The Normative-Economic Justification for Public Discourse: Letters to the Editor as a “Wide Open” Forum

Abstract

To show how U.S. society thinks about public discourse, this study examines how editors in the San Francisco Bay area speak about the letters to the editor section. The research finds that editors successfully balance two visions of the section. On the one hand, editors celebrate its democratic potential. On the other hand, the letters section is also seen as a “customer service” feature that boosts the newspaper's financial success. The coexistence of the two models gives rise to a “normative-economic justification” for public discourse, which captures the idea that what is good for democracy is also, inevitably, good for business.