"The political media are important because, as Anthony Sampson puts it, a mature democracy depends on having an educated electorate, informed and connected through parliament’ (1996, p. 47), and it is principally through the media that such an electorate can be formed. That the actions of government and the state, and the efforts of competing parties and interests to exercise political power, should be underpinned and legitimised by critical scrutiny and informed debate facilitated by the institutions of the media is a normative assumption uniting the political spectrum from left to right. Analysts and critics may dispute the extent to which Britain has a properly functioning public sphere’ — a Jurgen Habermas called
that communal communicative space in which private people come together as a public’ (1989, p. 27)— but all agree that such a space should exist, and that the media are at its core. Thus in debates about the state of the democratic polity journalists figure large...

The ‘crisis of public communication’ identified by Jay Elumler and Michael Gurevitch in their book of the same name (1995) refers principally to two phenomena: firstly, a decline in the quality of political journalism... Nick Cohen typifies the argument when he writes of broadcast journalism in the New Statesman that ‘liberal, news — by which I mean impartial coverage of issues of public importance — is in crisis. Its practitioners are nervous and unloved. Its self-confidence has been undermined by the preposterous but dominant intellectual fashion of postmodernism.’"

--- Brian McNair, Journalism and Democracy: An Evaluation of the Political Public Sphere