How a terror attack can prompt debates on public sphere communication

What is it about?

The article investigates how a terror attack can prompt a discussion on what a public sphere is and should be. The case examined is the the deadly attacks on a public meeting and on a Jewish citizen in Copenhagen in February 2015, which gave rise to a vast amount of public discussion and interpretation of the events themselves, their background, their causes, their significance, and their repercussions. In these discussions, various conceptions of a public sphere or ‘publicness’ were expressed. This article sets out to analyze these conceptions of publicness and maps out some of the key different and partly contradictory notions of publicness that the reactions to the killings brought to the fore. The investigation thus focuses on expectations and ideals of public spheres, on the limitations and restrictions that were acknowledged, and on the main societal problems and (inter)national contexts to which publicness was viewed as related. The analysis covers national newspapers and center on the media elite responses to the attacks, for example in editorials, or comments by writers, academics, debaters, and intellectuals.

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