This essay examines and extends peace journalism's critique of mainstream news media in order to articulate a model of an enriched news narrative resistant to war propaganda and consistent with democratic praxis. It discusses the potential of political myth to delimit demonising projections that otherwise debilitate democratic deliberation and suggests that news media would advance democratic culture by enhancing the public archive on which deliberative practices depend. Critical attention is focused on two factors that reduce the democratic potential of news narratives: (1) the persistent omission of key information and (2) a chronic imbalance in interpretive frames. Whether or not professional conventions and market considerations render corporate media incapable of correcting truncated and unbalanced news narratives, the capacity of the public archive to support democratic deliberation corresponds to the knowledge and perspective it accrues to curtail alienating projections. We must ask, then, if democracy's deliberative prospect can be realised short of correcting the shortcomings of news media.
As far back as 1987, Mark Philp had concluded that no one had ever devised a universal "one-line" definition of corruption; 1 eleven years later nothing much had changed. 2 The need for such a generally accepted "one-line" definition was so pressing that even if the feat seemed improbable, it had to be undertaken. The unifying definitions were promulgated by two influential institutions: the World Bank and Transparency International. Corruption was defined by the * This chapter is based on work done in the frame of my Fulbright Fellowship at George Mason University (2009-2010) on the project "Law as the Last Shelter of Corruption: Comparative Analysis of Bulgarian and American Law". I am indebted to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions directed at improving my work and, also, would like to acknowledge the efforts of Ms. Kristin E. Silver in skillfully editing and insightfully commenting on a prior version of this chapter.
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