In this episode, we discuss the impact of digital media on one of the most important structures hosting the public arena, the news media.

From the eighteenth century onward, news media have been crucial structures hosting the public arena in Western societies. They provided information, made elites visible to publics, and publics visible to elites and to each other. In this, they never functioned without fault or were completely free from power structures in society. Their role, beneficial and detrimental, in hosting the public arena and serving democracy over time and in different countries has been well established. But for our purposes here, we will focus on three features of news media that matter strongly for the contemporary public arena: 

Chapters:

00:00 - Introduction
00:22 - News media as structures of the public arena
01:14 - News media as institutions
09:23 - Economic foundations of the news
16:23 - Alternative news media in the public arena
23:24 - Conclusion

Script:

http://digitalmedia.andreasjungherr.de/public_arena.html#news-media-as-structures-of-the-public-arena