From Strong Public Nature To Weak Public Nature

The public nature of media critics is the important criteria against which the media justice and social justice are measured. But considering the practice and academic histories of our media critics, we see the public discourse of the media critics is a problem to be constructed. This paper starts with this logical point, employs the publicity theory by Habermas and discusses the relationship between public opinions and media critics so as to attempt to construct the public discourse of media critics. The construction is divided into two parts:First, theory construction. Through inquiring the public meaning system and the public theory by Habermas, the basic judgment dimension of the public nature is summarized. From this point of view, the practice structure and structural elements of the media critic discourse is studied. The author comes to the conclusion that the publicity of the media critic discourse practice is consistent with that of the public opinions-the publicity with the public as its subject, the public domain as its space, a consensus as its goal and in the form of negotiation and debates. In detail, as for various dimensions of the media critic discoursive practice, this publicity is specifically characterized by public texts, the public spirits of justice, fairness and commonality, the objective public problematic and the media's public transmission features.Secondly, diachronic construction. The media critic discoursive practice falls into four categories:scholars' political commentary type, party organ's commentary type, city papers' commentary and network's commentary type. This paper employs the strong and weak publicity theory by Habermas to study the publicity of the scholar's political commentary and network commentary. The scholar's political commentary is the process during which modern public intellectuals use modern media to spread public opinions, which represents the strong publicity with enlightenment and relative high normativity. The network's commentary discoursive practice has week publicity. That is, in the special support of network, the opinion body and the opinion communicating network expand, the opinion exchanges become public, free, and interactive and the effectiveness of the opinions increases greatly, thereby the network's commentary discoursive practice becoming a type that is mostly close to Habermas's publicity. What's more, this paper starts with the critical publicity theory by Habermas and the controlling publicity theory and studies the publicity of the party organ's commentary and the city paper's commentary. The party organ's commentary discoursive practice is primarily featured by party spirit without aiming at publicity practice. However, as a result of balanced consideration of both party interest and public interest, the former has certain publicity in partial fields. The rising city paper's commentary in the late 1990s creates nowadays' flourishing commentary. Based on the citizen society and the market economy, the commentary practice possesses complex and multidimensional publicity-on one hand, it offers public opinions on various public problems; but on the other hand, the publicity is controlled by political power and commercial interest, which shows lack of thoroughness and even falsity.