Habermas on the decline of the public sphere

An interview with Jürgen Habermas is always worth reading and the interview published last weekend tin the Financial Times (free registration required) is no exception.  Most of the interview is a passionate defense of the eurozone and the EU project, along with some pointed criticism of Angela Merkel's response to the financial crisis in Greece.  And this is what caught the attention of the press ("Habermas attackiert Merkel").  

But also of interest are Habermas' comments on the decline of the "public sphere" – a central interest of the philosopher since the publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1962). 

“By the ‘public sphere’ we mean first of all the realm of our social
life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed,”
writes (the real) Habermas. “Citizens behave as a public body when they
confer in an ­unrestricted fashion – that is, with the guarantee of
freedom of assembly and association and the freedom to express and
publish their opinions – about matters of general interest.”

That Golden Age where informed citizens debated the issues (“rational-critical discussion”) in coffee houses and salons vanished long ago.  Might the Internet with the ability of individuals and groups to communicate across all boundaries create the opportunity for a revival of the public sphere?  Habermas is skeptical on this point:

“The internet generates a centrifugal force,” he says. “It releases an
­anarchic wave of highly fragmented circuits of communication that
­infrequently overlap. Of course, the spontaneous and egalitarian
nature of unlimited communication can have subversive effects under
authoritarian regimes. But the web itself does not produce any public
spheres. Its structure is not suited to focusing the attention of a
dispersed public of citizens who form opinions simultaneously on the
same topics and contributions which have been scrutinised and filtered
by experts.”

A good example of how the Internet can facilitate dysfunction in the public sphere is the state of political "discourse" in the United States:

Consider, Habermas suggests, the public debate about Obama’s healthcare reforms.
He seethes about the “progressive destruction of the infrastructure”
that would allow a conversation about the ­substance of the proposals
and their relative merits, rather than the ­bandying about of
ideologies. “If we consider the information on the basis of which a
majority of the American population demonises even modest healthcare
reforms as an outgrowth of ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’, we cannot assume
that the public sphere and political education are still ­functioning
properly in ­western countries.”

The facts on healthcare reform are available on the Web for all to read and debate.  Instead, a large swath of the American public is content to consume lies about "death panels" and "Soviet-style" rationing. When lies are preferred over truth the public sphere is done for.