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Abstract
Televised deliberation has been celebrated for its accessibility and derided for its tendency toward spectacle. Deliberative theorists and practitioners seek ways to make deliberation more inclusive because widespread participation facilitates deliberative legitimacy. This analysis operates between these two challenges, to consider how the daytime television show The View, drawing upon the televisual logics of spectacle and intimacy, nonetheless offers a public pedagogy of deliberation that provides resources for facilitating inclusive deliberation. I argue that the show models deliberators overcoming typical barriers to deliberation, such as disagreement and discomfort, with five deliberative habits: everyday talk, civility, agreement, friendship, and humor.
Disclosure
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Digital platforms are promising because they allow for multi-directional flows of information, and they circulate user-created content, a sharp contrast to television’s unidirectional broadcasting of elite content. Driven by algorithms that reward engagement in the form of likes, views, and re-posts, social media such as twitter seems to afford the possibility of democratic agenda setting. Nonetheless, digital technologies also have the limitations of corporate ownership, and their algorithms have been amply demonstrated to be interested and biased (Simone Citation2010, 122; Noble Citation2018).
2 The co-host is credited as “Whoopi” on the show, so I refer to her as such here.