Four Models of Media Pluralism

The next speaker at ECREA 2014 is Daniëlle Raeijmakers; her interest is in media pluralism. The concept itself is widely supported, but tends to be poorly defined; there are a number of different conceptions that may be used to understand it.

The first of these is a liberal model: democracy functions through social heterogeneity, and media are expected to cover such differences authentically. The second, deliberative model expects that media do not just contribute to a politician consensus, but provide the public debate to construct the consensus, serving as a public forum. The third, agonistic model positions media as sites of struggle, which should cultivate political debate but do not necessarily produce a concensus.

This creates a fault line between affirmative views (which believe in a social consensus) and critical views (which problematise the idea of a social consensus, and are concerned about issues of power and equality). Additionally, there is a fault line between diversity and pluralism: diversity transmits pre-existing empirical differences within society; pluralism addresses such differences to facilities dialogue between sides within a common society.

These fault lines result in a two-dimensional matrix: affirmative diversity (seeing media as a mirror of society), affirmative pluralism (a public forum), critical diversity (a cultural industry), and critical pluralism (a site of struggle). In the current social and political context, we must use media discourses to critique the current social order; this seems to point to a critical pluralism approach as affirmative views lack the necessary tools.