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This article explores public responses to UK government communication of COVID-19, focusing on public solidarity as a crucial part of an effective pandemic response. Drawing on focus group research with members of the public, we identify three limitations in the way solidarity was communicated by government. What solidarity meant and entailed was not always (1) clear and understandable, (2) adequately justified to all, or (3) demonstrated by the actions of political leaders themselves. In conclusion, we consider the implications of our analysis for how the communication of solidarity could have been improved. Beyond any specific communicative shortcomings, communicating solidarity was always bound to be difficult. What solidarity meant and entailed in the context of the pandemic was never normatively self-evident, especially given the different values and interests at stake. Given this, we suggest that a more deliberative-democratic approach to solidarity would have been both normatively desirable and more likely to be effective in sustaining solidarity. But the need for this approach reveals an underlying systemic weakness in the political-communication environment: the lack of adequate opportunities for those called upon to show solidarity to reflect on, contest, and shape its meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizens want politicians to demonstrate that they 'understand people like them'. Yet many citizens believe politicians fail to do this when they communicate and that this signals what appears to be a broken relationship between them and their elected representatives. Through four focus groups with voters in the UK reporting low interest in politics, this article explores what people mean when they state that politicians do not understand them or people like them. Interpreting our findings in relation to political theories of recognition and respect, we suggest that failures of trust in politicians arise from lack of clarity about what democratic representation entails. Repairing this communicative relationship depends upon the nurturance of public respect towards the role that political representatives perform. By respect we do not mean deference or submission, but a capacity to appraise role performance in terms of clear expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media policymaking is often regarded with suspicion by stakeholders, with the result that policy can lack legitimacy and be difficult to implement effectively. This paper reports on a UK-based, collaborative and impact-oriented project where we engage stakeholders in a process of meta-deliberation, aimed at producing a stakeholder-centric, systemic understanding of copyright consultations and a strategy for change. Based on the findings, we propose a framework of purposes and principles that provides both a means of critical evaluation of copyright consultations and a guide for their reform. We conclude that shifting focus from policy outcomes to policy process is a constructive way to move debate forward in intractable policy areas like copyright, characterised by polarised and seemingly intransigent stakeholder positions. While changing the policymaking process would face significant institutional barriers, the framework we present here supports those who are concerned with taking the policymaking process in more democratic directions, whether they are officials within public authorities or activists outside them. [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.1467-9248.2007.00709.x Byline: Giles Moss (1), Ben O'Loughlin (2) Abstract: This article is about political representation and representative claim making, taking as its backdrop the ongoing public controversy and disaffection concerning the British government's policy and conduct in the 'war on terror'. We investigate ethnographic-style data that chart the responses of citizens to foreign and domestic policy in the war on terror and in particular their responses to the representation and justification of policy decisions by political leaders. Our focus is not on political representatives and their intentions, but on the representations of objects and identities in political discourse and how citizens respond to these representations. We suggest that despite the existence of matters of potentially shared concern, such as 'Iraq' and 'terrorism', the representations offered by the British government have often been too certain, fixed and direct, making it difficult for citizens to comprehend or connect to their representations as meaningful and negotiable. Following Bruno Latour, we describe this mode of representation as 'fundamentalist', and contrast it with a 'constructivist' mode of more contingent representations where politicians take into account and can be taken into account. Our analysis suggests citizens respond to fundamentalist claims in several ways. For some, the response has been antagonism, alienation and a lack of belief in the ability of democratic politics to arrive at responsible decisions on shared problems and concerns. For others, however, inadequate representative claims generate a demand for the construction of more nuanced, complex representations, even acting as a spur for some to contest the claims through political engagement. Author Affiliation: (1)University of Oxford (2)University of London Article History: (Accepted: 20 April 2007)

Copyright law has a significant impact on public access to and use of creative works and can lead to the imposition of sanctions for infringements. Decisions about copyright law should therefore be justified to the public, but current consultation practices have not included the public voice adequately. This article presents the findings of a deliberative event where members of the UK public were asked to engage in-depth with different aspects of copyright law and its implementation. Participants drew on different justifications in assessing copyright, which we interpret in terms of Boltanski and Thévenot's 'market', 'civic', and 'inspired' orders of worth, and their views shifted over the course of the weekend as a result of the deliberative process. The findings challenge common perceptions that copyright policy is both too dry and too complex for the public to engage in and demonstrate the value of deliberation as a means of involving the public more effectively in this complex policy issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I evaluate the use of the ‘capability approach’ developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum as a normative perspective for critical media research. The concept of capabilities provides a valuable way of assessing media and captures important aspects of the relationship between media and equality. However, following Rainer Forst’s critique of outcome-oriented approaches to justice, I argue that the concept is less well placed to address important questions of power and process. In particular, when it comes to deciding which capabilities media should promote and what media structures and practices should promote them, the capability approach must accept the priority of deliberative and democratic processes of justification. Once we do this, we are urged to situate the concept of capabilities within a more process-oriented view of justice, focused not on capabilities as such but on outlining the conditions required to support such justificatory processes. After discussing the capability approach, I will outline the process-oriented theory of justice Forst has developed around the idea of the ‘right to justification’. While Forst does not discuss media in depth, I argue his theory of justice can provide a valuable alternative normative standpoint for critical media research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Real-time response methods, which were developed by media and communication researchers as early as the 1940s, have significant potential for understanding media audiences today. However, this potential is not realized fully by current methods such as "the worm," which are limited to collecting positive and negative responses and fail to examine why audience members respond as they do. This article advocates a new research agenda for understanding how audiences respond to political messages through real-time response methods. Instead of measuring preferences, we suggest that realtime response methods should focus on people's sense of whether their democratic capabilities are advanced--an approach that would provide a more critical as well as a more nuanced understanding of how audiences respond to political communication. We describe an innovative Web-based app our team has designed to capture audience responses to political messages, and we outline some key questions we hope to address in future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers televised election debates from the perspective of Amartya Sen and Martha C. Nussbaum’s notion of capabilities and entitlements. In contrast to the kind of predetermined “information needs” upon which most debate effects’ studies have been based, the authors set out to ask citizens to explain what kind of democratic capabilities they hoped to derive from watching televised election debates. Through group deliberation within twelve focus groups, participants articulated five broad capabilities that they felt entitled to realize as viewers of televised election debates. Comprising the first stage of a larger project, which is developing an open-source, web-based platform that incorporates a suite of visualization tools that will help citizens make sense of televised political debates, the research reported here attempts to outline what such debates would be like if they were designed from the perspective of citizens rather than political elites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reflecting on recent research in the United Kingdom, we consider how to investigate the mediation of news in a contemporary city. We put forward the notion of a "media ecology" to capture the relationships between varied news media and practices--from mainstream news media and community media to the everyday circulation of news through local grapevines--and to explore how individuals and groups relate to the city and to one another. We outline the methodological challenges and decisions we faced in mapping such a complex thing as a media ecology and then in seeking to describe how it operates and to explain the difference it makes to the lives of city dwellers. We advocate the use of multiple methods because none could have provided an adequate explanation of the media ecology or the mediation of news in the city on its own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]