* Muhlmann is highly regarded as one of the outstanding young scholars of journalism and political communication. * Polity recently published A Political History of Journalism by the same author. This book is designed as a companion volume; it focuses on the relation of journalism to democracy.

Introduction. Chapter 1. Critiquing journalism: a difficult exercise. 1. The public: hostage to journalists. 2. Journalists: hostages to the public. 3. Two poles, two risks. What next? Chapter 2. The notion of 'public', and what can be expected of it. 1. The premises of the notion of 'public': liberal England in the seventeenth century. 2. Kant and the principle of publicity (Offentlichkeit). 3. French Enlightenment and American Enlightenment. 4. The denunciation of the naiveties of the notion of 'public': the problem of the domination of the 'homogenous' in democracy. Chapter 3. A first ideal-critique: the journalist-flâneur. 1. Varying the gaze. 2. An ambiguous and frustrating ideal. 3. Fruitless exasperation: Karl Kraus as a modern Sisyphus. Chapter 4. A second ideal-critique: the journalist-at-war. 1. The journalism of the young Karl Marx (1842-43). 2. The crisis of 1843: towards a radical critique of public space. 3. Journalism, an ongoing problem: Marx as journalist-at-war. Chapter 5. A third ideal-critique: journalism as a 'conflictual unifying' of the democratic community. 1. Gabriel Tarde and an answer to Gustave Le Bon. 2. The sociologists of Chicago (R. E. Park, H. M. Hughes) faced with the reality of an 'integrating' journalist. 3. The risk of myth. 4. Towards a 'conflictual unifying'. Two journalistic acts. Chapter 6. The limits inherent to the figure of the 'spectator', and what they tell us about democracy. 1. The journalism of decentring as the search for the limits of 'seeing'. 2. The Sartrean critique of the position of the spectator. 3. From the gaze to listening. Jean Hatzfeld on the Rwandan genocide. Epilogue.