Introduction: journalism, democracy and the critique of political culture

This 14,500 word Introduction is intended as a significant intervention in the debates over citizenship, media use, investigative journalism, and democracy.

Abstract in two paragraphs: Normative models of democratic politics work on the assumption that a truly informed citizenship requires the active intervention and support of a ‘free’ media, although the meaning of freedom in this context - economic, political, or institutional - is not always described in sufficient detail. Equally, comprehensive definitions of the media (employed here as a plural noun that refers to a collection of institutions and communicative practices), are sometimes absent or underdeveloped. Yet, even when these concepts are properly illustrated, and their apparent worth confirmed, practical commitment to the supposedly universal principle of free, ‘mediated’ exchange is less than complete, and is often reduced to modest calls for diversity and “information pluralism” (Fenton, 2016: 56) within the parameters of liberal democracy, or else distorted to serve the nationalistic homilies of the authoritarian state.

This Introduction provides the context for the wide-ranging studies that follow, by addressing the troubled relationship between formal authority, the public (as it is variously conceived), media formations, and established conceptions of democracy. Referring to a number of International case studies (including examples drawn from the UK, the US, Spain, Brazil, Bermuda, Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan, Syria, Egypt and Cambodia), particular attention is given to the role of journalism and its investigative variant, in part because journalistic labour is often thought more suited to the perpetuation of democratic ideals than other media activities and/or genres.