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The theory of recognition has much to offer the field of political communication as it struggles to comprehend communicative dysfunctions, political polarization and governing crises across the industrialized democracies. Drawing on the work of Axel Honneth, Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser and Michele Lamont, as well as more recent contributions, we put recognition theory into conversation with some of our field's contemporary concerns. In particular, we show how the theory offers depth, nuance and synthesis to progress communication scholars are making in the study of how attention economics and social identity shape perceptions and communications in a hybrid political media system. In the process, we argue that we are experiencing a historically novel phase of recognition, in which the granting and denial of recognition are transformed at the individual level by the affordances of many-to-many social networking platforms, and at the group level by the use of recognition for attracting attention to commodified media properties. At the intersection of the modern attention economy, heightened articulation of identity-based messaging, and recognition processes is what we term a recognition crisis, in which claims of misrecognition by multiple, conflictual groups are unresolvable and undermine the solidarity that grounds social and political life. We conclude with a roadmap of new opportunities to understand existing research findings and pose new research questions. Moreover, we show that the field of political communication has a great deal to offer discussions of recognition occurring in related fields of the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media is now central to how youth form their identities. Media also shapes the cultural background of much of young people's action and decision making and the institutional framework of social interaction. This article explores this mediated "lifeworld" of young people by examining rates of current media use and the infiltration of media into conventional forms of socialization such as schools, family, and peers. The authors argue that increasing media use coincides with a larger structural shift to an information-based society wherein social relationships are constituted and reinforced through a cycle of "networked individualism" and growing "risk" among youth. The authors illustrate the cycle of media use, individualization, and risk by briefly examining (a) rising economic insecurity among all Americans and American youth in particular, and (b) the contradictions minority youth face in navigating structural barriers to achievement. The authors conclude by discussing the implications of their work and suggesting policy directions for youth in a media-saturated society. (Contains 1 figure and 3 notes.)

For the Habermasian theory of the "public sphere" to make sense in the 2020s, it must be able to address the modern tendency toward global systemic crises. To examine the relevance of the Habermasian public sphere to today's deeply interconnected digital world, this article provides a selective reading of Habermas' writings on the public sphere, examining how he developed the concept from its conceptual core (1962) through his Legitimation Crisis (LC ; 1973) and The Theory of Communicative Action (TCA ; vol. 1 [1981] 1984, vol. 2 [1981] 1987). Working from the perspective of the "differentiated lifeworld," we show here that the theory's background assumptions about reality (truth), solidarity (justice), personality (authenticity) are now being exposed and destabilized by current crisis tendencies and imaginaries. Here, we examine three exemplary (and interconnected) global disruptions that expose these assumptions: the climate crisis, the intensification of financial inequality in the Global North, and the rapid push toward datafication. Through our examination of whether the public sphere as Habermas conceived of it can exist in today's world, we provide a more expansive form of criticism of the public sphere (which is usually critiqued on the narrow grounds of the rational bias of communicative rationality). Here, we underscore the fundamental importance of addressing the complex system-lifeworld dynamics that are today re-conceptualizing and re-contextualizing the "public sphere" in this era of contemporary global crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a firsthand account of research conducted for the Federal Communications Commission in connection with its inquiry into communities' critical information needs and how well they were being met by local news and information sources. I detail the industry and political pressures brought to bear in opposition to that inquiry and the extent to which opposition to this kind of research undermines the development of prosocial local information ecologies. Finally, I discuss what can be done to develop research in this vein and shore up local information needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As consumer culture pervades the social life of citizens in America and Europe, it becomes increasingly important to clarify the relationship between consumption and citizenship. With this in mind, faculty and students at the University of Wisconsin organized a conference titled ''The Politics of Consumption/The Consumption of Politics.' Held in October 2006, the meeting provided a forum for leading scholars to discuss the interplay of markets, media, politics, and the citizen-consumer. Revised and expanded versions of the papers they presented are collected in this volume with the goal of advancing this emerging area of inquiry. It is our hope that the essays and research papers we have collected here help define the next wave of theory building and research inquiry on file intersections of consumer culture, civic culture, and mass culture. Keywords: citizen-consumers; competitive consumption; civic engagement; lifestyle politics; materialism; political branding; socially conscious consumption; taste cultures

This article is excerpted from Public Journalism: Past and Present (Dayton, Ohio: Kettering Foundation Press, 2003). Public journalism is at a crossroads. Even though at least 320 newspapers have tried [...]

The entry of the Internet in the communication market influences the provision of information by traditional news media and the development of the multimedia curriculum. The growing acceptance of online information services suggests the emergence of a new model of multimedia journalism. Multimedia journalism can easily incorporate graphics, animation, audio, digital video, and hypertext links. A three-year experiment which successfully developed multimedia curriculum at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is described, and its practical implications discussed.

News institutions depend on a vibrant public and civic life for their own survival. For this reason they cannot remain neutral on whether public life should go well, even though public journalism institutions retain a neutral stance on what particular solutions to public problems work best in any given community. The newspaper or television station that practices civic/public journalism offers a forum for public debate over what issues are most important and how they might be addressed. Civic/public journalism is inclusive. At least in theory, it requires that all voices of the community be heard when public debates are joined., Communities are facing an increasingly complex set of challenges, not the least of which is the move toward devolution of responsibility to the local and regional levels. For some, this [...]

The differences in the coverage of Beijing Spring, the 1989 student movement in China, by different television networks reflect that the ideological frames used by news agencies conform to the fundamental news norms of specific nations. The coverage of the movement by CNN, CBS, Taiwan Television, and Chinese Central Television differed significantly. The reflection of national values in the presentation of important international events hampers the democratizing effect of the media in a globalized news system. This suggests the formulation of normative standards of framing devices for fair and objective coverage.

Electronic communication and information technology have a chance to radically affect how citizens practice democracy. The questions for the modern media researcher should center upon how the electronic model of communications and traditional media forms will counteract and reinforce each other. From the early evidence on computer networks, people are constructing new areas of political discussion over these networks, and are using them as an alternative to traditional news broadcasting and print journalism.

This article analyzes five main groupings of world television news organizations: national broadcast networks, international TV news agencies, regional news exchanges, global satellite networks, and regional satellite vernacular networks. Key news organizations and the relations among them are analyzed to demonstrate an emerging web of global television that is both vertically and horizontally structured.

In this research note, we provide evidence about burdens people face when voting and who benefits from policies designed to mitigate those burdens. Using pre-and-post 2018 midterm elections panel surveys in Wisconsin, we show that Black voters estimate greater time getting to the polls and Hispanic voters report longer wait times once they are there. Regarding who takes advantage of policies purported to ease these burdens on voting—early voting, voting by mail, and absentee voting—our analysis reveals that that those facing temporal disadvantages are not the groups benefiting from these electoral policy affordances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2007.00359_3.x Byline: Lewis A. Friedland (1) Author Affiliation: (1)University of Wisconsin-Madison

A certain social-political geography recurs across European and North American societies: As post-industrialization and mechanization of agriculture have disrupted economies, rural and nonmetropolitan areas are aging and declining in population, leading to widening political and cultural gaps between metropolitan and rural communities. Yet political communication research tends to focus on national or cross-national levels, often emphasizing networked digital media and an implicitly global information order. We contend that geographic place still provides a powerful grounding for individuals' lifeworld experiences, identities, and orientations to political communications and politics. Focusing on the U.S. state of Wisconsin, and presenting data gathered in 2018, this study demonstrates significant, though often small, differences between geographic locations in terms of their patterns of media consumption, political talk, and anti-elite attitudes. Importantly, television news continues to play a major role in citizens' repertoires across locations, suggesting we must continue to pay attention to this broadcast medium. Residents of more metropolitan communities consume significantly more national and international news from prestige sources such as the New York Times, and their talk networks are more cleanly sorted by partisanship. Running against common stereotypes of news media use, residents of small towns and rural areas consume no more conservative media than other citizens, even without controlling for partisanship. Our theoretical model and empirical results call for further attention to the intersections of place and politics in understanding news consumption behaviors and the meanings citizens draw from media content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kathryn Montgomery This past January I flew out to Los Angeles to attend the information superhighway summit, where Vice-President Gore addressed the television industry at UCLA. It was kind of [...]

Since the 2016 election, the relationship between Trump supporters and Fox News has gained considerable attention. Drawing on interviews with more than 200 people and a representative survey conducted in the state of Wisconsin, we dive deeper into the media habits of Trump supporters using a mixed methods analytical approach. While we do not refute the importance of Fox News in the conservative media ecology, we find that characterizing Trump supporters as isolated in Fox News bubbles obscures the fact that many are news omnivores, or people who consume a wide variety of news. In fact, we find that Trump supporters may have more politically heterogeneous consumption habits than Trump non-supporters. We find that 17% of our survey respondents who support Trump in Wisconsin are regularly exposed to ideologically heterogeneous news media. We also find that like other voters, Trump supporters are disenchanted with the divisive nature of contemporary media and politics. Finally, we analyze the media use of young Trump supporters and find an especially high level of news omnivorousness among them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite growing attention to an increasing partisan divide and populist voting, little attention has been directed at how social contexts might encourage greater or lesser political polarization. We address this gap by studying how county-level conditions—economic resilience, population change, and community health—intersect with individuals' political orientations and communication patterns to shape partisan evaluations. Our context is Wisconsin around the 2012 election, with our focus on two prominent political figures: Governor Scott Walker and President Barack Obama. Multilevel modeling reveals that partisans living in counties with more affluent, less precarious conditions during 2009–2012 exhibited more polarized partisan attitudes toward Walker and Obama. Our analysis also finds a significant role for interpersonal communication and digital media in shaping polarized attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article asks whether the concept of community is of continuing relevance in a postindustrial society that is rapidly advancing to a networked form of social organization. The author argues that community is necessary for democratic life to function, and asks what new forms of integration might emerge to create the boundaries necessary for community reproduction. Turning to Habermas's theory of communicative action, the author shows the relevance of the two-level concept of society, system, and lifeworld for addressing this question, and proposes the concept of the communicatively integrated community as a framework for understanding the central role of communication in producing community. Finally, the article offers a mid-range analytic theory of community communication ecology as a frame for connecting this larger theory to the specific analysis of communication and community.

A long tradition of research focuses on conversation as a key catalyst for community integration and a focal mediator of media influence on participation. Changes in media systems, political environments, and electoral campaigning demand that these influences, and the communication mediation model, be revised to account for the growing convergence of media and conversation, heightened partisan polarization, and deepening social contentiousness in media politics. We propose a revised communication mediation model that continues to emphasize the centrality of face-to-face and online talk in democratic life, while considering how mediational and self-reflective processes that encourage civic engagement and campaign participation might also erode institutional legitimacy, foster distrust and partisan divergence, disrupting democratic functioning as a consequence of a new communication ecology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the democratic significance of citizen talk about politics, the field of communication has not considered how that talk is weathering stresses facing our civic culture. We examine political talk during an archetypal case of political contentiousness: the recall of Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin in 2012. Pairing qualitative and quantitative methods, we show that a fracturing of civic culture took place in which many citizens found it impossible to continue political discussion. Individuals at fault lines of contention, by nature of occupation, geographic location, or other personal circumstance, were most prone to this breakdown. Our results call into question the ability of talk to bridge political and social differences in periods of polarization and fragmentation, with implications for democratic functioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local sectors of vibrant civic community news sites are important for journalism to improve and communities to thrive. In this study, we examine the news ecologies of four metropolitan regions, Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis, and New York City, to explain which structural features of the local news environment can make or break civic news websites. Based on a Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 137 cases, we conclude that the most significant contributors to sustainability are connection to a postsecondary institution and location within a news network. We suggest how foundations and others can direct their efforts for increasing sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paradigmatic focus on global and individual networks in communication has suppressed the Chicago tradition of understanding the city as a network of places. But the social ecology of the city continues to structure all aspects of urban communication networks including personal, institutional, and civic life. This article critically examines four major theorists of networked urban communication—Castells, Wellman, Fischer, and Sampson—and argues that the field of urban communication should return to a revitalized ecological tradition, while taking full account of the networked transformation of social life and social structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article advances a communicative approach to social capital that views communication as the fundamental source of societal integration. We contend that integration occurring at the system level via news consumption and at the individual level via interpersonal discussion is amplified through ties at the community level. This cross-level interaction is theorized to encourage civic engagement, writ large, above and beyond the influences of news, talk, or social ties. This perspective distinguishes between the extent of news use and political talk and the orientation toward news consumption and political conversation. We offer evidence that communication variables, specifically news attention and exposure along with conversational frequency and orientation toward conversational understanding, interact with associational membership and network size to foster engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As consumer culture pervades the social life of citizens in America and Europe, it becomes increasingly important to clarify the relationship between consumption and citizenship. With this in mind, faculty and students at the University of Wisconsin organized a conference titled ‘The Politics of Consumption/The Consumption of Politics.’ Held in October 2006, the meeting provided a forum for leading scholars to discuss the interplay of markets, media, politics, and the citizen-consumer. Revised and expanded versions of the papers they presented are collected in this volume with the goal of advancing this emerging area of inquiry. It is our hope that the essays and research papers we have collected here help define the next wave of theory building and research inquiry on the intersections of consumer culture, civic culture, and mass culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Habermas's late theory of the public sphere is fundamentally about democracy and growing complexity. The network form is at the core of growing complexity, and centrality of networks in the economy, political system, civil society, and the lifeworld calls for revisions in central theoretical assumptions about the structure of the public sphere. We argue that in order to maintain Habermas's larger democratic project, we will have to rethink theoretical assumptions linked to its neo-Parsonsian systems theoretical foundations and to systematically integrate new network forms of social life into theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argues that the student manifesto "The New Student Politics," by Sarah Long, has the potential to catalyze a participatory democratic movement among college students in the U.S. as compared with the "Port Huron Statement" that was drafted during the 1960s. Reasons for the manifesto's viability in developing sustainable forms of student civic engagement; Arguments of students on causes of civic disengagement; Influence of civic innovation in communities on the potential of service politics in campuses.

Examines public television in the United States as a public sphere institution through the case of the Wisconsin Collaborative Project (WCP), a programming cooperative contributing to the national PBS schedule. Organizational decentralization and diversification of program content and contributors.

Presents a letter to the editor and a response by Randy Stoecker to the letter regarding his review of the book, "Civic Innovation in America: Community Empowerment, Public Policy, and the Movement for Civic Renewal," by Carmen Sirianni and Lewis Friedland. Focus of the book; People central to social change; Portrayal of militant activists in the post-September 11, 2001 terrorist attack climate.