Abstract

The perspectives of this chapter are historical and systematical. We use the newspaper studies’ perspective of three early 20th-century philosophers to explore the development of mediation as a theoretical concept to understand public communication in a press-dominated—and in this sense: mediatized—society. First is the idealistic perspective of Karl Bücher ; second is the functional perspective of the ‘mediator’ role of journalism between diverse publics, which Erich Everth developed during the Weimar Republic and its ongoing clashes of ideologies; third is the analytical, meta-moral perspective of Ernest Manheim. All three philosophers explicitly referred to mechanisms of mediation which integrate normative perspectives sustaining public resistance. Only some years later, the Nazis used media as instruments of propaganda to strengthen the idea of a holistic Volksgemeinschaft with a uniform public will. In the last part of this chapter, we transfer the historical perspective to a systematical understanding of responsible mediation and communication in the 2010s.