Summary
Contents
The SAGE Key Concepts series provide students with accessible and authoritative knowledge of the essential topics in a variety of disciplines. Cross-referenced throughout, the format encourages critical evaluation through understanding. Written by experienced and respected academics, the books are indispensable study aids and guides to comprehension. Key Concepts in Journalism offers a systematic and accessible introduction to the terms, processes, and effects of journalism;a combination of practical considerations with theoretical issues; and further reading suggestions. The authors bring an enormous range of experience in newspaper and broadcast journalism, at national and regional level, as well as their teaching expertise. This book will be essential reading for students in journalism, and an invaluable reference tool for their professional careers.
Public Sphere
Public Sphere
A concept proposed and developed by the neo-Marxist Jürgen Habermas (1989), which describes a space for the free exchange of ideas through rational communication. Habermas argues that this space – ‘conceived as the sphere of private people come together as a public’ (1989: 27)–emerged as capitalist markets and institutions replaced the feudal centrality of the Church in defining social life. An increasingly powerful class (predominantly middle-class men), grounded in the philosophy and culture of the Enlightenment, created, for the first time, an opportunity and a channel to criticize the authority of the state (Harrison, 2000: 19). Thus, the public sphere is simultaneously an intellectual space, a deliberative democratic space as well as an institutional space, centred on coffee houses, theatres, debating societies, ...