Simon Dawes

Javnost the Public: Media Freedom and Stricture 'Voice, Capabilities and the Public Sphere: Assessing the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Media Freedom(s)'

Keywords: capabilities, citizenship, efficacy, legitimacy, public sphere, voice

Following previous work in applying the capabilities approach to the study of media, communications and culture, this article will consider the merits of applying a capabilities-supplemented account of cultural citizenship for evaluating the legitimacy and efficacy of the public sphere. Drawing on the work of Nancy Fraser on the public sphere and Nick Couldry on voice, the article will focus on the extent to which 'voice' can be understood as a 'fundamental capability'. For Couldry, 'voice' can also be articulated as a 'connecting term' alongside other normative frameworks, such as citizenship or the public sphere. Such a supplementary approach is necessary to avoid the universalism and paternalism to which normative and prescriptive accounts of citizenship and the public sphere are prone, as well as the absolutist libertarianism of free speech fetishists that often serves the benefit of those with rather than without voice. It also serves the function of grounding such abstract concepts in more concrete and measurable practices and social processes, while politicising the depoliticised accounts of rights and freedoms the capabilities approach tends to produce. Ultimately, it also enables a recasting of media freedom in terms of a focus on (the freedom and power of) the public rather than (the freedom of) the media.

We've all become accustomed to claims that free speech and media freedom are under threat in liberal democracies, normally from those used to having platforms and enjoying the benefits of unaccountability seeing their privileged position threatened by the critical expression of those who are not. It is important to acknowledge, however, that media freedom and media independence [START_REF] Karppinen | Beyond Positive and Negative Conceptions of Free Speech[END_REF][START_REF] Karppinen | What We Talk About When Talk About "Media Independence[END_REF] are far from uncontested values or concepts. While all of us would generally agree that media freedom is a good thing and that attacks on such freedoms are bad, freedoms are never absolute and always risk infringing upon the freedoms of others, or indeed on other freedoms, and the concept is of course applied strategically by those who want to further their own absolute and unaccountable power in its name, thus requiring us to be clear and precise about what we mean when we use such terms. Contemporary moral panics about a 'cancel culture' and a 'free speech crisis' are further examples of how such terms and discourses can be weaponised by those seeking to amplify and avoid accountability for their antidemocratic and socially harmful speech, while simultaneously silencing and denying the right to free speech of their critics (Riley 2020; Titley 2020).

For Wendy Brown, such democratic discourses, and indeed 'liberal democracy' itself, have become devoid of substance and are used as little more than a cloak for neoliberalism. Here, 'freedom' becomes a floating signifier (see Carpentier, this issue), used strategically as cover for what is perhaps better understood as 'power', whether that be the corporate power of the multinationals and barons that own media organisations or the power of elites or dominant social groups to spread unsubstantiated or offensive opinions without the consequence of legal repercussions or critical public opinion. While any concept can be repurposed and used in contradictory ways to serve the private interests of the user, the more fundamental problem with 'freedom' is its inherent malleability within the liberal tradition in which it has been developed (Phelan & Dawes). While there is a danger of getting bogged down in endlessly unresolvable disputes on the extent to which one freedom encroaches upon another, or to which any freedom is absolute, some critical scholars have suggested reframing the liberal 'freedom from' in terms of both state and market, thus protecting the media from both political and corporate power and interests, while others have drawn upon Habermas's critique of the liberal theory of media freedom to focus instead on citizenship and the public sphere, emphasising more issues of 'power over' as well as 'freedom from' and 'freedom to' (see Dawes 2014aDawes , 2014b)). Initially appropriated to defend the institution of public service broadcasting and an independently regulated media ecology from both state and corporate control, and in direct reaction to the tendency to argue for deregulation and privatisation in the name of media freedom, the association of PSB with the public sphere armed proponents with the emancipatory arguments they needed to challenge those of the privatising marketeers [START_REF] Collins | Public Service versus the Market Ten Years On: Reflections on Critical Theory and the Debate on Broadcasting Policy in the UK[END_REF] and to engage critically with the blindspots inherent to liberal theory itself, rather than just with the extent to which the practice of actually existing journalism matched the idealistic theory of media freedom.

But, as Natalie Fenton and Gavan [START_REF] Fenton | Mourning And Longing: Media Studies Learning To Let Go Of Liberal Democracy[END_REF] have argued, even the 'public sphere' and its associated concepts are at risk of capture by neoliberal governmentality, whereby a wellintentioned focus on deliberation and plurality is undermined by the contemporary unresponsiveness of decision-makers (2015: 6, 10) and the material inequalities and exclusions within liberal democracies (2015: 12). It is therefore not enough to simply sneer at the strategic or incorrect use of such concepts; instead, the effort must be to engage with the ways in which their use is integral to the exercise of such power (2015: 4). That is, to go beyond the reactionary claims of the mainstream media elites that media freedom and the public sphere are being constricted, and to examine the ways in which such instances of so-called media freedom are actually manifestations of media power that are harmful to the public sphere.

It is also necessary to fine-tune and qualify the way in which the media are evaluated in terms of their contribution to the public sphere, considering how they simultaneously enable and undermine it; more specifically by distinguishing between and attempting to evaluate the legitimacy of plurality and the efficacy of deliberation. Taking as a starting-point Fenton and Titley's intervention, and especially their suggestion that recognition and voice (2015: 14) be useful in this endeavour, this article will suggest the need to focus more on (the freedom and power of) the public rather than (the freedom of) the media, and to consider media freedom as a representative ideal of public freedom and power -important to the extent that it enables and expresses a public-centred (rather than a media-centred) public sphere. To this end, and similar to how Habermas supplemented the liberal theory media freedom with other traditions to develop the concept of the public sphere, I will demonstrate the benefits of supplementing the critical-theoretical concept of the public sphere with the more concrete (albeit less critical) measures of the capabilities approach, bridged by the 'connecting term' of voice and a contextual assessment of its legitimacy and efficacy in practice. Here, supplementing is understood in the Derridean sense of the supplément, as that which 'supplies what is missing but yet already inscribed within that to which it is added' [START_REF] Bernasconi | Derrida: Key Concepts[END_REF], so as to recast media freedom beyond its liberal limits and media-centrism, and to develop a more robust account of the extent to which media freedom enables or undermines the public sphere in terms of the extent to which the public are free from media power and able to hold it to account.

Following previous work [START_REF] Nicholas | Amartya Sen's Capabilities Approach To The Evaluation Of Welfare: Its Application To Communications[END_REF][START_REF] Hesmondhalgh | Capitalism and the media: moral economy, well-being and capabilities[END_REF][START_REF] Mansell | From Digital Divides To Digital Entitlements In Knowledge Societies[END_REF] in applying the capabilities approach [START_REF] Sen | Development as Freedom[END_REF][START_REF] Nussbaum | Frontiers of Justice[END_REF] to the study of media, communications and culture, and drawing on the work of Nancy [START_REF] Fraser | Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy[END_REF][START_REF] Fraser | Transnationalizing the Public Sphere On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World[END_REF] on the public sphere and Nick [START_REF] Couldry | Why Voice Matters[END_REF] on voice, the article will focus on the extent to which 'voice' can be understood as a 'fundamental capability' and applied as a 'connecting term' with other normative frameworks, such as citizenship or the public sphere. The article will suggest how such an approach could inform an evaluation of how well or badly certain media serve the needs and interests of the public, and the extent to which the public are capable of holding the media to account, by taking the French 'Je Suis Charlie' and the British News of the World phone-hacking debates as illustrative examples. While many have argued that to publish stigmatising cartoons of certain sections of the public or to invade the privacy of members of the public are the raison d'être of media freedom, and likewise that to critique such cartoons or to regulate against such privacy intrusions constitute threats to media freedom, I will suggest that these instances serve more as examples of media freedom undermining rather than enabling the politics of voice and the public sphere.

The article will argue that such a supplementary approach is necessary to avoid the universalism and paternalism to which normative and prescriptive accounts of citizenship and the public sphere are prone (condescending an undifferentiated public), as well as the absolutist libertarianism of free speech fetishists that often serves the benefit of those with rather than without voice. It also serves the function of grounding such abstract concepts in more concrete and measurable practices and social processes, while politicising the depoliticised accounts of rights and freedoms the capabilities approach tends to produce when applied alone. Ultimately, it also enables the recasting of media freedom in terms of a focus on (the freedom and power of) the public rather than (the freedom of) the media.

Media Freedom and Stricture

Critical theories of media freedom tend to draw on liberal freedoms 'from' (normally state-but also market-power) and freedoms 'to' (express oneself or speak truth to power), as well as republican traditions that emphasise participation, 'critical publicity' and the public use of one's reason, and communitarian, Marxist, feminist, anti-racist or postcolonial approaches that highlight the differences and inequalities between representative 'publics' or 'public spheres'.

The liberal theory of press freedom, whether as an educational or representative ideal, as an influence on public opinion or as a reflection of public opinion and provider of news and facts [START_REF] Hampton | Understanding Media: Theories of the Press in Britain, 1850-1914[END_REF], derives from the mid-19 th Century promise of a free market in ideas. As James [START_REF] Curran | Press Freedom as a Property Right: The Crisis of Press Legitimacy[END_REF] and others have pointed out, however, the liberal theory of press freedom makes a series of unconvincing assumptions, stemming principally from the reduction of press freedom to a property right exercised by publishers on behalf of society, with their free-market regulated actions seen as consistent with public opinion and the public interest, which in turn become synonymous with self-regulation and the market.

Although it was because the press were in private hands that private interests ultimately invaded the public sphere (Habermas, 1989: 185-188), for Jürgen Habermas, another problem was the 20 th Century welfare state and the associated recasting of media freedom as a social rather than a political right, aimed at providing citizens (through PSB) with the equal opportunity to participate in public communication, rather than the individual or collective freedom from government interference (1989: 227). Consequently, there is generally a debate between those who argue for a libertarian form of media freedom, equated for instance with either the free market or an absolutist defence of free speech, and those who argue for some form of regulation and accountability, which runs the risk of paternalism and depoliticising media freedom.

However, the perceived focus in contemporary cultural and media studies on what is sometimes called 'identity politics' at the expense of a focus on class inequality, and on discourse rather than the political-economy of media industries, has led to accusations of a depoliticised form of critique [START_REF] Downey | Ideology Critique: The Challenge For Media Studies[END_REF], while the tradition of drawing upon liberal theories of freedom, albeit often from a more complex and critical public sphere perspective, have also been criticised for undermining the scholarly critique of neo/liberal media [START_REF] Fenton | Mourning And Longing: Media Studies Learning To Let Go Of Liberal Democracy[END_REF][START_REF] Fenton | Fake Democracy: The Limits of Public Sphere Theory[END_REF]. Indeed, [START_REF] Fenton | Mourning And Longing: Media Studies Learning To Let Go Of Liberal Democracy[END_REF], drawing on [START_REF] Brown | Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy[END_REF], argue that a normative focus on ideals of publicness and the public sphere often emphasise the 'power to' (or 'power from') over questions of the 'power over', thus falling into the trap of legitimating neoliberal governmentality while ostensibly critiquing its failings in particular respects. It is therefore necessary to go beyond the assumptions of liberal pluralist, cultural studies and politicaleconomic approaches by emphasising the complexity and contradictions of neo/liberal democracy and contemporary capitalism (simultaneously enabling and undermining emancipation), and the need for critical scholars to exploit the instability and tensions of actually existing media, as well as to self-reflexively question the inconvenient limits of our normative repertoire for critique, rather than to simply apply normative theories heavy-handedly (Freedman 2013).

Similar radical critiques of media freedom have critiqued the extent to which the media have ever been free and to which even PSB was ever really about the public, arguing instead for future models of public media that privilege the participation of the public (or rather of diverse publics) themselves, whether in the form of the ability to hold the media to account or through more active and quotidian involvement in the commissioning of programming; placing the emphasis more on the 'public' than the 'media' in proposals for a future model of 'public media' (Dawes 2017;[START_REF] Hind | The Return of the Public: Democracy, Power and the Case for Media Reform[END_REF]Media Reform Coalition 2018;[START_REF] Mills | The BBC: The Myth of a Public Service[END_REF]. While invocations of media freedom focus on the freedom of the (public or private) media from (state or even corporate) power, and the freedom of the media to hold such power to account, what is often missing is any acknowledgment of the existence of media power -often linked to other forms of power (Freedman 2013) -or, more specifically, the public's freedom from media power and their freedom to hold media power to account.

Ultimately, what such critiques highlight are the fact that when we talk about media freedom, we're often talking about the freedom and unaccountable power of media owners or editors, and not so much journalists, nor other workers in the media industries, nor the public. And when we are talking about journalists (or for that matter owners/corporations), we're talking about their freedom even when it's in conflict with the public. What this neglects, however, is an acknowledgment of the link between journalists/the media, on the one hand, and the public/s on the other. For the theory behind media freedom, public opinion, public sphere, etc., is that the media are important for democracy; that they are representative of public opinion and the public; that they hold (state/corporate) power to account on behalf of the public. Because of this conflict between, on the one hand, the media's strategic use of 'media freedom' to maintain its 'freedom from' public accountability and even its 'power over' the public, and, on the other hand, the absence in reality of public accountability, of 'power over the media' and even of 'freedom from the media', the former are increasingly being contested by the latter, particularly via social media and during moments in which the myth of media freedom is particularly intense. When this myth is challenged and debated (indeed, when the future of media and democracy as we know it is questioned), these conflicts can be understood as what I call elsewhere 'media freedom events' [START_REF] Dawes | Media Freedom Events[END_REF], and the final section will address two such events to illustrate the problem of understanding them simply in terms of media freedom, the relative advantages of drawing on both public sphere theory and the capabilities approach, and the benefit of connecting both approaches via the concept of voice. First however, we must look at two particular aspects of public sphere theory in an effort to develop a more robust account of the extent to which the free media enable or undermine the public sphere.

Legitimacy and Efficacy

Much of the media and communications scholarship on policy since the 1980s has taken issue with the misguided assumptions and blindspots of liberal theories of media freedom, often seeking to merge a liberal focus on rights and freedoms with a more critical account of power. Graham Murdock, for instance, added to TH Marshall's categories of civil, political and socioeconomic rights [START_REF] Marshall | Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays[END_REF]) the idea of cultural-informational rights, requiring that the fullest range of information and opinions be provided and that spaces be made available within which individuals can recognise themselves and affirm themselves for what they wish to be (Murdock 1999: 29-30).

However, in recognizing cultural inequality between citizens that are formally equal in terms of legal rights, citizenship as a concept has been further broadened by communitarians to more adequately include struggles for recognition and redistribution [START_REF] Fraser | Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange[END_REF], and to balance universal citizenship with cultural diversity (Kymlicka & Norman 2000) and the accommodation of difference with the limits of tolerance [START_REF] Stevenson | Cultural Citizenship[END_REF]. Liberal accounts of citizenship rights, in contrast, tend to gloss over issues of social struggle and difference and to neglect a republican focus on the ethical dimension of civic virtue and the opportunities for citizens to actively participate in public life. Consequently, the liberal approach to citizenship, which emphasizes the institutional development of rights, has since tended to be supplemented in citizenship studies by a republican emphasis on either the intrinsic or instrumental value of participation (Lister 1997), and to be reconfigured in terms of extent (inclusion/exclusion), content (rights/obligations) and depth (thickness/thinness), which, within the framework of public sphere theory, can be understood in terms of legitimacy, whereby the polity must be defined by factors beyond those that formally enable participation (i.e. legal citizenship).

Habermas's discourse theory model (normatively weaker than republicanism but stronger than liberalism) depends on the state only as the institutionalisation of the procedures and conditions necessary for public communication. This proceduralist compromise moves away from a view of society as a state-centred and goal-oriented whole, towards recognising a decentred society (Habermas 1996: 27) that, in the first instance, produces influence (through public opinion), then communicative power (via elections) and ultimately administrative power (in the form of legislation). The extent to which one level can be guaranteed to lead to another, however, raises further questions on the efficacy of the public sphere. Consequently, constructionists [START_REF] Benhabib | The Democratic Moment and the Problem of Difference[END_REF][START_REF] Fraser | Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy[END_REF][START_REF] Mouffe | On the Political[END_REF] critically engaging with and building upon Habermas's interventions have since debated the link between inclusion and participation, and the importance of rational-critical debate to a genuinely inclusive and participatory (and legitimate and efficacious) public sphere (see also Feree et al 2002; Downey et al 2012 for an overview of these public sphere models).

Addressing the 'social question' (Fraser 1992: 113) and emphasising the significance of informal as well as formal 'impediments to participatory parity' (1992: 119), Nancy Fraser proposes instead the importance of making inequalities visible (1992: 120-121) and of determining the common concern through discursive contestation (1992: 129). She criticises the civic-republican presumption of the common good in advance of such deliberation, emphasising instead that the acknowledgment of private interests can help the less powerful recognise whether or not they are included in the public, and so better contest the common interest (1992: 129-130). Building upon Negt and Kluge's (2016) dialectic of bourgeois and proletarian counterpublic spheres, she argues that, in societies in which subordinated social groups have been formally or informally excluded from or disadvantaged by the dominant public sphere, subaltern counterpublics, although they may be antidemocratic, antiegalitarian or exclusive themselves, may enhance the participation of subordinate strata and provide the form of public life that comes closest to realising the ideal of the public sphere within actually existing democracies [START_REF] Fraser | Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy[END_REF]; see also Fenton &[START_REF] Fenton | Counter Public Sphere and Global Modernity[END_REF]Born 2006). Subsequently, she also argues (2007) for the need to rethink the concepts of normative legitimacy and political efficacy. While legitimacy has traditionally referred merely to the equal rights and shared community of participants, and efficacy to the relation between those participants and a sovereign state, she breaks legitimacy down into two parts -inclusiveness and participatory parity -where the inclusiveness condition concerns who participates (all with a stake in the outcome), and the parity condition concerns how they participate (with equal chances). Likewise, she splits efficacy into two elements -the translation condition and the capacity condition. The former refers to the translation of the communicative power of civil society into binding laws and administrative power. The latter refers to the capacity of public power to implement this discursively formed will (Fraser 2007: 22).

Considering issues of legitimacy and efficacy highlights the problem with the extent to which public or private media have ever really privileged the public as such, certainly in terms of inclusion of a differentiated public but also in terms of participation in the running and holding to account of media institutions. Likewise, the problem with the free media's role in holding power to account is the question of media power itself, and thus the power of the public (or indeed a plurality of publics) to hold the media to account. More generally, the problem with liberal free speech is that some are freer than others to express themselves, while the expression of certain viewpoints is in practice (if not in a legal or formal sense) more protected than others. Critical normative concepts are important for highlighting the power differentials and formulating why certain freedoms and limits are necessary, and thus how laws and organizational structures should be changed if deficient, but they don't necessarily help us to identify the extent to which some freedoms are articulated in practice. There is thus a difference between legal/formal freedoms and substantive ones. While such a critical and normative approach is valuable for critiquing the assumptions behind formal and legal freedoms, as well as evaluating the extent to which actually existing media arrangements and actions are reflective of the kinds of the freedoms espoused, they are less useful for revealing what the public actually want or need to be or do, and for connecting the abstract ideals with the public's actual power. In contrast, a capabilities approach takes into account the personal values and individual contexts of the extent to which such freedoms are valued by and realized for different sections of the public, opening up questions of substantive freedom in terms of concrete media practices.

Capabilities and Voice

For Amartya Sen, capabilities are freedoms conceived as real opportunities (Robeyns 2020); while 'functionings' are achieved freedoms, 'capabilities' are the ability to achieve those freedoms. Employing capability as an opportunity concept of freedom denotes the effective as well as the formal and legal availability of valuable options or alternatives [START_REF] Robeyns | The Capability Approach[END_REF]. The approach thus emphasises the substantive freedom of people 'to lead the lives they have reason to value and to enhance the real choices they have' (Sen 1999: 293), and seeks to assess the extent to which such freedoms are actually available in practice on an individual level, and not only hypothetically available to all in law and theory.

In the context of Sen's own limited engagement with media and communication (such as Sen & Drèze 1989), however, he has tended to presume a formally and legally free press without, as Hesmondhalgh (2016: 11) has argued, acknowledging the negative effects of ostensibly free media on more substantive media freedoms. He has, nevertheless, argued that the media can contribute to certain capabilities through providing information, forming certain values and encouraging 'public reasoning', as well as by 'giving voice to the neglected and the disadvantaged' (Sen 2009: 335-337). A growing number of media scholars [START_REF] Nicholas | Amartya Sen's Capabilities Approach To The Evaluation Of Welfare: Its Application To Communications[END_REF][START_REF] Mansell | From Digital Divides To Digital Entitlements In Knowledge Societies[END_REF][START_REF] Hesmondhalgh | Capitalism and the media: moral economy, well-being and capabilities[END_REF][START_REF] Moss | Media, capabilities, and justification[END_REF]) have subsequently taken up Sen's work, as well as that of Nussbaum and the capabilities approach more generally, to argue for just such an evaluation of substantive media freedoms. Indeed, in originally proposing the application of Sen's approach to an evaluation of media and communication policy, Garnham suggested that the media should be reconceived as 'enablers of a range of functionings' (Garnham 1997: 32) so that policy could be judged on how well or how badly it serves such needs and how the relevant capabilities are socially distributed. Such an approach could be useful for assessing the effectiveness, for example, of a self-regulated press and of commercial and public service broadcasting in reaching their publics and achieving their self-proclaimed aims. But in transcending the crude measures of access, usage and visits in cultural and media policy, and in critiquing the poor normative framing of the critique of such policies (Hesmondhalgh 2016: 12), Garnham's and Mansell's early contributions in this area also pointed towards the need for a differentiated approach to policy that recognises that 'different groups may require different resources to realise the same capabilities' (Moss 2018: 8).

Capability is, however, only one aspect of freedom, privileging opportunity over fairness and equity (Sen 2009: 295), and neglecting issues of responsibility, duty or obligation in favour of a focus on a rights-based approach, consequently providing only a partial account of social justice (O'Neill 1996 in Robeyns 2020). And although the application of such an approach to media policy can avoid both the paternalism of the prescriptive public service ethos on what the public should value as well as the relativistic fetishisation of consumer choice (Hesmondhalgh 2016: 12) or free speech, and although it takes us beyond a focus on utility or access, the focus on measurable functionings, the desirability of certain outcomes (Moss 2018: 3), and the concrete practices of what people actually do and actually need (Hesmondhalgh 2016: 11), fails to address these wider issues and confront questions of power. While useful, it is therefore insufficient for evaluating, nevermind justifying, the democratic legitimacy and efficacy of either public media or a free press.

Consequently, some scholars have recently suggested supplementing the capabilities approach with the critical normative one [START_REF] Couldry | Why Voice Matters[END_REF][START_REF] Hesmondhalgh | Capitalism and the media: moral economy, well-being and capabilities[END_REF][START_REF] Moss | Media, capabilities, and justification[END_REF], in particular by treating 'voice' -people's abilities to give an account of themselves -as a fundamental capability (Couldry 2010: 105) that overlaps with several of Nussbaum's ten capabilities, covering freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of religious exercise, liberty of conscience, and rights of political participation. The concept of 'voice' has also been suggested as a superior alternative to welfarist versions of 'citizenship' for assessing the media [START_REF] Collins | Paradigm Found: The Peacock Report And The Genesis Of A New Model Of UK Broadcasting Policy[END_REF][START_REF] Flew | The Citizen's Voice: Albert Hirschman's Exit, Voice And Loyalty And Its Contribution To Media Citizenship Debates[END_REF].

In Albert Hirschman's 1970 book, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, he identified three ways in which 'stakeholders' could hold institutions to account: through 'exit' (by ceasing to purchase the product or service); 'voice' (such as voting, or complaining); or 'loyalty' (a null option to neither exit nor make one's voice heard). For Hirschman, voice is dependent not just on the right of those affected to participate, but also on the argument that the wider the participation, the better the decisions, and the belief that individuals acquire political skills through their political participation (Flew 2009: 981).

Expanding the economic account of voice's effect within a market, Couldry offers a broader notion of voice as a socially grounded process (Couldry 2010: 7) that involves both speaking and listening (2010: 9) (see also Taylor 2020 on the right to listen, and Hansen 2018 on spaces of silence in the public sphere), as well as 'the capacity to make, and be recognised as making, narratives about one's life ' (2010: 7). The view of voice as a form of reflexive agency, whereby one takes responsibility for one's stories and explicitly links them to one's intentions, also moves us away from more formal and Habermas-influenced models of democracy as rational-critical deliberation or speech (2010: 8). Instead, Couldry develops voice as a 'counter-rationality' that challenges excessive individualism and the neoliberal conflation of society, culture, politics and economics with market processes (2010: 13). It is a process of articulating the world from a distinctive embodied position (2010: 8) that is, nevertheless, internally and externally diverse (that is, there are differences between voices, and within a particular voice). Voices can therefore be individual, collective or distributed (2010: 9), and rational or irrational. Couldry warns against the various ways in which voice can be undermined, whether by ignoring individual experience, collective views, or distributed practices (2010: 10). Although he praises markets and consumption for sometimes enabling voice, particularly when opportunities for some traditional forms of politics (such as citizenship) are reduced or denied, he emphasises that the problem with markets is that they do not function to provide voice, and do not require the 'exchange of narratives between reflexive, embodied agents'; indeed, economists would view this sense of voice as an 'externality of market functioning ' (2010: 11). Derived neither from an economic view of consumer choice, nor from a political view of citizen participation, the term 'voice' potentially offers a way of connecting the capabilities and critical normative approaches. Indeed, for Couldry, 'voice' is useful as a connecting term that can be articulated alongside other normative frameworks (such as citizenship and the public sphere).

In the final section of this article, we will now go on to consider how voice can be used to connect the capabilities approach to critical normative accounts in two specific contexts, revealing respectively the extent to which examples of media freedom in action can be seen to demonstrate problems with the legitimacy and the efficacy of the public sphere. The first of these contexts demonstrates the freedom of those with a voice (the mainstream media) to stigmatise publics without a voice, and the extent to which the critical opinion of those publics is then further silenced in the name of defending media freedom, while the second demonstrates the unaccountable power of the media to violate the privacy of the public, and the extent to which the public's attempts to reign in media power is thwarted and misrepresented as an assault on media freedom. I will argue that these contexts are better understood as examples of media freedom undermining respectively the legitimacy and the efficacy of the public sphere.

Media Freedom in Action

Charlie Hebdo and Free Speech

To the extent that journalists were targeted and killed on 7 January 2015 for being journalists and because of the content of some their journalism, the attack at the offices of Charlie Hebdo can understandably be framed as an attack on media freedom, or, more specifically, on the free speech of those working within the media. On another level, however, its framing as an attack on free speech and republican values (such as the right to offend and critique religion), reignited unresolved debates on the extent of free speech in France and whether or not some of the magazine's content was racist. On another level still, the extent to which the mainstream media framing of this debate was exclusionary -denying, marginalising and delegitimising counternarratives and the voices of ethnic and religious minorities among the French public revealed a fissure in the social fabric and highlighted the power relations at play in such framing.

Much of the heated debate that followed the attack was more centred around the phrase 'Je Suis Charlie' than with Charlie Hebdo itself, and thus more with the mainstream media and political framing and appropriation of the event (with the pressure to identify with the magazine, and with the delegitimising of those who wouldn't as indicative of the 'Muslim problem') than with the magazine or its journalists. Counter-assertions of 'Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie' on social media represented "a crack in the dominant meaning, a contestation of the narrative, perhaps even a different story altogether" [START_REF] Badouard | Pluralité Des Prises De Parole Sur Le Web Et Les Réseaux Sociaux[END_REF][START_REF] Dawes | Charlie Hebdo, Free Speech and Counter-Speech[END_REF]2017b;[START_REF] Giglietto | To Be or Not to Be Charlie: Twitter Hashtags as a Discourse and Counterdiscourse in the Aftermath of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo Shooting in France[END_REF]Merzeau 2015;Ratinaud & Smyrnaios 2015). In the dissemination of the 'Je Suis Charlie' slogan as a media frame and an emotive symbol of national unity, laïcité and republican values were again transformed into a 'performative ritual' that did not recognise cultural differences, and were used as a justification to scrutinize and interfere with the bodies, sensibilities and practices of (particularly women) Muslim citizens (Barras in [START_REF] Editors | Values and Violence: Thoughts on Charlie Hebdo[END_REF]. In contrast, some have argued for the need, in an increasingly multicultural society, to 'fit into each other's frames' (Bangstad in [START_REF] Editors | Values and Violence: Thoughts on Charlie Hebdo[END_REF]. Such an effort would necessitate the acknowledgment, recognition and representation of those that find the content of Charlie Hebdo offensive, that refuse to ventriloquise their condemnation of terrorism through a hollow slogan and identification with a publication that they feel discriminated by, and that seek to challenge dominant discourses on the acceptable limits of free speech and on whose voices do and don't count in the public sphere.

This event demonstrates how both the free speech fetishism of the magazine, and the mainstream media's defence of free speech as the dominant frame for understanding the attack, is actually better understood as a particular form of speech by particular publics and media, while other forms of speech and public are made substantively unfree by such ostensible defences of what is only formally and legally inclusive freedom. A capabilities approach to voice would enable us to ascertain the extent to which French Muslims have real opportunities and actual freedom to express themselves, regardless of the fact they are legally and formally considered equal to other French citizens. The focus on substantive freedom would turn attention to their views and values, and the extent to which these are represented, hearable and listened to in the public sphere, rather than being dismissed, ridiculed and shouted down on the rare occasions that they are represented. And recognition of the fact that one size does not necessarily fit all would challenge the universalist insistence on ignoring cultural difference and inequality, acknowledging instead that Charlie Hebdo's purported egalitarianism in its satire against all identities actually disproportionately affects some groups over others, depending on the levels of subjugation and discrimination from which they suffer in society more widely.

A more critical appreciation of voice than a purely capabilities-influenced interpretation would tend to produce would also lead us to question the harm posed by the unaccountable power of the free media and their privileging of certain experiences, views and practices over others, as well as their legitimising of certain narratives as rational and acceptable while counternarratives are ignored or dismissed as irrational and even dangerous. It would also encourage us to consider the extent to which dialogue within the dominant public sphere and between the various subaltern and counter public spheres is effective. And we would also be inspired to consider not only the inclusion and representation of different publics, views and experiences, but also the participatory parity among and between publics, and the extent to which those who may be permitted to speak are also sincerely listened to and fairly engaged with. It would, in short, permit a thorough account of the extent to which this particular event demonstrated the legitimacy of the public sphere.

News of the World and Press Freedom

Another example for us to consider, this time in terms of the efficacy of the public sphere, is The News of the World phone-hacking scandal, subsequent Leveson Inquiry and ultimately the failure of the Inquiry's recommendations on press regulation in the public interest to be put into effect.

The scandal, exposed by The Guardian in 2011, highlighted some contradictions inherent to liberalism and the liberal theory of press freedom (Dawes 2014a). On the one hand, the illegal activities of the right-wing tabloid demonstrated the problems with an unaccountable and (in effect) unregulated press; with the absence or ineffectiveness of privacy law in the UK; with the problem of lobbying and the influence of powerful private interests on the police and the judiciary, on the legislative and the executive, and on the public interest more generally [START_REF] Fenton | Post-Democracy, Press, Politics and Power[END_REF]. On the other hand, the persistence of the liberal broadsheet's investigative journalists also acted as a reminder of the ability of the press to resist such forces and to hold power to account, while the subsequent police investigations, trials and convictions, as well as the public inquiries and parliamentary debates and legislation, were interpreted by some as proof that all was well with liberal democracy in the UK.

But the liberal rhetoric of press freedom often serves more the private interests of media proprietors than it does the public interest, harming both the independence of journalists and the right of the public to know. The potential for individual freedom and the public interest to be all too easily conflated with the private interests of the powerful is a threat that is inherent to the liberal perspective, and which undermines the legitimacy of the state and the efficacy of public opinion to hold authority to account. As the Leveson Inquiry heard, there is a difference in scope and scale between an individual's unconditional right to free expression (which only ends where another's begins) and the freedom of a newspaper to "…undermine individuals' abilities to judge for themselves and to place their trust well, indeed…to undermine democracy" (O'Neill 2011).

Nevertheless, regulatory change is no longer on the political agenda, following the press's success at convincing enough members of parliament that the previously agreed upon need for independent regulation would mean the end of media freedom. The failure of independent regulation to come into being in any meaningful sense (with the tabloid, corporate press not being given the incentive to join the new regulator that Leveson recommended) or for justice to be truly done (with the abandonment of the second phase of the Leveson Inquiry), and for even The Guardian to refuse to join the new regulator, suggests a failure in the efficacy of the liberal public sphere -that is, for public opinion to translate into concrete actions -and that something is rotten at the heart of our understanding of media freedom and not just that which actually exists. The Guardian's own refusal to acknowledge either Impress or IPSO, and to regulate itself instead, is based on a misunderstanding of independent regulation that poses new risks of unaccountable media power to the detriment of the public interest, with little opportunity, for example, for the public to hold The Guardian to account when they misinform the public. The result is a still unaccountable press and a public denied their opportunity to hold media power to account through regulatory mechanisms beyond the communicative power of critical public opinion expressed through social media.

Analysing this example in terms of voice would involve the extent to which, first of all, the victims of phone-hacking, and, more generally, the public as a whole are able to translate the weight of their experience and opinion into actual regulation and accountability of media power. It would lead us to ask questions about whose interests are served by having an unaccountable and only self-regulated press and whose interests are trampled on or at best ignored, and turn attention away from the focus on the opportunities afforded to the press and towards questions of fairness and equity in society more generally, as well as on balancing the voice of the press with the voice of the public. In addition to ensuring the formal and legal availability of rights of reply and recourse to a regulator, we could also assess the extent to which they are actually available in practice and the effectiveness of those mechanisms that do exist, paying particular attention to the different needs of different groups. All this would help us evaluate the extent to which the communicative power of civil society did or did not translate efficaciously through public and police inquiries and parliamentary legislation into binding laws and administrative power to hold media power to account, as well as to evaluate the capacity of public power to implement this discursively formed will. In short, it would help us to assess the extent to which the free media enable or undermine a functioning public sphere.

Conclusion

This article has aimed to demonstrate the benefits of supplementing the capabilities approach with public sphere theory via the connecting term of voice as an alternative to the more simplistic recourse to liberal theories of media freedom and free speech, which increasingly run the risk of acting as little more than cover for what is better understood as manifestations of media power that undermine the politics of voice and, ultimately, the public sphere. While media freedom is conceptually limited and problematic, capabilities and the public sphere (and indeed, voice) likewise have their weaknesses when articulated alone. But when voice acts as a connecting term between these two supplementary approaches to media freedom, a simultaneously more critical and concrete account of how media freedom and media power are entwined can be articulated.

The capabilities approach remains a liberal, neoclassical approach rooted in mainstream economics. Although it suffers from the same assumptions and blindspots of liberal theories of freedom more generally, it nevertheless offers a more concrete way of measuring (the achievement of, as well as the ability to achieve) actually existing freedoms. The normative (whether Marxist, Gramscian, Habermasian, Foucauldian) critique of liberalism remains necessary, therefore, both for an interpretation of media freedom and free speech, and for an assessment of the extent to which such freedoms are valued and realised that takes into account power relations. As such, public sphere theory (drawing on disparate approaches) still offers a valuable resource for understanding how the formal and legal freedoms may themselves enable and undermine substantive freedoms. That is, how media freedom, understood as a free market or absolutist libertarian ideal, is also the freedom of some over others, a form of power that is not always representative of the public (and therefore illegitimate) nor accountable to the public (and therefore inefficacious). Rather than focusing on the extent to which the media function as a public sphere (enabling rather than undermining it), we should shift the focus away from the media and onto the public themselves. By using the concept of voice as a connecting term between the capabilities and public sphere approaches, we can more clearly assess the legitimacy of the public sphere and the extent to which the public are capable of achieving freedom from and through the media, as well as the efficacy of the public sphere and the extent to which the public are capable of holding the media and power to account.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Annette Hill, Sean Phelan and Gavan Titley for comments on an earlier draft.