Book Notes

Abstract

How can the public forums required for deliberative democracy be sustained within a technological environment that increasingly feeds people only the news they want to hear? Sunstein argues that while democracy is not made impossible by extreme forms of news personalization, it is made more dangerous without the moderating influence of “general interest intermediaries” like traditional newspapers and television broadcasts that provide audiences with common experiences and information that they would not have sought in advance. Drawing a sharp distinction between the competing demands of consumer sovereignty and political sovereignty, the book argues that a communications market designed to satisfy the needs of consumers is unlikely to suit the needs of citizens. However,Sunstein recognizes that new information technologies have the potential to improve the quality of democratic deliberation, and a chapter details several policy proposals designed to temper the excesses of news personalization so that its social benefits can be realized. Republic.com is perhaps miscast as an “Internet” book, for its argument indicts generally the tendency for market pressures to produce news content geared toward the idiosyncratic tastes of smaller and demographically homogeneous segments of available news audiences. The debate at the heart of this book between negative and positive definitions of press freedom is familiar ground for first amendment scholars. The book’s signal contribution to this debate is in updating Alexander Meiklejohn’s classic defense of positive press freedoms for a new technological age and in developing a normative framework with which to evaluate the impact of news personalization. Although the book has its weaknesses—notably a limited connection to empirical work on new media and media effects, its neglect of the philosophical literature on deliberative democracy, and a normative framework oriented around styles of news presentation rarely encountered before the twentieth century— Republic.com presents a novel and compelling argument, simply executed but eloquently turned, that marks it as an important book in the continuing debate over the press’s role in democratic politics.