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After handing in my PhD, I started working as a postdoc on a project on news diversity and algorithmic news recommenders. Over the past few months, I’ve been exploring this fascinating field of research. Here are a few first observations. 
1) The normative literature on the value of news diversity is basically good old democratic theory reinterpreted in the (algorithmic) news diversity context. (This is a good excuse to combine my work on ethics of influence by/through technology with my first academic love: ...
... : political theory and political philosophy).
2) Rawlsian political liberalism is still the default starting position which has ‘intuitive appeal’ but that needs to be amended. Too much leeway for laissez-faire media policies, not enough attention for emancipation, etc.
2) Rawlsian political liberalism is still the default starting position which has ‘intuitive appeal’ but that needs to be amended. Too much leeway for laissez-faire media policies, not enough attention for emancipation, etc.
3) Habermasian deliberative democracy as a model for designing news diversity policy/tech seems to be *the* uncontested default position. In short: media diversity – both in terms of topics and viewpoints – should and can contribute to a Habermasian public sphere.
4) Agonism is often briefly discussed as a ‘radical’ alternative and basically summarized as ‘maybe we need to give more exposure to ‘emotional’ news.’
5) My first, provisional, observation is that, ironically, agonistic perspectives are *less* radical than most of their Habermasian counterparts. I get the sense that media and communication theorists working in this field love the Habermasian slogans, but underestimate(?) how...
... incredibly demanding a ‘real’ Habermasian-inspired theory of media diversity is – or should be. Agonism seems to offer a less demanding and, in that sense, less radical perspective.
6) However, the standard criticisms of agonism – can it truly accommodate meaningful pluralism, what do agonistic democratic institutions look like – still apply, also when thinking about news diversity.
So one challenge will be: can we think of (more) productive ways to bring the agonistic perspective to the news diversity context?
