Abstract
John Nerone’s argument in this book is that the role of the media in liberal democracies is not simply to supply information on the basis of which people can make up their minds about major social issues and political topics, and so decide how to vote, but rather to represent the public by acting as the public in the halls of power, and by taking the part of the public in response to particular events and historical developments. He regards journalism in his own lifetime – he is now Professor Emeritus of Communications Research at the University of Illinois – as the most compelling mechanism for representing public opinion, even though the mechanism was faulty and inadequate. But as anyone who knows his work would expect, Nerone takes a much longer-term historical perspective than that provided by his own lifetime, starting with the rise of the printing press and the invention of the newspaper before looking at further key moments of change through which news has become transformed. These are the rise of liberal political regimes, the integration of the press into systems of mass politics, commercialisation and the market revolution, industrialisation and professionalisation. The final moment is the most unclear since it comprises contemporary lines of force that operate in different ways. Each of these moments have contributed, and in varying degrees of influence continue to contribute, to what media systems do in representing the public. A self-confessed limitation of the book is its Anglophone focus, with the United States being predominant, but aside from this it is refreshing in challenging some of the well-worn assumptions and shibboleths of journalism, and in avoiding mediacentrism and all-too-neat historical narratives. The book is to be welcomed most of all because of its historical understanding and outlook on the whole broad question of democratic communication and what we can take from the past in thinking of what is possible.