The public has been analysed many times (Lippmann 1921; Habermas 2022; Herman/Chomsky 2008). These analyses are often made the basis of media education theories and concepts. The opposite path has not been taken so far. Therefore, the lecture raises the question of how the public sphere should be shaped from a media education perspective. Based on suggestion for a public sphere that suits media education, it is discussed to what extent the public sphere in Austria has a structure that is suitable for the developpment of media literacy by a person.

In the first step, the possibilities of monistic and dualistic epistmologies for the development of proposals for the design of proposals for the design of the public sphere are discussed (Swertz 2021b). It is shown that monistic theories are not suitable for making the value of diversity the basis of realistic utopias and that dualistic theories are therefore preferable. In the second step, the theory of movement between spheres of value as an educational occasion, which has been developed in realdialectical media pedagogy (Meder 2004), is shown to be a possible framework for the development of a realist utopia (Swertz 2012). In the third step, the example of Austria is used to examine how the public sphere needs to be further developed in order to communicate the value of diversity in the context of creating occasions for the development of media education.

Results show that the public sphere should be shaped as citizen media, public media, state media and commercial media and that independent professionalised media pedagogical practice should primarily refer to free media. The current public sphere in Austria does not meet these requirements, since public media must earn advertising revenue, commercial media are subsidised with taxpayers' money, citizen media are tax funded and state media hardly exist. The public sphere therefore consists of only a nebulous structure that can be describe as a state-industrial media complex (Hug/Madritsch 2020). This complex prohibits media literacy. It is therefore necessary to further develop the existing apparent diversity into a real diverstity with clearly distinct structures.

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