Lights, Camera, Action! How the 2009 Romanian Presidential Debates Portrayed Political Candidates

In the last two decades, the concept of public sphere has reached international academic debates, its meanings have constantly changed and have been adapted to various domains. Particularly, in media studies, the question that needs to be addressed is this: to what extent the public sphere represents an arena of deliberativecommunication and equal access, as Jürgen Habermas had envisaged it? Thus, many authors claim that the mediated public sphere provided by television today no longer values the aforementioned elements, leadingto its dissolution. However, the meanings of this concept have been constantly reviewed, which requires a more careful consideration of this claim. Hence, the paper aims at understanding how the initial criteria of the public sphere have been assessed by academics in order to develop a personal definition of the concept. We argue that a main prerequisite of the mediated public sphere is that of deliberative communication, understood as equal representation granted by the media to political actors. Inspired by media bias theories, the empirical part of the paper addresses the following question: To what extent is the mediated public sphere a deliberative one? In order to answer it, the present paper examines the visual means used for portraying the political candidates and their supporters in the last Romanian presidential debate.