Habermas and The Public Sphere

The Case of Gibraltar and Curran

On March 6, 1988, in Gibraltar, three members of the Irish Republican Army were shot and killed by the British military on the premise of suspected terrorism, and this was published on official reports by the public broadcasting services like the BBC and even privatised media corporations as the true fashion of events. However, many suspicions were raised on the nature of the shootings, primarily the lack of weapons and arms found on the three persons and the immediate aggression by the British, but these suspicions were not published by any of the news agencies.
James Curran (1991) criticized the state of media regulation, calling it a situation where “state-linked watchdogs bark, while private watchdogs sleep”. Curran’s analysis of the coverage of the Gibraltar shootings shines light on the fact that media that is regulated by the government are constrained by their political ties to report as advised by the state and the private media companies, who are free of state interference and would ideally hold the government accountable, end up parroting the narrative put forth by their state-run counterparts due to their own commercial incentives and political leverages.

Habermas’ Theory of Public Sphere and its Criticisms

Habermas (1991) discusses the idea of a public sphere, wherein the public communication plays an imperative and active role in democratic functioning and government policy deliberations. In this sphere, people of the public come together on an “equal” front with “shared causes” and engage in a “ration-critical debate” on the functioning of society, protected from the interference of the “state and economic powers”. This discussion, according to the German philosopher, is essential to society as it empowers the public politically to hold their government accountable and become unified under a consensus.

Curran’s take directly links into Jürgen Habermas’ theory of Public Sphere as it shows the failure of the sphere. At the time, the narratives of the shootings were influenced and manipulated by the state and the information that was available to the public to engage in a political discussion as envisioned by Habermas was distorted, hence an informed consensus was not reached. Garnham (1986) also writes a critical view of the public sphere theory, saying that the theory was conceptualized originally in 1962, at a time when the society had many variables affecting its functioning that do not exist in today’s world. One of the main ones, says Garnham, is the monopoly of the bourgeoisie class on public communication wherein the upper class take the stance of representation of the wider public and their conclusions is adopted as the larger consensus, a criticism that Habermas puts forward and can be seen happening in the 1988 shootings.

Another criticism by Garnham is about Habermas’ false assumption that the public is always “fully knowledgeable” and equipped with adequate information to engage in the desired discussion and are also always willing to participate in such communications and this criticism is also apparent in the distorted truth floating in the news market in 1988.

Breese (2011) brings another assessment of the theory, claiming that Habermas assumes the existence of only one public in which everyone is “equal” and in agreement on all fronts, but this assumption is incorrect due to the “multiplicity and range” of opinions, backgrounds, cultures, and other social variables. Breese highlights Hannah Arendt’s 1958 theory of the public sphere in which she acknowledged more than one public sphere, that of private and public and where the inconsistencies of Habermas’ theory are not reflected, particularly where Arendt idealizes “pluralism” of ideas and promotes “action” over discussion as opposed to Habermas’ ideas of consensus and communication.

The digitalization of the media landscape

However, as the world develops in a faster pace than imaginable, the public sphere theory, by both Habermas and Arendt, do not consider the technological advancements and the globalization factors that affect information dissemination and media regulation and ownership.

There has been a steep decline in the use of traditional media, like newspapers and radio, as a medium of broadcasting news. The audience is turning to digital media as their primary sources of information, and this is increasing exponentially as the population’s access to the World Wide Web is also rising. Kemp (2023) records that over 65% of the world’s population has access to mobile phones, and almost all of them have unrestricted access to the Internet. 4.7 billion people are also on social media which is slowly becoming the number one source of news for the majority of the audience.

This drastic and widespread increase of internet access has achieved one of the conditions of Habermas’ theory on a large scale – providing the public with a platform to conduct the rational-critical debate. In this digital landscape, any event can become accessible to a “potentially unlimited audience” even if it was not intended to do so. This empowers the public to be socially active and politically involved. At the same time, this widely accessible and cheap platform becomes subject to interventions by many groups of people, from politicians, conglomerates, and even website owners, who manipulate and dispense targeted consumer marketing schemes to influence public communication (Eisenegger and Schäfer, 2023). All in all, digital media becomes capitalism oriented.

Ownership of the media

Fuchs (2021) highlighted the increasing influence of “profit-oriented corporations”, saying that while the digital market was expanding as the cost of access is very cheap, it was also narrowing itself to the hands of oligopoly. Fuchs, like Eisseneger and Schafer, goes on to say that the digital public sphere hinges on capitalism and is public “only in appearance” and more commercial. He talks of “public service internet” in which people engage in democratic and “non-capitalistic” discussions, but these are far and few in between and are faced with the danger of being capitalized or taken over by the aforementioned corporations.

Curran (1991) also adopts a similar viewpoint of media ownership in the digital age to say that the private media companies are not “independent watchdogs” that promote public interest and good but are instead “self-seeking mercenaries” that promote private interests. He cites an example in Australia where a group of media entrepreneurs forged an alliance with the government, a deal which entailed the assurance of their monopoly over the media market in exchange for “editorial endorsements” and imbalanced political campaign marketing. This, paired with the coverage of the Gibraltar case proves the criticism that the digital public sphere, though widespread, suffers at the hands of privatized ownerships of some multi-million-dollar conglomerates.

The Israel-Palestine conflict is a prime example of the censorship that the media companies put on, what was supposed to be, open and free public political discussion and action. Meta, a multinational media company that owns platforms like Instagram and Facebook, began and automated censorship of pro-Palestine voices, posts, and discussions on their platforms. But this censorship was not balanced, as posts that promoted the opposing party, Israel, where not supressed in the same manner (Younes, 2024). This is a clear display that the organization, rather than providing a safe landscape for discussion, regulates the communication channels to propagate their own political and economical interests.

Fragmentation, misinformation, and the negative impact of virtual sphere

Another disadvantage that the digitalization of the public sphere brings is the “fragmentation” of the public itself. For one, just the access and presence of the public on the internet does not guarantee an extensive “political discourse” or that everyone will take part in it. Much like the pre-digital public sphere, the conversations are dominated by a select few, the digital “elite”, despite the access to all possible sources of information. This wide variety of available information contributes to the specialization of “discussion groups” where people often prefer breaking off into smaller cliques and discussing hyper-specialized topics of common interest and due to the numerous “fragmented public spaces” the information received is also fragmented and only snippets of the larger truth. These further form “echo chambers” where the information that is received by the fragmented public only reinforces their set of beliefs and leaves out contrasting perspectives or truths. The effect of discussion is mitigated because of the incomplete and filtered information on random topics and the desired public sphere is not created (Papacharissi, 2002).

This sort of fragmented news ends up circulating the internet and with lack of context, transforms into misinformation or “fake news”. The circulation of this is largely credited to the ownership of the media platforms. Large corporations like Meta, X, Google, and more, utilise artificial intelligence and other “data-driven recommender systems” of the internet to censor, streamline, filter, and disseminate information based on digital transaction histories of users and the surfing patterns of the audience. AI that autonomously creates information through reading of past data flood the “public arena” with misleading information that seems plausible due to its nature of presentation (Jungherr and Schroeder, 2023).

The fragmentation, use of AI, and the subsequent generation of fake news, paired with the commercialization of news by capitalist media corporation owners distorts public discussion, much like the events in the 2016 U.S elections. Allcott and Gentzkow (2017) evaluate the fake news that circulated social media during the aforementioned period and find that the fragmentation of individuals allowed the fostering of fake news. The format of social media that only gave “thin slices of information” that made it difficult to verify, the money-hungry organizations that wrote misleading and falsely scandalous pieces of news to garner more traffic and revenue, and the small and heterogenous public spheres that had differing ideologies, political views, or even varying platforms (some in Facebook, some in Instagram, and other such websites) colluded to garble the true events of the elections and therefore divert the political conversation, leading to the victory of President Trump.

Additionally, the easily accessible platform and the convenient curtain of anonymity on social media gives rise to more problems, like people “altering their behaviours” and views according to the larger opinion that is so readily available or using the platform with such a wide reach to promote “personal benefits” or harmful ideologies, and both of these interactions with the so-called “digital public sphere” destroy the notion itself (Eisenegger and Schäfer, 2023).

Suovilla et al. (2020) conducted research on the #MeToo Movement and how the digital public sphere, specifically the one on the social media platform of Twitter (now X), allowed for the movement to succeed in a certain way. The platform created the concept of “hashtag-mediated public sphere” to spearhead public discussion under a common banner and cause. The “anonymity” that Twitter provided allowed many women that were victims of sexual violence to come forward. But this very anonymity also paved the way for many individuals to act “destructively” by spreading hate and engaging in “online abuse” towards women.

Media regulation by the state

Despite the many examples of the failure of the public sphere in today’s “virtual” public sphere, there are still many consistencies with the original “normative” idea by Habermas, says Mahlouly (2013). Mahlouly comments on the above-mentioned pressures on public sphere, that is the capitalistic and “economic parameters” of technological conglomerates and equates it to the political and commercial pressures that gave birth to the bourgeois dominance in the public sphere. Secondly, the rise of “amateurism” where everyone is a potential contributor due to the ease of access is like the vision of Habermas who regarded the individual “subjectivities” to be beneficial to the rational conversations.

Yet, according to Mahlouly, the digital format of public engagement in politics is superficial and is not sustainable as a representative sphere due to the various factors of ownership and regulation affecting its free market functioning.

Media regulation by the state, even in the digital era, is still existent in many ways. Habermas himself, in later works, notes the small interference of state towards providing the public with a protected platform to conducted critical conversations but beyond said provision would directly impede the basic raison d’etre of the public sphere.

As discussed so far in the essay, the virtual sphere has many factors that interfere with its theorized functioning, specifically of ownership by capitalistic companies. Bolzan and Marden (2015) cite several instances where countries like Venezuela, Argentina, and England, imposed regulations on the functioning of the press, based on the assumption that the oligopolies that controlled the media had “distorted its role” by manipulating audience perspectives rather than restricting their platforms to reproducing concerns that arose “spontaneously in civil society”.
However, say the scholars, such reasoning undermines the evolved role of journalism and media in the digital era. Rather than being only a stage for discussion, the media has become a sphere where individuals can form their own “realities” and social identities, and public opinion is formed “almost immediately”. State regulation will limit this and the public sphere that is existent in the technological platforms will dissipate.
Indirect state regulations also float around. For many privatized media corporations, access to the state information is pivotal and this is achieved through “negotiated agreements” between the two institutions, much like the case of Australia mentioned by Curran in his work. There are pressures put by the “state officials” on private journalists to limit the criticism of the government in the media through threats of legal actions and political pressures (Barrat, 1986). Once again, the information available to the public is orchestrated rather than pure.

Yet, government intervention in the digital sphere has not always been successful, as is apparent in the case of the Arab Spring, which was analysed by scholars Howard and Hussain (2013). When Mohammed Bouazizi immolated himself on the streets of Tunisia, when Khaled Said was brutally beaten to death by corrupt police officials in Egypt or when Neda Agha-Soltan was shot by a sniper during a demonstration in Tehran, social media and the virtual network of discussion empowered social protests. The government attempted in each case and in each country to shut down the digital network but the vast amount of routes available for online communication, both intranational and transnational, people organized political action with “a speed and on a scale never seen before”, leading to the success of the public sphere in holding the government accountable for its actions and defining a political stance under a unified consensus.

CONCLUSION

Habermas’ theory of public sphere, in the modern, technologically motivated media landscape, falls short in relevancy. While it is true that the complex network and widespread platform provided by the internet increases communication and availability of opportunities to engage in discourse theoretically, the manifestation of it in a tangible and quantifiable manner in real-life does not occur due to various constraints put forward by capitalistic ownership, political and economical pressures, and fragmentation of the online public. In the cases detailed above, such as the Arab Spring or the #MeToo Movement, the public was indeed unified to lead a social demonstration, but this is much too temporary and circumstantial for it to materialize as Habermas’ public sphere. The digitalization of the media has empowered people, but it has also subdivided them, with the commercialization and commodification of information making it even more difficult to unite the global audience under the single, permanent, and rational consensus that Habermas idealized in his theory.












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