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Culture & Society
Complexifying media power: a study of the interplay between media and

audience discourses on politics
Kim Christian Schrder and Louise Phillips
Media Culture Society 2007 29: 890
DOI: 10.1177/0163443707081693
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Complexifying media power: a study of the

interplay between media and audience
discourses on politics
Kim Christian Schrder and Louise Phillips
ROSKILDE UNIVERSITY, DENMARK
Media, politicians or citizens: locating the locus of power?

Discussions about media and political power, in the public domain as well as
among academic researchers, often revolve around the question of whether it
is the politicians who steer the media representation of social and political
reality, or whether it is the media that impose their own definitions of political events, actors and institutions on the public agenda. The implication of
this binary focus is that whoever succeeds in overruling the definitional
efforts of the other media or politicians will control public opinion and the
way citizens cast their votes in parliamentary elections, and hence determine
the direction of democratic government. The mediatized political struggle
over agenda-setting and definitional power is thus seen as a duel.
What about the citizens, then, one might ask those individuals who constitute the smallest sovereign unit of democratic societies? Do they not have
any power singly or organized into groups and communities over the public agenda, apart from the power to construct their own agenda of socially relevant topics by selecting from the agenda offered by the media (McCombs
and Shaw, 1972)? Do they not have any power over the discursive framing of
social issues into public meanings and values? Do they only take up responsive and reactive roles in relation to the menus and diets set by the media, or
by the politicians through the media, when it comes to playing a part in the
democratic, collective decision-making process?
Relatively little is known about this, because relatively little research exists
which has explored the discursive definitional power of citizens vis-a-vis the
Media, Culture & Society 2007 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New
Delhi and Singapore), Vol. 29(6): 890915
[ISSN: 0163-4437 DOI: 10.1177/0163443707081693]
Schrder & Phillips, Complexifying media power
891
mediatized political system. Nevertheless, verdicts on the impoverishment of

popular democracy are often offered in the public and academic debates, sometimes targeting the inexorable tabloidization of the media. Theoretically, these
analyses are often based on Jrgen Habermass (1962, 2006) historical analysis
of the gradual degeneration of the public sphere (e.g. Dahlgren, 2001; Postman,
1987). The verdict is that the mediated public sphere is in a dismal state and
we are now facing a serious erosion of civic engagement and a crisis of civic
culture and engagement (e.g. Dahlgren, 2001).
It is not that there are no dissenting, more optimistic voices in the public and
academic debates that emphasize the democratically enabling consequences of
popularization and tabloidization, and the role of consumer culture as a site for,
rather than a barrier or threat to, politics (for example, Delli Carpini and
Williams, 2001; Eide and Knight, 1999; Street, 2000; van Zoonen, 1998, 2005).
But these voices occupy a marginal position in the debate about the media/politics/citizens nexus. As the study to be reported in this article indicates, it is far
from clear what role the media play with regard to the democratic literacy and
civic engagement of the citizenry (for a discussion of the limitations of existing
research, see Graber, 2005; Schrder and Phillips, 2005).
We present a study of mediatized politics which tries to remedy some of
the deficits of mainstream research on the media and politics. For instance,
our study does not privilege politics in the traditional sense, but rather takes
its point of departure in the lifeworld context of citizens, for whom party
political and parliamentary politics is merely one concern among many, as
they navigate in, and make sense of, lived experiences in everyday life
(Dahlgren, 2006). The insights from our study are derived from an empirical,
discourse-analytical study of the ways in which citizens in focus groups talk
to each other and to us about everyday life, news media and politics. We then
relate our analysis of citizen discourses to a parallel discourse analysis of the
medias diet of political discourses that filled the mediated public sphere of
politics at the time.
Research design, theory and method

Our study was one project among many carried out with funding from the
Danish Parliaments large-scale investigation of democracy and power
(19992004).1 The aim of our study was to gain insight into citizens use of
news media for political purposes in everyday life, and to explore possible
bi-directional interdependencies between the medias and citizens political
orders of discourse (Phillips and Schrder, 2004).
This led us to create a research design consisting of three interrelated empirical investigations (Figure 1), conceptualized as forming two axes of investigation, each with separate but related knowledge aims. On the vertical axis
(Study A), we explored the citizens acquisition of democratic prerequisites
892
Media, Culture & Society 29(6)

FIGURE 1
Research design: the media/citizens nexus
A. Citizens use and

experience of media:
focus group study
1. Acquisition of
democratic
prerequisites
B. Media discourses
about politics:
discourse analysis
C. Citizens discourses
about politics:
focus group study
2. Definitional power over politics
through the media analysing issues such as How do citizens do agendagetting? What are their repertoires of media use? How do they make sense of
specific TV news stories? This study was conducted as a focus group study,
in the tradition of reception research.
On the horizontal axis, we were interested in exploring the definitional
power of media discourses and citizens discourses over politics in a broad
sense. We operationalized this knowledge interest in the form of two separate
studies, one dealing with the representation of politics in the news media
analysing the issue How do the media talk about (articulate the field of) politics? This study was conducted as a discourse analysis of print and electronic media texts (Study B).
The second study on the horizontal axis explored the representation and
negotiation of politics among citizens looking for answers to the question
How do citizens talk about (articulate the field of) politics? This study was
conducted as a focus group study (Study C).
This research design might seem to lend itself to all kinds of causal claims
about the relationships between the media and citizens. On the horizontal axis,
do the media impose their political agendas and discourses on the citizens? Or
does the discursive relation work the other way around so that the political discourses of the media merely reproduce the citizens political agendas and discourses? On the vertical axis, do the media spoon-feed citizens a democratic
diet that produces well-informed, critical and reflecting citizens? Or do the citizens shop around and prepare their own democratically nutritious meals?
893
We deliberately abstain from speculation about such causal links. We prefer

to see our research design as expressed in Figure 1 as a Bermuda triangle of
mediated democracy where causal power relations disappear, so to speak, but
not without leaving visible traces of the significant discursive landscapes of
our mediated democracy, and of the way media and citizens deeply interdependently navigate in them. Our distanciation from causal claims should
not, therefore, be seen as a retreat from clear conclusions about the definitional capabilities of central democratic actors and the health of democracy,
but as an epistemological stand based on the conviction that the complexity
of mediated discursive processes defies causal reductionism.
We ascribe to the consensus view in media studies today that audience
members are active meaning-makers, that media texts are polysemic and that
texts set limits for meaning-production. Here, we draw on a holistic understanding of the different stages in the communication process production,
text and reception as separate but interconnected moments, where meaning
is produced at all stages under cultural and institutional conditions that both
enable and constrain meaning-production (Deacon, 2003). Our assumption
is that the relationship between media and citizen discourses is complex and
bi-directional (Gamson, 1992). According to our view of mediatization,
media discourses set boundaries for what is understood as politics in society, as the media represent a central source of knowledge and experience. But,
at the same time, media discourses are saturated by the ways in which citizens talk about politics, since journalists and media sources draw on discourses that circulate in society (Phillips and Schrder, 2004).
Since it is our research assumption, and not our hypothesis, that there is a complex interplay between media and citizen discourses, we do not attempt to prove
that there is such an interplay or to disprove the theory of direct causal links;
rather, we aim to produce empirically based knowledge on how the medias and
the citizens mutual definitional power is negotiated through particular discourses
which represent particular ways of constituting politics that marginalize or
exclude alternatives. Thus our approach diverges from the tradition of primarily
quantitative research on the role of news media in providing citizens with the necessary information to fulfil their duties as citizens, since this research tradition
assumes, and seeks empirically to demonstrate, direct causal links in its investigation of the effects of news media on citizens political knowledge and behaviour (Graber, 2005). And, with respect to qualitative research, we also go beyond
the tradition of audience research labelled the incorporation/resistance paradigm
by Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998), with its focus on whether audiences
accept their subordination to the ruling ideologies through their consumption of
media texts or whether they resist their subordination through active meaningmaking in text consumption. And, following Corner (1996), we also aim to avoid
ending up with the banal conclusion that media/audience relations are complex,
by discussing the implications for power and democracy of the specific content
of media and citizen discourses and their interrelations.
894
Our discourse-analytical framework for exploring language use about

media and politics is based on a combination of two social constructionist
approaches to discourse analysis: the form of critical discourse analysis
developed by Norman Fairclough (1992, 1995, 2003), and the form of discursive psychology associated with Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell
(Potter and Wetherell, 1987; Wetherell and Potter, 1992).
Both approaches are based on the assumption that language use is central
to the formation of our social world: our ways of talking are organized in discourses that create representations of reality that are not mere reflections of a
pre-existing reality the representations are constitutive of reality (Jrgensen
and Phillips, 2002). This represents an understanding of discourse that is
based on Foucaults (1972) definition of a discourse as a limited set of possible utterances which set the limits for what can we can say and, therefore, do.
Discourse is closely tied to power. Power operates through discourse by creating our social world and identities in particular ways. As power creates our
world, it is productive but, as it creates it in ways that exclude alternative forms
of social organization, it is also constraining. Since discourses enable us to talk
about the world including aspects of the world such as politics individual
discourses can be understood as resources. But because they set the boundaries
for what we can say and do with respect to politics, they exclude alternatives.
For our focus group analysis, we applied both approaches mentioned above on
the grounds that they supplement each other as analytical tools. We use critical
discourse analysis in order to map the discourses including their construction on
the basis of a range of linguistic features and their relations to one another and
to make a connection between the discourses and the broader societal tendency,
namely the mediatization of culture and politics. We attempt to map and then
compare two orders of discourse. The totality of discourses used in media representations of the field of transport, politics and everyday life is conceptualized in
our study as the order of discourse of the media, while the totality of discourses
used in citizens representations of the field of media, transport, politics and
everyday life is conceptualized as the order of discourse of citizens.
Discursive psychology is applied in order to gain insight into how, in the
production and negotiation of meaning, peoples rhetorical positioning of
themselves and others within particular discourses creates particular discursive patterns. Thus discursive psychology is used to support the critical discourse analysis of the relations between different discourses within the order
of discourse. Inspired by Potter and Wetherell, we have chosen to call discourses interpretive repertoires in order to stress their status as flexible
resources which people make use of in text and talk.
The order of discourse of the media and of citizens each represents a limited set of resources for the ascription of meaning to politics and thus sets
the boundaries for what can be understood and talked about as politics. By
mapping the orders of discourse, we create a static picture of a structured
field, but, at the same time, the analysis of the flexible language use of journalists
895
and focus group participants aims to demonstrate that the discursive patterns
are fluid and shifting; they are not just structure but also practice, with the
capacity to change these very structures.
The exploration of democratic prerequisites (Study A)

Our study of the discursive processes of the agenda-getting practices of the citizens takes its point of departure not in the media but rather in citizens and the
ways in which they draw on the media in their everyday life. The focus is on the
ways in which they talk about their use of the media in order to keep themselves
informed about what is going on around them locally, nationally and internationally. Our study thus bears some resemblance to the study by Couldry et al. (2006)
of peoples sense of public connection (see also Phillips, 2000). We limit our
study to the use of informative media, although obviously people also use what is
usually classified as entertainment media, including fictional genres, for purposes of information and social orientation (Delli Carpini and Williams, 2001).
We talked to seven groups with a total of 30 participants. All the groups
were homogeneous with respect to educational level (short education [max.
10 years] vs. long education [academic degree]), which served as the main
demographic variable due to its established importance as a divider of taste
and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984; Slaatta, 2003). We used two age groups,
1825-year-olds and 3550year-olds), but mixed in gender and occupation.
We invited the focus group participants to participate in discussion on the
basis of questions such as the following: how do people ensure that they gain
the information that is necessary, important and relevant for them so that they
can function in daily life? Which media and in the case of television, which
programmes do they use most for these purposes? And how do people experience the media or programmes they use the most why do they prefer them
to others? What matters most: content, style or participants? The overall perspective underlying these questions was our aim to gain insight into how different media or programmes are discursively constructed as prerequisites for
peoples practices as citizens in a democratic society.
The group sessions were divided into two phases. In the first phase, participants talked in general terms about their everyday use of media for local,
national and international news. The second phase was organized around five
excerpts from well-known news, current affairs and debate programmes.2 Most
of the groups also included a discussion of the celebritization of the media.
Analysis: citizens in the landscapes of informative media

The generalized findings of Study A can be summarized in Figure 2, which
divides the media into three main categories:
896

FIGURE 2
Citizens and media in everyday life: media preferences and
modes of experience of informative media
Long education
Short education
Daily newspaper
Cultural leaflets and
public information
from local
government
Radio: culture and
society programmes
The news-hour
(DR1)
Deadline (news
magazine)
-------Mode of experience
Equal orientation
towards media
content and
aesthetics
Awareness of their
social determinants
Infotainment
programmes
(consumer, lifestyle,
etc.)
Free local paper
(bi-weekly)
Metro/Urban (free
city newspapers)
P4 Copenhagen
Radio
TV-News:
DR1 and/or TV2
Lorry (regional TV)
Text-TV
The internet:
overview or
specialized
information
19 Direkte
(popular/populist
TV news)
-----Mode of experience
Primary orientation
towards media
content, secondary
towards aesthetics
Desire for general
overview of news
Desire for depth of

information
International
outlook
media that are mainly used by those with a relatively long education
media that are mainly used by those with a relatively short education
media used by long- and short-educated people alike, in similar or different ways.
For each of the two educational groups, the diagram specifies first the media
and programmes that make up their news diet and, second, their mode of experiencing these media. The media exposure patterns delineated in the diagram
turn out to correspond fairly closely with existing media statistics, but the most
interesting aspect of the analysis is not the fact that these groups use a certain
configuration of media, but rather their discursive construction of why they use
the media they do, what they say they use them for, and how they assess the
content and form of the different media, genres and programmes.
Focus group participants with a short education present as their main concern the wish to gain an overview of what is in the news on a daily basis. They
want news that is to the point without unnecessary and irrelevant details, and
justify this news preference on the grounds of a lack of time and a lack of
interest in in-depth background knowledge. The participants refer to a small
897
range of television programmes that provide them with the news overview
that they consider necessary. A newspaper is excluded from their news menu
with the legitimation of lack of time.
In contrast, participants with a relatively long education give accounts of a large
and varied media use encompassing heavy media and genres. They position
themselves as socially engaged citizens to whom it matters to be well-informed,
which means both to have a broad overview, but also to immerse themselves in
the background and context of the political and cultural stories on the news
agenda. At the same time, some of the participants no longer subscribe to a daily
broadsheet newspaper, justifying this on the grounds that they now read the free
daily tabloid and two weekend newspapers. This move from consumption of the
daily newspaper to the free tabloid was a pattern found across focus groups.
Implications for media policy and journalistic practice

The findings from our seven focus groups obviously cannot be generalized to
be representative in a strict sense of the Danish population as a whole.
Nevertheless, in the absence of previous studies of its kind, we believe that
our study has provided insights of considerable importance for the way we
conceptualize the interplay between media and citizens, and for the way we
evaluate the role played by the media in democratic processes.
We shall now briefly address the implications of our discourse-analytical
findings for an assessment of the current condition of the public sphere. Our
conclusions appear to offer a corrective to the verdict that the public sphere is
in a dismal state and that we face a crisis of civic culture and citizenship
(Dahlgren, 2001):
Provision of media in Denmark: our group conversations indicate that no
citizens are unable to fulfil their perceived needs for information required
in everyday life and for democratic purposes. As far as we can see, there is
no recognized need for new media offers to readers, viewers and listeners,
except for the gradual adjustment to changing social and cultural conditions that media organizations always have to make in their product development. Apparently the existing supply of newspapers, TV and radio news
programmes and internet news was sufficient.
The role of media in English: any evaluation of the Danish news market
must now also take into account the growing readiness of large sections of
the Danish population to supplement a staple diet of Danish media with
English and American ones, especially international TV channels like
CNN and BBC World, and internet-based news sources. Consequently,
assessments of the democratic enlightenment of the Danish population
must include the extent to which Danes draw on news sources in English.
898
Confrontational and consensual journalism: there is agreement between groups

with a relatively long and groups with a relatively short education that recent
TV journalism is unnecessarily confrontational and often polarizes the issues
far beyond what is reasonable. The informants would like journalists to strive
for a Habermassian ideal of public-sphere dialogue, and not pursue their own
negative and confrontational agenda. The focus group participants often talk
from a position which presupposes that there is a right solution for any given
problem, and that it is the purpose of public, political debate to serve as a vehicle for such a solution; they believe that common sense would often prevail if
only journalists did not polarize the different views for the sake of drama.
More generally, the focus group conversations show the contours of citizens uses of the media that appear to live up to the minimal requirements of
democratic participation, and for most of the participants considerably more
than that. The participants, whom we regard as typical of large sections of the
Danish population, are generally well informed about what goes on socially,
politically and culturally in society. They possess extensive knowledge repertoires which they can draw on in their appropriation and contextualization of
the information offered by the media. They also have elaborate aesthetic
repertoires that enable them to meet the media constructions of social reality
with a critical distance, even if we have found considerable differences in this
respect between the groups with short and long education.
The exploration of the definitional power over

politics (Study B and C)
In this study, unlike spin researchers, we are not interested in the power to
define day-to-day politics; rather, our study is aimed at exploring the definitional power over what politics is, as discursively constructed in the interplay
between media discourses and citizens discourses. In discourse-analytical
terms, we wish to map a societys political order of discourse, as constituted
externally by the struggles and negotiations between the medias political order
of discourse and the citizens order of discourse, and internally within each
order of discourse between the range of discourses or interpretive repertoires, defining the political along a continuum from parliamentary politics through sub-politics to life politics. Through analysis of the relations
between the medias and the citizens orders of discourse, our aim is to gain
insight into the definitional power of both the media and citizens and the
interplay between the two.
We thus view politics as a discursive construction, a product of different ways
of ascribing meaning to politics. The configuration of different discourses
which give meaning to the political together construct politics. Based on our
conception of mediatization and our holistic understanding of the communication
899
process mentioned above (Deacon, 2003), we view the orders of discourse of

the media and citizens as two separate but interconnected fields. Each field represents a structured and delimited terrain of repertoires. Media discourses set
boundaries for what we understand as politics, but conversely the medias discursive framing of politics is shaped by the framings of politics which citizens collectively have developed in everyday life, including through their
sense-making exposure to media discourses. While we treat politics as a discursive construction, we draw on sociological theory about the content of the
political in late modern society, taking our starting-point in Beck, Giddens and
related social theory (Beck, 1986, 1997; Giddens, 1991, 1994a, 1994b). We
thus theorize politics as a broad entity which embraces forms of politics (subpolitics and life politics) outside the established, formal political system. Both
sub-politics and life politics are expressions of a general tendency towards individualization whereby aspects of life which earlier were treated as inexorable
are now treated as objects of choice and responsibility.
Choice of primary policy area: traffic and transport policy

To explore the discursive construction of politics in the orders of discourse
of the media and citizens, respectively, we analysed the media coverage of an
inter-party transport agreement in January 2001 between the SocialDemocratic/Social-Liberal government and three right-wing opposition parties, and seven focus group interviews in which citizens talk about traffic and
transport issues and about transport policy.
We chose transport as this is an area belonging to the established political
system and raises traditional political questions, such as the distribution of
societal resources, while at the same time it raises sub-political and life-political questions such as the negotiation between personal responsibility for
public problems, on the one hand, and the demands of everyday life and the
individuals responsibility for her family on the other.
Everybody has personal, often daily experiences with traffic conditions and
issues, and at the start of the focus groups we asked the informants to share
such experiences with each other. As in the reception study above, with this
personal starting point we moved gradually towards the political dimension
of traffic and transport policy, asking participants to discuss the decisionmaking processes that have led to the ways in which transport and traffic have
become socially organized, and divided between public and private forms of
transport, in their local community, regionally and nationally. Who holds
responsibility for the present traffic arrangements, and who can affect the way
we as a society organize the transport conditions of the future? What are the
most productive ways for citizens to gain influence over such processes and
decisions? We thus invited the participants to discuss the role of politicians
and their own (views on) participation in politics.
900
At one point we showed the groups, as a discussion stimulus, a taped

TV-news story about young families involved in a car-free week experiment.
We also broadened the discussions by moving beyond traffic issues and into
other policy areas when the opportunity arose.
As the time frame for data collection of media discourses we chose the
week in which the transport political agreement was reached, in January
2001. This week was, in all respects, an average news-week in Denmark. We
analysed the coverage of both the transport agreement and all other political
coverage of a parliamentary, sub-political or life-political kind. Our sample
consisted of four national daily broadsheet newspapers, two national tabloid
newspapers, one local broadsheet newspaper, one local free newspaper, three
national TV channels, one regional TV channel and one radio programme.
Six repertoires: the medias and the citizens political orders of discourse
Through extensive, systematic discourse analysis of the media material and
the focus group recordings/transcripts, we mapped two orders of discourse
that consisted of the same six interpretive repertoires, but which weighted the
individual repertoires differently. These six interpretive repertoires have
grown out of the analytical encounter between our broad theory of politics (as
defined above) and the media and interview data. This interpretive process can
best be characterized as an abductive inferential process that cross-fertilizes
theoretical structuration and empirical analysis, through which interpretive
categories emerge, merge and diverge until the material appears to have been
exhaustively analysed.
Accordingly, the media and citizens can be said to talk about politics on the
basis of six different interpretive repertoires, which should be seen as often
intertwined with each other, and only analytically separable:
(1)
(2)
(3)
The party political game parliamentary democracy in action. Politics

is represented here from a positive perspective as party political
negotiations with the government as the leading force. Politicians are
represented as dynamic and full of initiative.
The party political game politics as dirty deals. Here politics is
defined as a democratically suspect game in which political parties
participate, where horse-trading and even mafia-like methods are in use.
Populism. Here social problems are seen as a result of politicians
detachment from, and ignorance of, peoples everyday life in local
contexts. Politicians are shown as detached, arrogant and ignorant
representatives of the system and therefore as the cause of problems,
while citizens are positioned as experts of everyday life who have
privileged knowledge based on their everyday experiences (common
sense).

(4)
(5)
(6)
901
Grassroots politics. Grassroots organizations are presented as actors on

the sub-political scene in opposition to, and in cooperation with, the parliamentary system. In the environmental discourse, public transport is
often seen as beneficial, while motorway expansion is identified as
detrimental to the environment.
Politics of everyday life. Here, everyday life is politicized through the
attribution of transport problems to the individual consumers failure to
participate in environmentally responsible activities. The lack of participation is attributed to constraints on action which emanate from everyday life.
Meta-discourse on politics. A reflexive detached stance is taken to the
political field, with an analytical and critical focus on the dynamics of
politics. The political system is evaluated from an outside position. In
the case of the focus groups, all discussions moved naturally into this
meta-position, so that all their talk about politics can be said to build on
the meta-discourse. In other words, the other five repertoires were articulated within this meta-discourse.
The outer boundaries of the two orders of discourse, together, represent the
limits of what we can say and do in relation to politics. Definitional power
consists not only in the articulation of repertoires but also in the absence of certain interpretive repertoires, excluded because their perspective is considered to
be marginal, irrelevant or does not even come to mind as an existing perspective at all. In our case, an interpretive repertoire is missing that could have articulated politics as a radical critique of the present socio-economic order,
putting into question the current political arrangement whereby private corporate power is unquestioningly granted a considerable domain of control, beyond
the scope of democratic politics. The need to constrain corporate power is certainly present in some of the interpretive repertoires we found, such as in media
reports on the Attac-led grassroots critique of a G8 summit. But this is a form
of critique of capitalism that merely argues for the need to constrain the power
of corporate capital (through global taxation), not to abolish it, as we would
probably have found in an analysis of the political repertoires in the 1970s.
Similarly, a religious articulation of politics is not voiced in our material.
Media discourses on politics

The dominant repertoire in media discourse on politics is The party political
game parliamentary democracy in action. It conceives politics as party
political negotiations with the Government as the leading force and views
such negotiations as an integral part of the democratic process. Thus it
presents politics primarily in a positive light, as in the following example of
a newspaper article:
902
Presents for the right wing

Celebrations on the right side of Folketinget about the transport agreement. Metro
from Copenhagen to Roskilde and bigger motorways around Copenhagen
By Christine Cordsen
10 to the asphalt gang. This is how the left wing characterized the governments
transport agreement with the right wing, which means new motorways for 4.5 billion crowns. The left wing find the concurrent decision about the metro to Roskilde
too ambitious. We are very, very satisfied. We have got so many presents and
wishes fulfilled, said the spokesperson for transport, Brian Mikkelsen (Cons.),
when the agreement was in place yesterday. Transport Minister Jacob Buksti (Soc.
Dem.) entered into an agreement about the motorways and the metro to Roskilde
with the Conservatives, the Social-Liberals and the Centre Democrats.
The happy parties to the agreement implied that the government has had an election in mind. A qualified guess is that motorways are very popular around the
country, says Brian Mikkelsen. The left wing have strongly hinted that Jacob
Buksti chose the agreement with the right wing because he wants to drop the controversial restrictions on the expansion of the railway between Copenhagen and
Ringsted through Valby, where Bukstis constituency is Jacob Buksti stresses
that it is not about trains versus cars. I would rather talk about transport. We have
in recent years made massive investments in the railways and now there is a need
to get rid of some obvious problems: with the traffic jams on the motorways in the
capital and with stretches of road with many traffic accidents, says Jacob Buksti
Both the left wing and the World Wide Fund (WWF) are, however, worried about
the environmental consequences of the transport agreement. In a letter to Prime
Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen (Soc. Dem.) the WWF have called attention to the
fact that it is only a few days ago that the news came that man-made CO2 fumes
are changing the climate drastically.
The Social-Liberal Party expressed cautious satisfaction at the agreement: There is
still a lack of resources for the railways but it was not possible to get any further this
time. That I recognize. Such are the conditions for entering into an agreement. But it
continues to be a Social-Liberal demand that future finance laws must fund investments in the railways, says transport spokesperson Vibeke Peschardt (Soc. Lib.). Jacob
Buksti emphasized after the agreement yesterday that he agrees that in the coming
years there will be a need to discuss public transport. (Politiken, 25 January 2001: 4)3
The repertoire Parliamentary democracy in action is articulated here

through the representation of the struggle between the different parties in the
negotiation process and in the run-up to the coming general election as a natural dimension in the democratic process, and through the representation of
politicians as active and dynamic actors. The focus is on the outcome of the
agreement as the product of the victory of the right wing in a party political
struggle directed strategically towards the general election. Victory is represented using everyday language as success in a football match, where the
winning team is dubbed the asphalt gang, an implicit intertextual reference
903
to a statement on the television news the evening before by the transport

spokesman for the left-wing Unity Party, Sren Kolstrup.
Everyday language is also used in the description of the outcome of the
agreement as presents to the right wing. While the article positions all the
actors as active agents, no representatives from the left wing are represented in
direct or indirect speech. The perspective of the left wing is represented exclusively in statements in the newspapers own voice. For example, it is stated in
the voice of the newspaper (and in an objective modality) that the left wing
have implied that the transport minister Jakob Buksti has been motivated
unreasonably by personal political interests concerning his constituency.
Generally in the article Transport Minister Buksti is presented as the most
active agent in the parliamentary game through various textual features. For
instance, he is positioned as an agent in an action process: Transport Minister
Jacob Buksti (Soc. Dem.) entered into an agreement . And the article
reproduces several statements where he comments authoritatively about reality through the use of categorical objective modalities: We have in recent
years made massive investments in the railways .
Towards the end of the article, we get the reaction of Vibeke Peschardt, transport spokesperson of the Social-Liberal Party, in which she refers to an imbalance
in the distribution of resources in the agreement to the advantage of car ownership: There is still a lack of resources for the railways but it was not possible to
get further this time. That I recognize. At the same time, the imbalance is construed as an unavoidable product of the party political game: Such are the conditions for entering into an agreement. This involves a recognition that the rules
for the strategic game in the agreement limit the actors scope of action so that
they cannot be held responsible for the results, as they are a product of the workings of the rules of play. In this way Vibeke Peschardt legitimates both the results
and the participation of the Social-Liberal Party in the transport agreement. And
in Peschardts final statement, the Social-Liberals are positioned as active agents
in the party political game: But it continues to be a Social-Liberal demand that
future finance laws must fund investments in the railways. The Social-Liberal
position is presented as solid and constant by the use of a nominalization (SocialLiberal demand) and by the omission of the agent rather than the use of an action
process verb with an agent such as The Social-Liberals demand that .
The second most dominant discourse in the media is the populist repertoire,
which sets up a binary opposition between politicians who represent the system and the people. Societal problems are constructed as conflicts between
ordinary people, who know what they are talking about because they have
personal experience of the problems, and detached politicians who arrogantly refuse to recognize that their distance from everyday life and their privileged way of life make them incapable of understanding and treating
problems from the perspective of ordinary people. Here the tabloid newspaper BT gives an account of the situation in a part of the country where, according to the transport agreement, one of the new motorways is to be built:
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Sad Arthur: Were losing our house

There was not much to celebrate in the old grocers at the home of Elna (74) and
Arthur (78) north of Svendborg while the rest of the inhabitants of Funen celebrated that the motorway between Odense and Svendborg was now going to
become a reality. We are losing our house where we had hoped to enjoy our old
age The cars are going to speed right through our house and back garden when
the motorway is finished in 7 or 8 years, says Arthur Olsen.
No to saving houses
Together with other inhabitants he has tried in vain to persuade the Roads
Authorities that the motorway should be moved 1.5 km to the east. Then the cars
would be able to drive through an open space and 3040 houses will avoid being
knocked down. And politicians ought to take it into account that it would also give
financial savings of almost 40 million crowns to move the road further east. But
apparently they dont care, says Arthur (BT, 26 January 2001: 44)
The people are personified here as named individuals, Elna and Arthur,
while their adversary is constructed as the system through use of dehumanizing terms such as Roads Authorities, politicians and they instead of
proper names. Politicians are discursively constructed as representatives of
the system and thus as responsible for Elna and Arthur losing their home. A
solution exists, apparently, that would harm no one, and save tax-payers
money but the politicians dont care.
Citizen discourses on politics
In the political discourses articulated by citizens, one main focus was on their
discursive understanding of traffic problems and their attribution of
responsibility for these problems and their solution. We probed into what people
understand as a public problem and what they understand as a personal matter.
The following short excerpt illustrates the frequent co-articulation of the two
most dominant repertoires in citizens talk, namely, the party political game
politics as dirty deals, where politics is represented as a democratically
suspect game, and the repertoire populism, which contrasts distant, arrogant
politicians with ordinary peoples sound common sense:
Frederik: I think it was quite frightening to see how many motorways are lacking
in the Copenhagen area. I mean you build a motorway for a lot of money
between towns like Herning and Brande <Yes, I think so too>, but what about
building a ring-road around Copenhagen? They have simply not taken that into
account. It will have to be built further out from the city, if they have not bought
the land for it and had it insured and so on. And then suddenly itll be too late.
Kirsten: (interrupts) But you cant give something to one part of the country
without giving the others something too (laughs a bit), thats the way they
distribute things.
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Frederik: Yes, it is, its pretty scary, its political horse-trading.

Verner: (interrupts). Thats politics in a nut-shell, isnt it! <Frederik: Yes>
Frederik: And I say every time I see that fellow Arne Melchior [former Minister of
Transport] involved in something or other, (the others start to laugh) theres
some kind of hidden agenda. (Group 7)
In this conversation, responsibility for the unfair distribution of resources

is attributed to the dependency of political bargaining on the principle that all
parties must gain something from the negotiations. At the same time, responsibility for the unfair distribution is also ascribed to one particular politician,
Arne Melchior, who is an actor who operates according to the principle. The
other participants laugh at the mention of Melchiors name because this representation of his behaviour is culturally shared knowledge. Through the
nominalization political horse-trading the responsibility for the irrational
distribution of resources between different regions and different forms of
transport is attributed to the political system as such, and the fact that it is
inherent in the system is expressed in Verners categorical conclusion that this
is the very essence of politics.
When focus group participants draw upon the populist repertoire, they support
their authority as sources of knowledge by positioning politicians as elitist and
detached from the world, and by positioning themselves as a type of expert thanks
to their everyday experiences. Their accounts of their everyday experiences in
relation to transport problems and politicians responsibility for them are characterized by indignation and consternation, construed in moral absolutes. This
moralistic way of understanding problems and actors is considered by some theorists as an expression of a de-politicization (Mouffe, 2000). Accounts of politicians detachment from the people are constructed through use of expressions to
the effect that politicians are out of touch with the real world:
Stig: I dont think there were any real improvements in the transport agreement.
Those two or three small motorways, in order to move traffic out of the town
centre right? Theyre planned to move the traffic out. But it doesnt relieve the
pressure on the main thoroughfares.
Iben: Well they just dont have their finger on the pulse, because Lyngby
Motorway is blocked every morning, and that bit from Roskilde to Tstrup,
there the motorway is also blocked. And Motorway South, thats just as crazy.
Turn on the local radio every single morning, theres chaos. And theyre not
going to be expanded at all none of them.
Stig: No its great for those who get a by-pass, but when it comes to the traffic its not
worth a penny. Nothing is being done to improve things for those on the big roads.
Steen: But you need to know a bit about conditions in the different places where
they build the new bits <Stig: yes>, about where there is a lot of traffic, and I
906

cant comment on it because I dont know, I only know, as you put it, that damn
Lyngby Motorway
Moderator 1: I think it was you, Iben, who used the expression they dont have
their finger on the pulse or
Iben: Yes it was me, yes, they dont know where its wrong apparently. When
Mogens Lykketoft [Foreign Minister] is riding around on his bike in the city, he
isnt thinking that the motorway from Roskilde to Tstrup is only two-laned,
and if you are driving at half seven in the morning, for example, and need to go
into town, well youll be lucky if you can go higher than third gear before you
get to Tstrup. They havent got a clue about that. He speeds right through the
city on his bike, but its a bit far from Roskilde. (Group 3)
Stig, Steen and Iben criticize the transport agreement for its failure to take the
needs of car-owners into account, and no recognition is made that there could
be other needs that are equally legitimate. Responsibility for the problems is
ascribed by Iben to them, who are accused of not having their finger on the
pulse. She supports this claim by reference to specific traffic conditions in three
local areas around Lyngby Motorway, the stretch of motorway between
Roskilde and Tstrup and Motorway South. Through a high level of detail and
the use of objective rather than subjective modalities, Iben downplays her own
role, so that the account is constructed as a neutral description of the world out
there rather than merely Ibens personal opinion. And the roots of the account
in local reality, together with her indignation, are further strengthened by the
imperative of her rhetorical appeal to the other focus group participants: Turn
on the local radio every single morning, theres chaos. Moreover, the extent of
the problems is stressed through the use of extreme-case formulations such as
crazy, every single morning and chaos (Potter, 1996).
One of the other speakers, Steen, backs up Ibens claim by talking from the
same everyday perspective. However, he makes it clear, by use of subjective
modalities, that his knowledge is based on his own personal experience. And he
speaks about the problem without the attribution of responsibility to any particular source. The moderator then tries to turn the discussion back to the question of the politicians lack of understanding of the problems. In her response,
Iben draws on the populist repertoire to criticize politicians detachment from
the people from the perspective of the car-owner. As an example of how politicians are detached from the people, she describes how a particular government
minister (the then Foreign Minister Mogens Lykketoft) rides a bicycle instead
of driving a car. The people in this case are thus equated with car-owners.
Two maps: the medias and the citizens discursive landscapes of politics
We have tried to produce a visual display of our discourse-analytical findings
(Figures 3 and 4) in order to clarify the patterning of interpretive repertoires
in the two orders of discourse.
Interpretive
repertoires:
Political
levels
Parliamentary
democracy in
action
Parliamentary
democracy:
politics as
dirty deals
Parliamentary
level Parties,
politicians
Populism:
citizens
against the
system
Meta-discourses about politics
Sub-political level
Movements,
activists
Grassroots in
the media:
growth versus
environment
Politics in daily
life: negotiation
of individual
responsibility
Life-political
level Family,
consumer-citizen
Grey background indicates dominant interpretive repertoires: the darker the background, the more prominent the repertoire. The linear
position of the repertoires indicates their relative articulation of the political levels of parliamentary politics, sub-politics and life-politics.
FIGURE 3
Interpretive repertoires in the news media's discourses about politics

907
Interpretive
repertoires:
Political
levels
Parliamentary
democracy in
action
Parliamentary
democracy:
politics as
dirty deals
Parliamentary
level Parties,
politicians
Populism:
citizens
against the
system
Politics in daily
life: negotiation
of individual
responsibility
Life-political
level Family,
consumer-citizen
Grassroots
movements
growth versus
the environment
Meta-discourses about politics
Sub-political level
Movements,
activists
Grey background indicates dominant interpretive repertoires: the darker the background, the more prominent the repertoire. The linear
position of the repertoires indicates their relative articulation of the political levels of parliamentary politics, sub-politics and life-politics.
FIGURE 4
Interpretive repertoires in the citizens' discourses about politics
908
909
The basic design of the two maps is identical: at the bottom we have placed
the first five interpretive repertoires, so that their linear positions indicate their
relative articulation of the political continuum from parliamentary politics,
through sub-politics, to life-politics. As the meta-discursive repertoire is neutral with respect to this continuum, we show it as a long bar, thereby indicating that, with this interpretive repertoire, actors observe and assess the political
continuum as a whole.
The difference between the two maps lies in the shading of the boxes: grey
shading indicates the more prominent interpretive repertoires within the order
of discourse. The darker the grey, the more prominent the repertoire is.
The shading thus shows that the medias discourses about politics are dominated by the repertoires labelled Parliamentary democracy in action,
Populism: citizens against the system and Meta-discourses about politics,
in that order.
From this pattern we conclude that, by showing the positive picture of politics conveyed by the repertoire Parliamentary democracy in action, the
media, and especially the public-service TV channels, play an important part
in educating citizens in the day-to-day mechanics of parliamentary democracy.
As the days, months and years go by, citizens are exposed to a media curriculum of politics that takes seriously the legislative and executive processes
of government. Our study of the ways in which citizens talk about their use and
experience of informative media indicates that they pick up considerably more
than the mere essentials for being an informed citizen (cf. Study A). Moreover,
the critical analytical glance of the meta-discursive repertoire complements
this media portrayal of efficient parliamentary government.
However, through the frequent articulation of the populist repertoire, the
media may simultaneously serve to discredit politicians and the political system, and to invite political actors to follow popular moods rather than political vision and rational argument. On the other hand, the populist repertoire
may also have a democratically healthy influence, in so far as the medias
populist critique of the system coincides with the more venerable media role
of fourth estate.
Turning to the map of the citizens discourses about politics, we see a configuration of repertoires dominated by the repertoire Politics as dirty deals
and the populist repertoire, followed by Politics in daily life: negotiation of
individual responsibility, and Meta-discourse on politics. The two dominant
repertoires, Politics and dirty deals and the populist repertoire, attribute
responsibility for causing and solving transport problems to the functioning of
the party political game and ascribe little agency to citizens with respect to
both the causes and solution of the problems. Consequently, within these
repertoires, citizens experience their scope for political action as political
agents to be extremely limited. But, at the same time, it can be said that the
repertoires were used across educational, gender and age groupings as
resources in engaged discussion of the concepts and rules of politics that is,
910
in a meta-discourse on politics. And the ability to analyse political questions,

institutions, actions and actors in a critical way is a necessary though not
sufficient prerequisite for engaged citizenship in a functioning democracy.
The prominence of the Politics in daily life repertoire in citizens discourse is a reflection of, and a force in, the politicization of everyday life, not
only in the extent to which citizens actually assume responsibility for environmental problems by adopting responsible transport practices, but also,
conversely, when they recognize such responsibility by attributing transport
problems to their own failure to adopt the right practices. This lack of lifepolitical participation is attributed to constraints on action that emanate from
everyday life. A key constraint is time pressure. Everyday life is understood
as a complex network of activities and the limited time available to deal with
all the activities is viewed as a source of stress. It is because of time pressure
that people use their cars rather than public transport and do not participate in
political activities other than voting.
Within this repertoire, another constraint on life-political action which
relieves the speakers of responsibility for solving transport problems is financial pressure. Some focus group participants use financial pressure to justify
the fact that they do not use public transport (its too expensive). Often an
ambivalent hybrid position in the negotiation of responsibility is constructed
where people position themselves as partly personally responsible for traffic
problems on a general level (often drawing on the environmental discourse),
but at the same time they justify their lack of participation in action directed
towards transport improvements by referring to the everyday constraints.
It is interesting to observe that a prominent populist repertoire is a shared
feature of both media and citizen discourses. This may raise the question of
causality, where some observers would see the discursive convergence as evidence that a growing media populism has been transferred to the citizens,
who in turn have become more populist, for instance in their voting behaviour, as seen in the increased support for the right-wing populist Danish
Peoples Party in the general election in Denmark in 2001. However, it could
equally well be the case that it is the media that are responding to an increasing populism among the voting population. Due to the competitive media
environment, the media are now operating under a condition of audience orientation which obliges them to present a picture of reality that resonates with
the citizen groups they address and depend on for their success or survival.
We are not suggesting that the medias articulation of politics is without
consequences for citizens discursive construction of politics, including their
view of whether or not it is worthwhile to engage in political activities. In our
material we find the paradox that, on the one hand, citizens believe that party
politics is the best way to gain political influence, while, on the other, it is not
worthwhile to seek political influence through politics because political
visions and goals are suffocated by the very nature of the political game.
Conceivably, this paradox can be seen as a consequence of the continuing
911
dominance of parliamentary party politics on the news scene, which may discourage the idea that grassroots and life-political activities can be effective
vehicles of political power.
If the causal relationship was a simple and uni-directional one from media
discourses to citizen discourses or from citizen discourses to media discourses, it would be surprising that the Parliamentary democracy in action
repertoire, which dominates the media discourses, plays a negligible role in
the citizens discourses and that the media rarely articulate the politics of
everyday life repertoire drawn on frequently by citizens. Below, we return to
a theoretical discussion of the question of the complex and bi-directional relations between media and citizens.
Whats power got to do with it?

Through the three studies, we have mapped three discursive territories in the
mediatized democratic formation (Figure 1), and considered some of their
interrelations. Without postulating relationships of a causal kind, our analyses
enable us to make pronouncements on the interplay between media and citizens in the Danish democracy:
The media function as an inclusive forum for Danish societys collective
dialogue with itself about political issues in a broad sense.
Citizens talk about the media and especially the two public service TV
channels extensively and critically, as key resources in the formation of
democratic public opinion.
Citizens widely distrust the ritual games that politicians play with each other,
view politics as a process that takes place behind closed doors and experience their scope for political action as very limited.
They are capable of a considerable amount of critical reflection about the
political system and their own political practice.
We have thus explored some of the crucial relations of power in a knowledge
society, where the negotiation of social meanings through the media is a constitutive feature of deliberative democracy.
Through our three interrelated empirical studies, all relying on a discourseanalytical methodology, we have tried to complexify the way we conceptualize the notion of definitional power in a mediatized society. Through the three
visual displays of our findings (Figures 24) and the accompanying thick
descriptions of the underlying discursive practices, we have maintained the
discursive complexities while also providing the analytical generalizations
that make the complexities graspable and discussable. We have thus demonstrated how the power relationship between the media and the citizens is
complex and bi-directional (Gamson, 1992).
912
Theoretically, we believe that any discussion of the medias definitional

power in a society must take its point of departure in an investigation of the
concrete political and economic framework that determines how the media
and the citizens interact. Today, due to the extent of the commercialization of
the media, the fundamental condition governing this interaction between
media and citizens can be labelled audience-orientation. This means that no
mass-mediated communication can deviate, in a general sense, from the values and attitudes of its established audience.
In order to grasp this orientation theoretically, we propose to extend the
anthropologically inspired bardic theory of Fiske and Hartley (1978), originally conceptualized as a theory about the audience relations of national television, into a general theory about all forms of mass-mediated communication
that has to operate with audience-orientation as its fundamental condition.
According to this theory, the mass media function as a societys bard that is,
as an actor who relays cultural messages to members of that culture, thus providing ritual confirmation of the culture and its members.
Fiske and Hartley point out that both the classic bard and television (or the
mass media in general) are centrally located in their culture, and it applies to
both of them that the real originator of their messages is the audience whose
communicative and cultural community they share. Both function under a
cultural logic that obliges them to speak from a position of assumed consensus, but also to reflect the cracks and inconsistencies that may appear in that
consensus. The media as bard thus have to:
articulate the main lines of the established cultural consensus to assure the
culture at large of its practical adequacy in the world by affirming and confirming
its ideologies/mythologies [but also to] expose, conversely, any practical inadequacies in the cultures sense of itself which might result from changed conditions
in the world out-there, or from pressure within the culture for a reorientation in
favour of a new ideological stance. (Fiske and Hartley, 1978: 88)
This balancing of traditional and emerging discourses about the political is

precisely what happens in the six interpretive repertoires that we found in
media discourses and citizen discourses about politics.
The attractiveness of this theory about the definitional relationship between
media and their audiences lies in its accentuation of the mutuality between
media and citizens in the collective construction of the cultures discursive
universe, and its exclusion of simple power and causal relationships. The
communicative work of the media is seen as generated by an interrelationship
between a never completely stabilized state of consensus (manifesting itself
in discursive taken-for-grantedness) and the cracks that appear as discursive
conflicts and ambivalences in both media and citizen discourses.
Our study thus rests on a discourse-theoretical concept of power that complexifies the notion of power. We do not directly challenge theories about the
power of the media over the public agenda of topics (as found in classic
913
agenda-setting theories, cf. McCombs and Shaw, 1972), or over the specific
articulation of particular stories (as found in classic reception theories such as
Hall, 1980 [1973] and Morley, 1980, as well as their more contemporary inheritors, e.g. Deacon, 2003). But we insist that in these matters, where the power
of the media is indisputable, the specific tabling and articulation of the particular
story takes place within the framework of discourses that already are articulated
among the cultures members in other words, in accordance with the bardic
role of the media, as a catalyst of a cultures collective dialogue with itself.
In our study we have identified a set of six interpretive repertoires that represent the totality of discourses in the medias and the citizens political orders
of discourse. We have looked at the different forms of knowledge and identities that are constructed in the discourses, at how they enter into relations of
dominance and subordination with each other, and thus how they speak the
political into discursive existence in Danish society. By exploring the three
discursive terrains, we have aimed to create new insights about the complexity of power and to challenge established notions of power, with the long-term
objective of increasing awareness of the scope for political action facing individuals and groups in mediatized societies.
Notes
1. The authors would like to thank the Danish Democracy and Power Study for
funding the research on which this article is based.
2. Readers interested in details about the focus groups, including interview
excerpts, are referred to Schrder and Phillips (2005).
3. All newspaper texts and focus group extracts in this article are translations from
the original Danish. The analysis presented has been carried out on the Danish texts
and then translated.
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Kim Christian Schrder is Professor in Communication Studies at Roskilde

University, Denmark. He is co-author of The Language of Advertising
(Blackwell, 1985) and Researching Audiences (Arnold, 2003), and co-editor of
Media Cultures: Reappraising Transnational Media (Routledge, 1992). He has
published widely on the theoretical and methodological aspects of qualitative
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media in a combined text/audience perspective, and with methodological issues
around the quantitative/qualitative divide. Address: Communication Studies,
Building 43.3, University of Roskilde, PO 260, DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark.
[email: kimsc@ruc.dk]
Louise Phillips is Associate Professor in Communication Studies at Roskilde
University, Denmark. In addition to recognized journal articles, she is coauthor of the book Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method (Sage, 2002)
and How the Media and Citizens Talk about Politics: A Discourse Analytical
Study of Politics in Mediatized Society (Aarhus University Press, 2004, in
Danish). Her current research is on the dialogical communication of researchbased knowledge in order to contribute to the further development of methods
for the analysis and practice of dialogic communication initiatives. Address:
Communication Studies, Building 43.3, University of Roskilde, PO 260, DK4000 Roskilde, Denmark. [email: louisep@ruc.dk]

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Complexifying media power: a study of the interplay between media and

>> Version of Record - Nov 7, 2007

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Complexifying media power: a study of the

Media, politicians or citizens: locating the locus of power?

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Schrder & Phillips, Complexifying media power

mediatized political system. Nevertheless, verdicts on the impoverishment of

Research design, theory and method

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Media, Culture & Society 29(6)

A. Citizens use and

2. Definitional power over politics

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Schrder & Phillips, Complexifying media power

We deliberately abstain from speculation about such causal links. We prefer

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Media, Culture & Society 29(6)

Our discourse-analytical framework for exploring language use about

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Schrder & Phillips, Complexifying media power

The exploration of democratic prerequisites (Study A)

Analysis: citizens in the landscapes of informative media

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Media, Culture & Society 29(6)

Desire for depth of

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Schrder & Phillips, Complexifying media power

Implications for media policy and journalistic practice

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Media, Culture & Society 29(6)

Confrontational and consensual journalism: there is agreement between groups

The exploration of the definitional power over

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Schrder & Phillips, Complexifying media power

process mentioned above (Deacon, 2003), we view the orders of discourse of

Choice of primary policy area: traffic and transport policy

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Media, Culture & Society 29(6)

At one point we showed the groups, as a discussion stimulus, a taped

The party political game parliamentary democracy in action. Politics

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Schrder & Phillips, Complexifying media power

Grassroots politics. Grassroots organizations are presented as actors on

Media discourses on politics

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Media, Culture & Society 29(6)

Presents for the right wing

The repertoire Parliamentary democracy in action is articulated here

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Schrder & Phillips, Complexifying media power

to a statement on the television news the evening before by the transport

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Media, Culture & Society 29(6)

Sad Arthur: Were losing our house

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Schrder & Phillips, Complexifying media power

Frederik: Yes, it is, its pretty scary, its political horse-trading.

In this conversation, responsibility for the unfair distribution of resources

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Media, Culture & Society 29(6)