Is there a "dictatorship" of memory and media over deliberative democracy? Questions discourse and civil society
Is there a "dictatorship" of memory and media over deliberative democracy? Questions discourse and civil society

Summary/Abstract: Deliberative democracy and mass‐media are closely linked in the nowadays society, considering the fact that the latter is not only a source of information but also a platform for debates and decisions. That could be the image of a perfect democracy, with informed and active citizens deeply involved in the process of decision making. Obviously, things are more complicated than that, since the target of the democratic game is power and it paves its way to there through discourse. This paper aims to compare and contrast the two views on discourse, the constraining and manipulative one promoted by Michel Foucault and the one based on freedom of speech, promoted by Jurgen Habermas, and to observe which one prevails in media and which one describes best the discourse of collective memory. The hypothesis is that the deliberative process is highly influenced by the collective memory of the community, which is simultaneously partly constructed and reflected by any kind of media. The case study represents an analysis of discourse on the way media reflected a process of small scale decision making and the position of the civic society towards that process. The topic is the much debated inscription on the statue of Matei Corvin in Cluj‐Napoca added there first in the ‘30ies with a quote from the historian Nicolae Iorga.

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