Salience principles for democracy*

Abstract

I discuss the roles of journalism in aspirational democracies and argue that they generate a set of pressures on attention that apply to people by virtue of the type of society they live in. These pressures, I argue, generate a problem of democratic attention: for journalism to play its roles in democracy, the attentional demands must be met, but there are numerous obstacles to meeting them. I propose a principle of salience to guide the selection and framing of news stories that I argue may help address the puzzle: the public-as-protagonist principle.

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