Communicating to an Ideal Audience: News and the Notion of the ''Informed Citizen"

The news genre presupposes an ideal audience type-the ''informed citizen." Here, I will address what it means to ''be informed." How should audiences be addressed to enable them to become informed citizens, compared to addressing them as consumers? I will argue that when going beyond the official status attributed to news, one might find that viewers have contradictory feelings regarding the genre. I will provide examples of such news-related ambivalences and frustrations from my own research.