Media orient citizens by sifting out intersubjectively shared interpretations of the world

Evidence

The old media are suitable vehicles for advertising only as long as their contents are commercially successful. However, these contents themselves obey a completely different inherent logic – namely, the demand for texts and programmes whose form and content must satisfy cognitive, normative or aesthetic standards. That readers and audiences evaluate journalistic performances according to such epistemic standards (broadly understood) becomes immediately apparent once we grasp – from the philosophical perspective of analysis of the lifeworld – the important function that the media fulfil in providing orientation in the increasingly confusing ‘media society’. In the face of societal complexity, the media are the intermediary which, given the diverse perspectives presented by social situations and cultural forms of life, sifts out an intersubjectively shared core from among the competing interpretations of the world and validates it as generally rationally accepted. — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 41

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the media’s lifeworld function: selecting and validating a rationally accepted shared core interpretation against societal complexity.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that media must satisfy epistemic standards while also being commercially successful encodes the whole tension driving Habermas’s structural-transformation thesis.
• XREF: connects to: Media presence itself becomes the model that precedes and drains meaning from events — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 187; Media shapes public knowledge by defining events and scenarios people cannot access directly; Media balance reproduces the shared presuppositions that bracket political disagreement (+9 more)

Related

• Mass daily news created the modern public sphere and public opinion (similarity 0.83)
• Sovereign influence over government hinges on mass-media enlightening quality. (similarity 0.80)
• Digital platforms are not media in the traditional sense (similarity 0.79)
• Media shapes public knowledge by defining events and scenarios people cannot access directly (similarity 0.79)
• Media structure enabling deliberative opinion is a constitutional imperative. (similarity 0.78)
• The common-man pose of elite media commentators claims proximity to reality over theory (similarity 0.78)
• Media do ideological labor by assigning events to classifying schemes. (similarity 0.78)
• Media manipulation is not a them-versus-us relation but a shared echosystem (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Media shapes public knowledge by defining events and scenarios people cannot access directly #expands (0.75)
• Global modern institutions depend on pooled shared knowledge via news #expands (0.75) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 193
• Media balance reproduces the shared presuppositions that bracket political disagreement #expands (0.72)
• Shared attention builds a collective rather than merely private reality #expands (0.70) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 121