"Our politicians have ever-decreasing legitimacy, our financiers -- their huge corporate risks underwritten by the taxpayer -- are literally and morally bankrupt. All this is done in the name of us, the public, yet we seem to have no genuine say in decision-making and no power to effect change. Why not? Hind traces how, historically, political and intellectual elites constructed a deeply ambiguous idea of the public, one designed to serve their own ends and preserve the ruling status quo. After the second World War, as democratization by previously marginalized groups -- women, ethnic minorities, the young -- presented new challenges to the establishment, governments made fresh attempts to exclude them from genuine political participation, invoking the arcane expertise of allegedly liberal economics and the mystic qualities of nationalism, fueled by a compliant mass media. For decades, the public has been told to leave democracy to the experts. Now, Hind outlines a way forward for a new participatory politics, one based on the wholesale reform of the media. After the failure of the private, now is the time for the return of the public."--Dust jacket.