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Likewise, those hankering for visibility in the media, such as the lead-
ers of political parties or oppositional groups like Sea Shepherds, often
phrase their discourses in terms of 'the public interest'. As Barnett rightly
argues,
...
a public
appear[s] through representative acts of being spoken for and
spoken to
Any public utterance does what it says, it brings into being
what it presupposes to exist already as the condition of getting off the
ground.
...
(Barnett, 2008: 411-12)
This doesn't mean that 'the public' is a
fiction
or that there's a
single
public
within any democratic political unit (or more broadly); instead, it means
that the mass media is key to constituting and reconstituting publics and
public issues on a continuous basis. 'Publics are always in the making,' as
the editors of
Rethinking the public
correctly observe (Mahony
et al.
, 2010: 8),
because there's a
variety
of ways in which members of any public can be
interpellated by mass mediated representations of what 'the public' should
care about, who is implicated and what should be done:
a public is not best thought of as a pre-existing collective subject that straight-
forwardly expresses itself or offers itself up to be represented. Rather,
...
publics,
in the plural, are called into existence, or summoned.
(ibid.: 2)
From the perspective of citizens the mass media is thus both an invalu-
able
resource
and a potential
threat
. The threat arises because, without proper
internal and external regulation, the mass media can hollow out (or debase)
few citizens ever get to involve themselves in its internal affairs. Indeed,
in a real sense, citizens don't know what their 'public' needs and wants
are
without the mass media, which gives the latter considerable 'power to'.
For instance, opinion polls organised by television news programmes can
ventriloquise 'public attitudes' towards an issue or event, rather than giv-
ing people the opportunity to share their more complex and considered
assessments. Relatedly, political parties and private companies utilise 'spin'
and 'public relations' professionals in order to engage in what critics, after
the public is a weighty epistemic responsibility and one that can be dis-
charged for the wrong reasons and towards highly particularistic ends. This
is why many countries decided many decades ago to create public media
organisations existing at arm's length from the national state and free from
the profit motive of private companies. Such organisations are intended to
give citizens a nutritious and varied menu of materials that inform, edify
and entertain, often by challenging the norms of their own society. Increas-
ingly, however, they exist in a global media industry that's dominated by