Responsabilidad de Colseguros S.A

Following Peters (2007), public discourse can be understood as a means of cultural self- understanding that is based on a public culture which is produced and renewed by these discourses at the same time. Public culture in this sense must be regarded as a reservoir of symbols, meaning, knowledge, and values that are available to and should be interesting for a public collective (e.g., within a nation state) (Wessler & Wingert, 2007). Furthermore, the foundation of the public sphere and the discourses within are constructed by public culture. As Wessler and Wingert (2007) explain the term, summarizing Peters, a public culture consists of the language of the majority, and of familiar visual images, movies, songs, plays, and monuments, commonly used narratives, ceremonies, villains and heroes (p.16). These elements of the public culture form the basis of communication and understanding. They determine associations and basic principles for justifications. As such, they also influence the acceptance of decisions and attention for certain events and developments.

The classic understanding of the public sphere refers to it as a sphere of unconstrained public opinion formation and decision-making in a democratic society, a sphere that regulates public concerns (Peters, 2007, p. 59). Marcinkowski (2008) defines the term as follows:

The public sphere is an indispensable element of a democratic society and the institutional core of democratic decision-making. Every democratic political order is essentially based on the idea that citizens participate in collectively binding decisions, articulate their interests and opinions openly, listen and evaluate the opinions and arguments of others, and, on that basis, make up their minds. The public sphere establishes an arena of discussion on public affairs and guarantees that all these processes are open to the public. (Marcinkowski, 2008)

Beyond political issues of collective concern, debates on general orientation, normative principles and values as well as the engagement with a collective past and an assumed future are also part of public debates in the public sphere. However, as Peters (2007) summarizes Tönnis, public debates are not only supposed to form opinions, but also build the basis of motives and contribute to the collective decision-making.

According to the arena model of the public sphere by Ferree et al. (2002a), which helps us to image how the public sphere is constituted, public discourse is held in different forums. Every forum has an arena in which individual and collective actors present themselves, a gallery from where the active audience can follow the processes in the arena, and a backstage area where actors prepare themselves for the arena by planning their strategies and collecting ideas. There are different forums in a society, e.g., parliaments, courts, party conventions, scientific congresses, and the mass media. What is understood as the “public sphere” is the entirety of all these forums. The mass media have become a “master forum” (p.10) which is used by all actors of the other forums, whether as actors or as audience in the gallery. The mass media forum today is the main stage for political competition. However, discourses from the other forums (e.g. sports, science, law) are well presented in the mass media forum, although there is a process of selection and simplifying. Ferree et al. (2002b) emphasize that this mass media forum does not simply present current events, but that it influences society in return. The arena of the mass media forum is the stage in which actors formulate their statements and try to transport their messages, e.g., for a political project or for an organization they represent. Actors usually speak for collective actors (e.g., parties) and therefore always represent a part of the audience in the gallery. Journalists have a special role here. On the one hand, they are gatekeepers, deciding who is to be quoted and therefore who is to be recognized and taken to be important. On the other hand, journalists become actors, too, by framing, interpreting and commenting on events. Furthermore, the audience at the gallery does not only consist of individuals, because all members of the audience are somehow tied to collective identities, so-called “imagined communities” (p. 12), e.g., women, workers, environmentalists. Finally, the backstage area of the mass media forum plays a special role because this is where collective actors receive organized preparation. They are provided with strategic analysis, background material, and arguments. Actors without professional support in the backstage area of the mass media forum are disadvantaged in the competition of the arena. (Ferree, Gamson, Gerhards, & Rucht, 2002, pp. 9–13)

This heuristic model helps us to gather an understanding about how the public sphere is structured. But we need to go a step further if we want to understand how the actual processes within this setting work— especially about how the actual discourse is led, by whom, and why. As Ferree et al. (2002b) summarize, there are different theoretical assumptions about the actual constitution of the public sphere as well as different normative ideals on how the public sphere should function in a liberal, republican, deliberative and agonistic tradition of theory. The theories differ in various aspects, e.g., regarding the questions of who should be included in the debate, what kinds of communicative forms are acceptable, and what is a legitimate outcome of a debate. The four theories presented by Ferree et al. would all work as a foundation for a normative assessment. Normative assessment in general can help to provide a rationale for empirical research as well as a contextual foundation for the analysis (Althaus, 2012), which is also highly relevant for this study. While different normative assumptions would lead to different conclusions when evaluating the performance of the public debate and the media within it, it is important to be aware of the possibilities and limits that the application of a particular theory carries with it.

One of the theoretical strands with a long tradition builds on Habermas’ theory of communicative action and is known as deliberative theory. This theory has far reaching implications for democratic systems and presents a comprehensive understanding of communication in a society from the individual level to the mass media level. By and large, it draws a picture of a society that functions by communication between its members, who have to make collective decisions for which the exchange of information and rational arguments is an important foundation. On principle, everyone who is involved in some kind of (political) matter that requires collective action should have the chance to engage in the discourse on that issue. The ideas of the deliberative theory will be described in more detail in the next section, because they will be important to set the normative standards which are used in this work for evaluating the quality of narrative news writing. It is important to note at this point, however, that the basic ideas of deliberation theory are particularly relevant for a topic like climate change. Since climate change is an all-encompassing issue that affects everyone on the planet, one that requires collective action to be solved, deliberative theory provides a suitable standard for how societies should handle the process. Dealing with climate change requires an agreement about its causes and (expected) consequences as well as agreement about all possible solutions. While the scientific evidence for climate change is unambiguous, it

is nevertheless complex, and this complexity has to be represented adequately in the media discourse in order for people to comprehend (and accept) the implications. This complexity is increased by the profound questions of justice and responsibility related to the great variety of how people’s lives are affected by climate change in different parts of the world and within societies. Different perspectives need to be made visible to gather a complete picture. It is therefore necessary to display the wide range of aspects as completely as possible to grasp the phenomenon. Deliberative theory, as we will see in the next sections, provides a rationale in which such an exchange of different viewpoints is possible. As a normative theory that aims at finding the balance between different interests, it is especially suitable to investigate the climate change debate. The ideas of deliberative theory will therefore be used as a measuring stick to evaluate in how far narrative elements within news writing can help to approximate the ideal of deliberation. As Habermas himself noted, deliberation is a normative scale, because its complete implementation cannot be expected. It should be seen as a methodic fiction (Gerhards, 1997, p. 8). In my own study on the deliberative quality of narrative news, I will therefore not focus primarily on the question of whether or not narrative news fulfills deliberative criteria, but rather ask under which circumstances narrative news can have a positive impact (in a deliberative sense) on the public debate on climate change.