Public Journalism: A Viewpoint form Deliberative Democracy

• Main Authors: Hao-Jung Huang, 黃浩榮
• Other Authors: 張錦華
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2004
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/28699886305378549228

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 新聞研究所 === 92 === This study attempts to make clear what the idea of public journalism (PJ) really means. It has no concrete definition or operational rule though, the idea of PJ would contribute to rebuild the “connectedness,” instead of separations, between the media and the citizens, the citizens and the community where they live, as well as the media and the community. In addition, PJ, in effect, embodies the idea of participatory democracy which encourages the citizens to engage in the public affairs, community issues, and social problems in a more active, even deliberative manner. Consequently, the author, using a theoretical viewpoint from deliberative democracy, goes on examining the idea and the practice of PJ. It seems that PJ has several procedural flaws, not consistent with the rigorous norms of deliberative democracy, but we shall not have to pessimistically deem PJ as an obstacle of deliberative democracy; on the contrary, the author tries to renew it with the procedural norms of deliberative democracy so as to make PJ a catalyst for deliberative democracy. Moreover, as an exploratory study on the PJ issue in Taiwan, the author took in-depth interviewing as the method to do an empirical study, by interviewing several key-persons of mainstream newspapers as well as senior reporters on political beats. The result shows that the main papers in Taiwan neither oppose nor assert to take the idea of PJ into practice; at present, profit seems to be their major concern. To those senior reporters, nevertheless, they see the need in Taiwan to have PJ rooted in society, expecting it to transform the existing pattern of political reporting, which excludes the public opinion from the general citizens. Notably, confined to the particular contextual restraints of Taiwan society, though the reporters are looking forward to the experiments of PJ, they don’t lay an optimistic view on how it would work.