Democratic Public Discourse Research Articles

How Public Service Media Disinformation Shapes Hungarian Public Discourse

The structure of the illiberal Hungarian media system is well documented. Fewer publications address the question of how disinformation is reshaping public discourse in Hungary. The most important feature of disinformation in Hungary is that it is often generated and disseminated by the pro-government media. This is certainly unusual, as in other EU countries it is typically the fringe media which are responsible for spreading disinformation. The Russian war against Ukraine illustrates how the disinformation ecosystem works in Hungary, and it also reveals its devastating impact on democratic public discourse. Public service media play a prominent role in spreading disinformation. We were able to identify several false narratives in the period of the first year since the start of the war. In the first few months of the war, a key element of disinformation that was being spread in Hungary suggested that Ukraine had provoked the armed conflict. Later, the prevailing message was that only Hungary wanted peace, while the Western powers were interested in a continuation of the war. During autumn, the focus of the disinformation campaign increasingly shifted to the EU, disseminating an anti-EU message that was more concerned with the sanctions than the war. The pro-government media constantly told news consumers that the economic difficulties and the rise in energy prices had not been caused by the war launched by Russia but by the sanctions that the EU had imposed in response to the aggression. Public opinion research clearly shows the impact of these narratives on the perceptions of the Hungarian public. The polls readily capture how the Hungarian public’s opinion has changed over time. This study is primarily based on a content analysis of the relevant shows of the M1 public television channel, but we have also relied on some insights from public opinion polls to inform our analysis.

Mapping Exposure Diversity: The Divergent Effects of Algorithmic Curation on News Consumption

Abstract Diversity is a crucial precondition for a democratic public discourse. In today’s high-choice media environments, exposure to diverse news is largely determined by individuals’ personal selection. Yet these decisions are increasingly shaped by online platforms, whose curation mechanisms may serve to expand or contract the diversity of encountered content. In a major extension of existing research, we show that positive short-term effects of platforms mask detrimental long-term effects. Drawing on a four-month tracking dataset and a comprehensive content analysis covering the online news consumption of over 10,000 German citizens, we demonstrate that even though short-term usage of platforms uniformly increases exposure diversity, long-term reliance can lead to decreases. In addition, platforms vary in their influences: News aggregators are beneficial to exposure diversity, while Twitter and search engines have a limiting effect; Facebook offers no significant influence.

Somebody Else’s Problem as a Practice in the Identity Discourse

The article presents the characteristics of various types of collective identities: hard, programmatic, soft, pluralistic, and proposes an outline of the concept of reflective identity as essential for democratic public discourse. Moreover, the practice of invalidation in the public discourse has been analyzed. Articulated invalidation and silent invalidation have been articulated as two communicative practices and their characteristics. The article presents the social and psychological reasons for invalidation as a practice of public discourse.

Double harm to voters: data-driven micro-targeting and democratic public discourse

Double harm to voters: data-driven micro-targeting and democratic public discourse

The Dangers of Hate Propaganda: Why Ethiopia Needs Democratic Militancy

The philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson said “the ancestor of every action is thought”. Emerson’s observation is also true in that speech is also the accessor of most political actions and historically responsible for various forms of mass atrocities. As much as freedom of expression gives vitality to democratic public discourse, it has also historically played a significant role in fomenting hatred and animosity and inciting despicable violence against particular groups of society. While it is true that the roots of genocidal violence — such as those against six million Jews in and close to one million Rwandans — have complex historical and socio-political factors, the historical evidence shows clearly that hate propaganda and incitement of genocidal violence had a significant role in those atrocities

Rage inside the machine

According to an influential objection, which Martha Nussbaum has powerfully restated, expressing anger in democratic public discourse is counterproductive from the standpoint of justice. To resist this challenge, this article articulates a crucial yet underappreciated sense in which angry discourse is epistemically productive. Drawing on recent developments in the philosophy of emotion, which emphasize the distinctive phenomenology of emotion, I argue that conveying anger to one’s listeners is epistemically valuable in two respects: first, it can direct listeners’ attention to elusive morally relevant features of the situation; second, it enables them to register injustices that their existing evaluative categories are not yet suited to capturing. Thus, when employed skillfully, angry speech promotes a greater understanding of existing injustices. This epistemic role is indispensable in highly divided societies, where the injustices endured by some groups are often invisible to, or misunderstood by, other groups. Finally, I defuse the most forceful objections to this defense – that anger is likely to be manipulated, that it is epistemically misleading, and that my defense presupposes unrealistic levels of trust – partly by showing that they overlook the systemic character of democratic discourse.

Visualizing Disposability: Photographing Neoliberal Conflict in the United States

On July 6, 2016, millions of viewers watched Diamond Lavish Reynolds's live Facebook video of Philando Castile bleeding to death after having been shot by a Minnesota police officer during a traffic stop. She knew, even as her fiancee sat dying and the police officer continued to point his gun through the car window, how important it was to have proof of that violence and to make that proof public. The first thing she said as she began filming from the passenger seat is stay with me--and it is unclear whether she is speaking to Castile or to us, the viewers and complicit witnesses to yet another police shooting of a black man. What is powerful about Reynolds's video is its articulation of the lethal danger faced by marginalized populations in the United States, as well as the video's contextualization within an ever-widening range of documents of state violence--from photojournalism to graphic representations in popular culture--with which viewers are confronted on a daily basis. The proliferation of such visualizations sustains the decades-long debate about images of violence and their ethical and political usefulness, and amid the sheer volume of images it becomes increasingly clear that greater quantities of more graphic images do not necessarily signal a corresponding jump in awareness or attention. This conundrum, fueled by the digital age and widening distribution of images, has unsettled photography at large and placed the photographic treatment of conflict in a state of flux, characterized by both the shifting forms and content of atrocity images. What has been termed post-photography (1)--describing, among other things, digital preponderance, the blending of previously discrete photographic approaches, and the rising use of found images, bricolage, and collaborative approaches has emerged increasingly in the documentation of conflict. The landscape of war photography is forced to adapt as journalistic access is restricted, the prosecution of war is increasingly digital and remote, and photographers struggle ethically and aesthetically to make sense of enduring states of conflict. Traditional photojournalism is often unable to respond to the growing discomfort with the hierarchical relationships between photographer, audience, and subject, or to the enduring visual traffic in Western stereotypes about brown and black bodies. The politically influential mode of photojournalism that emerged during the Vietnam War has been steadily dismantled by several material factors within the visual economy, including labor insecurity as secure staff assignments and investigative journalism are replaced by rapid story turnover, the popularity of citizen journalism, the rising dominance of uninsured contract work, and diminishing journalistic freedom. As a result of this shifting landscape, photographing conflict that is characterized by evolving forms of precarity and disguised forms of warfare requires new approaches that engage self-consciously with the role and state of photography itself. While photographs are crucial for translating combat across geographical and cultural distances, contemporary photographers must contend with the complexity of neoliberal conflict's domestic dimension in the US. Powerful narratives about threats to American safety are deployed to foment domestic militarization just as much as they are utilized to justify international military intervention. Such militarization includes the evisceration of due process and privacy through the 2001 USA Patriot Act and ensuing NSA transgressions; the arming of state police forces with surplus military equipment; draconian policies that overwhelmingly target people of color, the poor, and those with dissenting opinions; and the institutional barriers in place that prevent collective organization, protest, or the sustenance of productive and democratic public discourse. (2) These deformations are implemented through the solicitation of consent to certain types of violence and infringements of rights, guided in large part by the visualization and public representation of war and violence. …

Authenticity and Carrier Agents: The Social Construction of Political Gaffes

Political campaigns require constant performance from politicians. This presents ample opportunity for the occurrence of political gaffes. While it is not surprising that political gaffes can have a major impact on political campaigns, the process by which a gaffe is transformed into a meaning‐laden defining campaign event is underanalyzed. To address this, we analyze and reconstruct the media trajectory of three instances, two involving Senate candidates (George Allen and Todd Akin) and one a presidential candidate (Mitt Romney), in which gaffes were constructed into meaning‐laden events. We find that constructing a political gaffe as a meaning‐laden event is a deeply social process. Our research highlights the impact of sousveillance (surveillance from below) and the difficulty that political performers have maintaining consistent “authentic” performances. Recounting the trajectories of these three gaffes allows for a detailing of the diverse methods by which the hybrid media system was effectively mobilized by “carrier agents” (actors with narrative capacity and media know‐how). Further, we find that these gaffes proved particularly salient because they were interpreted as embodying an authentic representation of the candidate while simultaneously violating emergent norms of inclusive democratic public discourse.

Explicating media, governance, and capitalism: A critical comparative analysis of historical cases

Ample literature argues that media is vital for the functioning of democratic public discourse and helps other firms comply with effective governance. While scholars have focused on understanding media’s impact on corporate governance, they have not thoroughly investigated how media companies are governed. Accordingly, we adopt a qualitative and comparative historical case narrative approach for investigating and analyzing corporate governance in commercial media firms. The paper contributes nuanced and critical insights into governance practices in the context of institutional change. Our evidence suggests that commercial media, suffering from firm governance challenges, may not have the collective capacity to effectively function as meaningful discursive components in capitalist systems. The paper concludes with a critical discussion and additional areas for future research.

Rhythm, rhyme and reason: hip hop expressivity as political discourse

AbstractUsing Norwegian hip hop as an example, this article argues that public sphere theory offers a fruitful theoretical framework in which to understand the political significance of music. Based on a musical and lyrical analysis of Lars Vaular's ‘Kem Skjøt Siv Jensen’ (Who Shot Siv Jensen) – a song that recently became the subject of extensive public political discourse in Norway – this article first highlights how the aesthetic language specific to hip hop music constitutes a form of political discourse that may be particularly effective in addressing and engaging publics. Further, the analysis brings attention to how hip hop music is characterised by phatic, rhetoric, affective and dramatic modes of communication that may be of value to democratic public discourse. Lastly, this article examines the expressive output of ‘Kem Skjøt Siv Jensen’ in light of Habermas' concept of communicative rationality. In conclusion, the article contends that the dichotomy between (‘rational’) verbal argument and (‘irrational’) musical expressivity constructed within public sphere theory is contrived and, moreover, that hip hop expressivity under certain conditions does conform to the standards of communicative rationality.

William F. May, Testing the National Covenant

In 1985, Robert Bellah and his co-authors published the first edition of Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. It was an instant classic—a profound cultural analysis of American individualism and a sophisticated moral Jeremiad against its destructive consequences. The problem, as they identified it, was not the presence of individualism in American culture, but its growing tyranny over the moral imagination of the American people. Their remedy was to strengthen other significant, yet neglected, strands of the American cultural conversation, including, especially, its biblical and republican heritage. American social life and democratic public discourse required, they proposed, a richer, more communally oriented set of moral resources than individualism alone could provide. Over a quarter century later, William F. May’s Testing the National Covenant: Fears and Appetites in American Politics makes a similar argument in a different historical context. In fact, May’s volume can be seen, in style and substance, as an heir to that classic work. Testing the National Covenant is a profound theological and moral Jeremiad against possessive individualism and social contract liberalism. Like Habits of the Heart, it does not so much propose to eliminate individualism from the American cultural consciousness—as though that were even possible—but to point out its moral insufficiency and restrain its hegemonic pretensions. And also like Habits of the Heart, May’s volume enriches the moral

Framing sustainability: A case study analysis of the environment and sustainability discourse in the Indian English language press

The definition and local cultural adoption of globally generated terms such as environment and sustainable development happen largely through an imbricated process of meaning negotiation within democratic public discourse. Framing behaviour by media and influential opinion makers shapes and moulds local and national discourse about environment and sustainability, particularly in developing countries where pro-development forces face off against pro-conservation groups over resource use choices. Using elements of framing and grounded theory, a qualitative interpretive case study analysis of environment and sustainability related articles from a leading English language fortnightly magazine in India reveals that highly emotive frames are being used in media construction of the environment and sustainability discourse in India. While the research findings suggest that stock themes from the international framing repertoire are in use, they also indicate that distinctive new frames are being employed that could assist in instigating social change and refashioning public attitudes.

Pluralism, Slippery Slopes and Democratic Public Discourse

Agonist theorists have argued against deliberative democrats that democratic institutions should not seek to establish a rational consensus, but rather allow political disagreements to be expressed in an adversarial form. But democratic agonism is not antagonism: some restriction of the plurality of admissible expressions is not incompatible with a legitimate public sphere. However, is it generally possible to grant this distinction between antagonism and agonism without accepting normative standards in public discourse that saliently resemble those advocated by (some) deliberative democrats? In this paper we provide an analysis of one important aspect of political communication, the use of slippery slope arguments, and show that the fact of pluralism weakens the agonists’ case for contestation as a sufficient ingredient for appropriately democratic public discourse. We illustrate that contention by identifying two specific kinds of what we call pluralism slippery slopes, i.e. mechanisms whereby pluralism reinforces the efficacy of slippery slope arguments.

Deliberate conflict: argument, political theory, and composition classes

In Deliberate Conflict: Models of the Public Sphere and the Teaching of Argument, Patricia Roberts-Miller argues that much current discourse about argument pedagogy is hampered by fundamental unspoken disagreements over what democratic public discourse should look like. The book's pivotal question asks: in what kind of public discourse do we want our students to engage? To answer this, the text provides a taxonomy, discussion, and evaluation of political theories underpinning democratic discourse, highlighting the relationship between various models of the public sphere and rhetorical theory. Roberts-Miller seeks to diffuse student antagonism toward argumentation challenging the assumption that the nature of public participation is implicit. She holds that the lack of awareness of different models of democracy in argument pedagogy is not an indication of consensus. To address this concern, she provides a range of theories, discussing the major features and rhetorical applicability of the liberal, the interest-based, the communitarian, and the deliberative models of the public domain. Deliberate Conflict makes a cogent case for reintegrating instruction in argumentation into the composition curriculum. By linking the ability to argue effectively in the public sphere with the ability to effect social change, Roberts-Miller pushes compositionists beyond a simplistic Aristotelian conception of how argumentation works, and offers a means by which to prepare students for active participation in public discourse.

Professing Democracy: An Historian's Guide

This book fits the criteria for inclusion on Beard's reading list. Its author skillfully sifts through the past to find actions and ideas that provide practical guidance for readers who may be lost in the epistomological quandaries and cultural battles of contemporary academic life. Mining the record of intellectual history that extends from the early nineteenth century up through the 1950s, Bender retrieves copious examples, admonitions, advice, and inspiration to persuade scholars to venture outside the academy and into democratic public discourse. Bender's positive, generous, civil voice injects a soothing dose of optimism into current academic