Is Daily Kos a public sphere?

Daily Kos (http://www.dailykos.com/) describes itself as the premier online political community. Stating that it is a news organization, community, and activist hub. The website also explains that it contains posts by presidents past and present, senators, congressmen, and other prominent elected officials, as well as the common American.

Jurgen Habermas describes a public sphere as a place where private people come together as a public to debate issues of politics. More quotations from Habermas can be found here. Habermas defines the public sphere as "above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public". With this description, Daily Kos is almost positively a public sphere. It is an online meeting place where individuals in society come to share their opinions in a public space.

Habermas also states that in the public sphere "access is granted to all citizens". Now, this statement can be true when applied to the Daily Kos, but only in the sense that it is granted to all citizens that have access to a computer and the internet. And although much of our society today is based upon technology and sharing information, there are large portions of the world that don't have this access and knowledge of sharing information on the web. But one could also argue that this website is predominantly a site used by people in the United States, and its slogan is "The state of the nation", where much of society is capable of accessing this site.

With the majority of society, or at least bourgeois society (as Habermas would put it), on the internet, Daily Kos is a public sphere for the 21st century. Instead of going to town hall meetings and debating in more physical ways, our society does much of its political talking online. Not to say that town hall meetings are obsolete, but the internet is definitely edging them out. Almost every post on Daily Kos is related in some way or another to the political world here in the United States, and most of the comments on these posts or articles also relate to that world. Habermas states that in a public sphere, "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". This is exactly what Daily Kos allows people to do. Express their opinions about matters of general interest in an unrestricted fashion. Anybody who goes to this website and looks at an entry is allowed to enter their own comments and posts about it. Habermas goes on to say the public sphere "mediates between society and state, in which the public organizes itself of the bearer of public opinion." Daily Kos shows the opinion that the public has organized, and although it does not represent the entire public, it does a decent job a representing a important portion of them. And with a slogan like "state of the nation", Daily Kos does in fact mediate between society and state.

Daily Kos is not the complete, ultimate idea of a public sphere, but then again, does a public sphere exists right now that satisfies all of Habermas's ideas? Advertising, the administrators, and other factors are always going to interfere and influence how public and fair a website is. But when we look realistically, Daily Kos is a concrete example of what a public sphere is in our society.