Genealogy of conceptualizations of (the principle of) publicity since Kant and Bentham reveals a fundamental difference between the currently prevailing notion of freedom of the press as the fourth estate derived from Bentham's model of "distrustful surveillance" and the Kantian quest for the public use of reason and his principle of publicity. Bentham favored a free press as an instrument for public control of government, in the interest of the general happiness. Kant favored free public discussion as an instrument for the development and expression of human autonomous rationality. Yet a "free press" embodied in the property rights of the owners of the press may well fail to achieve either Benthamite or Kantian goals, which lead to a personal right to communicate rather than to a corporate right to press freedom. In democratic societies where citizens rather than different estates legitimize all powers, the control dimension of publicity embodied in the corporate freedom of the press should be effectively supplemented by actions toward equalizing private citizens in their public use of reason. Similarly, Habermas' political philosophy is grounded on the assumption that in the last instance, both the public and democracy depend exclusively on public democratic engagement of citizens regarding important public issues. An analysis of the transformation of journalistic discourse, and of political and cultural implications of the new popular (Slovenian) journalism reveals that the ideological structure of the "journalistic field" (Bourdieu) can't be validly analyzed when focused exclusively on political and economic interests involved but should include at least two additional key elements of the journalistic production: professional mythology and self-representation of journalism, and popular ideology/mythology, which is construed in reproduced by journalism in any specific historic moment.