The prism of the public sphere: The COP15 coverage by the Brazilian media system

Abstract

Current studies of political communication offer valuable contributions to assessing and measuring mediated deliberation. But in our understanding of the news media's role in a deliberative system a number of questions remain unanswered, especially concerning problems posed by social complexity. This paper aims to contribute to closing this gap by conducting an empirical analysis on how distinct contributions to public deliberation – namely the provision of publicity and intelligibility – are articulated via outputs offered by different types of media outlets, specifically in the case of the Brazilian coverage of the 15th UN’s Climate Change Conference (COP15). Our results suggest that this coverage seems to have fostered citizens to search for more information about this Conference and augmented the visibility of UN’s climate negotiations. This gives support to the idea that news media system works like a prism of the public sphere, promoting accountability of complex governance processes by offering information and public scrutiny adequate for a heterogeneous citizenry.