Technical Rationality and the Public Realm: A Critical Theory of Responsibility as Mass Communication Theory and Practice

This perspective [critical theory], once derived from Habermas' investigations, can be further clarified and be made relevant to U.S. mass media through comparison with the investigations by an American media critic, Herbert Schiller, whose analyses of mass communication have explicated those media techniques which frustrate the realization of informed, participating citizens. Based upon the Habermas-Schiller comparison, the consequences of a critical mass communication theory for communicators should suggest a mass media praxiology.