http://www. sachina.edu.cn/Htmldata/news/2006/09/2375.html>
15.	Interview with a Former Producer. 2005. CCTV, Beijing, May, 18.
16.	Interviews with a Scholar. 2005. Qinghua University, Beijing, March, 8.
17.	Interviews with a Scholar. 2005. Qinghua University, Beijing, March, 17.
18.	Archive of CCTV, accessed in Beijing, May 2005; Archive of ZJTV, accessed in Hangzhou, August 2005.
19.	Archive of WZTV, accessed in Wenzhou, March 2006.
20.	Interview with a Senior Manager on Equipments. 2007. WZTV, Wenzhou, May, 18.
21.	Interview with a Scholar. 2005. Renmin University, US, October, 30.
22.	Interviews with Producers. 2005. CCTV, Beijing, March, 19; May, 18; June, 15. Interviews with Producers. 2005. ZJTV, Hangzhou, August, 24.
Interviews with Producers. 2007. ZJTV, Hangzhou, April, 28.
23.	Interviews with Producers. 2005. CCTV, Beijing, April, 14; May, 18; June, 10. Interviews with Producers. 2005. ZJTV, Hangzhou, August, 24.
Interviews with Producers. 2007. WZTV, Wenzhou, May, 10.
24.	Interview with a Scholar. 2005. Qinghua University, Beijing, March, 14.
25.	Interview with a Producer. 2005. CCTV, Beijing, May, 18.
26.	Interview with a Scholar. 2005. Qinghua University, Beijing, March, 17.
27.	Interview with an Official. 2005. SARFT, Beijing, May, 27.
28.	"Spiritual civilisation" was first put forward in 1979 to improve the nation's educational, cultural and moral standards, but had evolved in the 1990s to promote the national character of the Chinese market economy.
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76 javnost-the public
MEDIA STUDIES AND THE DOUBLE DIALECTIC OF
INFORMATION robert e. babe
Abstract
As noted elsewhere (Babe 2009, 161-73), information is inherently dialectical. Reflection upon the seminal work of physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker, however, reveals that information is doubly dialectical. The first part of this article explains and justifies this claim. The second part of the article catalogues various reductionist (non-dialectical) stances toward information, and draws out some of their implications. Confusions, and indeed grievous errors, result from such incompleteness. Finally, the communication theories of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan are reviewed briefly as exemplars in ways of forwarding information's
double dialectic.
Robert E. Babe is Professor at Faculty of Media and Information Studies, University of Western Ontario; e-mail: rbabe@uwo.ca.
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Weizsacker's Double Dialectic of Information
In 1980, nine years after first being published in German, Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker's Die Einheit der Natur appeared in English as The Unity of Nature. There the physicist provided keys for better comprehending and integrating such ancient and contemporary dilemmas and polarities as materialism/idealism, objectivity/ subjectivity, determinism/freedom, individualism/collectivism, and medium/message. Weizsacker conceptualised information dialectically. Indeed, I will argue, he proposed (in effect) a double dialectic of information.
Citing Aristotle, Weizsacker noted that "in the realm of the concrete ... no form [or shape, or pattern] exists without matter; nor can there be matter without form" (Weizsacker 1980, 275). He explained that forms (for instance, cupboards) "in the realm of the concrete" must be made of something - wood, plastic, metal. Likewise, material (such as wood), again "in the realm of the concrete," must have shape or form - whether of a cupboard, a tree, or a pile of sticks. While one may speculate, of course, on angels, telepathy and parapsychology, science and social science investigate "the concrete," meaning that for scientific study there is always both matter (or energy) and form.
For Weizsacker, then, information is the form of matter, or stated otherwise it is matter-in-form. He wrote:
"Information" [is] "form," or "pattern," or "structure"...This "form" can refer to the form of all kinds of objects or events perceptible to the senses and capable of being shaped by man: The form of printer's ink or ink on paper, of chalk on the blackboard, of sound waves in air, of current flow in a wire, etc. (Weizsacker 1980: 39, emphasis added).
Weizsacker's phrase, perceptible to the senses, announces a further property of "information," namely its relation to sensate creatures, particularly to human beings. He explained:
Information is something that can be perceived by man, can be understood, y	can be thought. But it is not the mental act of thinking; rather, it is what this
thinking thinks (Weizsacker 1980: 39; emphasis added). £	To qualify as information, then, matter/form must be perceptible and indeed
must be perceived. (One might say, if not perceived but capable of being perceived - for example, books gathering dust on library shelves - the matter-in-form constitutes potential information). According to Weizsacker, therefore, whereas information indeed exists objectively (it is matter-in-form, it is what the thinking thinks), that is not the whole story: Information also is subjective; it must be perceived. ^	To be information, however, it is insufficient even that the matter-in-form be
perceived; it must also be understood: "Information is only what can be understood" (Weizsacker 1980, 282). Another way of saying this is that there must be a language or code which the perceiver is capable of applying to the matter-in-form. Language/code is the means whereby the perceived matter/form may acquire meaning. This requirement, too, means that information exists subjectively in accordance with the decoding capabilities of the perceiving subject.
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Hence, there are two dualities concerning information. First, information is mat-ter-in-form (or form-in-matter). Second, although information exists objectively as p^ matter-in-form, information is also a subjective entity as it must be perceived and
understood. For someone who is blind or has poor vision, there will be less visual information than for a person with excellent eyesight or for someone using visual C^ aids (eyeglasses, telescopes, microscopes, television). Again, the requirement that ^ information must be understood points to its subjectivity: to apply a code requires prior experience/learning on the part of a perceiver.
There is yet a further highly important aspect to information, and it is contained in Weizsacker's phrase, "capable of being shaped by man." This phrase connotes that people craft information; they construct forms out of matter (or impose patterns on energy, as with a telegraph message). Message producers and senders expend energy; work is done. (Admittedly, shapes not formed by human hands, too, can be "read" or decoded, but the principle remains that energy ("work") moulds these shapes: For instance clouds, mountains, and trees all are products of previous applications of energy).
In the next section I canvass some problematic positions that acknowledge only one side or the other of the dual dialectics of information. These are depicted in the four quadrants of Figure 1.
Figure1: Dual Dialectic of Information
subjective / active reader	mterpretatiw
phenomenology	poststructuralism Thayer	(Lundberg)
tt		t r . ,
behaviourism	Semiology (de Saussure)	
economic determinism	Boulding, Wiener	
objective
Reducing Information
As illustrated in Figure 1, there are four basic ways of conceiving information non-dialectically: as (1) material only, and subjective, (2) immaterial (form only) and subjective, (3) material only and objective, and (4) immaterial (form only) and objective. There are, and have been, many celebrated exponents of each of these "reductionisms," and exemplars are proposed in the four quadrants of Figure 1. These "reductionisms" all have consequences, some of which I now address.
Material, Subjective
This quadrant is the most difficult one to deal with since materialism and objectivity are so often linked. Nonethless, we can glance both at the active reader hypothesis as forwarded by Stanley Fish and at phenomenlogy as set out by G. A. Lundberg as possible exemplars. Both these authors deny the dual dialectics of
information, the first (matter-in-form) through inadvertence, the second (objectivity-subjectivity) explicitly.
In asking, "Is There a Text in this Class," Professor Fish (1980) was not questioning the materiality of textbooks; rather, he was in effect dismissing the significance of forms. As Paul Cobley remarked, "for Fish, the reader supplies everything; this is because there can be nothing that precedes interpretation ... There can be no 'given' as such" (Cobley 1996, 405-6). For extreme "active reader" theorists, books are like Rorschach (inkblot) tests: there can be as many meanings as there are readers. If the meaning of any shape or form depends entirely the "reader's" subjectivity, subjectivity is highlighted and objectivity diminished if not indeed negated entirely. True, Fish did not explicitly deny form; but he did, in effect, deny the dialectic of matter/form: despite print on its pages, a book is a tabula rasa for Fish inasmuch as it is readers who compose their own particular varied and sundry texts.
A similar case in point is George Lundberg's phenomenology. Writing in 1933, he stated:
In any valid epistemological or scientific sense we must say that the substitution of a Copernican for the Ptolemaic theory of the universe represented a major change in the universe. To say that it was not the universe but our conception of it which changed is merely a verbal trick designed to lead the unwary into the philosophical quagmires of Platonic realism, for obviously the only universe with which science can deal is "our conception" of it (Lundberg 1933,309; quoted in Hammersley 99; emphasis added).
As one critic responded, Lundberg's radical subjectivity if applied in everyday life would "lead to freeway accidents, to lots of other trouble, and finally to the psychiatrist's couch" (Adler 1968, 38; quoted in Hamersley 229, n. 10).
Phenomenolgists' position, generally, is not to deny the material world, but to contend it can be known only indirectly through the mind's processing of sensory impressions. Again, we find a non dialectical position acknowledging matter but claiming total subjectivity. Again, there in no explicit denial of form, but neither is y a dialectic of matter-form acknowledged.
A related but more dialectical approach to subjectivity/objectivity was provided by symbolic interactionists George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer. They emphasised the commonality of "readings" among language groups. They proposed that shared codes are applied to forms by members of linguistic and other cultural groupings; hence, they proposed a degree of objectivity to forms. However, this is not to say that they acknowledged a dialectic of matter-form.
It is worth noting that Wilbur Schramm, one of the principle architects of American communication study, related that in the early 1950s he purposefully adopted the active reader model in order to counter then prevalent apprehensions on the part of the American public concerning the amount of influence of propaganda/
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persuasive communication. He stated:
[My essay] "How Communication Works" [1950] ... was in part a reaction against the mechanistic psychology much in use at the time to explain communication effects, and against the irrational fears of propaganda being
expressed in the early 1950's ... [I proposed] the concept of a highly active, highly selective audience, manipulating rather than being manipulated by a qq	message (Schramm 1971, 8).
To summarise, major consequences of accepting the extreme active reader/ phenomenological positions are first denial of the possibility of humans gaining insight into the real, and second dismissal of any and all power or influence on the part of information providers. "Active reader," then, can be a useful position to promote for both those wishing to alleviate public anxiety concerning persuasion or other media effects and for those striving to reduce accountability on the part of message providers.
Immaterial/Subjective
A second reductionist (non-dialectical) formulation of information is post-structuralist/postmodernist, which I have located in the immaterial/ subjective quadrant of Figure 1. With poststructuralism there is an emphasis on language, and in particular on the proposition that language, being self-referential, does not point to or describe accurately conditions in the material world. In brief, according to many poststructuralists, language is severed from material existence and is in effect a system on its own.
Frank Webster, for instance, characterised poststructuralism as rejecting all modes of expression - artistic, scholarly, even architectural - claiming "to represent some 'reality' behind their symbolic form" (Webster 1995, 164-5). Poststructuralist Mark Poster seemingly affirmed Webster's depiction: "Language no longer represents a reality, no longer is a neutral tool to enhance the subject's instrumental rationality: language becomes or better reconfigures reality" (Poster 1994, 176). According to Ben Agger, for poststructuralists language "produces meaning only with reference to other meanings against which it takes on its own significance," adding we are thereby destined "to remain locked up in the prison house of language" (Agger 1991, 28-9).
The dialectic of matter-in-form would be highly problematic for poststructur-alism because that dialectic contravenes poststructuralists' radical segregation of discourse from material conditions. Form-in-matter, after all, draws attention to language/discourse inherently being a component of material conditions.
The radical disjuncture between language and material conditions proposed by poststructuralism flies in the face of scientific theory/discovery/experimentation, and technological development. Significantly, the poststructuralist position (like those of the active reader and phenomenology) also denies any possibility of pursuing social justice or seeking environmental health because language or discourse (according to these writers) bears no necessary or likely correspondence to material reality: we simply never know what is real as we are inextricably locked in the prison house of language!
In denying connectivity between language and non language reality, poststuc-turalism posits extreme subjectivity. There are no objective (material) referents to anchor meaning. Note how Lawrence Grossberg, for one, made this extreme subjectivity explicit by proposing articulation as a key poststructuralist category. Grossberg defined articulation as "the production of identity on top of differences, of unities out of fragments, of structures across practices," adding that "articulation links this practice to that effect, this text to that meaning, this meaning to that reality, this experience to those politics; and these links are themselves articulated into larger structures, etc." (Grossberg 1992, 115). These declarations and definitions
imply that there are few if any limitations with regard to what can be joined, few or no irreversibilities, few bonds that cannot be broken, few constraints on creating and disassembling structures. "Articulation" posits enormous freedom to do. There are, in other words, few if any objective constraints.
Material/Objective
The reductionism of this quadrant of Figure 1 denies any possibility of interpretation. Meaning resides objectively in the information/message. Hence, message transmission and reception result in foreordained consequences. It is likely this view of information that Wilbur Schramm had in mind when writing derisively of the "Bullet theory" (Schramm 1971, 8); others have termed it the "hypodermic needle model" (Lubken 2008). This is a materialist theory of information insofar as it proposes strict causality in line with materialist determinism, indicating thereby an absence of interpretive freedom.
When B. F. Skinner wrote Beyond Freedom and Dignity, he proposed a strict determinism through operant conditioning, thereby denying the possibility that people can actually make decisions. Behavioural psychology consequently also rejects the notion of human dignity, as Skinner admitted: one can neither take credit or be held accountable for actions in a world where choice/freedom is illusory. The potentially horrendous, totalitarian implications of this perspective are obvious enough.
Skinner denied neither matter nor form; nor did he, however, consider any interplay between them. Skinner, rather, dealt solely with "stimuli," which he maintained could be classified objectively as pleasure or pain, as reward or punishment. Even though it is an experimental subject who experiences these stimuli, they are understood objectively by Skinner.
Immaterial (Form Only) and Objective
In contemporary communication/media studies this position was, arguably, inaugurated by Ferdinand de Saussure. This founder of semiology defined a "sign" y as consisting of both a sound presence or a visual form (termed the signifier), and a mental image (the signified). De Saussure, then, dealt with form only, not matter-in-form. For him, signs were "wholly immaterial" (Chandler 2006). Moreover, de Saussure confined his attention to what he termed "internal linguistics, declaring: "My definition of language presupposes the exclusion of everything that is outside its organism or system - in a word, of everything known as 'external linguistics'" (De Saussure 1915, 20).
Cultural theorist Katherine Hayles attributed the tendency of certain contemporary writers to de-materialise information - or as she put it, to view information as "an entity distinct from the substrates [or media] carrying it" (Hayles 1999, 11) - to the influence of Shannon and Weaver's mathematical theory of communication (1948). Three social scientists downplaying the material aspect of information while
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nonetheless recognising the objectivity of "form" (or perhaps better the dialectic of objectivity-subjectivity in connection with form) were Norbert Wiener, Kenneth Boulding and Gregory Bateson.
Cyberneticist Norbert Wiener viewed the human body as a "text," and rhapsodised how, over time, the body discards and replaces all of its matter while retaining qq the pattern: "We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves,"
Wiener declared in an oft-quoted passage (Wiener 1967, 130). Wiener, then, did
not deny matter; he simply minimised its importance by emphasising its transitory fO
nature compared to enduring form or pattern.
Economist Kenneth Boulding went further, declaring that information is not subject to the two laws of thermodynamics, namely the law of conservation of matter-energy and the law of entropy, both of which universally apply to matter-energy. Hence Boulding implicitly presumed information to comprise form but not matter. Regarding information not being subject to the law of conservation, he wrote:
The through-put of information in an organisation involves a "teaching" or structuring process which does not follow any strict law of conservation even though there may be limitations imposed upon it. When a teacher instructs a class, at the end of the hour presumably the students know more and the teacher does not know any less. In this sense the teaching process is utterly unlike the process of exchange which is the basis of the law of conservation. In exchange, what one gives up another acquires; what one gains another loses. In teaching this is not so. What the student gains the teacher does not lose. Indeed, in the teaching process, as every teacher knows, the teacher gains as well as the student. In this phenomenon we find the key to the mystery of life (Boulding 1956, 35).
In remarking how both he and his students were enriched by his classes, Bould-ing neglected to recall that students are material carriers of forms (their bodies "carry" Boulding's lectures). Energy is expended as these living organisms acquire and process the knowledge (new patterns and forms); and energy is expended also through metabolism as his students simply maintain their existence.
Boulding also maintained, in a similar vein, that the "law of information" counters the law of entropy (the second law of thermodynamics), thereby again segregating matter and form into separate domains.
Finally, let us turn to Gregory Bateson, who defined information as "news of difference" (Bateson 1979, 68, 29):
It takes at least two somethings to create a difference. To produce news of difference, i.e., information, there must be two entities (real or imagined) such that the difference between them can be immanent in their mutual relationship ... There is a profound and unanswerable question about the nature of those "at least two" things that between them generate the difference which becomes information by making a difference ... The stuff of sensation, then, is a pair of values of some variable, presented over a time to a sense organ whose response depends upon the ratio between the members of the pair (Bateson 1979, 68-9).
Information, for Bateson, being the difference between two stimuli, indicates its immaterial nature: two entities emit stimuli, but no single entity emits a "difference." A difference is akin to a form or pattern. Materialism is at best once-removed in Bateson's configuration.
Boulding and Wiener both emphasised the objectivity of information. Boulding instructed his classes and his students learned; Wiener wrote about the pattern (form) of the human body that was perpetuated despite the ephemeral character of the matter comprising it. Bateson, too, may have been speaking of the objectivity
of information in declaring that the "response depends upon the ratio between members of the pair." On the other hand, Boulding and Bateson certainly agreed that information is "subjective" insofar as sensory impressions must be perceived, and Boulding furthermore repeatedly berated to behaviourism for its refusal to consider information processing/interpretation on the part of message receivers.
Today, when one thinks of a "paperless economy" as being environmentally sound, it is important to bear in mind that electronic communication, too, requires a medium or carrier - that like print, electronic communication therefore has effects governed by the two laws of thermodynamics. Indeed, many electronic media are known to be environmental hazards. Due to the materiality of information, moreover, the information economy does not present the prospect of unbounded growth. Only in the problematic realms of angels and parapsychology is there communication through forms-without-matter.
Innis, McLuhan, and the Dual Dialectics of Information
In considering the dual dialectics of information - i.e., the interplays of form and matter, and of subjectivity/objectivity - it is useful to turn to Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. Although each on his own failed to consider fully the dual dialectics of information, when combined their analyses rectify deficiencies stemming from non dialectical (reductionist) views of information.
Innis famously proposed interactivity between medium and message, which is to say between matter and form. Depending on the physical properties of any given medium (or "substrate") - durability, lightness, ease or difficulty in being encoded, capacity to carry messages, transportability - the medium is predisposed to carry either time-binding or space-binding messages, thereby supporting elites whose power is based on the particular monopoly of knowledge made conducive by the prevailing medium. Messages, though, Innis insisted, act recursively on media, as message senders will tend to choose the medium most attuned to the time/space bias of their messages (Innis 1950, 7). y	Innis maintained, too, that the supply of paper "had profound implications for
... literature" (Innis 1946, 35). According to Innis, abundance in the supply of paper reduced the costs of producing literature, and publishers consequently sought out new markets. "With the gain in literacy after the Education Act [in England] after 1870 and the commercialisation of literature, the lower classes made enormous demands for the new journalism and the new literature and these demands were met by cheap paper and printing ... The popularity of fiction followed the lower prices of novels. Books were sold in enormous quantities and popular writers, particularly women, wrote incredible numbers of novels" (Innis 1946, 51). The medium, in other words, had significant impact upon the message.
Innis provided heuristic and nuanced analyses of the dialectic of medium and message, of matter and form. And he tied that analysis not only to message senders intent on establishing or maintaining monopolies of knowledge, but also to various classes of message recipients in their various tastes for messages, that is in terms of their various subjectivities.
Unlike Innis, McLuhan initially emphasised the medium, and hence downplayed form (as exemplified in his celebrated maxim, "the medium is the message"); qq consequently, considering that maxim only, McLuhan could be viewed as engag-
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ing in a materialist reduction. However, McLuhan proposed connections between the material means of encoding messages and "biases" in interpreting them by LH receivers or audiences. He maintained that media, as extensions or amplifications of either the eye or ear, affect interpretation/perception in broadly predictable ways (McLuhan 1962). For example, he attributed the predominance of either linear logic or of analogic reasoning to the preponderance in any given culture of media extending (or amplifying the power of) the eye or ear respectively. Linear logic, according to McLuhan, derives from the (illusion of) connectedness in visual space, whereas analogy, due to gaps inherent to audile/tactile space, is more common in cultures emphasising the ear. McLuhan, though, was far from being determinist in this regard, as he insistently forwarded techniques for aiding readers to heighten their critical awareness (figure/ground, pattern recognition, cliche and archetype, laws of the media) (McLuhan, Hutchon, McLuhan, 1971). By focusing on message forms, McLuhan reinstated the fuller "dialectic of information."
Combined, Innis and McLuhan give insights into communicating systems in which sender, receiver, medium, message, objectivity, subjectivity, freedom, causation, are in dynamic interaction. Whereas reductionist or non-dialectical views of information undoubtedly provide important insights, there are costs. It is therefore important to keep in the back of one's mind the full dialectics of information when reading partial accounts.
References:
Adler, Franz. 1968 Comments on Lundberg's Sociological Theories. In A. de Grazia, R. Handy, E. C. Harwood and P. Kurtz (eds.), The Behavioral Sciences, Great Barrington, MA: The Behavioral Research Council.
Agger, Ben. 1991. A Critical Theory of Public Life: Knowledge, Discourse and Politics In an Age of Decline:
London: Routledge Falmer. Babe, Robert E. 2009. Cultural Studies and Political Economy: Toward a New Integration. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Bateson, Gregory. 1979. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York Dutton. Boulding, Kenneth. 1956. The Image: Knowledge and Life in Society. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Chandler, Daniel. 2006. Signs: Semiotics for Beginners. <http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/ S4B/semiotic.html>
Cobley, Paul. 1996. Interpretation, Ideation and the Reading Process. In P. Cobley (ed.), The
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Toronto: University ofToronto Press. Lundberg, George A. 1933. Is Sociology Too Scientific? Sociologus 9, 298-322.
Lubken, Deborah. 2008. Remembering the Straw Man: The Travels and Adventures of Hypodermic. In D. W. Park and J. Pooley (eds.), The History of Media and Communication Research: Contested Memories. New York: Peter Lang: 19-42. McLuhan, Marshall. 1962. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
McLuhan, Marshall, Kathryn Hutchon and Eric McLuhan. 1977. City as Classroom: Understanding
Language and Media. Agincourt, ON, Canada: The Book Society of Canada. Poster, Mark. 1994. The Mode of Information and Postmodernity. In D. Crowley and D. Mitchell (eds.),
Communications Theory Today, 173-92. Stanford University Press Schramm, Wilbur. 1971. The Nature of Communication Between Humans. In W. Schramm and D.F. Roberts (eds.), The Process and Effects of Mass Communication, 3-53. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Webster, Frank. 1995. Theories of the Information Society. London: Routledge. Weizsacker, Carl Friedrich von. 1980. The Unity of Nature. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wiener, Norbert. 1967. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society New York: Avon Books.
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MARKET PHILOSOPHY AND INFORMATION
PRIVACY YONG JIN PARK
Abstract
This article examines U.S. policy shaping of personal information flow in its historical trajectory. The analysis newly draws on the notion of the marketplace ideal in privacy debate and analyses a regulatory continuum that an online information protection regime is the product of active formulation of a policy principle. Proxy regulation that attributes the function of privacy protection to discrete commercial domains is analysed in analogy with the diversity principle of broadcasting. Alternative Internet policy models are discussed beyond the oversimplified dichotomy between market and government. In a critique of the Federal Trade Commission's latest proposal of "Do Not Track List," a thesis is advanced to encourage a simplified user interface with a forceful measure that can intervene in
the marketplace.
Yong Jin Park is Assistant Professor in School of Communications, Howard University, Washington D.C.; e-mail: yongjinp@hotmail.com.
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Introduction
Imagine, for a moment, a very young medium called the Internet. The faith of the virtual city, in which the civic, political, and commercial lives of citizens converge into digital platforms, is about to be shaped. Policymakers are concerned about how information flow should be governed; how citizens exercise their rights to privacy control; and how private organisations can access, retain, and appropriate user data. The year is 1995; the government agency is the Federal Trade Commission (FTC); and the tension is on the function of the marketplace, that is, the extent to which the government is to assume a role in determining the future of information flow in virtual environments.
The purpose of this article is to historically and critically examine the underlying information condition for marketplace institutions and individual users in the Internet. The central question is how the government policy principle helps determine the function of institutions and users in personal information control. In other words, this article aims to ask what the current state and the role of U.S. policy are in conditioning privacy control and to deconstruct the principle of marketplace rationale in its historical trajectory.
Fair Information Practices (FIPs) remain a focal point of analysis, i.e., how the FTC FIPs have evolved into the current regulatory stance in the Internet. Over the decades, the FTC has reinstated its stance in resorting to the marketplace principle online. In the proposed privacy principles for behavioural advertising, the FTC stated:
The [self-regulatory] principles reflect FTC staff's recognition of potential benefits provided by online behavioural advertising and the need to maintain vigorous competition in the area. At this time, Commission believes that self-regulation may be the preferable approach for this dynamic marketplace because it affords the flexibility that is needed as business models continue to evolve (FTC 2008, 13).
y	Most recently, in 2010, the FTC proposed an online "Do Not Track List," however,
Q	the Commission left its implementation and enforcement to online commercial enti-
£	ties. What the Commission takes for grant is the validity of marketplace rationale.
Perhaps more important is a consistent policy framework with no or limited shift of orientation. This study will step back to reexamine the construction of Internet privacy policy from a critical analytic perspective because it helps reformulate policy objectives in concrete terms.
Overview
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This article has the following structure. First, a theoretical framework of U.S. yj communication policy is presented. Second, a brief U.S. privacy policy history pro
ceeds in two stages: (1) the constitutional foundation period and (2) the computer era from the 1970s to the 1980s. Third, the FTC policy of the Internet era is dissected in concrete terms. Finally, policy recommendations will be offered for formulating concrete alternatives to the current regime that is in place online.
The organisational framework of this article is not to indicate the causal direction from new technology to policy. Rather, it is to note the reverse directionality, from qq policy to technology, with the critical role of policy in shaping new technology in
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each of three stages. In sum, the aim is to provide a critical account of information privacy policy in historical background. Policy history, in this sense, indicates more ^ than the aggregate of facts and events pertinent to privacy - it is a review of the root of U.S. policy and its ensuing impact before making concrete recommendations to the FTC in its formulation of online policy.
The analysis draws on the combination of historical and policy insights. For this, a comprehensive data archive was constructed. Firsthand sources came from two policy origins: (1) the government, mainly the FTC, and (2) the civic sector. The goal was to collect multifaceted resources in the reconstruction of existing policy conditions. Ultimately, this reflects how the current regime in the Internet has evolved in particular ways.
Overall, this article contributes to bringing privacy policy discussion to a concrete level in which users and institutions play out their parts under the policy assumption. Theoretically, this study aims to newly dissect the rationale that underlies Internet privacy policy from a perspective of a prominent metaphor of the marketplace of ideas.
Framework of the Marketplace Ideal
The marketplace of ideas is the most prominent metaphor in U.S. communication policy (Napoli 2000). The notion indicates more than rhetoric, but it serves as a fundamental basis for the operation of the policy principle in concrete terms. The idea goes back to John Locke1 in the seventeenth century when he pointed out that "the attainment of the truth is best achieved through the free uninhibited exchanges of ideas/information in the marketplace" (Napoli 2000, 105). Under this viewpoint, government regulation is to be left to a minimum to keep the full functionality of the marketplace (Dalhgren 2001; Horwitz 2005). In an affirmative sense, the policy is a hindrance when the self-functioning marketplace best guarantees the sharing of diverse viewpoints, and ultimately the truth.
The two aspects of this ideal are the market and the democracy. Also we can regard the two entities in their interplay: party 1 (e.g., source, sender, or business) and party 2 (e.g., exposure, receiver, or citizens) (see Figure 1). This gives us a matrix in which each entity is positioned to practice their rational interests in four dimensions.
Figure 1: Matrix of Marketplace Ideal
Market
Rational Position 1 Market and Business
Business
Rational Position 3 Democracy and Business
Rational Position 2 Market and Citizens
Citizens
Rational Position 4 Democracy and Citizens
Democracy
One of the most important aspects of this principle is that entities involved in the free exchange of information are reduced to the relationship between two actors in perfect power symmetry. Furthermore, other political or social objectives are assumed to operate in functional equivalence to the economic rationale in the marketplace. The principle speaks to not only the faith in political liberty, but also the marketplace integrity that functions for other social goals, with no mediating force in between (Streeter 1996).
In most U.S. communication policies, policy inaction is the direct consequence of this philosophical root. Policymakers have recognised the power with which rational citizens freely choose a wide range of options, fully informed in the marketplace. Conversely, the market institutions are assumed or even theorised to perform certain standards of action fulfilling democratic responsibilities in a self-governing society.
Here the policy inaction does not mean "no action at all." Rather, it indicates the laissez-faire model (Neuman et al. 1997) in which the self-regulatory market mechanism is promoted on policy grounds. For example, marketplace ideas are often factored into binding Federal Communications Commission (FCC) policy guidelines such as "public interest, convenience, and necessity" (Napoli 2000). It is critical that the function of the marketplace is assumed to be perfectly rational in translating such policy guidelines. The metaphor, in this sense, has a tangible consequence - the assumption that the marketplace is best regulated at the hands of the parties at stake.
Drawing on the notion of the marketplace idea to privacy debate, two qualifications are in order. First, the interaction between the two entities is a simplified one. The marketplace is more complex now than in the seventeenth century and involves a wide array of groups, such as websites, credit card companies, Internet service providers (ISPs), and so forth. Second, the distinction between privacy of content and privacy-related transactional information (McManus 1990) increasingly blurs on the Internet, and it is not plausible to exclude one for the sake of the other when focusing on privacy control conditions. Subsequently, the metaphor as follows is to operationalise privacy debate in analytical parsimony.
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U.S. Privacy Policy History Constitutional Foundation of Privacy Control
The U.S. privacy policy is founded on the liberal market model in the metaphorical regulatory continuum (Solove 2001; Venturelli 2002). That is, privacy regulation in industry is self-regulated, characterised by both non-commercial obligation ^	and no burdensome public-interest obligation. Its philosophical origin is aligned
with the marketplace ideal. In fact, the U.S. Constitution per se does not explicitly state the right to privacy. While the Fourth Amendment is construed as a broad legal basis, policy intervention has always been reactionary only when the market between the involved parties fails to function.
This point is significant because most communication policy has been under-
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stood primarily in the context of the First Amendment. For example, in FCC policy, the objective of media diversity has been understood to be achievable as a function ^ of commercial freedom in the marketplace as interpreted in the Associated Press v.
United States in 1945. Here the foundation goes to the Fourth Amendment as this is further operationalised in the consistent U.S. privacy policy stance imbued in the marketplace ideal.
The minimal privacy protection position is best illustrated in three landmark cases. The case of Olmstead v. United States (which involved the telephone - the new technology of the day) shows limited interpretation by the Court of constitutional privacy rights. In this 1928 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to telephone wiretapping. Chief Justice Taft, in the majority opinion, noted:
The Fourth Amendment should be construed liberally; but it is submitted that by no liberality of construction can be a conversation passing over a telephone wire become a "house," no more can it become a "person," "paper," or an "effect" (Taft 1928, 451).
In 1970, Katz v. United States restored the protection of individual rights to a certain extent. The Court ruled that wiretapping constituted a search under the Fourth Amendment. However, the majority opinion also made it clear that the Fourth Amendment protects only against certain kinds of governmental intrusion in highly limited contexts, refusing to establish its constitutional ground for general rights to privacy. Even this limited position was weakened by the 1976 decision in Miller v. United States, in which the Supreme Court upheld that citizens do not have a reasonable expectation to privacy when communication can be restored in third parties; thus, they cannot be held accountable.
The Miller decision came just before the computer era of the 1980s. The date remains critical because this set the reassuring regulatory tone for commercial telephone operators in ensuing digital networks. The significance is that personal information condition, with the absence of explicit regulatory principle, was reduced to the matter of individual discretion in the uses of commercial networks - subsequently, in a minimised role for the state to play in free information exchange.
It is important to recognise that the Fourth Amendment principle reflects an enriched respectful tradition of citizens' rights that set the United States apart from the rest of the world (Rotenberg 2001). Yet a critical point is that the de facto protection, from the very early forms of communication technology, has been compromised through case and statuary laws. Further, the consistent reluctance by the Court in establishing constitutional protection became a broad interpretive frame. The early cases established the foundation on which the rights to privacy are left to private parties at hand. To rephrase, it is the reluctance, in line with liberal principle, from which policy intervention is interpreted as the last resort.
The Era of Computerisation from the 1970s to the 1980s
The absence of an explicit regulatory framework governing the protection of personal information flow continued from the 1970s to the 1980s. The advent of information technology opened up opportunities in which to reshape policy initiatives. However, a patchwork of policy was constructed within the existing regulatory legacy instead of a new cohesive policy framework that could better address increased infringement on personal privacy.
Three main factors characterise the formulation of U.S. privacy policies in this period. First, there was no unified formal policy created at the federal level. Second,
such absence was filled with a multitude of state-level protections in complex variations of scope and implementation. Third, this complicated policy configuration exacerbated the problem as sector-by-sector piecemeal solutions were introduced, which further varied depending on the technological platforms (Park 2009).
This is not to say that there was a complete regulatory ignorance of privacy rights. Most notably, the 1974 Privacy Act was enacted to restrict the access by federal agents to records of individual citizens. The U.S. government also pushed for the Cable Communications Policy Act, the first of this kind in network service, opening up the door for further legislation, such as the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act that protects information regarding video rental (Flaherty 1989). Furthermore, through the 1970 Fair Credit Reporting Act, the U.S. government formulated the policies that protect the privacy of citizens in commercial transactions. In this period, the inception of fair information practice (FIP) principles is particularly noteworthy. The originator of the FIP principles was the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1973 in response to the increased use of automated data records. It was this earlier version of the FIP principles that provided the rationale behind the 1980 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) guidelines. Thus it is accurate to say that active U.S. policy formulation created a core set of guidelines for private-sector privacy protection earlier than the rest of the world (Bellman et al. 2004).
Nevertheless, the two contexts qualify the active policy formulation in this era. First, the 1974 Privacy Act concerned government data collection in the public sector. That is, the 1974 Privacy Act created a significant and vast legal loophole in which the private sector was insulated from burdensome public obligations for the use, collection, and retention of information regarding citizens in public spheres. This hailed a completely different regulatory model from which the function of the mass media industry at its minimum presupposes the fulfilment of certain standards of public-interest obligations in use of spectrum and access to the general public (see Streeter 1996).
Second, the construction of sector-by-sector patchworks indicates the creation of the environment in which much of the scope and implementation of data protection is up to the discretion of separate industry norms, under varied government sanctions. Citizens are assumed to exercise discretion and control in direct negotiation with individual sectors and scattered regulatory protections. This is a critical Q point because the notion of the marketplace ideal, in which the private sectors and ^ individual citizens are under one-to-one symmetrical contacts, is now sealed in a myriad of statuary grounds for personal information protection.
It is not difficult to document a clear orientation entrenched in this era leading up to the Internet age. In discrete sectors, the patchwork of policy, instead of a rigid strict government standard, was intended to function as a flexible open frame in which information would flow more freely (Langenderfer and Cook 2004). Conversely, the multitude of policies and the segmented marketplace formed a complex environment for citizens to function in. The key to understanding privacy policy and regulation in the United States is to understand the fundamentally fragmented nature of its making, in light of the Constitutional provisions regarding federal and ^ state powers on one hand and the division of power and checks and balances on
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the other. In sum, the 1970s and 1980s marked the translation of market-oriented regulatory legacy into tangible policy forms, providing offline statutory grounds f^ for the online regime to function.	^
The Internet Era
In the 1990s, with the advent of the Internet, the fundamental principles of the FIPs came to the forefront of privacy policy in the United States. The pattern of industry self-regulation should be understood in the administrative context of the FTC, of which the main objective was to promote commerce in business interests. Furthermore, it is important to consider the time period of 1990s in which the FTC took over the jurisdiction of online commerce with the launch of the first commercial search site - Yahoo! The FTC (and the Clinton administration in the mid-1990s) had a clear policy incentive to promote free information flow for the online industry, which was in its infancy.
The most noticeable change resides in, not the adoption of FIP principles, but the acceleration of the marketplace principle in its online application. In fact, the FTC adoption of the FIP principles further reinforced the market-friendly policy stance. The original FIP principles with eight items were reduced to two items (Notice and Choice) (see Figure 2), and technically, they adhered to the fundamental guidelines from the OECD. Also, no clear benchmark was set for the voluntary observance of Notice and Choice. Most of all, in the faith in the marketplace integrity, no enforcement mechanism was in place online. The relatively active policy formulation of the 1970s and 1980s, even within such limited statutory contexts, ground to a halt and succumbed to the entire discretion of industry sectors in the online marketplace.
Figure 2: The Evolution of Fair Information Principles
						
	The Original OECD Principles Collection, Data Quality, Purpose Specification, Use Limitation, Security Safeguards, Openness, Individual Participation, and Accountability		FTC Principles Notice Choice Security Integrity Enforcement		Industry Version Notice and Choice	
1980			1995		-> 2000	
It is crucial to recognise the shift to the much-relaxed FIP standard in favour of online commercial entities. Over the decades, the FTC, in the provision of the operating principle, made it clear that its jurisdiction was to function for commercial interests in the new medium (e.g., in the 1997 Clinton-Gore initiative). In 1999, the FTC in its report to the House commerce subcommittee on Telecom, Trade, and Consumer Protection affirmed that
[self-regulation is] the least intrusive and most efficient means to ensure fair information practices online, given the rapidly evolving nature of the Internet and computer technology.... The Commission believes that legislation to address online privacy is not appropriate at this time (FTC 1999, section II).
This position was embraced again and again in each of the FTC reviews in 1998, 1999, 2000, and most recently, 2007 (in its review of behavioural target advertising; EPIC 2007). In the first adoption of the FIP principles in 1995, the FTC refused to include a full set of the guidelines, while much of its policy position was grounded in the encouragement of voluntary adoption of the FIP principles. With no federal oversight agencies as of 2010, however, the industry version of Notice and Choice remains as the only working principles. Two types of enforcement mechanisms are in place under this principle: (1) the voluntary seal certification program (e.g., TRUSTe, BBBonline) and (2) the Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), in which websites are voluntarily expected to provide the elements of the FIP principles through their memberships.
Prior to the proposal of "Do Not Track List" in 2010, the only period in which the FTC seriously considered amending the industrial self-regulatory codes (in a vote of 3 to 4 of the FTC commissioners) was 2000. Nevertheless, the introduction of new legislations was overturned in 2001 in favour of existing policy guidelines under a new FTC chair. It should be understood that this consistent emphasis on the privileges of parties at hand is the continuation of a hands-off position in liberal market principle, in a more dramatic shift of power to private entities (cf. Agre and Rotenberg 1997). The position of the minimal "voluntary control" regime introduced in 1995, reinstated in 2001, and in place up to 2007, remains as the operating principle in online consumer protection (FTC 2002) (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Level of Policy Involvement in Privacy Protection
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Self Help
Voluntary Control Data Commissioner Registration Licensing
Low
Laissez-faire
Medium	High
(adapted from Milberg et al. 1995)
The Inertia of Market Philosophy
A critical point to debunk is the somewhat naive notion that the self-regulatory regime is a product of policy inaction. Rather, the online information regime is a regulatory construct that did not evolve in vacuum. It is a product of active formulation within the marketplace policy ecology that is best oriented toward the minimalist approach of non-public obligations. Note that aligned with the liberal
market model, the policy formulation in the earlier two stages was characterised by the market-based minimalist approach, that is, a laissez-faire approach to infor- LO mation and privacy control. With the FTC at the forefront in 1995, this accelerated ^ with the following:
(1)	The full scope of the FIP principles was compromised.
(2)	There was no clear benchmark for adequate data protection in the voluntary
FIPs observance.
(3)	No enforcement mechanism was in place.
In short, the hyperactive policy continuum of the regulatory construct of marketplace rationale characterises the current privacy policy regime in online spheres, as manifested in the FTC adoption of the FIP principles in the 1990s.
In this policy continuum, then, questions naturally arise: What is the viable future for the users to exercise control? How are we to understand the function of the underlying regulatory condition of privacy control? And for shaping the information flow in digital spheres, how should the FTC proceed from the marketplace legacy, and with what imperatives?
To answer, it is important to cautiously dissect the posited function of institutions and users in interplay. The operational assumption of information privacy protection is linear. First, online market institutions are willing to embed the FIP core principle in voluntary compliance. Second, the users are recognised as able agents fully capable of data control according to personal needs or concerns (Marx 2007). The net result is complete faith in the integrity of marketplace incentive - the provision of privacy control, on one hand, with the most optimistic view of capable users, on the other.
An analogy would be the policy principle of traditional broadcasting diversity. Under the FCC principle, it is in fact assumed that structural regulation over media consolidation and/or ownership on the side of production (i.e., source diversity) would guarantee viewing diversity (i.e., exposure diversity) on the side of consumption (Horwitz 2005, Napoli 2000). In this vein, the current FTC regime is also a form of proxy regulation over the structure alone. That is, under the provision of the guidelines for the industry, if the proper organisational behaviour follows, users' information protection will be achieved. In other words, the current policy attributes the full function of the marketplace ideal to the functional power of commercial institutions alone.
In a practical sense, if the FIP principles function as a de juror standard, a de facto policy is the proxy regulation that governs only the party of the information provision. The absence of users in the policy picture indicates the operational principle in which the adequate structural provision alone, as defined by the industry standard, satisfies the fulfilment of the marketplace ideal. This is not to bluntly question the rationale of marketplace ideal per se. What is being questioned is the validity of self-regulatory measures with no due mechanism. Under the current FTC regime, the rationale is to set up the condition, as operationalised in the proxy (FIP principles) regulation, in which entities are to function. The irony is that the FTC stance is grounded on the absence of a valid policy measure that sustains the very function of the entities.
In 2001, the Patriot Act vastly expanded the government power of data surveillance, and is pending extension as of 2011. The debate over the scope of ad-
ministrative snooping power (and its due process) is to be distinguished from the concern on the regulatory model of privacy control and protection in commercial transactions. However, critics worry about the encroachment of government data tracking in the domain of business. This broader post September 11, 2001, context offers even more serious vulnerability to the posited self-regulatory conditions for information protection on the Internet. The problem of the idealised marketplace is that the market functions to the optimal interest of business (dimension 1), whereas democracy, when it best positions, functions to maintain interests of citizens' rights (dimension 4). The policy imperative is to correct this potential imbalance between market and democracy in rational positioning.
Figure 4: Functional Dimensions of Marketplace Ideal
Market
Business
Optimal
Rational Position 1
Suboptimal
Rational Position 3
Suboptimal
Rational Position 2
Optimal
Rational Position 4
Citizens
Democracy
Possible Remedies
Possible alternatives can be varied. Yet the dramatic shift of FTC policy orienta-^ tion toward concrete grounds is paramount to move beyond the oversimplified dichotomy between market and government. In other words, the marketplace metaphor embedded in privacy policies needs to be substantiated with policy instruments that help sustain the function of users and online institutions.
The alternative policy model should be equipped with effective standards covering two strata. The first stratum covers online market-institutions, with a focus on the interface design of each site that enables the actual function of the FIP principles so that users can rely on a site interface to make conscious decisions to reject or accept information collection and use. The second stratum covers users. Here policymakers should concentrate on how to build competent citizenry in which users are ably equipped to exercise control of their interests. Each stratum could restore functional power symmetry between entities (Dana and Gandy 2002) by empowering users through interface and competency.
Another ingredient in effective standards for market-institutions is privacy zoning. The FTC must achieve regulatory standardisation through benchmark
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interface-design requirements that vary according to website zones or types. The current FTC recognises no difference among websites, for example, financial, ^ family oriented, or regular e-commerce sites. Privacy zoning should mandate the
FIP principles for all websites but differentiate their scope for the sites that deal with sensitive financial or health-related data. For the users, public education is the most direct intervention. Yet this should be executed in combination with other powerful government initiatives. Specific targeting is key. For example, for children, the inclusion of accessible educational materials in the K-12 curriculum should be made. For other demographic groups, such as older or ethnic minority users, the FTC must design a long-term program for incremental change, such as the distribution of a FTC privacy protection manual to local communities and a specific FTC interactive site channel for circulating consumer information.
This privacy zoning proposal concerns the commercial entities that are currently under no mandatory regulation. One may question whether these types of requirements in commercial sites would be feasible at all. Yet the marketplace ideal does not necessarily mean the freedom from any regulation. Even in the tradition of the First Amendment protection of freedom of press, for example, there are such regulatory exceptions such as obscenity and fighting words.
Do Not Track List
In a similar vein, the latest FCC proposal of the "Do Not Track List" would bring no meaningful change to the Notice and Choice approach without mandatory interface requirements. The proposed framework will let consumers decide if they want websites and advertisers to track them. However, there is no mechanism of enforcement for websites to ensure the transparency of the step to "Opt in the Do Not Track List." This is a fundamentally similar proposal to the pre-existing industry standard of P3P or TRUSTe in which commercial sites offer a voluntary choice option to wilful users amid long incomprehensible website policies. Even this voluntary provision does not presuppose the implementation of the full scope of the FIP principles.
The solution is, not the option of opting out of being tracked, but the option of opting in for specific sites and allowing them to track and tailor the particular needs of users. If the current premise of the FTC proposal holds any promise, the creation of a "Do Track List" as opposed to a "Do Not Track List" of trusted sites must be implemented with specific interface design requirements that vary according to privacy zones. To mandate a simplified step that allows users to select the scope of tracking is paramount in creating a condition that will incentivise the marketplace.
Conclusions
A critical analysis of U.S. policy formulation in the past, present, and future is critical in advancing the understanding of how the FTC FIP principles regime evolved into the current state online. The historical trajectory in the deconstruction of the principle of marketplace ideas showed the foundation on which the online privacy protection regime was built. Further, as this foundation was reinforced in the 1970s and 1980s, offline statutory grounds with which the online protection regime functioned were analysed. One of the main theses was the entrenchment of marketplace logic for information flow. In other words, market utility, instead of protection, for which one-to-one entities are situated in discrete domains, con-textualises privacy control.
The central task remained the same as when Justices Warren and Brandeis (1890) penned a seminal piece in the Harvard Law Review because they were bothered by the intrusion of a photographer's zooming lens at their friend's wedding. Warren and Brandeis' concluding remark has lingered with privacy scholars for more than 100 years:
If he condones what he reprobates, with a weapon at hand equal to his defence,
he is responsible for the results.....'Has he then such a weapon?'.....The
common law has always recognised a man's house as his castle, impregnable, often, even to his own officers engaged in the execution of its command. Shall the courts thus close the front entrance to constituted authority, and open wide the back door to idle or prurient curiosity? (Warren and Brandeis 1890, 45, emphasis added).
Yet no matter how well-crafted policy design is, it is unlikely that the inception of new privacy law by itself keeps up with constant challenges from new technology. Conversely, the marketplace alone is inept to deal with the "public good" nature of information flow. In addition, the politicised debate is complicated by the dichotomy between government and market and its zero-sum cost-benefit analyses exaggerated in the ideological division in policy studies (Entman and Wildman 1992).
Answers may be found in a story of post-World War II Eastern Europe where government leaders had to decide on how to redesign devastated cities. While they had an opportunity to build entirely new efficient roadways, most cities resorted to the same flawed construction of narrow, winding city blocks - they were locked in history making the same mistakes. Lessons can be learned from the 1995 FTC regulatory construction of personal information flow over the Internet. The shift from the self-regulatory regime is warranted, not because of the failure of the marketplace metaphor, but because of the failure of the policy action that supports it on tangible grounds. The dramatic shift of policy orientation is urgent in visioning ^ beyond regulatory legacy.
Acknowledgements:
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This research was supported by Rackham Research Fund, the University of Michigan. The author wishes to express the gratitude to Dr. W. Russell Neuman at the University of Michigan for his guidance and support. The author also fully acknowledges the kind supports from Dr. Malek, Dean Dates, Dr. Ford, Dr. Merritt, and the faculty members of Howard Media Group, from School of Communica-^ tions, Howard University.
Note:
Q	1. Also see Areopagitica (Milton 1644) for a marketplace principle for regulating speech.
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^	Information Privacy. The Information Society 20,5, 313-324.
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April, June, October, December; occasional supplements
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avnost - The Public
ournal of the European Institute for Communication and Culture
Javnost - The Public, an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed social and cultural science journal published by the European Institute for Communication and Culture in association with the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, addresses problems of the public sphere on international and interdisciplinary levels. It encourages the development of theory and research, and helps understand differences between cultures. Contributors confront problems of the public, public communication, public opinion, public discourse, publicness, publicity, and public life from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives.
Editorial board
Editor: Slavko Splichal, University of Ljubljana Editorial Assistant: Boris Mance, University of Ljubljana
Editorial Advisory Board: Muhammad Ayish, University of Sharjah; Carlos Barrera, University of Navarra, Pamplona; Kees Brants, University of Amsterdam; Andrew Calabrese, University of Colorado at Boulder; Nico Carpentier, Free University of Brussels; Joseph Man Chan, Chinese University of Hong Kong; Lincoln Dahlberg, Massey University, Wellington; Peter Dahlgreen, University of Lund; Terry Flew, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane; Isabel Capelo Gil, Catholic University of Portugal, Lisboa; Jostein Gripsrud, University of Bergen; Tatsuro Hanada, University of Tokyo; Hanno Hardt, University of Ljubljana; Robert L. Ivie, Indiana University; Karol Jakubowicz, National Broadcasting Council of Poland; Nicholas Jankowski, University of Nijmegen; Risto Kunelius, University of Tampere; Chin-Chuan Lee, City University of Hong Kong; Breda Luthar, University of Ljubljana; Ed McLuskie, Boise State University; Paolo Mancini, University of Perugia; Vincent Mosco, Queen's University, Kingston; Barbara Pfetsch, Free University of Berlin; Horst Poettker, University of Dortmund; Philippe Joseph Salazar, University of Cape Town; Colin Sparks, Westminster University, London; Daya Thussu, Westminster University, London; Janet Wasko, University of Oregon at Eugene; Yuezhi Zhao, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby; Liesbet van Zoonen, Loughborough University.
LARS NYRE
RADIODIFUZNA JAVNOST IN NJENI PROBLEMI
Za zahodne demokracije je dejstvo, da so tehnologije brezžičnega prenosa iz obdobja okrog leta 1900 postale radiodifuzne in ne sredstvo, ki bi bilo bolj demokratično, poraz. Prenos namreč zahteva središčno strukturo, strokovno usmerjeno novinarsko etiko in relativno pasivno kulturo sprejemanja. Vendar to ne zadostuje. V strogo tehničnem razumevanju bi bile lahko nove tehnologije prenosa zasnovane kot platforma za javno udeležbo. Prenos bi lahko postal vsakodnevna realizacija demokratične vizije Johna Deweyja, a je končal kot enosmeren medij v duhu Walterja Lippmanna. Od začetka 20. stoletja sta se radio in televizija v marsičem spremenila; prišlo je do počasnega, a stanovitnega povečevanja aktivnosti občinstva ter vsebin, ki jih ustvarjajo uporabniki, televizijo pa so pomladili resničnostni šovi, iskanje talentov in podobno. Kakorkoli že, prenos še vedno ne omogoča participativnega komuniciranja, ki bi ga tehnično lahko. Članek kritizira zahodno industrijo radiodifuznih medijev in znanstvenike, da so bili preveč samozadovoljni glede radikalne spremembe s sodelovanjem. Z navezavo na razpravo med Lippmannom in Deweyjem članek prevladujočo paradigmo oddajanja postavlja nasproti participativni komunikacijski etiki, ki še ni imela priložnosti, da bi se dokazala tako v tehnološkem kot družbenem pomenu. Članek obravnava tri medsebojno povezane probleme radiodifuzne javnosti: (1) elitistično utemeljitev gradnje enosmerne tehnološke infrastrukture, (2) odsotnost družbene enakosti med profesionalci in amaterji, in (3) komercialno retoriko opolnomočenja državljana z mediji. Če bi bili omenjeni trije problemi rešeni ali vsaj obravnavani bolj robustno s stališča participativne komunikacijske etike, bi prenos zvoka in slike v živo končno uresničil svoj javni potencial.
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KRISTOFFER HOLT MICHAEL KARLSSON UREDNIKOVANA UDELEŽBA: PRIMERJAVA UREDNIŠKEGA VPLIVA V TRADICIONALNIH IN DRŽAVLJANSKIH SPLETNIH ČASOPISIH NA ŠVEDSKEM
Čeprav državljansko novinarstvo pomeni objavljanje vsebin, ki jih ustvarjajo uporabniki, je uredniški vpliv v državljanskem spletnem mediju pomemben. Uredniki določajo pogoje, pod katerimi uporabniki ustvarjajo vsebine, kontekst objave in dojemanje pomembnosti vsebin. Kljub temu ostaja nejasno, kako se ta vpliv kaže navzven in v kakšnem odnosu je do razprav o participativnem potencialu medijev za oživljanje demokracije. Članek primerja tri švedske spletne medije: Sourze - prvi švedski državljanski časopis, Newsmill - družabni medij, ki temelji na novicah in razpravi, in DN - spletno različico največjega švedskega jutranjega časopisa Dagens Nyheter. Avtorja zastavljata vprašanje, kakšen učinek ima uredniški vpliv na udeležbo. Rezultati nakazujejo, da je polje udeležbe zamejeno z logiko lastnega konteksta produkcije. Članom različnih družbenih kategorij se sodelovanje različno pogojuje. Še več kot to, uredniki oblikujejo agendo tako, da sugerirajo teme in nagrajujejo članke, ki upoštevajo njihove sugestije. Rezultati ne oporekajo domnevi, da so državljanski časopisi bolj dostopni kanali za ^^ državljane in zaradi tega tudi zanimivi kot možni načini za oblikovanje bolj demokratičnega udejst-vovanja državljanov, a kljub temu zavračajo domnevo o svobodi pred omejitvami, ki so značilne za tradicionalne medije, kot so npr. prednostno tematiziranje, funkcije odbiratelja in medijska logika.
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LEENA RIPATTI-TORNIAINEN JAANA HUJANEN
KULTIVACIJA DEMOKRATIČNEGA RAZUMA ZANEMARJENA ZNAČILNOST IZOBRAŽEVANJA ODRASLIH V JAVNEM NOVINARSTVU
Članek proučuje formativna besedila o javnem novinarstvu, napisana v ZDA devetdesetih letih prejšnjega stoletja, tako da gradi na primerjavi z izobraževanjem odraslih. Primerjavo javnega novinarstva z izobraževanjem odraslih utemeljuje z obravnavo usklajenosti ciljev, metod in opredelitve strokovnih vlog, ki jih imata javno novinarstvo in ameriško pragmatistično izobraževanja odraslih. Pri proučevanju posega v javno ravnanje državljanov uporabita avtorici metode intelektualne zgodovine, ki sta jih konstruirala zgodnja zagovornika javnega novinarstva Jay Rosen in Davis Merritt. Avtorici dokazujeta, da je ideja Rosena in Merritta sestavljena iz dveh elementov. Prvič, Rosen in Merritt pozivata novinarje, naj oživijo družbeno združevanje in s tem za državljane ustvarijo razmere, v katerih lahko prepoznajo svoje javno in politično delovanje. Drugič, novinarjem predlagata, da spodbujajo vključujoče in k rešitvam usmerjene javne razprave med državljani. Izobraževanje odraslih prepoznava oba elementa, vendar je v primerjavi s smotri izobraževanja odraslih namen Rosenove in Merrittove artikulacije intervence abstrakten in instrumentalen, njun pogled na opolnomočenje državljanov pa bolj restriktiven. V nasprotju z idejo človeške emancipacije je v središču Rosenove in Merrittove argumentacije abstraktni ideal javnega življenja.
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HONG ZHANG
INTERNACIONALIZACIJA KITAJSKE TELEVIZIJE: MANIFESTACIJE IN MEDSEBOJNI VPLIV MOČI, 1978-1991
Članek proučuje glavne značilnosti in dejavnike moči v začetni fazi globalizacije televizije v celinski Kitajski. Na podlagi raziskovanja dokumentov na različnih upravnih ravneh treh kitajskih televizijskih postaj in s pomočjo poglobljenih intervjujev s televizijskimi menedžerji, producenti in znanstveniki avtor trdi, da se je kitajska televizija internacionalizirala med letoma 1978 in 1991. Internacionalizacija televizije je bila opredeljena kot proces, ki ga je upravljala partijska država s prevzemanjem in preoblikovanjem mednarodno razširjanih televizijskih kulturnih form, z namenom vzpostaviti nacionalne medije in prevladujoče ideologije na Kitajskem. Argument sestoji iz treh delov. Avtor najprej dokazuje, kako je partijska države ublažila svojo sovražnost do tujcev na kitajski televiziji kot del nacionalnega projekta modernizacije v okviru spremenjenega sistema partijskega nadzora. Drugič, avtor dokazuje, kako so te politike uvedle mednarodne televizijske tokove in preoblikovale nekatere ključnih vidikov televizijske dejavnosti, zlasti upravljavske prakse, produkcijske vrednote in programske vsebine. Tretjič, avtor dokazuje, kako so bili partijska država in njeni odnosi z zahodnimi državami in mednarodnimi organizacijami najpomembnejši dejavnik, ki je vplival na kitajsko televizijo, kljub naraščajočemu vplivu tehnologij, tržnih sil in liberalnih intelektualcev v osemdesetih 20. stoletja.
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MEDIJSKE ŠTUDIJE IN DVOJNA DIALEKTIKA INFORMACIJE
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Avtorjeva teza je, da je informacija inherentno dialektična. Refleksija na zgodovinsko delo fizika Carla Friedricha von Weizsackerja pa odkrije, da je informacija dialektična v dvojnem pomenu. Prvi del članka pojasnjuje in utemeljuje to trditev. Drugi del članka navaja različna redukcionistična (ne-dialektična) stališča do informacije in predstavlja nekatere njihove posledice. Posledica te poenostavitve so zmede in tudi hude napake. Članek zaključuje kratek prikaz komunikacijskih teorij Harolda Innisa in Marshalla McLuhana kot primerov uveljavljanja dvojne dialektike informacije.
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YONG JIN PARK
TRŽNA FILOZOFIJA IN INFORMACIJSKA ZASEBNOST
Članek proučuje zgodovino oblikovanja politike ZDA do zasebnega pretoka informacij. Analiza ponuja nov pogled na pojem ideala trga v razpravah o zasebnosti in proučuje razvoj regulacije, v kateri je režim varovanja spletne informacijske zasebnosti proizvod aktivnega oblikovanja političnega načela. V analogiji z načelom raznolikosti v radiodifuziji je proučevana tudi uredba, ki zadeva proxy strežnike in omogoča zaščito zasebnosti prek skritih komercialnih naslovov. Avtor razpravlja tudi o alternativnih modelih internetne politike, ki segajo onkraj poenostavljene diho-tomije med trgom in vlado. V kritiki najnovejšega predloga »Seznama ne-sledenja« (Do Not Track List) ameriške Zvezne trgovinske komisije (FTC) avtor zagovarja tezo, da je treba z učinkovitim interventnim ukrepom v tržnem sistemu postaviti enostaven uporabniški vmesnik.
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NOTES FOR AUTHORS
Priprava rokopisov
Rokopise pošljite na naslov uredništva po elektronski pošti v formatu Microsoft Word/Windows. Če uporabljate drugačen urejevalnik besedil, shranite dokument v formatu Word. Zaradi lažjega anonimnega recenziranja naj bodo imena in naslovi avtorjev v posebnem dokumentu.
Maksimalna dolžina člankov je 50.000 znakov (8.000 besed). Besedilo pošljite z enojnim razmakom, uporabljajte črke Times Roman 12 in ne poravnavajte desnega roba. Vsak odstavek naj se začne z enojnim umikom. Med odstavki naj ne bo dodatnega razmika. Ne uporabljajte nobenih drugih urejevalnih orodij razen uporabe kurzive in mastnih črk.
Naslovi naj bodo kratki, jasni in ne daljši od sto znakov. Lahko uporabljate večje in mastne črke za ločevanje med različnimi ravnmi naslovov, vendar jih ne številčite. Naslovi prvega in drugega reda naj bodo v svoji vrsti, naslovi tretjega reda pa na začetku odstavka pred prvim stavkom.
Gradivo, citirano iz drugega vira, naj bo v dvojnih narekovajih; če je daljše od 300 znakov, naj bo v posebnem odstavku v kurzivi in z umikom od levega in desnega roba.
Vsaka tabela ali slika naj bosta na posebnem listu za seznamom citiranih del. Imeti mora zaporedno številko in kratek naslov. V besedilu naj bo označeno, kam je treba uvrstiti tabelo ali sliko ("Vstavi Tabelo 1 / Sliko 1"). Uporabljajte orodje za oblikovanje tabel v programu Word.
Reference, opombe in citati Reference v besedilu
Osnovna oblika citiranja v besediluje (Novak 1994). Za navajanje strani uporabljajte (Novak 1994, 7-8). Če citirate delo z več kot tremi avtorji, zapišite "in drugi" (Novak in drugi 1994). Za navajanje več del istega avtorja uporabite podpičje; če so dela izšla istega leta, jih ločujte s črkami abecede (Kosec 1934a; 1934b; 1936). Uporabite "n.d", če letnica publikacije ni znana.
Opombe
Za bistvene opombe ali navajanje neobičajnih virov uporabite opombe na koncu članka in jih označite z zaporednimi številkami, ki so nadpisane na ustreznih mestih v besedilu.
Informacija o avtorju in zahvale
Avtor naj bo predstavljen s polnim imenom in priimkom, institucijo, v kateri je zaposlen, in e-naslovom. Zahvale naj bodo zapisane na koncu besedila pred opombami.
Seznam citiranih del
Vsa dela, citirana v besedilu, naj bodo razvrščena pa abecednem vrstnem redu za opombami.
Članek v revijah:
Novak, Janez. 2003. Naslov članka. Javnost-The Public 10 (volumen), 3 (številka), 57-76 (strani).
Knjiga:
Novak, Janez in Peter Kodre. 2007. Naslov knjige: Podnaslov. Kraj: Izdajatelj.
Poglavje v knjigi:
Novak, Janez. 2006. Naslov poglavja. V: P. Kodre (ur.), Naslov knjige, 123-145. Kraj: Izdajatelj.
Navajanje internetnih virov:
Novak, Janez. N.d. Global Revolution. <http://www.javnost-thepublic.org/> Retrieved October 1, 2006.
Recenziranje
Uredništvo uporablja za vse članke obojestransko anonimni recenzentski postopek. Članke recenzirata dva recenzenta. Urednik lahko brez zunanjega recenzenta zavrne objavo neustreznega članka.
Manuscript Preparation
Manuscripts should be submitted electronically as e-mail attachments to the Editor in Microsoft Word for Windows format. If you are using another word-processing program, please save the file as Word for Windows documents. To facilitate blind review, names and affiliations of authors should be listed on a separate file.
Maximum length of articles is 50,000 characters (8,000 words). Single space your text, use preferably 12-point Times Roman and a ragged (not justified) right margin. Indent the first line of each paragraph with a single tab and use only one hard return between paragraphs. Do not lay out (design) your manuscript. Do not format text beyond the use of italics or, where necessary, boldface. Do not use headers and footers.
Headings in articles should be concise and descriptive and should not exceed one hundred characters. A few basic formatting features (larger font, bold) should be used to make clear what level each heading is. Major sub-heads should appear on a separate line; secondary sub-heads appear flush left preceding the first sentence of a paragraph. Do not number headings and subheadings.
Material quoted directly from another source should be in double quotation mark or set in a separate paragraph in italics with increased indent when longer than 300 characters.
Each table or figure must appear on a separate page after the Reference List. It should be numbered and carry a short title. Tables and figures are indicated in the manuscript in the order of their appearance ("Insert Table 1 / Figure 1 about here"). Use the table feature in Word to create tables.
References, Notes, and Citations References within the Text
The basic reference format is (Novak 1994). To cite a specific page or part: (Novak 1994, 7-8). Use "et al" when citing a work by more than three authors (Novak et al. 1994). The letters a, b, c, etc. should be used to distinguish different citations by the same author in the same year (Kosec 1934a; Kosec 1934b). Use "n.d" if the publication date is not available.
Notes
Essential notes, or citations of unusual sources, should be indicated by superscript numbers in the text and collected on a separate page at the end of the article.
Author Notes and Acknowledgements
Author notes identify authors by complete name, title, affiliation, and e-mail account. Acknowledgements may include information about financial support and other assistance in preparing the manuscript.
Reference List
All references cited in the text should be listed alphabetically and in full after the Notes.
Journal Article:
Novak, Janez. 2003. Title of Article. Javnost-The Public 10 (volume), 3 (number), 57-76 (pages).
Book:
Novak, Janez and Peter Kodre. 2007. Title of the Book: With Subtitle. Place: Publisher.
Chapter in a Book:
Novak, Janez. 2006. Title of the Chapter. In P. Kodre (ed.), Title of the Book, 123-145. Place: Publisher.
Electronic Citations and References:
Information that you get from the Internet should be documented, indicating the date of retrieval. Novak, Janez. N.d. Global Revolution. <http://www.javnost-thepublic.org/> Retrieved October 1, 2006.
Review Procedures
All unsolicited articles undergo double-blind peer review. In most cases, manuscripts are reviewed by two referees. The editor reserves the right to reject any unsuitable manuscript without requesting an external review.
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Izdajatelj: Fakulteta za družbene vede Univerze v Ljubljani za Evropski inštitut za komuniciranje in kulturo
Published by Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, for the European Institute for Communication and Culture
Editor
Slavko Splichal
Glavni urednik
Slavko Splichal
Oblikovanje naslovnice Miran Klenovšek Medja Karlson
Cover Design
Miran Klenovšek Medja Karlson
Typesetting
Karmen Zahariaš
Računalniški prelom Karmen Zahariaš
Tisk
LITTERA PICTA d.o.o. Rožna dolina c. IV/32-34 Ljubljana
Printing
LITTERA PICTA d.o.o. Rožna dolina c. IV/32-34 Ljubljana
Ljubljana
Slovenia
2011
Ljubljana 2011