Public Sphere.

So what is the public sphere? The media play a major role in public discourse. An idea of this would be the BBC politics programme Question Time. This programme allows politicians to inform the public but also allows the audience to question them back.

McNair came up with 5 points in relation to the media and Public Sphere.
1) Inform about events truthful and unbiased reporting of events
2) Educate public about facts in a impartial way.
3) Provide space platform of discourse were people can argue disagree – question time, phone in radio.
4) Give publicity to politics – make visible what they do good or bad exposures. (this point can be clearly seen in the exposure of the MP’s expenses.)
5) News make it clear they are coming from a political stance (Myth The Sun did it) when the sun decide to back a certain political party the win. Were as someone like the BBC have to be unbiased and cover everyone.

But with all these points criticisms have been found within them. Not all news is actually unbiased how can it actually be when someone such as Rupert Murdoch owns so much news that is distributed throughout the United Kingdom. With him owning so much news it is inevitable that his news will be biased and follow which party he chooses to follow.
Also that the press can manipulate things to get what they want and also that the news is so fluffy and biased we don’t actually find out all the facts we want to.

The above video Adam Boulton the political editor of SKY news interviewing politician Alastair Campbell. So of course this should be an impartial interview and the interviewer should be unbiased and not show in any way who he votes for. But this on the other hand is the complete opposite and also funny at the same time. But of course Adam Boulton has the same political views as Rupert Murdoch who is the owner of BSKYB. It is clear to see that Adam Boulton makes his views very clear on which political party he favours.

Now people are not only relying on what they get from the press people are starting to use facebook, twitter as platforms for democracy and using these to get information across. For example when something occurs in another country we can quickly find out what it is due to what people post on these social network sites and other sharing sites. In the past we would have to wait for the next day or wait for the news to come on.
Now to finish this off with the wise words of Barack Obama "freedom to access and publish information is a basic human right". Which is so true in this day and age and how easy it is now to publish information whether it be on facebook or youtube or whether you work for a News company.