Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre, The Making of Public Space: News, Events and Opinions in the Twenty-first Century The Making of Public Space: News, Events and Opinions in the Twenty-first Century. BoltanskiLucEsquerreArnaud. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press (distributed by John Wiley & Sons), 2024. 304 pp. $69.95 cloth; $26.95 paper; $22.00 e-book.

In the contemporary media landscape, the boundary between "the news" and "the political" has become increasingly porous, if not entirely obscured.In The Making of Public Space, Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre provide an exhaustive and intellectually demanding investigation into the machinery of this blurring.This book provides a comprehensive ontological framework for understanding how "current affairs" are constructed, contested and transformed into political action in an age of digital abundance.The book's primary contribution lies in its distinction between "news" and "history."Boltanski and Esquerre argue that the news is not merely a collection of facts about the present.Rather, it is a specific way of organizing reality.While history seeks to "close" the past by creating a stabilized, definitive narrative, news is characterized by its "openness" and radical uncertainty.The authors posit that we are moving away from a period where the "public space" was defined by a unified, editorialized version of reality.Instead, we have entered an era of "multiple planes of news."This shift is not merely technological; it is social.The "monopoly" previously held by legacy newspapers to decide what constitutes a "major event" has fractured.However, Boltanski and Esquerre avoid the simplistic "death of journalism" narrative.Instead, they argue that journalism has been re-situated as one of many competing forces in the politicization of reality.The core of the book's analytical rigor is found in its three-stage model of politicization.The authors meticulously trace how a report on a localized event (e.g., a protest, a crime or a policy change) escalates into a national or global concern.The first stage is "the plane of news," which is the initial selection process.The authors argue that an event only becomes "news" when it is perceived as a break in the "normal" flow of time.Once an event is reported, the public engages in two specific forms of evaluation.First is the menace (threat)-the assessment of how this event might harm the collective.Second is the recours (appeal)-the demand for a specific authority, usually the state, to intervene.Finally, the event enters a moral economy of blame.In this stage, the news is no longer about the event itself but about the "guilt" of the actors involved.For journalism researchers, this model is a powerful tool for analyzing "outrage culture."It suggests that the hostility found in comment sections and on social media is not a bug of the system but the primary engine of modern public space.One of the most impressive aspects of the book is its methodological breadth.Boltanski and Esquerre combine "distant reading" (computational analysis of large datasets) with "close reading" (traditional qualitative analysis).They analyzed