Dean’s book analyzes how the ‘public’s need to know’ and demands for ‘transparency’—which have only become more dominant in the Internet age—neatly dovetail with the interests of the mass media. Instead of an active, contested forum where power is laid bare we are served up an endless stream of distractions, half-truths, and so-called secrets all of which take the focus off real political issues and action. This media spectacle, Dean argues, is what masquerades as the ‘public sphere’ in our age of ‘communicative capitalism.’ See in particular the book’s introduction, ‘Communicative Capitalism: The Ideological Matrix.’