The Enlightenment idea of publicness postulates the universal principles of public use of reason and public control of power. If public opinion is to be an important democratic force rather than just an aggregation of opinions arising from individual leisure or promotional activities, it must be based on reason, access to information and a democratic communication culture. Bentham's and Kant's early theories of public opinion and all the succeeding ones emphasise the press’ and journalism's key roles in providing reliable, factual information (news) about public-worthy events on which public opinion must be articulated due to their long-term serious social consequences. It is clearly not just a historical coincidence that the word ‘journalism’ came about in the same period that ‘public opinion’ did. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the French cognate of journalism to 1781; in the English language, it began to appear in the 1830s, but the word ‘journalist’ entered common usage before the word ‘journalism’ did (Nerone 2015; see Figure 5). In the scholarly debates on public opinion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, authors such as Tarde, Tönnies, Dewey and Lippmann considered the quality of journalism and newspapers critically important for publics and public opinion to emerge. When the commercialisation of the press was recognised as a great threat to journalism even before the general abolition of censorship by bourgeois revolutions, solutions were eagerly sought for independence from entrepreneurial freedom and for the socialisation of journalism and the press as the backbones of public opinion. The ideas on the socialisation of the press never fully materialised, however, but some of these ideas were later brought to life with the establishment of public service broadcasting organisations, starting with the British Broadcasting Corporation in the 1920s. It was the rise of radio and then television broadcasting that opened up bright perspectives for journalism at a time when its development was dissociated from public opinion, which was then dominated by opinion polls.

Throughout history, audiences have had very limited opportunities to participate not only in newspapers but also in later broadcast media despite the development of at least some technical communication capacities perhaps best exemplified by the idea and practice of community radio.