Normative standards or roles that define how institutions which hold a specific function in society should operate serve well as benchmarks to evaluate their actual performance (McQuail 1992: 17; Norris and Odugbemi 2010: 12). Hence, this chapter aims to clarify the normative standards of democratic media performance in order to avoid the ‘theoretical vacuum’ of many previous comparative media studies (Hallin and Mancini 2012b: 214). In other words, to carry out a systematic analysis of mass media’s contribution to democracy, it is first of all necessary to identify the functions that media are supposed to fulfill in a democracy. This further requires specifying how the media’s compliance with such functions manifests itself in reality, that is, how their democratic performance can be empirically observed.
CITATION STYLE
Müller, L. (2014). The Functions of the Media for Democracy. In Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century (pp. 35–60). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137391384_3
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