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CHAPTER 2. THE PUBLIC SPHERE 29
Habermas links the changing function of the press in relationship to the liberal
public sphere both to its emergence as a commercial force, and, somewhat paradoxically,
to the establishment of the right to a press free to publish critical commentary
of the state. The press replaced the system of private correspondence
and institutions of sociability (the salon, the coffee house, etc.) as the preeminent
institutions of the public sphere once it acquired an editorial function – inserted
between the gathering and the publication of news – and once the political functions
of newspapers became as important as their economic purposes. As Habermas
(1989, 183) explains, however, newspaper publishers “procured for the press
a commercial basis without commercializing it:”
A press that had evolved out of the public’s use of its reason and that had
merely been an extension of its debate remained thoroughly an institution
of this very public: effective in the mode of a transmitter and amplifier, no
longer a mere vehicle for the transportation of information but not yet a
medium for culture as an object of consumption.
As long as the state contested the mere existence of a press that critically examined
its actions, the press itself was involved in the ongoing “struggle over the
range of freedom to be granted to public opinion and over publicity as a principle”
(Habermas 1989, 184). Once the battle was won – that is, once the political
public sphere was legally protected by the very state that contested its existence
– the press was able to eschew ideology and concentrate on profit making. The
trend of the press away from the idealized public sphere was only exacerbated by
technological developments which required ever larger bases of capital to support
the growing enterprises.
Habermas (1989, 192) rejects, however, the notion that the introduction of advertising
into the publications of the public sphere did, in and of itself, transform the
public sphere, laying the blame, at it were, on “public relations:”
Just as the daily newspapers roughly since the second third of the last century
began to differentiate a classified section from the editorial one, so too a
separation of the publicist functions (into a public rational-critical debate
of private people as a public and a public presentation of either individual
or collective private interests) could have left the public realm essentially
untouched.
However, such a public sphere as an element in the economic realm split
off, as it were, from the political one – a public sphere independent in provenance
of commercial advertising – never reached the point of crystallization.