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This chapter looks at how consumption of news online gives rise to audience fragmentation and polarization. It considers the conditions under which audience fragmentation and polarization may occur or operate. It also reviews the research literature to find evidence for the fragmentation and polarization of online news audiences in contemporary democracies. More specifically, it examines whether people base their news exposure—and thus their knowledge and opinion—on factors such as political beliefs. The chapter also discusses types of audience fragmentation and polarization, the causes of fragmentation and polarization, and exposure fragmentation and polarization on the Internet and compares those with those in the traditional or offline media. Finally, it analyzes fragmentation of public affairs knowledge and of the public agenda.

Chapter 9 places empirical findings about mediated deliberation in the context of research about the declining quality of mediated public communication. It suggests that larger questions about critical rationality are best posed to the space of opinion as a whole, rather than to specific opinion formats. True, a plethora of new opinion formats offer new definitions of autonomy and influence than those traditionally offered by objective journalism. These formats tend to be partisan and reductive, as they seek a new kind of influence in politics rather than autonomy from it. But it is important to understand that newer formats have emerged in a densely interconnected space of opinion which is characterized by increasingly intertextual processes of monitoring and criticism that occur across and between formats. In this context, it behooves those media intellectuals who seek to defend traditional journalistic virtues to provide meta-commentary to identify their own enemies in the world of punditry, and to clearly justify their own vision of what news and opinion should be. In the end, the degree of critical rationality in the opinion space depends not on the arguments that are made within a single forum, but rather on the ensemble of spaces, and on the nature of critical dialogue that takes place between them.

This book has been concerned with the different production factors that affect the manner of selecting substantive topics and the manner with which these topics are developed within popular television programmes. Inevitably, the cases its discusses are culturally specific, ‘snapshots’ of a dynamic process that reflects mainly UK production contexts. They are also potentially time specific, addressing television production when those working within the industry were beginning to witness the intensified demands of commercial imperatives, the proliferation of channels and the fragmentation of audiences. This concluding chapter aims to extend the debate and address the ideological struggle over prime-time entertainment in terms of wider questions pertaining to public knowledge, citizenship and cultural forms. These are of great significance not least in the current debate, where prevailing ‘culture wars’ mean that US media and popular television in particular are under significant scrutiny from those with a conservative agenda. This final chapter begins by outlining some key findings from the production case studies, before considering how these might link with existing ideas about television fiction and the soap opera as a relatively ‘open’ television format. It concludes by providing some thoughts on directions in media and communications research.