Center for Culture, Organizations and Politics - Previously Affiliated

This study tests Habermas’s contention that greater commercialization undermines the media’s capacity to serve as a public sphere, that is, to promote rational-critical public debate involving the widest possible citizen participation. Hypotheses about commercial and state effects on news production are tested via comparison of the commercially dominated American media and the state dominated French media. In news coverage of comparable protest events, the French media are more participatory, less rational in certain aspects and equally critical. The mezzo-organizational environment of the “journalistic field” is shown to mediate external pressures, accounting more fully for cross-national differences and similarities.