ABSTRACT
Modern democratic societies have come to depend on some form of foundational assumptions about the involvement of the public in political decision-making. This inscribing of a public, defined as wider than the legislative and judicial bodies themselves, into journalism was key to both the legitimation of democratic processes and as a conduit to knowledge of the decision-making processes themselves. Journalism has over time increasingly claimed to be a core contribution to both those processes. It informed the public and it involved the public. In addition, it developed arguments to sustain its own commercial survival as a surveyor of the activities of the powerful and the privileged in society. Moreover, journalism has always had a strong incentive to address a public, not least because of its ever-present economic imperative to make money by constructing and maintaining audiences. This strong commercial basis has meant that journalism would survive only by identifying a variety of social groupings as a public and in articulating the specifics of those groupings in their language or discourse.
