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Chapter 3 develops a cultural sociological model of the space of opinion and its role in democratic deliberation. It analyzes three waves of media theory which have shaped thinking about news and opinion. The first wave of media theory emphasized the importance of objective news and a neutral media for rational information-processing citizens. It defined much of the media scholarship produced prior to the 1960s, and it continues to resonate with broad publics because of its elective affinities with the professional project of objective journalism. The second wave of media theory had its roots at the University of Chicago in the 1920s. It offered a sociological analysis which recognized that small groups and social networks intervene between media and citizens to shape the nature of deliberation. The third wave of media theory builds on the second wave to emphasize that a wide variety of aesthetic and performative structures help citizens identify with media intellectuals, which leads to increased levels of public involvement in the political public sphere. This cultural model of media and deliberation points to the importance of a variety of communicative formats for journalism, including the innovative formats of the space of opinion.

The chapter begins with a review of how philosophy, historiography, and sociology have conceptualized events. Thereafter the chapter focuses on the theoretical accounts of “events” in media research. It examines and critiques the most influential book on events, Daniel Dayan’s and Elihu Katz’s Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Harvard, 1992). It also documents attempts to rethink it, most notably Media Events in a Global Age, edited by Nick Couldry, Andreas Hepp, and Friedrich Krotz (Routledge, 2010). Overall, the chapter argues that these scholarly writings in communication studies grasped important aspects of the media narration of events. But they are like puzzle pieces… They are like puzzle pieces that did not come together in one picture that would show how stories of events travel in fragmented interpretive spaces, over time and across media.

This chapter explores cross-fertilization between researchers and media figures in the late 1950s, as LSD spread from controlled trials to the black market. News reporters gravitated toward research documenting astonishing results with LSD, even as those studies were becoming further removed from the scientific consensus about the drug. Scholars James Coleman, Elihu Katz, and Herbert Menzel launched the study of the diffusion of tetracycline that resulted in the landmark Medical Innovation, cementing the idea that innovations spread through interpersonal relationships. Allowing for a role for media in informing physicians of the existence of new drugs, the scholars emphasized the apparent importance of social relationships in spreading the determination to actually use them.