If democracy is to be understood as government by and for the people, popular judgment has to be competent : decision-making procedures need to be both inclusive and effective. In this paper I consider a condition for the competence of the people : the existence of a public sphere propitious to the public contestation of political decisions. By comparing the contestatory (Pettit) and epistemic (Cohen, Estlund) models of democracy, I first show that contestability can only ground democratic legitimacy if popular contestation operates partly via the public sphere. I then claim that that it is unrealistic to expect that the actions of media agents will spontaneously produce an appropriate deliberative context provided that freedom of expression and media pluralism are legally protected, as some suggest (Page). Finally, I conclude that the space for public contestation must be instituted, which implies that the regulatory resources offered by journalistic ethics, social criticism and media law should be exploited.