Rethinking news media from the perspective of epistemic democracy: ‘Democratic imagination’ in the coverage of minoritised activism in Polish liberal media

Abstract

This article contributes to the rethinking of the relationship between news media and democracy by adopting the perspective of ‘epistemic democracy’, characterised by universal and equal participation of all knowers. While this perspective foregrounds the tension between the normative vision of news media as facilitators of democratic deliberation and their actual socio-political position as part of the hegemonic domain, it also enables the reconceptualisation of media’s democratic role as the cultivation of ‘democratic imagination’. On the one hand, media can exercise democratic imagination in their reporting by promoting epistemic diversity. On the other hand, they may extend the public’s horizon of democratic imagination by generating epistemic friction. The article operationalises this process as countering epistemic exclusion of minoritised knowers and employs the three-tier framework borrowed from feminist philosophy as its main heuristic. Empirically, the investigation focuses on the Polish liberal news media’s coverage of minoritised activism. This is a particularly relevant case due to the liberal media’s stake in reimagining democracy in Poland. The article finds that the Polish liberal media were ready to include minoritised perspectives and relay minoritised experiential knowledge, though they were unable to offer them an equal platform.