What is journalism’s contribution to deliberative communication and democracy?

In this chapter, our normative point of departure is that professional journal- ism still matters. Perhaps it matters more than ever for the achievement of deliberative communication and democracy. This statement could be seen as a response to the utopian theories of the early internet era and notions of replacing professional journalism as the ‘fourth estate’ with dynamic many- to-many communication, provided by numerous networked actors (Benkler, 2011), with journalists as only one contributor to democracy among many others. Hence, for the past decades, scholars have often suggested the rela- tive or even decreasing democratic importance of professional journalism in relation to other actions and actors in globalized and digitalized economies. However, professional journalism, driven by democratic ideals, norms, and practices, has an important mission in society when it comes to
• empowering citizens with reliable information and knowledge, which, to- gether with other sources, can guide them in their political deliberation with others (i.e. Dewey, 1927/2012; Habermas, 2022);
• enlightening citizens about how ‘anything’ could be transformed into po- litical struggle and citizenry deliberation (on how to change the unwanted condition of A into B) often referred to as the political (Mouffe, 2013).