The Role of Media in the public Sphere

As the internet continues to grow and expand exponentially, the role that media plays in the society, and specifically within the public sphere is changing. In the Week 4 Lecture, it was established that as populations continue to grow, the media has also become an important tool to the public sphere, on the basis of its ability to provide oversight and retain its role as an agent of information and shaping the opinions of people. Kaiser et al. (2018, p. 440) explain that opinions that seem to matter include only those linked to a majority of people in a population or society. In line with this assertion, the definition of public sphere and opinion relates to a concept of a majority, meaning that the role of the media is to feed the masses in a way that creates opinions, debates, and establishes a majority opinion.

The media controls the public sphere in the modern environment because it occupies virtually every aspect of life today. According to Bainbridge (2015), find that people are now controlled by media as it is a ‘natural’ component of their daily life. The examples given in their study include how mobile phones have become a medium of media, expanding the sphere of spreading information to the masses in an instance and anywhere (Bainbridge, 2015, p.5). The media has become a major influencer of how societies view certain elements of life such as romance, crime, music, entertainment, lavish lifestyles, and so on. Today, media components such as broadcast news are created to address audiences directly. For example, the recent political climate in the United States showed just how media can be used to direct, dictate, and drive political narratives, with big media houses like CNN and FOX News going against each other to support individual candidates, spread news, all in an attempt to control how the masses view different topics. Issues like systemic racism, gun control, and other societal issues can be controlled easily using the media. Therefore, the media is a control agent in the public sphere.

Inadvertently, the media has a myriad of roles that can be summarized into a watchdog or oversight role and a source of news in a vested interest type of way (Week 4 Lecture). The public sphere is a tool that determines how well a society functions through the discussions and freedom of debating on different issues of a society. Bainbridge (2015, p.16) terms it as an index of the health of public discussions and societal democracy. In my interpretation, this role of the media in the public sphere can span from an oversight role that keeps other societal functions in check to a manipulative role of profit making that uses whatever narrative is available to further vested interests. For example, the ownership and use of Facebook and other applications linked to the cite show just how manipulative the media can be, as evidenced in the recent cases of political interference from the media giant. In the end, the media’s role is seen to be quite diverse, taking on different elements in a dual functioning that sometimes demand oversight on other public functions such as governments to sometimes use of their reach to further private and vested interests.

Reference List

Bainbridge, J., Goc, N. and Tynan, L., 2008. Media and journalism: New approaches to theory

and practice. Oxford University Press.

Kaiser, J., Fähnrich, B., Rhomberg, M. and Filzmaier, P., 2017. What happened to the public

sphere? the networked public sphere and public opinion formation. Handbook of Cyber-Development, Cyber-Democracy, and Cyber-Defense. Springer, Cham.

Week 4 Lecture 54040 Notes