1.

Van Zoonen, Audience reactions to Hollywood politics

1.Research Topic
Author wanted to notice people’s reactions to popular American movies and tv series about
politics, in order to find out whether and how they use such stories to perform a political self.
Media used are: ewspapers and news magazines, television news bulletins or current affairs
programmes. Questions were raised about political communication about effects of mass media
on people’s interest, knowledge, attitude and behaviour with respect to politics. Research
question is what do people do with films and series, or how people use these films to present a
‘political self’. Van Zoonen used qualitative analysis of people’s postings about films and
series such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Primary Colors or The West Wing on the Internet
Movie Database.

2. Gamson 3 kinds of resources- media discourse, experiential knowledge & popular

wisdom.
3 kinds of resources that people use to make sense of politics are: media discourse, experiential
knowledge and popular wisdom.
1.Media discourse: film and tv fiction, where many of them are explicitly articulated with
politics as it happens in Washington and London. Former political advisers or speech writers
have been involved in scenario development; politicians and journalists make cameo
appearances; politicians have referred to movies and tv series to explain their style and position.
They use realistic frames of story-telling and visual codes that, for audiences, produce the
impression of being present at the scene. This creates experimental knowledge.
2. Experimental knowledge: result of the exposure to the media discourse using visual codes
and realistic frames of story - telling. They are stories based in direct familiarity and the
experiences of others one hears on the radio or sees on tv. Realistic style inherent to film and
tv representations of politics enables the parasocial interaction with the protagonist, and so
people transcend their personal experience and imagine how they would feel in another
person’s situation.
3. Popular wisdom: a part of most representations of politics in popular films and tv series,
which create potential resource that is a combination of media discourse, experiential
knowledge and popular wisdom and produce personalized and linear narrative capable of
evoking intense audience investments, that may be very influential in how people make sense
of politics, form their attitudes and express their opinions

3. Study of priming effects of the West Wing, Holbert, 2003.

Results: viewing The West Wing primes both positive images of the presidency and of
Presidents Clinton and Bush. This study of effects of political communication is concentrated
on cognitive dimensions of political citizenship, such as political interests, knowledge,
understanding, attitude, party and candidate preferences.

4. Citizenship as congnitive and cultural practice, Schudson

Citizenship is congnitive practice (concerning political interests, knowledge, understanding,
attitude, party and candidate preferences) and cultural practice: politics has to be done, or
performed rather than
merely thought about- for example voting, protest, activism and discussion . The effects of
popular films and tv series about politics, can also be sought in what people do as a result of
watching these fictions.
5. Study of political talk as a presentation of self, Eliasoph
Working within speech act theory, which asserts that people ‘do things with words’, she
analysed how particular styles of talking about politics enabled people to present a picture of
themselves as ‘irreverent’, ‘intimidated’ or ‘concerned’ speakers.

6. Methodology and types of coding

Through Internet Movie Database, researcher used four types of narrative structure of films and
series about politics. Narratives were: quest, soap, conspiracy, and bureaucracy, from which
549 comments from posters were analyzed. This selection wasnt meant to produce a
quantitative distribution of particular kinds of audience performances, but to adequately map
the range in audience reactions in order to explore the range of political performances resulting
from popular film and tv fiction about politics. Problems: in Internet it is unclear what this
postings represent, but in the context that politics also involves the presentation of a political
self, these data are helpful. This data were coded by three coding steps:
open, axial and selective coding. Open coding- it was asked what people do in their comment
and what kind of presentation is achieved through it, and individual comments were categorized
into collection of comments. Here people described the content of programme and compared
it to what the poster perceives as reality. Axial coding- it revolved around the question of how
categories of comments were articulated with particular films or series.Here people people
reflect in their comments on issues and dilemmas in politics. Selective coding: it included
analysis of the categories and relations in terms of the performance of political self, asking what
kinds of politics were not performed on the basis of the films and television series selected.
Here people people use their comments to express judgements of politicians and political
stories, and fantasize about ideal ways of conducting politics.

7. Problem with political representation in face-to-face, Potter and Whetherell

Much of our vocabulary of mentalistic terms has no “inner” referent, instead of being merely
descriptions of mental states these words are themselves an autonomous part of particular social
practices.’The emphasis in the analysis has therefore been on the kind of political self that is
constructed in a particular kind of comment, rather than on what political knowledge, attitude
or ideological position of the poster is reflected by it.

8. Results of study: description, reflection, judgement and fantasy

Description, reflection, judgement and fantasy are the four categories that summarize what
people do in their comments.

9. Description: posters were retelling of the story of the film in combination with a reference
to the way the film itself ‘describes’ reality. These are based on a hunch of how things go in
politics. This use of ‘realism’ as a criterion to assess the qualities of tv resembles experimental
knowledge: both real and fictional politics seem to be weighed against what people know about
politics. Posters’ assessments of the realistic quality of the film or tv series determine whether
and how they will be affected by it. When texts are taken as realistic, it becomes possible for
audience to express new perspectives. They present themselves as smart
people, who know what is going on in ‘real’ politics, or have learned such from the particular
movie or tv series they watched.
10. Judgement: this contains comments on what politicians could learn from fiction and
implies a criticism of politicians and their current conduct. Some judgements critique the overall
liberal perspective of Hollywood. Some of the remarks fit into existing political oppositions,
and confirm a basic consistency of media effects research, that people tend to selectively
perceive media offerings and mould them into their own ideological frameworks. Yet others
indicate that resentment or appreciation of a film’s or series’ideology is not, by definition,
simply predicated upon one’s own views. Audiences use movie and tv fictions about politics to
perform their ideological position in a public setting. The posters who present themselves as
liberal or conservative mostly deem Hollywood film and television products liberal. Some, for
example, prescribe a distance between the ideology of a film and its possible appel, which can
exist separately.

11.Reflection: presentation of the film or television series that the poster watched as a series of
dilemmas and compromises, where posters see politicians portrayed as ‘flesh and blood’ people
who suffer from human frailties like the rest of ‘us’. ‘Reflection’ entails people who reflect on
what they have seen and who stress that one has to reach one’s own conclusions. Typical
comments in this category present politics as a battle between contradictory forces for example
fight between progress and reaction in Yes, Prime Minister. People who react in this way to the
narrative, present themselves as open-minded, who refrain from strong judgements but see the
complexities of everyday politics. They identify dilemmas in everyday political practices that
are beyond ideology.

12. Fantasy: desire for a better politics, but balanced with a pragmatic, sometimes cynical
recognition of real political processes. Political fictions seems to be used to muse on the
uncontested existence of a perfect society and an ideal political process that surpasses partisan
and ideological oppositions. Such utopias pertain to the virtues of ordinary human beings and
to the country itself, and they include – often – a critique of prevailing cynical attitudes. In the
utopian comments, common man is presented as possessing the common virtues that politicians
seem to lack. The utopian category obviously is an optimistic one. It collides with cynical
accounts of politics. Fantasies in these comments about idealistic politics and perfect politicians
are obviously grounded in criticism of current practices, but posters present a picture of realistic
people who want to maintain an optimistic perspective on politics and long for politicians and
practices that meet their desires.

13. Critique of liberal perspective of Hollywood

Audience who present themselves as liberal or conservative mostly deem Hollywood film and
television products ‘liberal’. Academic assessments of fictional representations of politics have
identified most of narratives, regardless of the story line, as having a liberal undertone. The
IMDb-posters from Van Zoonens work thus repeat what seems to be common knowledge about
Hollywood’s politics, and tend to express
appreciation thereof if they present themselves liberal and aversion if they consider themselves
conservative.

14. Results of Van Zoonen study

The results demonstrate that people ‘do’ politics in relation to films and series, and construct in
their reactions a particular and public version of their political selves.That result is very much
at odds with the beliefs of cultural and political pessimists who invariably label popularizations
of politics as a ‘malaise’, which are radically different and should be kept apart from ‘real’
politics. The research has shown that popular film and tv culture does not necessarily produce
an impoverished political performance.The four ‘selves’ reconstructed here are not so
unexpected that one does not recognize more elaborate and elegant versions of them in existing
political discourses. The ideological self is a common sight in political struggle and standpoint
politics, the reasonable self may fit well in the models of deliberative democracies that political.
Theorists have developed, and the longing self may have something in common with authors
who have conjured up images of utopia.

2. Van Zoonen, I- Pistemology: Changing truth claims in popular and political culture

I-pistemology: It means that the truth is in there’; in the self, in personal experiences and
feelings, in subjective judgement, in individual memory, it is turn into the self as the origin of
all truth. It is a contemporary cultural process in which people from all walks of life have come
to suspect the knowledge coming from official institutions and experts, and have replaced it
with the truth coming from their own individual experience and opinions. I-pistemology is the
result of critical theory and movements that have identified ‘knowledge’ as an instrument of
power that needs to be contested. Online and offline popular culture have raised personal
experience to the level of the only relevant truth. Epistemology is concerned with the nature,
sources and methods knowledge, but I-pistemology answers these questions from the basis of I
(as in me, myself) and Identity, with the Internet as the great facilitator.

Epistemological suspicion: Today’s popular and political cultures are pervaded by

epistemological suspicion, i.e. the belief that claims to truth and knowledge are tied to particular
social and material interests, and therefore not to be believed, or at least taken with scepsis.
While such a trope was once particular to feminist, critical and postmodern theory, it now seems
to have turned into a dominant mindset. This suspicion has gone hand in hand with the
emergence of the self as the source and arbiter of the thruth.

Substitutions for i-pistemology: ‘truthiness’, ‘post-fact society’, ‘fact-free politics’, ‘age of

suspicion’ and ‘civic narcissism’ by Papacharissi.

Criticism of i-pistemology: critics see it as postmodernism gone wrong. They are Sennett and
MacIntyre. Sennett: the personal relevance of other people and outside acts is posed so
repetitively, that a clear perspective of those persons and events in themselves is obscured.
MacIntyre: would see the self-as-the-source-of-truth as evidence of ‘emotivism’, which makes
truth and morality a matter of individual taste and feeling.

Distrust of official knowledge- what it relies on + 3 examples: Knowledge institutions,

governments and media depend on people trusting their facts and outcomes to be relevant,
impartial and replicabe, they expect the information coming out of them to be true. There are 3
examples that this is no more self-evident.

1. Dutch vaccination story: Dutch government introduced a vaccination scheme in 2009 for
girls of 12 and 13 years old against the HPV virus, it met with resistance from the public. They
contested the information of the government about the necessity and safety of the procedure,
and produced alternative facts about the dangers of the vaccine. The effect of this was huge,
and in the end only about 44% of Dutch girls were vaccinated.

2.‘Climategate’ scandal in the UK: researchers of the University of East Anglia were accused
of manipulating academic results to prove that human behaviour and pollution is the root cause
of global warming. After that it was argued as well that trust in science had declined.
3. Intelligent design: it concerns attempts of proponents of intelligent design to add their
version of the emergence of the human race to the standard biology curricula, in a straight
challenge to evolution theory. Creationism is not reserved to the United States but has its
supporters in Europe as well, and such is their influence that the Council of Europe found it
necessary in 2007 to issue a resolution in which it urged its 47 member states to firmly oppose
including creationism in science and biology.

Primary and secondary trust in media, Coleman: It may explain the paradox of a general
trust in the main knowledge institutions, but specified distrust in some of the things they claim
to be true, and would also explain why trust in government is generally declining in EU an US
but trust in democracy is relatively stable. Trust in media is a similarly complicated -
longitudinal data from the Eurobarometer show that trust in media varies per country and per
medium but has been relatively stable over the past decade. Radio is trusted by 60% of people,
while the internet and the press trusted by 40%, with tv in between. In the UK, the percentage
of people who trust the press is low (18%) compared to Northern European democracies (39%).
Also, many countries have witnessed particular media scandals ( UK- News of the World, Kelly
Affair on BBC).

Risk society or the fear culture: These concepts cover the idea that economic and
technological progress has made it possible to bring many of society’s earlier problems under
control. However, progress itself has created new issues that we are less able to manage:
economic growth causes environmental damage; financial growth led to the banking crisis;
globalization brought terrorism; then the traditional risks of pandemic diseases, natural disasters
and poverty. Beck & Giddens have pointed out how a continuous collective and individual
reflection on what might happen is a central feature of the risk society. Furedi (2007) adds that
such reflections tend to take the form of fear, ‘often said to be the defining cultural mood in
contemporary society’. The institutions that we would like to turn to for knowledge and
reassurance about the risks facing us have problems of their own.

Culture of narcissism, Lasch: In the time of epistemological insecurity, of not knowing what
is true or who can be trusted to have access to the truth and tell it, people have created two
things: first, found someone to blame through conspiracy theories (illusion of knowledge and
control, causal connections of chaotic world and identifiable actors) and second, they turned
themselves as an alternative source of understanding. The growth of therapy (finding oneself),
spiritualism (improving oneself) and personal media (expressing oneself) are just some of the
signs of this movement that was already being denigrated as a culture of narcissism.

Me, myself and I or movement to personal experience , Iraq study and first person media:
‘I’ has become the privileged position to speak from. Politics is thoroughly personalized, with
politicians routinely evoking their own personal histories to claim their access to the right
political course. Also, audiences actively construct a distinction between mediated and
unmediated knowledge giving the latter a higher ‘truth’ status than the former. Personal
experience and observations claim to provide an authoritative position to speak from, for a
wide range of different people participating in political and popular culture, in media
consumption and in everyday conversations.

Iraq study: Audiences actively construct a distinction between mediated and unmediated
knowledge giving the latter a higher ‘truth’ status than the former. The following quotes from
research about internet discussions touching on the war in Iraq are typical of the way personal
observations have replaced media information. Truth claims on the basis of personal
experience, were differently contested, especially if they came from army personnel, for
example ‘I have a daughter in the military’. Views that were not based on personal observations
were vilified by these posters:

First person media: Popular culture carries a similar partiality to the personal. Dovey argues
that ‘subjective, autobiographical and confessional modes of expression have proliferated
during the 1990s – across print journalism, literature, factual TV and digital media’. He uses
the term first person media to identify particular kinds of talk shows and the then emerging
genre of reality TV, that all revolve around the disclosure of the self and its most intimate
thoughts and experiences. Both candidate and audience pleasures in these genres appeared to
concern the personal challenge of ‘being oneself’ or ‘remaining true to oneself’ in artificial
circumstances.

Populism and I-pistemology: Popular media and populism find each other in their evocation
of ‘the people’ who are supposedly united through their common whiteness, Christian values
and Enlightenment ethos, and they have been seriously alienated by the excesses and failures
of multicultural politics, by the political and media elites, by ‘Europe’ and specifically by
‘Islam’. The resulting politics of the respective populist parties is typified by a paradoxical mix
of welfare state social security agendas, libertarian proclamations of individual freedom and
protectionist economic and cultural agendas. Populist politics does not have a monopoly on I-
pistemology; it has also been constitutive of the progressive politics of feminist, civil rights
and gay movements.

Second wave feminism: personal was not only political, but true. The individual experiences
of women were thought to add up to a collective truth of women’s subordinate positions. Second
wave feminism shared the conviction that official knowledge is produced from a male, white,
heterosexual perspective and that part of the feminist political project was to produce the
alternative knowledge coming from the experiences of women, blacks and gays. Sandra
Harding talked about ‘feminist epistemology’, ‘standpoint theory’ and ‘situated knowledge’.
In feminist methodology it was translated into research that would give voice to the lived
experiences of ‘ordinary’ women and let them speak in their own words.

I-pistemology dillema: I-pistemology on all sides of the political spectrum leads to question
whether collective identities based on personal allegiances provide equally valid claims to the
recognition of one’s issues, culture and politics.

I-pistemology and Internet: internet is a great multiplier that not only offers easy access to
everyone who wants to vent her or his truth, but enables quicker connections between these
truths. Yet these connections tend to take the form of demonstrations; dialogue, deliberation,
discussion or even confrontation seem to be more uncommon than simply posting a comment
or video for others to deal with, performing one’s identity without much interest in that of
others.

Permanent accountability: In the case of the failed cervical cancer vaccination campaign in
the Netherlands, the responsible government agency decided the next year not to launch a
general campaign again, but to keep a continuous and active presence in all the websites, forums
and social media where the issue would come up. It countered anti-vaccination claims with
bespoke response, information and links. Apparently, it was thought necessary to replace the
traditional public health campaign with such an interactive approach.
3. Van Zoonen, The visual challenge of celebrity politics

Celebrity coverage of female politicians, Grazia: celebrity coverage of female politicians

involves gender-specific risks because it confines female politicians to notions of femininity
which are not easily transposed
to the political field, or like Schwartzenberg said: while male politicians can import some
elements of the star
system by performing ‘charming leadership’, this is not an option for a female politician.
Current female celebrity is more performed as sexualised and built on continuously changing
exploitations of the sexualised body, so it provides unfavourable environment for female
politicians who mainly neither have the age nor the body to find accepted place there. It is
imperative that female candidates, their parties and campaign advisers come to understand how
to manage, overcome or exploit these conditions.

Grazia shoot: they photographed young female candidates, of whom no one has ‘deviant’
body, and whose average age is just 31 years. Authors found three visual markers in this photo
shoot: camera angle, grouping and apparel that create pictures that are articulated differently in
the tension of successfully combining celebrity culture with politics. 1. Camera angle: the
Labour candidates are shot from above, the Liberal Democrat at the same eyelevel with the
photographer, and Conservative candidates are looking down slightly on the photographer.
Visual grammar says that there is sense of power by looking down, a sense of being on an equal
par and a sense of being marginalised. In the political context visual codes thus present the
Labour candidates as powerless, Conservative candidates in a controlling perspective.
Grouping: both the Labour and the Conservative candidates stand close together, their bodies
overlapping each other in a shared space. The
Liberals are staged as five individuals with distinct bodies in individual space. Apparel: the
choice of clothes of the candidates is remarkably different. The Labour women wear ‘cocktail’-
style dress in a colour combination with strong sexual connotations: black and red. Cocktail
style is the also preferred apparel for Liberal Democrat candidates, but in dark greyish, and
yellow dress. Conservatives are typified as tenue de ville, the traditional etiquette label for city
wear which is also deemed appropriate for office presence.

4. Van Zoonen, The personal, the political and the popular

Femenist expectations from women politicians: Historically and currently, feminists have
hailed women in such positions of political leadership as potential agents of change, likely to
produce new attention for women’s issues in international and national politics, to modify the
detached and rational style and to transgress the rigid separation of public and private life. They
have expected the potential of women in the political field to disrupt traditional exclusive codes
and conventions of good citizenship, and open it up to a more inclusive understanding of
citizenship as an intersection of political, cultural and social dimensions of inclusion.

Politainment: Popularization and personalization together constitute ‘celebrity politics. Meyer:

politainment would only tolerate a pseudo, celebrity politician who counts on his immediate
physicality and its hold on the media. It is as though he were projecting a media-ready astral
body, and the public, grateful not to be bored by any arguments or factual information, shows
its enthusiasm for the sheer entertainment value of his appearance.
Research question from personal, political and popular: examine whether and how the
presence and representation of female political leadership in celebrity politics articulates new
dimensions to societal inclusion and exclusion, and new forms of good political citizenship.

Fame versus celebrity for men and women: fame is public estimation, reputation or renown.
Fame and celebrity are considered to be dependent upon the recognition of others and upon a
certain degree of public visibility. Thus, fame and celebrity become unmistakably gendered
qualifications because public visibility is not evenly distributed among women and men, and
because they do not carry the same meanings. ‘Celebrity’ is a product of the publicity produced
by the 20th and 21st century mass media, whereas ‘fame’ has a longer history as the typification
resulting from outstanding and publicly recognized achievements. Thus, fame is primarily a
man’s preserve for it is built on public achievements, whereas celebrity would be a woman’s
domain because it is predicated on being (in the media) rather than doing. Fame is contingent
on a culture of production and celebrity to a culture of consumption, yet both fame and celebrity
tend to exclude women from the political field.

Why is fame hard to achieve for woman in public sphere? Because of their historical
exclusion from the public sphere. ‘Celebrity’ is a no-less problematic attribute, because it
confines female politicians to notions of femininity which are not easily transposed to the
political field. Celebrity refers to being well known because of mass media exposure. That
exposure can be the result of extra-media fame, and in that case, celebrity and fame collapse;
but celebrity is also an independent product of the media themselves. Celebrity’ is built
structurally on the confluence of media appearance with the real lives of performers. As a result,
female celebrity is articulated primarily with the codes and conventions of media
representations of women.

Feminine style of speech and restrictions: Jamieson shows in her history of public speech,
women were actively excluded from achieving fame because of vigorous restrictions on their
speech. The means to do so changed from physical to discursive: women engaging in speech
acts considered inappropriate, especially those directed against institutional representatives
were labelled ‘whore’,‘hysterics’ or ‘witches’. As a result, specific ‘feminine style’ of speech
developed which was consistent with women’s role in the family and traditional notions of
femininity.

4 myths of femininity MacDonald: media representations of women can be brought back to

four popular myths of femininity: as enigmatic and threatening, as nurturing and caring, as
sexuality, and as a bodily practice. Female celebrities will be constructed from these
mythologies. For Gledhill, who takes Hollywood cinema as her frame of reference, this means
that the female star will be‘a focus of visual pleasure for an apparently masculine spectator.

Why doesn't female celebrity notion transfer to politics? Female celebrity remains built
primarily on the appearance of the body, and the instability of changing appearances is not the
kind of reliable image that a politician would want to project for herself. Schwartzenberg says
that female politicians have only limited options in celebrity politics. They need to mask their
femininity and imitate men, otherwise accusations of being frivolous and coquettish, and
charming leadership – male style of politics based on art of seduction – is no option for. Only
feminine model of celebrity available to women in politics is the mother, tying into myths of
femininity as nurturing and caring.
Tarja Halonen and Angela Merkel: Both women are reticent about opening up their private
personae to the scrutiny of the media and public, which the latter mostly find problematic; both
women are subject to continuous comment and derision about their appearance and style; both
women ran into risky confrontations with popular culture, with Halonen handling her encounter
with Conan O’Brien with humour and Merkel being apprehensive
and ill-advised about her articulation as ‘Angie’. Looking at the increased attention given to
appearance and style, the Halonen and Merkel cases may suggest that today it is obsession.
Current celebrity politics makes political leaders appear on pop cultural venues where dress and
looks are key measurements of success. Both of them were caught off-guard by popular
culture’s style. Both Halonen and Merkel more or less refuse to show, let alone exploit, their
private personae and life as a political asset. They represen a more classic ideal of political
citizenship, with clear boundaries and singular codes and conventions.

Todays female politicians as others: The hyperfemininity of current celebrity culture and
post-feminism, construes female politicians as exceptions to the feminine mainstream, who are
part of another distant world. As a result, female politicians more extremely than before, are
‘others’ to dominant images of femininity while remaining ‘others’ in the political sphere, due
to their minority position.

Private life of celebrity woman politicians as odd: while the private lives of female politicians
mostly signify their odd position as unusual family members (or lacking a family altogether)
and as unusual politicians.
Like appearance, private life is a potential site of trouble for female politicians, not because it
contains the danger of sexual scandal as it does for men, but because it is a continuous reminder
of women’s odd choice of public mission instead of private fulfilment.

5. Trends in political television fiction in the UK, Van Zoonen

Political fiction and first one on British TV: British television has a long tradition of
broadcasting ‘political fiction’ as telling stories about politicians in the form of drama, thrillers
and comedies. Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton from 1965 is the first of these for a mass
audience.

Tv fiction as source of political understanding or audience interpretation of the West

Wing: Audience research about the interpretation of The West Wing has shown that regular
viewers have a more positive understanding of the institution of the presidency, and of
individual presidents, regardless of their political affiliation. Van Zoonen has shown for many
other examples of political film and tv fiction how it enables audiences to learn about politics,
reflect on it and judge it, and to imagine ideal political situations and practices. Political tv
fiction can function as a source of political imagination and understanding, complementing or
contrasting with the journalism standard choices.

3 dimensions or resources of political fiction on tv: resources offered by political television

fiction are the textual features of political television fiction in terms of characters, themes and
narratives; and the particular engagement it invites from audiences.

Characters: much of US political TV fiction takes the White House as the main setting and the
president as main protagonist. Generic codes and conventions of film and tv drama require a
focus on individual characters which focuses political fiction on stories of individuals or groups
of individuals engaged in politics. These individuals are primarily men with women mostly cast
as helpers to the main protagonist.

6 dominant themes in Hollywood, Giglio: political campaigns and conventions, political

machines, capital crimes and misdemeanours, macho men, presidents and assassinations. Giglio
concludes that office holders are stereotyped in three roles as idealists, saviours and villains,
with the villain role becoming more dominant. These themes are all easily connected to the
personalized, character-driven stories that typify popular film and television fiction. Issue-
driven portrayals of politics are much more rare, but have focused on war and nuclear and
environmental disaster. Themes of political film and television are tied up with the political
concerns of the particular era in which they are made.

Types of narratives by Van Zonnen: narratives that are often used in political fiction: quest,
soap, conspiracy, and bureaucracy. A typical one combines well with the individualized focus
of popular film and television fictions is the quest in which an honest, virtuous candidate
pursues his political ideals against the odds. Example of this is Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
The quest is often conducted in the context of another narrative, according to namely that of a
conspiracy in which obscure and self-interested (groups of) individuals frustrate the democratic
process. This two narratives include clearly defined individual protagonists and antagonists, but
next two narratives are driven by collective processes often beyond the control of the individual.
The bureaucracy shows how the inexplicable workings of the system or ‘machine’ frustrate the
ideals of individual politicians, example is Spin City. Soap portrays a community of candidates
and support staff in their everyday interactions, failures and victories. Example is The West
Wing.

Holbert, typology of political entertainment: situation comedy, fictional drama and docu-
drama.

Realism of british tv fiction and engagement:

Realism of british tv fiction: The range of articulations with reallife politics is wide and
persistent, hence this kind of TV fiction always raises the question of whether it represents
political reality in a realistic way. It is this particular aspect that produces its potential relevance
in terms of affecting people’s political understandings,
judgements and engagement. Perceived realism is one of the clearly identified mechanisms
through which television effects have been seen to occur, though always mitigated by specific
circumstances.
Engagement: Popular film and tv fiction are increasingly assumed to be an appropriate lens
through which to better understand politics and bring politics to life. Part of the controversy is
that the assertions about the (dis)engaging qualities of political film and television fiction are
based on too general claims that try to cover all fiction over long time periods, or paradoxically
– on too specific ones.

British political comedy: Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister The New Statesman, The
Young Ones,The Thick of It. British political sitcoms thrive on portraying politicians and civil
servants as dim-witted, lazy and uncooperative at best, and as malign, manipulative and
obsessed at worst. Commonly these dramas are set in a bureaucratic environment where
characters are governed by incomprehensible codes and conventions that are resistant to
change, in the unlikely event that a protagonist would be pursue such an agenda. Failure and
derision are inevitable. They have been subjected to the question as to whether they accurately
portray ‘the inner workings’ of government. Margaret Thatcher, had said for Yes (Prime)
Minister that it is realistic depiction of ‘what goes on in the corridors of power’. Many of the
plots are reworked versions of what we have endured on our news bulletins these last eight
years. Adding to the supposed realism of the political sitcoms is their perceived direct
connection to real politics and politicians.

British political thrillers: Examples: most powerful one is The Manchurian Candidate, most
famous House of Cards, then The State Within, Natural lies,State of play and The guardians.
Mostly they are stories of conspiracies, with identifiable collective actors undermining
government and/or the democratic process for political or financial gain. Like the comedies, the
thrillers are similarly intricately tied to real-life politics and
politicians. The 1970s and 1980s outputs featuring state surveillance are also informed by the
growing influence of new technology. Furthermore, many were framed as implicitly referring
to the situation in Northern Ireland, an ongoing conflict which provided the rationale for the
growing power of the so-called secret state. Broadcaster were fearful of becoming mired in this
controversy and they, like other media producers, were often prone to censorship.

British political drama: Bill Brand, Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton, The Line of Beauty,
First Among Equals and Our Friends in the North. Political drama in UK focuses on the human
emotions involved in politics,
and the social and psychological relations between the main characters. That gives it ‘soapish’
flavour. Recurring theme here is the tensions that everyday political, party and media pressures
create. The key generic developments in tv drama revolve around the relationships that develop
between characters with multifaceted personalities. Many story lines deal with friendships and
fallings out that result from conflicting understandings as to the best way to realize one’s
political ideals. More than thriller or comedies, suggestion of realism in this kind of drama
comes from the seemingly emotional credibility of the story lines together with the relationships
and the inner conflicts of the characters. Here a more general aspect of soap stories is relevant
and this is what Ang refers to as the ability to conjure up ‘a tragic structure of feeling’ in which
personal problems are ubiquitous, repetitive and the prospect of solutions always illusionary.
Given this context it is hardly surprising that the most popular kind of tension to narrate in this
melodramatic imagination is that of the almost inevitable compromise between left-wing
idealism and adopting a more reformist position to change the status quo.

Difference between british and american tv fiction: Characters and stories in UK political
television fiction present a rather gloomy understanding of how politics works and what
individuals can achieve. Most American political tv and film fiction, in which the outcome of
the characters’ struggles with conspiracy, bureaucracy, political and personal predicaments is
mostly positive, showing that one can prevail regardless of circumstances. To exaggerate one
could say that most American political TV fiction tells stories of hope, whereas British political
TV fiction tends to narrate stories of despair. On the basis of these differences, we could expect
American series to inspire, whereas the British versions would tend to discourage, especially
because of the recurring theme that the political machinery tends to crush individual agency.
The individual heroism present in much American political film and TV fiction, is linked to the
US presidential system of politics. In British politics, while narratively cast in the simple
opposition between two rival parties, it is the parliament that is key, with individual MPs always
needing to negotiate, compromise or retreat.
6. Imagining the fan Democracy, Van Zoonen

Audience participation and Big Brother format: Such audience participation programmes
make visible that audiences are not the passive couch potatoes, the mindless dupes or the
vulnerable victims. They given audiences a possibility to act on their involvement with a
programme and to intervene in its course. These processes resemble traditional civic
requirements so much that various kinds of political
actors have taken them as a sign that it is still possible to interest people in ‘public affairs’ on a
massive scale.

American candidate: idea: The American Candidate, proposed by R.J. Cutler, was meant to
find a grassroots political candidate who would run as an independent candidate in the 2004
race for the White House. The programme would start on the Internet, where the applicants
could build their support base and debate their opponents, but was decided to be to expensive.

Hansard society: an independent non-party organization, which explores possible lessons that
the Big Brother house could teach the House of Commons.

3 dimensions of political culture and Big Brother: Big Brother experience shows the desire
of audiences for three indispensable but currently marginal dimensions of political culture:
transparency and authenticity; interactivity and control; and respect for diverse epistemologies.

Against politics on TV or mixing politics and entertainment plus Neil Postman: Postman
thinks of entertainmentt as a different domain from which politics should keep well away.
Similarly, other authors have talked about harmful roles of television in politics: television does
not produce adequate knowledge and it does not inform citizens satisfactorily; it alienates us
from the political process and diminishes our sense of citizenship; it weakens rational public
debate and fails to provide an awareness of political and social variety. It is a medium located
in the domains of leisure and entertainment. Big Brother and such genres have been capable of
activating audiences into discussion, participation and creativity. These are activities that would
qualify as civic competences if they were performed in the domain of politics. In the domain of
television entertainment is a suspension of seriousness.

Difference between audience and publics, Dayan: Denouncing the usual downbeat
interpretations of audiences as the passive opposites of active, sociable and deliberating publics,
Dayan asks the question whether and according to which conditions tv audiences could become
publics. The two kinds of ‘almost publics’ he sees emerging from tv are fan communities that
are engaged in ‘make-believe subjects’ and publics that temporarily develop around media
events.

Proponents of Big Brother as revival of politics: Their claim that there are parallels
between the involvement of people in Big Brother and the commitment one would want people
to have towards politics. Both need a commitment to candidates and a willingness to vote in
elections

Van Zoonen, Fan groups: Fan groups are social formations that are structurally equivalent to
political constituencies; they make use of and value similar repertoires of activity; strength of
their respective relations to their ‘objects’ is built on corresponding emotional investments. This
shows the relevance of television entertainment for politics.
Marketing crisis: It emerged when social positions and economic status no longer predicted
consumer behaviour and media use, and the allure of specific products in itself turned out to be
the decisive factor in consumer behaviour. Similarly, political parties and candidates now have
to produce their constituencies on the basis of their appeal rather than being able to rely on
already existing social commonalities.
Audience or spectator democracy: It resides primarily in the mass media who show political
leaders as the telegenic embodiments of particular ideals. This may capture the reality of
contemporary politics as a mass mediated phenomenon, it assumes audiences as relatively
passive bystanders and does not at all address the dynamic and complex relations of individuals
and collectives with the mass media and among themselves.

Continuum of audience involvment: fans, cultist, enthusisast: Abercrombie and Longhurst

(1998) have developed acontinuum of audience involvement which ranges from consumers on
the one hand, producers on the other, with fans, cultists and enthusiasts in the middle. Fans are
those people who become particularly attached to certain programmes or stars within the
context of a relatively heavy media use. In other words, they are voters of a party for a party or
a candidate. Cultists are more organized than fans. They meet each other and circulate
specialized materials that constitute the nodes of a network. The political parallel here are the
members of a political party. Enthusiasts are, in our based predominantly around activities
rather than media or stars and are analogous to party representatives in various governing
bodies. Analogy with politics: starting as a relative indiscriminate consumer of politics, one
may become a fan and then travel through the phases of cult and enthusiasm to that of the
political professional.Then, electorates are similarly positioned to parties and politicians, as
fans are to programmes or stars.

Fan activity study on soap opera by Baym: 2000 Internet community study of American
Soap opera All of my Children. The conversations between the participants were primarily
concerned with the interpretation of soap stories and characters. These interpretations emerged
in dialogue and deliberation, which have both a playful and an emotional component. The
participants prove to be
a highly competent audience expressing critical assessments of the show that often surpasses
the knowledge of the producers.

Decline of social capital, Putnam: Putnam considers social capital to be the backbone of
people’s capacities and willingness to engage in public debate and participate in political
activity, its demise represents not only a serious threat to social cohesion but to democracy as
well. Weakening social capital can therefore be considered as the root of political degeneration
in the US, as expressed in declining political knowledge.

Political practices of fans and fan practices: Fans have an intense individual investment in
the text, they participate in strong communal discussions and deliberations about the qualities
of the text, they propose and discuss alternatives which would be implemented as well if only
the fans could have their way. These are, in abstract terms, the customs that have been laid out
as essential for democratic politics: information, discussion and activism.

Essentials for democratic politics: information, discussion and activism.

Relationship of politics and emotions in fans: As is clear from various accounts of fan
engagement, the relation of a fan with his or her favourite object is primarily based on affective
identifications. Such hefty emotional investments do not seem easily reconciled with a civic
subjectivity that is supposedly based on knowledge, rationality, detachment, learnedness or
leadership.
Affective orientation to party + election nights: emotional political motivations have found
their way into the widely used concept of party identification, which has been defined as an
affective orientation towards a group or party that results from early life socialization processes
that mainly take place in the family. In everyday political practice emotions have been ritualized
in characteristic political ceremonies, which evoke fan behaviour rather than civic behaviour
among their participants. Election nights, for instance.Privileged party members who are
allowed entrance to election nights
they yell and cheer, admire and love, or cry and mourn with the leadership. They behave, in
other words, like highly ecstatic or deeply bereft fans.

Affective intelligence Marcus: His alternative theory of affective intelligence counters the
common case against emotion in politics by showing it is the key to good citizenship because
it
enables the use of reason. He proposes that emotions function as a trigger for our cognitive
capacities. In the context of politics, feelings of enthusiasm (all is well) and anxiety (something
is wrong) are
particularly relevant, because they produce the cognitive state of mind that enables the
acquisition of information and analysis of the situation. The kind of cognitive work that is
encouraged by enthusiasm and anxiety differs. A sense of all being well results in habitual
judgement, whereas anxiety would produce deliberative judgement. Without the affective
investments resulting from enthusiasm and anxiety, political interest and commitment would
falter.

3 dimensional equivalence between fan communities and political constituencies: 1. Fan

groups are social formations that are structurally equivalent to political constituencies. This can
be seen from Abercombie & Longhurst 1998 continuum of audience involvement, with fans,
cultists and enhusiasts, which could be compared to the politics sphere. Fans are starting as a
relative indiscriminate consumer of politics, one may become a fan and then travel through the
phases of cult and enthusiasm to that of the political professional.Then, electorates are similarly
positioned to parties and politicians, as fans are to programmes or stars.
2. they make use of and value similar repertoires of activity: impossible. Fans have an intense
individual investment in the text, they participate in strong communal discussions and
deliberations about the qualities of the text, they propose and discuss alternatives which would
be implemented as well if only the fans could have their way. These are, in abstract terms, the
customs that have been laid out as essential for democratic politics: information, discussion and
activism.
3. strength of their respective relations to their ‘objects’ is built on corresponding emotional
investments: relation of a fan with his or her favourite object is primarily based on affective
identifications. Similarly, emotional political motivations have found their way into party
identification, which has been defined as an affective orientation towards a group or party.

Relevance of television in politics: TV is extremely capable of creating short- and long-lived

fan communities. Such fandom has been an intrinsic feature of audience behaviour. Since fan
communities and political constituencies have similarities, it is clear where the relevance of
television for politics lies: in the emotional constitution of electorates which involves the
development and maintenance of affective bonds between voters, candidates and parties. The
representation of politics on television, generically entertaining, may be seen as inviting the
affective intelligence that is vital to keep political involvement and activity going.

7. Popular Culture as a Resource for Political Engagement

Popular culture as source of political issues: Popular culture, it has been argued, is an
authoritative source of cues about the relevance of political and social issues and offers scripts
which audiences, and young people in particular, use to play at being citizens. Through popular
culture young people ‘play-act their way not only into the web of power relations that constitute
personal identity but also into the disciplines and values of larger entities’.

Political engagement: Implicit in this public perception of young people as apolitical is the
assumption that voting is an activity by which we can measure the extent to which someone is
politically engaged. It is a traditional approach which defines political engagement as trying to
influence or otherwise engaging with the institutions and principles by which a political
community is governed.

Young people thoughts on politics: Respondents described formal politics as difficult to

comprehend, dominated by a combative mode of communication, and as a domain or concern
for people older than our respondents. As we have argued elsewhere in more detail, our
respondents perceive politics as a world in which expertise and authority are signalled in very
conventional ways. The picture of a successful politician that emerged across focus groups and
interviews was one of a serious, argumentative and mature person (Inthorn and Street, 2011).
Our respondents clearly feel distant from politics in the traditional sense of the word and do not
engage in the kinds of activities that are traditionally considered to be important for democracy.
Yet as others have demonstrated, just because young people may be disengaged from formal
politics and live lives deeply emersed in popular culture, that does not necessarily mean that
they are apolitical.

Politics, feminists: politics involves the contestation of relations of power and is an inherent
aspect of all social relations, including the public and the private sphere. Feminist scholars have
applied this approach to the analyses of media use in the home, demonstrating the ways in
which the routine interaction of couples can be seen as ‘a systematic re-creation and
reinforcement of social pattern’ through which ‘women and men are creating and affirming
themselves and each other as separate and unequal’. Once we accept the premise that politics
manifests itself at the micro-level of everyday life.

Political engagement by Street: We do not suggest that the state is irrelevant to politics. We
also want to retain boundaries between actions or statements that are political and those that are
not. The key lies in the extent to which actions are connected with wider structures of power,
which may include but are not exclusive to those exercised by the state. In order for a verbal
or non-verbal action to be political it needs to have an element of public orientation.

Public connectedness by Couldry, politival and non political issues: he used concept of
‘public connectedness’ for their definition of political engagement. Public connection captures
‘an orientation to any of those issues affecting how we live together that require common
resolution’. This definition demarcates non-political issues from political ones. Political issues
affect large sections of society and require collective action. Non-political ones do not. This
does mean that experiences which a traditional and narrow definition of politics would identify
as non-political can in fact be considered as political.

How can engage politicaly? There are many ways in which a person can make a connection
with an issue of public concern. Engagement in government and network politics is recognized
by many writers as a contribution to the public sphere. Actions that seemingly have very little
conection with formal politics may indeed be a form of political engagement. Livingstone
suggest that talk, even in its smallest and tentative forms, may prepare us for participation in
the public sphere. If in their everyday conversations young people talk about something as an
issue of public concern, then we can say that they are engaging in politics.

Politic engagement, Dahlgren: The term ‘political engagement’, in contrast, tends to imply
some dimensions of conflict and captures any activity that is ‘oriented toward influencing
government action in some way’ (Dahlgren, 2009: 59), including potentially anti-democratic
ones.

What Is Necessary for Political Engagement? Central to this approach is the idea that
political engagement is informed by knowledge. The role of the media is to provide the balanced
and diverse range of information that is necessary in order to form rational opinions (Barnett,
2002: 400; McNair, 2000: 197). One form of such knowledge relates to the actions of political
and social elites. The media act as a watchdog, holding to account those in power and providing
the resources an individual may need to develop a relationship with sources of power in society
. Yet the media’s role is not limited to that of moral guardian or watchdog. Drawing on cultural
citizenship theory, we argue that political engagement involves a willingness to encounter,
recognize and accept cultural diversity. The resources that fuel political engagement do not
need to be rational. Political engagement also has a subjective side.

Political values: In this study, when we speak of political values we refer to those values that
envision how the members of a given society should relate to each other.

Affinity, Dharlgen: scholars have returned to this issue and have argued that emotions are
central to democratic politics and may even motivate political action. In our study we are
particularly interested in those kinds of emotions that make individuals associate with the
interests of often distant others, which is what Dahlgren (2003: 159) calls ‘affinity’. when we
speak of expressions of ‘affinity’, we refer to moments in which someone expresses a sense of
group membership that extends beyond their immediate personal context.

Imagined community, Anderson: Anderson’s (1991) work on the ‘imagined community’ of

the nation, which describes a horizontal comradeship that is felt and articulated by people who
are and are likely to remain strangers to each other.

Tension between values and pleasures of watching the news: This tension between the
values and pleasures of watching the news occurred frequently across focus groups. Watching
the news and finding out, as one respondent put it, ‘what’s going on’ for many is something
they see as important. They even criticized others for not seeing the point in gathering this kind
of knowledge about the world, and measured the extent to which someone cares about the world
by their willingness to learn. However, only a few respondents described themselves as
interested in news programmes and none declared an interest in the news without being
prompted. Yet, un-prompted by us, many respondents expressed an appreciation of
opportunities to gain knowledge about institutions of power and the experiences of diverse
social groups in fictional narratives, such as soap operas. Even when they rejected media
content for not being what they described as a true reflection of the real, these young people
suggested that they use the media to reflect on issues of public concern. What this exchange
shows is that while some of our respondents rejected the mode of presentation of some
programmes and soap operas in particular, they nevertheless recognized that fictional narratives
are a potential source of learning. Moreover, they identified issues that they deemed to be of
relevance for a wider collectivity.

Notions of responsibility towards strangers: Exchanges likes this demonstrate that our
respondents are grappling with notions of responsibility towards strangers. These young people
clearly explored the question of how people should treat each other and they sought to apply a
set of values to a community of people which included people whom they might never meet.
They made the question of how adults should treat children an issue of wider public concern.
Our respondents’ answers suggest they use the media to gather knowledge about the world they
live in, to encounter unfamiliar social identities and playfully to explore the principles that
govern how people live together. Earlier in this paper we suggested that at moments when
young people consider their social responsibility towards others, or when they express an
interest in the experiences of diverse social groups, they may be motivated by feelings of
affinity. A young person might express these feelings by vocalizing an interest in the lives of
others, but inherent in this interest is a sense that their life and their interests are somehow
connected with those of others. We suggest that political engagement may be informed by the
feeling of belonging to a wider collectivity. The role of popular culture here is twofold: It offers
the feeling of being represented, but also of feeling part of a wider collectivity and its shared
cultural practices. When describing what popular culture means to them, some respondents
expressed a strong sense of cultural identity and belonging.

Cultural self and other: To us such statements have a clear public dimension and suggest that
popular culture offers our participants ways into developing and strengthening a sense of
connectedness with other members of a public community. While the last example appears to
illustrate their affinity to people from specific geographic areas, the following extract from a
discussion about comedy illustrates another key theme that emerged in many focus groups and
interviews in which respondents drew on a discourse of national identity. Mapping the world
into distinct cultural collectivities, they distinguished between a cultural Self and Other.

Affinity: Respondents who drew the boundaries of their communities in this way appeared to
work with a traditional mapping of the world in which local identity and nation matter most.
Yet in some conversations the young people we spoke to also expressed a sense of
connectedness with a wider global community. For some of our respondents media rep-
resentations of human suffering in televised fundraising events like Comic Relief invited them
to express affinity with distant others.

Talk as political engagement, Livingstone: Picking up the phone and donating money may
not in the eyes of some be a particularly significant form of political action. He political
potential of what Livingstone calls ‘early expressions of interest, exploration of experience,
tentative trying out of viewpoints’. Talk helps young people to identify and think through issues
of public concern and, as Livingstone (2005) suggests, this activity should be taken seriously
for the way in which it might help prepare young people for their participation in the politics of
the public sphere.

Young people and politics: Many young people feel disconnected from formal politics and
struggle to see the connection between formal politics and their own lives. Yet such apathy
should not be mistaken for indifference. In our study even young people who expressed a lack
of interest in government politics engaged in conversations about social responsibility and the
interests of diverse social groups. It was talk about popular culture that stimulated these
conversations. Our findings suggest that popular culture can provide young people with key
resources they need to engage in politics. Discussion is a political activity and the young people
in our study seem often to engage in talk with each other. Rather than leading young citizens to
‘bowl alone’ popular culture provides them with at least some of the resources they need to
actively engage in the public sphere, even if those are conventionally not understood as
political. While we feel that our study lends further support to the argument that popular culture
can help people to engage in politics, at the same time we want to add a note of caution. Our
study echoes the findings of others who have argued that young people remain alienated from
formal politics. However, given that young people use popular culture to explore the geographic
and cultural (including normative) boundaries of their political community and to identify
issues of public concern, it seems plausible to suggest that representations of political activism
not only in the news, but in entertainment television, popular music and video games, may end
up undermining its potential to invigorate the public sphere.

8. Handbook of PC, Street

Intimacy of popular culture and political representation: Elections of Barck Obama, John
F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.

Dumbing down: Notion driven by the thought that modern forms of political communication
have borrowed the language and conventions of popular culture, and have opted to simplify the
message, emptying it of detail and appealing to lowest common denominator. Eg. movie the
Candidate or Postmans book Amusing ourselves to Death.

Lack of research: It lacks research of effects of popular culture and communication on political
engagement and discourse. It may be that infotainment enhances political engagement and
represents a new form of political communication.

Critics of popular culture in democracy: Robert Putnams Bowling Alone or time stealing
thesis – popular culture has negative role of disengaging citizens who might otherwise engage
in collective public acts, but are breeding attitudes that undermine the practice of civic
engagement.

Use of popular culture in political communication: Political actors use it instrumentally, by

the extent to which it enables them to achieve their specific political goals. Popular culture is
marked by its ability to attract and entertain a large number of people, and this power to attract
and engage is important for political communication. Nazis used the film Triumph of the Will
to convey a message to their public. NGOs use it to convey their message, for example Amnesty
made concerts with Bruce Springsteen. Language or music or tv formats underwrite the way in
which electoral politics is communicated. Rationale behind this derives from the assumptions
about the effects of popular culture and logic of political communication in fragmented society.

Political culture and modernization, Mancini and Swanson: key lies in the collapse of
tradicional institutions of political communication: the extended family,political party, trade
union and church. Modernization diminishes their role and forge a more individualized society
in which mass media become core means of communication. Citizen becomes a part of a mass
audience for mass media.

Growing impact of mass media, Frankfurt school: it incorporates many different forms of
communication to assume even larger significance as sources of information and influence.
Spectacle of democracy, Zolo and Crouch: institutions of mass democracy are no longer
capable of delivering the promises of representation and accountability. Power is held by global
elites, and formal legitimating mechanisms become diminished and similarly, legitimacy a
spectacle of mass participation.Electoral process becomes extension of voters participation in
game and talent shows. Modern mass societies enact spectacle of democracy and citizens,
instead of being active participants become spectators, and politics a branch of show bizz.

Macro, micro and meso level theories: macro- see the connection of being forged to large
scale social and political transformations, meso- focuses on the logic of medium of
communication and profesionalization of communicators. Micro- locates the change in the
nature of political communication itself, from the perspective of individual rational actor or
from the nature of representation itself.

4 ways popular culture and political communication are linked:

1. Revealing the political / transcoding to capture the process: focus on the text, but political is
revealed instead of directly represented. Politics is read into text, or text is seen acting as a
metaphor for present political concerns. Rather than translating set of political values in cultural
form,politics is converted from one code – the experience of real life global politics- to that of
medium involved. This way, popular culture communicates politics as ideology and establishes
form of common sense. Eg : Independence Day or Heroes.
2. Representing the political: popular culture and political communication are linked as virtue
of their subject manner. In this perspective, popular culture becomes extension of news and
current affairs. For example, popular culture which deal explicitly political topics.Like Yes,
Prime minister and The West Wing.
3.Politically positioning the audience: this links text to the audience, and asks how the works
of popular culture construct a relationship between audience and political power. As Van
Zoonen says, contrasting narratives establish different relationships to the political realm. Here
the attention is in how popular culture serves to create communities of interest.
4. Dramatizing political morality:popular cultures capacity to communicate polliticaly is to be
found in its ability to energize politics, and this is connected to its contribution to collective
action. It concerns how popular culture inspires enthusiasm or indignation in people- through
popular musicians who are for example key to animating forms of collective action.

Imagined community by Anderson or invented tradition by Ranger: collective identities

can be forged through cultural representations. There is a lot of research of the way that cultural
forms help to generate a collective identity.

Political communication as a form of popular culture, Street: and vice versa, popular culture
communicates political ideas and values. Formal distinctions that separate news and current
affairs from entertainment are formal distinctions, and as such are hard to establish in practice.

Celebrity politician, Street: First is convetonal politician who adopts the devices, platforms
and stars of popular culture in order to promote their representative claims, and second one is
the star of popular culture who uses their fame to claim representation of political causes or
interests, and both of them use political culture to communicate their message.

9. Corner and Pels

Voter paradox: politicians encounter the greatest dilficulty in getting out the vote in ordinary
elections, while the enthusiasm to vote for celebrities on reality shows such as Big Brother,
popstars and Pop Idol regularly reaches levers that border on collective frenzy. For example, in
2002 finals of Pop Idol election campaign,
the two remaining candidates together polled more votes than the Liberal Democrats in the
general election. Reality TV is not the end of civilisation as we know it; it is civilisation as we
know it, Germaine. Voting paradox may focus us on changing nature of political
representation.The mass visibility that is afforded by modern mediated politics has
foregrounded issues of ,style, appearance and personality , breaking down some of the fences
that separate politics from entertainment and political leadership from media celebrity Citizens
have become political consumers who buy ideological packages or party brands and are
mobilised around 'singular' political personarities.

Politics as culture industry: official politics has been blurring boundaries and levelling
hierarchy between high politcal representation and low political entertainment. It manufactured
pop has adopted some of conventions of political electioneering and become more of culture
industry, resembling a talent show.

Political culture: the realms of political experience, imagination, values and dispositions that
provide the settings within which a political system operates, shaping the character of political
processes and political behaviour. It is the elements of political culture that interconnect the
official world of professional politics with the modes of the popular variously to be found within
work and leisure.

Media or enabling view of media, Corner and Pels: media are necessary agents of the
practice of modern, popular democracy. Subject to certain conditions (the question-begging
economic and regulatory circumstances of 'free press' being the most importat), their circulation
of knowledge, presentation of diverse views and critical scrutiny of those in power that act as a
guarantor of political health and active citizenship.

Disabling view of media: the media are seen as variously undermining the practice of
democracy or, at least, of having a strong propensity to do so. They perform their subversive
function through such routes as the substitution of entertainment for knowledge, the closing
off of true diversity, the pursuit of an agenda determined primarily by market factors and their
susceptibility to control by government and corporate agencies.

How do media impact negatively on political practice or two versions of imbalance: The
first version is notion of a politicised media. In this, the media's independance is seen to be
almost entirely circumscribed by the controls of the political system. The realm of politics has
effectively superimposed itself on the realm of media. As independent agencies, the media
have been shut down. Here one could see many arguments about the effect of 'spin' and of
political marketing. The second version reverses the relationship and might be called the notion
of a thoroughly mediatised politics. Here, it is the realm of politics that has become colonised
by media logics and imperatives, losing its specificity and integrity. Politics has become an
adjunct to show business.

3 C: celebrity, consumerism and cinism:

1. Consumer: the emphasis on the consumer within relations of market provision has extended
beyond the core areas of trade and shopping. It has shaped revised forms of public service,
including education and health, and it has placed politicians in the role of of being service
providers. Some argue that rather than undermining citizenship, it has reinforced it by supplying
new kinds of awareness. To other writers, the prominence of the consumer and the language of
consumerism indicate the continuing contradiction between market values and democratic
development.
2. Celebrity: Forms of celebrity, involving sustained performance within conditions of
expanded media visibility and, quite often, vigorous media scrutiny, are a major feature of
contemporary culture. Alongside the more established 'public figures', a whole new range of
people from television, sport, popular music and other areas of entertainment have become
members of a celebrity system that extends to the international level.
3. Political cynism: The increase in cynical disposition, most noticable in low election turn-outs
but by no means limited to electoral periods, is the single most worrying element of
contemporary politics. Often, media treatment of politics is blamed for reinforcing if not
causing the tendency, and another cause is the adoption of more aggressively commercial forms
of political marketing in many countries and the negative and more distanced attitudes towards
political activity that this is said to have encouraged.

Political style: it operates as a focus for post-ideological lifestyle choices. While all parties
tend to become centre parties and reproduce divisions of the political spectrum within
themselves, voters float away from these empty cubicles in order to identify with public
individuals or celebrities, who condense particular themes and emotions in spectacular display
of character and style. Increasingly, people want to vote for persons and their ideas rather than
for political parties and their programmes. Their interest is facrlitated by new forms of visual
and emotional literacy, which allow audiences to read political characters and judge their claims
of authenticity and competence. The continuous media exposure of political personae lends
them a strange familiarity.

System of celebrity power or audience subjects: New visibility of persons and the affective
identification they attract represents a broader cultural shift that fits the individualisation of
political trust. The proliferation of differences within institutions (such as political parties) and
social categories spills and tends to blur the boundaries between them. Individuals themselves
traver more freely across these institutional and classificatory boundaries institutions are
represented and identified by the individual faces who front them, while individuals turn into
institutions as a result of their mediated ubiquity and universal fame. The central significance
of celebrity culture for this new constellation is that public figures embody stylised forms of
individuality, which offer a temporary focus for identification and organisation by fluid
collectives. Such 'audience subjects', as Marshall calls them, appropriately express both a
unique individuality and the social power of a particular group. Within this context, individuals
attempt to make sense of social experience through celebrating and selectively identifing with
the lifestyles of public personalities.
Aesthetic politics: idea about politics as theatre, focused on spectacle, style, emotion and the
cult of personality. Example: Gesamtkunstwerk, in which the charismatic political artist would
shape out of the rough and disorganised matter of the popular mass. By critics it caused
massification and mediatization (Adorno, Horkheimer). Today: subsequent evolution of
political democracy has demonstrated that aesthetic stylisation is an inherent and inevitable
feature of mass politics, particularly in its (post)modern mediated form. Under such new
conditions of mediated visibility and 'thin' solidarity, a politics of personal style may generate
democratic effects, by expanding platforms of engagement and citizenship, and and by offering
forms of popular appeal and emocional identification. A performative politics foregrounds the
politician as an actor, whose performance
on the public stage is continuously judged in terms of autherticity, honesty and character.
Presentation of political self, Goffman: nature of self consciusness and political
performance. For professional
politicians, 'the presentation of self in everyday rife, involves the management of a number of
different roles, some performed in a cultural context where the relationship and interplay
between public and 'private' realms is indeterminate and changing. The styling of self in
politics, the projection of political persona is partly a matter of choice (a conscious 'branding'
exercise designed to sharpen profile) and partly a required reaction to the terms of media
visibility that frame and interpret political action in many countries.

Sociological and psyhological dimensions of political self: Sociological - we cannot

understand contemporary
political processes and settings unless we at least engage with the kinds of identity that
politicians project and the relation of these to popular perceptions and judgements. The way in
which poriticians are assessed, both as members of a professional grouping and also as
somehow representatives of the people, articulating differing versions of common sense, is
crucial too. This assessment connects outwards to the broader identities they enjoy as
celebrities, or subjects of political gossip.
Psyhological: politics has a'secret rife', a narrative of inner management and tension, of
aspiration and fear. There are shifts in personalization of politics that may make link between
inner and outer more prominent. Renewed interest in trust and of politics that somehow escapes
the distortions of system currently is one feature of changes in the terms of political culture.

Political language: is seen as one key test of their integrity and quality and of their strategic
acumen' Finding the 'right' kind of language to address particular audiences to adress on specific
topics is the primary challenge. The forms of language in use will necessarily refrect in part the
broader shifts in public and cultural coinage. Terms and phrases can lose, or gain, credibility
and cogency within the space of a year or so. There is also a move towards a more colloquial
political language.

Political honesty and manegarial politics: modern forms of democracy added to the growth
of new patterns of political communication and revised terms of suspicion, and reconfigured
conditions of being honest and thruthful. Politicians are so deeply within currents of
persuasion,assertion and denial that it would be naive to be completely honest. Some authors
argue that lying is in very nature of political imagination. Today managerial politics is widely
used, where they pre-empt the bad news, reasure on a point of growing anxiety, and hold a
compromise position between interest groups and points of view.
Notion of inner voice and two theories on political reality, Schumann: a melody that is not
actually played but strongly suggested by what is played. Political reality similarly arises in the
gap between what is objectively there and what is suggested. Ther is two theories on political
reality: classic that says it must be transparent, unambiguous and consensual and romantic that
says there can be essential ambivalences and perspectival conflicts from whixh political thruth
emerges as inner voice in the form of new political style.

Parasocial identification, Pels: novel proximity between representers and represented

counterbalanced by dramatic distance that remains between celebrities and civilians. Political
personalities adopt more aesthetic forms of self display, but civilians judge them on the basis
of emotional intelligence and political taste. So, stylisation of politics bridges the gap and may
inspire future democratisation.

10. "Mediatization" of Politics: A Challenge for Democracy. Mazzoleni, Schulz

Irresponsible nature of media – influence on the political process by critics: Critics’
concern for the excessive power of the media expanding beyond the boundaries of their
traditional functions in democracies focuses mainly on the “irresponsible” nature of the media
complex: While the political parties are accountable for their policies to the electorate, no
constitution foresees that the media be accountable for their actions. Absence of accountability
can imply serious risks for democracy, because it violates the classic rule of balances of power
in the democratic game, making the media (the “fourth branch of government”) an influential
and uncontrollable force that is protected from the sanction of popular will. According to critics,
the media have distorted the political process also by turning politics into a marketlike game
that humiliates citizens’ dignity and rights and ridicules political leaders’ words and deeds.
Critics argue that the media’s presentation of politics in the United States as well as in many
other countries—as “show-biz” based on battles of images, conflicts
between characters, polls and marketing, all typical frenzies of a journalism that is increasingly
commercial in its outlook—has diminished if not supplanted altogether debate about ideas,
ideals, issues, and people’s vital interests and has debased voters by treating them not as citizens
but rather as passive “consumers” of mediated politics.

Critics of new media influence on politics: Traditional democratic institutions of

representation will be undermined or made irrelevant by direct, instant electronic
communication between voters
and officials; the new media will fragment the electorate, eroding the traditional social and
political bonds that have united the polity; political parties will lose their function as cultural
structures mediating between the people and the government; shrewd, unprincipled politicians
will find it easier than before to manipulate public opinion and build consensus by using new
information technologies and resources; and the new media can facilitate the spread of populist
attitudes and opinions.

Media's mutagenic impact on politics: Critics regard conventional mass communication and
new communication technologies as sharing what could be described as a “mutagenic” impact
on politics, that is, the ability to change politics and political action into something quite
different from what traditionally has been embodied in the tenets of liberal democracy. Without
depreciating the validity of the critical, somewhat apocalyptic positions.

Mazzoleni shultz study arguments: democracies, it is our argument here that the increasing
intrusion of the media in the political process is not necessarily synonymous with a media
“takeover” of political institutions media intrusion cannot be assumed as a global phenomenon,
because there are very significant differences between countries in this respect. Recent changes
that have occurred in the political arenas around the world cannot be explained as reflecting
some common pattern of “media-driven democracy.” Instead, the concept of “mediatization”
of politics is a more sensible tool for addressing the question of whether the media complex
endangers the functioning of the democratic process.

Mediatization by Schultz Mazzoleni: Mediatization is, in fact, a phenomenon that is common

to the political systems of almost all democratic countries, where it has taken different shapes
and developed at different speeds. However, it has in all cases proved impossible to contain
because the media have assumed the character of “necessity” in the political domain. The mass
media are not mere passive channels for political communicators and political content. Rather,
the media are organizations with their own aims and rules that do not necessarily coincide with,
and indeed often clash with, those of political communicators. Because of the power of the
media, political communicators are forced to respond to the media’s rules, aims, production
logics, and constraints.

Mediatization in communication ages: The mediatization process has been under way for
many years, stretching from the “first age” of political communication, when communication
systems were based on few press and electronic channels and cohabited with political systems,
through the second age of tumultuous changes in the nature of both systems and of relations
between them. In the third age of multichannel communication, the mediatization of the
political sphere has accelerated to the point that the subordination of the media system to the
political system in the first age seems to have changed into the acquisition by the media of great
power in the public sphere and the political arena. However, this power, although far-reaching,
is not so pivotal that it puts the media complex in the place of the political parties, narcotizes
the public, or diverts citizens from civic engagement.

Mediatization vs mediation: term mediatization denotes problematic concomitants or

consequences of the evelopment of modern mass media. It is distinguished from mediation,
which refers in a neutral sense to any acts of intervening, conveying, or reconciling between
different actors, collectives, or institutions. In this sense, mass media can be regarded as a
mediating or intermediary agent whose function is to convey meaning from the communicator
to the audience or between communication partners and thereby sometimes substitute for
interpersonal exchanges. As an intermediary or mediating system, mass media have the
potential for bridging the distance between actors in both a physical sense and a social
psychological sense, that is, reconciling unacquainted or even conflicting parties.

Mediatation of politics, Mazzoleni & Schulz: if modern politics is being mediated it is merely
a descriptive statement. Communication, including mass mediated communication, is a
necessary prerequisite for the functioning of any political system. The demands of citizens as
well as their expressions of system support must be articulated by communication, channeled
into the political arena by mass media, and converted into system output. In a similar way,
system output—political decisions and actions has to be communicated to the public.

Mediatization of politics, Mazzoleni & Schulz: Mediatized politics is politics that has lost its
autonomy, has become dependent in its central functions on mass media, and is continuously
shaped by interactions with mass media. This statement of the mediatization hypothesis is based
on observations of how mass media produce political content and interfere with political
processes.

Process of mediatization of politics: First, in their news reporting, mass media present only a
highly selective sample of newsworthy events from a continuous stream of occurrences. Events
are identified as “newsworthy” when they satisfy certain rules or news values. the media’s
selective sample of events that are reported defines what appears to be the only reality for most
citizens and often also for the political elite.News value criteria also impose a systematic bias
upon the media reality of politics because news reports typically accentuate the features that
make an event newsworthy. Second, modern democratic states are characterized by mediatized
participation. Mass media construct the public sphere of information and opinion and control
the terms of their exchange. A media-constructed public sphere sharply differentiates the roles
of actors and spectators.
ASPECTS OF MEDIATIZATION OF POLITICS THROUGH A MEDIA CONSTUCTED
PUBLIC SPHERE: It is left to the media to decide who will get access to the public. In the
same way that media select and frame events, the media select which actors will receive
attention and frame those actors’ public images. This is one aspect of the mediatization of
politics through a media-constructed public sphere. A second aspect consists of the agenda-
building and agenda-setting functions of mass media. In addition to conferring status upon
actors by giving them attention, the media also assign political relevance and importance to
social problems by selecting and emphasizing certain issues and neglecting others. Third,
“media logic” the frame of reference within which the media construct the meaning of events
and personalities they report, increasingly has come to reflect the commercial logic of the media
industry, mixing the structural constraints of media communication with the typical aims of
commercial communication activity. One major implication for politics is the
“spectacularization” of political communication formats and Fourth, since the mass media’s
attention rules, production routines, selection criteria, and molding mechanisms are well known
in the world of politics, thanks not least to the efforts of communication scholars, political actors
know and are able to adapt their behavior to media requirements. Such reciprocal effects may
be seen as a special kind of media impact on reality. If political actors stage an event in order
to get media attention, or if they fashion an event in order to fit to the media’s needs in timing,
location, and the framing of the message and the performers in the limelight, we can speak of a
mediatization of politics. The same measures also may be seen as attempts by political actors
to gain control over the media.

Domains of adaptation of political language to media patterns, Mazzoleni & Schulz: (a)
the communication
“outlook” of political actors, be they the government, the parties, leaders, or candidates for
office; (b) the communication techniques that are used; and (c) the content of political
discourse.

Soundbite sindrome: U.S. politicians almost became voiceless on television during recent
decades; in television news coverage of political campaigns, the soundbites of presidential
candidates shrunk dramatically as journalists appeared to speak for the politicians by presenting
paraphrases and summaries of the politicians’ remarks, In Europe, however, the “soundbite
syndrome” is still uncommon among the media and politicians.

When does journalistic partisanship become problematic? (a) when the political beliefs of
journalists deviate substantially from the beliefs of their news audiences, which seems to be the
case in countries like Italy and Germany where journalists view themselves as more liberal than
their audience, and (b) when the mass media exaggerate their control functions and focus
excessively on the negative aspects of politics, which also is an obvious trend on the European
scene.

2 societal trends that change relationship between media and politics: trends the crisis of
the party system and the rise of a sophisticated citizenry are independent variables in the
changing conditions between mass media and political institutions. Since the latter trend has to
a certain degree affected the former, we look first at the different species of homo politicus and
the social changes that gave rise to their evolution. 1) In a number of studies he has provided
empirical evidence of a shift from material to postmaterial values. Inglehart contends that the
growing economy and the establishment of a comprehensive welfare system altered the value
preferences of certain segments of the population. Instead, people placed higher priority on
postmaterial values such as individual freedom, self-expression, and participation. 2) All
industrial societies have been experiencing an enormous expansion of higher education. As a
result of higher education, many more people than ever before develop higher cognitive skills
and a higher degree of political sophistication. Political sophistication also expands the horizon
of people’s interests. On the one hand, the level of political information holding has not
increased considerably, and raises their level of attention. On the other hand, measures of
interest in politics have been going up during the same period, as have civic engagement. These
seemingly contradictory trends fit together if they are interpreted as symptoms of a general
change in the public’s orientation to political institutions. Because of their increased political
skills, major parts of the population have been emancipated from traditional political
institutions. The “self-mobilized” citizens, as Dalton calls this new species, formulate their
stance on current issues independently of the positions of the political parties. Sophisticated
citizens have included unconventional modes in their repertoire of political participation. Overr
time, election turnout has become a weak indicator of political participation.

Postmodernization hypothesis, Inglehart: In a number of studies he has provided empirical

evidence of a shift from material to postmaterial values. Inglehart contends that the growing
economy and the establishment of a comprehensive welfare system altered the value
preferences of certain segments of the population. As people’s basic subsistence needs were
met in advanced industrial societies, material values receded into the background. Political
issues linked to economic growth, crime prevention, and national defense became less salient.
Instead, people placed higher priority on postmaterial values such as individual freedom, self-
expression, and participation.

Self mobilized citizen or chronic know nothings: Because of their increased political skills,
major parts of the population have been emancipated from traditional political institutions. The
“self-mobilized” citizens, as Dalton calls this new species, formulate their stance on current
issues independently of the positions of the political parties. Sophisticated citizens have
included unconventional modes in their repertoire of political participation. Overr time, election
turnout has become a weak indicator of political participation. Although societal changes gave
rise to a growing segment of “self-mobilized” citizens, there remains a large group of people
who are poorly informed and not much interested in politics, the chronic know-
nothings.Because of their low level of education and motivation, these people lack the cognitive
resources for more active participation in politics. In previous times, the majority of this group
relied on political parties to relieve them of the need for individually deliberated choices. With
the general trend toward declining party identification in advanced industrial democracies, the
parties have lost much of their former orientation function, particularly for apolitical citizens.

Ritual partisans, new independents and apoliticals, Dalton: Dalton (1996) presents survey
data that show that over a period of four decades “ritual partisans,” as he labels the less
sophisticated citizens who feel attached to one of the political parties, have declined from 42%
to 20% of the U.S. population. During the same period the “new independents”—highly
mobilized citizens without a party identification increased from 16% to 24%, while apolitical
citizens remained stable at 16%. In addition to their weak or nonexistent party identification,
the apoliticals and the sophisticated citizens have one other thing in common: They turn to the
mass media for political orientation and guidance.

What happens when citzizens rely only on the media? When citizens rely heavily or
exclusively on the media for their political nourishment, there is a metamorphosis in the ways
they approach and do politics. In recent years, first public opinion and then electorates have
become more volatile, more sensitive to current issues, to images of political leaders, and to the
changing zeitgeist. Because a party’s showing in elections increasingly has come to depend on
its ability not only to activate the traditional party supporters but also to win the volatile citizens
of both types, the apoliticals as well as the new independents, voter mobilization has become a
primary goal of modern election campaigns.

Informational citizens, Schudson:We have to deal with a society composed of a majority of

what Schudson calls “informational citizens,” those who are “saturated with bits and bytes of
information” abundantly and chaotically provided by the media, and a minority of “informed
citizens,” who have “not only information but a point of view and preferences to make sense of
it” and who appear “in a society in which being informed makes good sense, and that is a
function not of the individual character or news media performance, but of political culture”.

The crisis of political parties: consequence of changing value preferences and the emergence
of the selfmobilized citizen is a change in the political orientation and voting behavior of major
parts of the population. The traditional social cleavages—conflicts between social classes, the
center versus the periphery, and the State versus the Church—that gave rise to political
ideologies and parties in the 18th and 19th centuries have been leveled or have lost much of
their formative influence. This is manifested, for example, in the continuous decline of class-
based party choice. The traditional leftright dimension is still the dominant dimension. It
became quite common to see the rapid rise (and rapid disappearance) of new political
movements, single-issue parties, and “light parties”. On the other side of the political spectrum,
right-wing and racist parties found their constituencies among adherents of old materialist
values who have been suffering from economic insecurity or decline. European party systems
are facing a severe crisis of legitimacy. The extreme case is Italy, where the party system has
become almost completely detached from the electorate.

Result of the crisis of parties: it has only expanded the political function of the mass media.
Voters no longer have to rely on the parties to signal who stands for what and to tell them what
they should be for or against. It gives rise to candidate-centered and highly personalized
campaigns that rely heavily on the mass media. In the U.S. system. The situation in Europe is
different. Although political leaders may run independently of the traditional party system as
the Berlusconi case demonstrated in a spectacular way, the usual pattern is still that candidates
are nominated by party organizations and that the campaigns depend to a high degree on the
party organizations. European parliamentary systems allow much less room than the American
presidential system for personalization of election campaigns focused on individual leaders or
candidates. Parties still play an important role in the typical European campaign. But the mass
media have appropriated several of their functions and have transformed traditional party
campaigns into media campaigns.

Changes in mediatization of politics: First, the news business in Europe was characterized in
the past by the strong presence of public service broadcasting, which meant there was some
form of governmental control, direct or indirect, over the entire newsmaking process, from
recruitment of journalists to production policies.
Second, the process of commercialization of the public and private news media industry is
clearly seen in the preferences noted earlier of news organizations for spectacular and
sensationalistic coverage of political events and leaders. Third, in addition to a widespread
journalism that pursues commercial objectives and frames political reality accordingly, we can
also observe in various national contexts the rise of an adversarial type of news media that does
not fit the traditional model of the role relationships linking the press and politicians. A number
of news media organizations try to compete with the political parties and political actors for
public consent and legitimation in the same political arena.

11. Mediation and Mediatization, Stormback

Mediated politics, Stormback: mediated politics refers to a situation in which the media have
become the most important source of information and vehicle of communication between the
governors and the governed. In such a situation, people depend on the media for information
about politics and society in a broad sense of the words, just as politicians and other powerful
elites depend on the media for information about peoples’ opinions
and trends in society, and for reaching out to people. Stated differently, the media mediate
between the citizenry, on one hand, and the institutions involved in government, electoral
processes, or, more generally, opinion formation, on the other. Politics could thus be described
as mediated whenever the mass media are the main channels through which politics is
communicated and when, as a consequence, the depictions of “reality” that are conveyed
through the mass media presumably have an impact on how people perceive “reality.”

What changed during last 2 decades, Stromback: The intensity of mediated experiences has
increased and that the (experienced or actual) relevancy of institutions, events, and processes
beyond people’s own reach has increased. The latter, in turn, is an effect of numerous other
processes, including the expansion of the welfare state, the rise of the industrial and service
economy, and, in the latter part of the twentieth century, the informational economy (Castells
1996) and advances in transportation technology. In this context, the media have also played an
immensely important role, making us more aware of institutions, events, and processes beyond
the borders of our local, regional, and national communities.The media have thus contributed
to a deterritorialization of human experiences and perceptions. The concept of mediated politics
is basically a descriptive and rather static concept that refers to whether or not the media
constitute the most important channels for information exchanges and communication between
the people and political actors.

Mediatization Stormback: mediatization relates to changes associated with communication

media and their development. Mediatization implies a process through which core elements of
a social or cultural activity assume media form.

3 stage process of mediatization Asp & Eassion: Medialization of politics can be seen as a
three-stage process in which there is a development toward increasing media influence. This
influence can be exerted over people’s perceptions and over political institutions, respectively.

Media effect theories bad sides: the main focus of the majority of these theories is on the
media’s effects on individual perceptions and opinions. They also assume that media effects
are based on the content of media messages, rather than the media or communication format.As
a consequence, the media effects theories largely fail to appreciate the interactions,
interdependencies, and transactions at a system level and with regards to how the media shape
and reshape politics, culture, and people’s sense making.These theories also largely fail to
recognize the reciprocal effects of the mass media on the subjects of media coverage.

Media logic, Altheide & Snow: media logic consists of a form of communication; the process
through which media present and transmit information. Elements of this form include the
various media and the formats used by these media. Format consists, in part, of how material is
organized, the style in which it is presented, the focus or
emphasis on particular characteristics of behavior, and the grammar of media communication.
Format becomes a framework or a perspective that is used to present as well as interpret
phenomena.

Storytelling techniques and media logic, Mazzoleni Patterson: media logic can be taken to
mean the dominance in societal processes of the news values and the storytelling techniques
the media make use of to take advantage of their own medium and its format, and to be
competitive in the ongoing struggle to capture people’s attention. These storytelling techniques
include simplification, polarization, intensification, personalization visualization and
stereotypization, and the framing of politics as a strategic game or “horse race”.

2 dimensions of political logic, Meyer: political logic consists of both a policy dimension “the
effort to find solutions for politically defined problems by means of programs for action” and a
process dimension “the effort to gain official acceptance of one’s chosen program of action.”

Political communication dominated by media or political logic: political communication in

a particular society can, to a significant extent, be governed mainly by either media logic or
political logic. In the former case, the requirements of the media take center stage and shape
the means by which political communication is played out by political actors, is covered by the
media, and is understood by the people. In the latter case, the needs of the political system and
political institutions take center stage and shape how political communication is played out,
covered, and understood. In the former case, what people find interesting and what is
commercially viable for media companies take precedence. In the latter case, what is important
for people to know, as interpreted mainly by political actors and institutions, takes precedence.
In the former case, media companies are essentially perceived of as commercial enterprises
with no particular obligation apart from catering to the wants and needs of their audiences. In
the latter case,media companies are perceived as political or democratic institutions, with some
kind of moral, if not legal, obligation to assist in making democracy work.
4 dimensions of mediatization of politics, Stormback: The first aspect of the mediatization
of politics is the degree to which the media constitute the most important or dominant source
of information on politics and society.A second aspect is the degree to which the media are
independent from political institutions in terms of how the media are governed. A third aspect
is the degree to which the media content is governed by a political logic or by media logic.A
fourth aspect, finally, is the degree to which political actors are governed by a political logic or
by media logic. This aspect also includes some political institutions and how they are governed,
although the focus here will be on political actors. These aspects form the major dimensions
that, taken together, determine the degree to which politics is mediatized. From this perspective,
the mediation of politics should be perceived of as one, although necessary, part of the
mediatization of politics. They are correlated.

Media models in countries:the media in countries belonging to the polarized pluralist model,
such as Italy, are more a part of the political system than the media in countries that form part
of the democratic model, such as Sweden, and the liberal model, such as the United States. In
addition, the degree to which particular media outlets are governed by media logic should be
perceived of as a variable, rather than a constant, to allow for the fact that party-controlled
newspapers might coexist with commercial newspapers, just as public service broadcasting
might coexist with commercial broadcasting.
The First Phase of Mediatization:it is reached whenever the mass media in a particular setting
constitute the most important source of information and channel of communication between the
citizenry and political institutions and actors, such as political parties, governmental agencies,
or political interest groups. This is also when politics is mediated. In other words, the first phase
of mediatization corresponds to the concept of mediated politics. As such, it is a prerequisite
for subsequent levels of mediatization. It is also a prerequisite for the media’s power over their
audiences. Hence when politics has reached the first phase of mediatization, the depictions of
reality as conveyed by the media presumably have an impact on how people perceive reality,
and these perceptions arguably matter when people form their opinions.This forces political
communicators to take the media into consideration when attempting to shape opinion or react
to public opinion. The other three dimensions are, relatively speaking, of lesser importance. It
is a prerequisite for the successive phases of mediatization.

The Second Phase of Mediatization: In the second phase of mediatization, the media have
become more independent of governmental or other political bodies. The influence of the media
on the institutional level increases; thus the media logic becomes more important for those
attempting to influence the media and its content. Autonomy of the media has increased in the
second phase. The second phase of mediatization is also a process of increasing journalistic
professionalization, a more pragmatic and less sacerdotal approach to politics, and increasing
commercialization. the second phase of mediatization means that the media have become semi-
independent, that they largely control their own content, and that they possess resources that
can be utilized in what Cook (2005) has termed the “negotiation of newsworthiness” against
those who are attempting to influence the news. Political actors and institutions might still have
the upper hand, but they cannot control the media or unconditionally.

Third Phase of Mediatization: In the third phase of mediatization, the media continue to be
the dominant
source of information and channel of communication between different sections of
society.What distinguishes the third from the second phase is that the independence of the
media has further increased, and that the media in the daily operations have become so
independent and important that political and other social actors have to adapt to the media,
rather than the other way around.The media continue to be governed more by media logic than
any kind of political logic. This forces political actors to further increase their skills in news
management and so-called spinning. The importance of the media in the third phase thus goes
beyond single interactions
with political actors attempting to influence the news. It also goes beyond agenda setting or
framing effects on individuals. The media logic have become so pervasive that basically, no
social actors requiring interaction with the public or influence on public opinion can ignore the
media or afford not to adapt to the media logic. In other words, as the media logic has become
so important, political and social actors adapt to the media logic, with
the consequence that media reports on these political and social actors constitute reflections of
the media themselves and their logic. The mediated reality becomes more important than the
actual reality, in the sense that it is the mediated reality that people have access to and react to.
This is what Lippmann referred to when he wrote about the pseudo-environment and what
Nimmo and Combs refer to as a fantasy world. It is reasonable to expect political actors in the
third phase of mediatization to adapt to the media logic, but to do so in such a way so as not to
corrupt the political logic more than is deemed necessary. The tension between media logic and
the political logic, or the demands of the media system versus the political system.
Fourth Phase of Mediatization: The fourth phase of mediatization is thus attained when
political and other social actors not only adapt to the media logic and the predominant news
values, but also internalize these and, more or less consciously. standards of newsworthiness to
become a built-in part of the governing processes. If political actors in the third phase adapt to
the media logic, they adopt the same media logic in the fourth phase.Thus, in the fourth phase,
the media and their logic can be said to colonize politics, with political or other social actors
perhaps not even recognizing the distinction between a political and a media logic.The
transition from the third to the fourth phase of mediatization thus spurs the development of
permanent campaigning. as an essential strategy of governing. By mobilizing all available
resources in the daily battles to influence and shape the news, mainly by accommodating the
wants, needs, and standards of newsworthiness of the media, political and social actors might
become successful in the short term, but at the same time, their actions reveal the relative
insignificance of the political logic as opposed to the media logic. Politicians may then win the
daily battles with the news media, by getting into the news as they wish. The dominant source
of information continues to be the media. However, the intensity of media experiences is
stronger than in earlier phases, and politics and society—from the micro to the macro level—
are permeated with the media to such an extent that the media and their communicative output
is almost impossible to avoid. The media have become as independent from political institutions
as any institutions can be from a social systems perspective, where total independence
is always impossible.

Mediatization, Stormback: The process of the mediatization of politics can be described as a

process through which the important question involving the independence of the media from
politics and society concludes with the independence of politics and society from the media.

Media in democratic countries: At a general level, it can be argued that the media in
democratic countries are always positioned somewhere between the political system and the
economic system.The political system forms the institutional and regulatory boundaries within
which the media are required to operate, whereas the markets and the dynamics between supply
and demand shape what it is possible for commercial media enterprises
to do to survive or be profitable. The more independent the media are or become from politics,
the more dependent they become on market forces. Increasing independence from politics thus
tends to increase commercialism in the media sector.This, in turn, contributes to the process of
the mediatization of politics.

Biggest problem of media in democracies: The main problem associated with the media in
this context is that they belong to both the political and the economic systems. While it is a fact
that most media companies in contemporary democracies are private and commercial
enterprises, it is also a fact that democracy requires some kind of system in which there is a
flow of information from the governors to the governed and from the governed to the governors,
for public discussions and deliberations.

Degree to which politics is mediatized: degree to which politics is mediatized in a particular

society partly depends on the institutional setting.

Internet and mediatization of politics: The Internet is thus not guided by any one logic, but
includes many and competing logics. The crucial question, then, is not whether the Internet is
important or not for individual citizens, the media, or political actors. The crucial question in
the context of the mediatization of politics is rather whether the Internet makes the media more
or less dependent of political institutions, media content more or less governed by political
versus media logic, and political actors more or less governed by political versus media logic.
In this context, it is mainly used as a supplement to traditional media. media. Dividing the
politically relevant news or views material on the Internet into unique and repackaged material,
most of the material that reaches a wider audience is repackaged thus it does not replace
traditional media. Theoretically, it is possible to reach out to wider audiences through the
Internet, but in the absence of coverage in the traditional news media, this possibility is seldom
realized.

Mediatization, Stormback Esser

Media and pseudo events: The media also turned these debates into national events instead of
local events focused primarily on those physically attending the debates. Televised political
debates are thus typical examples of “media events” and “pseudo-events”, set up to suit the
demands of the mass media, celebrated as being of major significance, and aimed first and
foremost at a distant, imagined although real, audience of mainly passive spectators. When
political debates became televised, their formats successively changed to suit the demands of
the media rather than the demands of the contenders or the electorate. This is particularly the
case when televised debates have become institutionalized, and political candidates,
pragmatically if not theoretically, have no choice but to participate.

Mediated and mediation: that is, transmitted by the broadcasting media from the locale of the
debates to the audiences wherever they were located. In this sense, and conceptually speaking,
mediation should be understood as “a natural, preordained mission of mass media to convey
meaning from communicators to their target audiences”. Politics is thus mediated whenever
people experience it through media rather than directly and through their own experiences.

How media expectations or interventions shape debates or how politics became

mediatized on CNN example? When people sat down to watch the debates and the candidates’
performances, their expectations were to a significant degree shaped by the media. The
candidates were also aware that the outcome—how the debates finally would be perceived—
depended as much on how the media and their commentators interpreted the debates as on any
actual or objective reality. They were furthermore aware that their performances would be
judged against the mediashaped expectations and that the post-debate analysis might be as
important as the debate in itself as to how people perceived who won or came across better.
Following from the post-debate analysis in the media, might be as important as, or more
important than, the direct effects following from a debate in itself. CNN, for example, chose to
continuously track and show people’s responses to the debates, using real-time response
measurements. Instead of transmitting the first debates as neutrally as possible, CNN intervened
in a way that inhibited people’s opportunity to judgefor themselves how the candidates
performed. In other words, people saw the debates as the media shaped them, and these media
interventions likely affected how the people perceived the candidates and their performances.

Mediation / mediatization by Altheide, Snow, Nimmo and Combs: “social life is constituted
by and through a communication process” and how media logic increasingly shapes the
workings and understandings of society, they term this a process of mediation, while
acknowledging that some prefer the term mediatization. Nimmo and Combs also used the term
mediation rather than mediatization to denote the dynamic processes through which media
communication shape and reshape society and our understandings of it.
Mediation, Stormback, Esser: The concepts of mediation and mediatization should not,
however, be understood as synonymous. Arguably, mediation can be used both to denote a
neutral act of transmitting messages through the media and as denoting “the overall effect of
media institutions existing in contemporary societies, the overall difference that media make by
being there in our social world”.However, the essence of mediation as a concept is the rather
neutral act of transmitting messages. Using mediation to denote both the neutral act of
transmitting messages and the active, ever-present, and increased media influence makes the
concept less precise and hence less useful.

Mediated communication and concept of meddiated politics: Mediated communication

should therefore primarily be understood as opposed to direct, first-hand, or face-to-face
communication, whereas mediated politics primarily should be understood as politics
communicated via and experienced through different media. When politics has become
mediated, people depend on the media for information about politics and society in a broad
sense of the words, just as politicians and other powerful elites depend on the media for
information about people’s opinions and trends in society, and for reaching out to people. When
politics has become mediated, the media mediate between the citizenry on the one hand, and
the institutions involved in government, electoral processes or, more generally, opinion
formation, on the other. The media might also mediate between different actors and institutions
within the governing or political communication system.

Most important element of mediation of politics: the most important aspect related to the
mediation of politics is hence whether people, located in various parts of and playing different
roles within the political communication system, depend on the media for information and
communication with each other.

Concept of mediatization, Stormback Esser: Mediatization, in contrast, is an inherently

process-oriented concept, focused on how media influence has increased in a number of
different respects. Thus, mediatization as a general theory is not focused solely on politics.
Rather, mediatization has been conceptualized as being on par with other major societal change
processes such as modernization, individualization, and globalization. Mediatization is thus a
process affecting all parts of society, either directly or indirectly.

Mediatization by Mazzoleni: “mediatization of society” indicates an extension of the

influence of the media into all societal spheres. All the main societal domains are affected by
the connection between media and society: sex/gender and generational relationships, deviance,
control and surveillance, religious and ritual dimensions, power relationships, urban
environment and city life, localization and globalization processes, and so on.

Mediatization as media influence: mediatization is a process-oriented concept that is about

“changes associated with communication media and their development” or, to quote Hjarvard
“the process whereby society to an increasing degree is submitted to, or becomes dependent on,
the media and their logic.” Asp and Esaiasson similarly note that mediatization is a process “in
which there is a development toward increasing media influence.”

Media, Cook: The media should rather be understood as an ever-present social and cultural
system of production, broadcast, circulation, and dissemination of symbols, signs, messages,
meanings, and values. The media should be understood as an institution.
Mediatization and media system: mediatization means that the media form a system in its
own right, independent although interdependent on other social systems such as the political
system. Within this media system, there are hierarchies, with some media being more important
in shaping the overall media logic and the configuration of the media system than other media
are. For example during the last decades, television has arguably been the most influential
medium.

What makes media important and fantasy pseudo environment: What makes the media so
important is not only that they have come to constitute an independent although interdependent
social and cultural system in society,
but also that the media have become “an omnipresent symbolic environment creating an
essential part of the societal definitions of reality. Hence, the media permeate all spheres of
contemporary societies
and have become the most important source of information about all matters
beyond people’s everyday experiences. As noted by Silverstone, “The
media are becoming environmental.” This is a consequence of the notion that people’s everyday
experiences are
heavily shaped by the media, as people react to and interpret phenomena they
encounter through the lenses of prior information or schemata, and as these, to a significant
degree, are shaped by information received
through various media. Our knowledge or impressions of politicians, political
issues, and people or places beyond our own experiences comes primarily from
the media. is that people base their knowledge,
understandings, and opinions on the “fantasy reality” or “pseudo-environment” created by the
media.
If people are guided by their social constructions or reality, the building
blocks of these social constructions are heavily shaped by the media’s social constructions.
Media are environmental, Silverstone: Silverstone’s expression that the media have become
environmental is enlightening:
The environment is always present, and human beings cannot be perceived
as being located outside of the environment. Just as birds are dependent on air
and fish are dependent on water, the human being lives in and interacts with the
environment, and it does not make much sense to ask what the effect of air is on
birds, of water on fish, or of environment on the human being. The effects are
tremendous and still virtually impossible to isolate and capture.
Why are media effects theories insufficient? In other words, if the media permeate and are
intertwined with basically all
social, cultural, and political processes, and if media content cannot be conceived
of as isolated from media formats and grammar, the logic of separating dependent
from independent variables is challenged, and the established media effect
theories are insufficient for an understanding of the full extent of the media’s
influence. The media effect theories are important but insufficient. As noted by
Schulz: mediatization as a concept both transcends and includes
media effects.”
4 + 1 processes of social change from the media,Schultz: extension, substitution,
amalgamation, accommodation + creation.
media extend human communication capabilities across both
space and time. Second, the media “partly or completely substitute social activities
and social institutions and thus change their character”.
Things that were previously done in a face-to-face manner or that required physical
presence can now be done or experienced through various media. Third,
media activities merge and mingle with non-media activities or processes, thus
becoming an integral part of, and making it all the more difficult to separate the
media from, these other activities and processes. Similarly, information gained
from media merges and mingles with information gained through interpersonal
communication or experiences. As this happens, “the media’s definition of
reality amalgamates with the social definition of reality.” Fourth, as the media
become increasingly important, different social actors have to adapt to and alter
their behaviors to accommodate the media’s logic and standards of newsworthiness media, one
should add creation. Not only do the media create events in
the form of texts and programs, the importance of the media makes other social
actors create events with the main or sole purpose of being covered by the media.
This is what Boorstin refers to as “pseudo-events.” These affect society on all levels,
from the individual (psychological) to the institutional (sociological).
Media logic, Stormback, Esser: time, media logic can be
conceived of as one important force in the mediatization of society (Mazzoleni
2008c), suggesting that an understanding of media logic is a prerequisite for an
understanding of mediatization. Altheide and Snow: Media logic consists of a form of
communication; the process through which media
present and transmit information. Elements of this form include the various media
and the formats used by these media. Format consists, in part, of how material is
organized, the style in which it is presented, the focus or emphasis on particular characteristics
of behavior, and the grammar of media communication. Format becomes
a framework or a perspective that is used to present as well as interpret phenomena.
media logic can be understood as a particular
way of seeing, covering, and interpreting social, cultural, and political phenomena.
According to the theory, the various media formats, the production processes
and routines, and the media’s own need for compelling, attention-grabbing, and
dramatic stories shape how the media perceive, cover, and interpret social affairs.
In other words, the media have certain formats, processes, and routines, and they
need to be competitive in the struggle to capture people’s attention.
Media content molded by format: important format considerations for
events on U.S. network TV news include accessibility, visual quality, drama and
action, audience relevance, and thematic encapsulation. Format considerations
such as these guide both selection and production of news events and are important
for understanding the media’s news values and standards of newsworthiness.
While the concept of media logic is important in itself, it also highlights the
notion that the media are not guided by logics external to the media themselves.
There is one exception, in the sense that media logic is overlapping with that
of commercial logic. As most media are run as commercial businesses, media
logic both follows from, and is adapted to, commercial logic.
Political logic, 6 dimensions of political logic: At the heart of any conceptualization of
political logic lies the fact that politics
ultimately is about collective and authoritative decision making as well as the
implementation of political decisions. This includes the processes of distributing
political power; the processes of political deliberation, bargaining, and decision
making; the processes of implementing political decisions; and the question of
power as it relates to “who gets what, when, and how”.More precisely,
political logic consists of at least the following six dimensions: A power allocation dimension:
the efforts to, and processes of, distributing
and allocating political power through elections or appointments.
• A partisan dimension: the efforts to win partisan advantages, mainly
although not exclusively through elections.
• A policy dimension: the efforts to, and processes of, defining problems
that require political solutions, and of finding solutions for politically
defined problems. A deliberation dimension: the efforts to, and processes of, deliberating,
building consensus, or compromising between different policy proposals,
and of making authoritative decisions.
• An implementation dimension: the efforts to, and processes of, implementing
political decisions.
• An accountability dimension: the efforts to, and processes of, monitoring
political decision making and implementation, and holding those responsible
accountable for their conduct.
Politics: politics is also about
policies and programs for solving societal problems that require political decisions,
and for reforming society according to various value systems or ideologies.
The focus of most political processes is thus on issues; that is, societal problems
and suggestions with respect to how these can or should be addressed. Some
might argue that power is the ultimate goal, and policy programs and promises are
the means to reach that goal. But others might argue that, while
power is the means, being able to enact policies according to their own value system
or ideology is the ultimate goal.
Why is media important to politicians? politics is also about communication, and media
communication
is an integral part of all the dimensions that form what politics is about.
Political actors, located within political institutions, consequently need to take the
media into consideration, and the media might independently intervene, in all
the processes and along all of the dimensions that form politics.
Media logic governed society vs political logic society: politics and political communication
in a particular society
can be governed mainly by either media logic or political logic. In the former case,
the requirements of the media take center stage and shape the means by which
political communication and governing is played out by political actors, covered
by the media, and understood by the people. In the latter case, the needs of the
political system and political institutions take center stage and shape how political
communication is played out, covered, and understood. In the former case, what
people find interesting and what is commercially viable for media companies take
precedence. In the latter case, what is important for people to know, as interpreted
mainly by political actors and institutions, takes precedence. Media are essentially perceived of
as commercial enterprises with no particular
obligation apart from catering to the wants and needs of their audiences. In
the latter case, media are perceived as political or democratic institutions, with
some kind of moral, if not legal, obligation to assist in making democracy work.
4 dimensions or continuums of mediatization of politics: The first dimension is concerned
with the extent to which
the media constitute the most important or dominant source of information
and channel of communication. The second dimension is concerned with the
media’s independence from other social institutions, not least political institutions.
Although all institutions, from a social systems perspective, should be perceived
of as interdependent, for the media to have an independent impact on
other social or political actors or institutions, they have to form an institution or
a social system in their own right. The third dimension is concerned with media
content—most importantly, news and nonfictional content—and the degree to
which media content is governed by media logic or political logic. The fourth
dimension focuses on political actors and the degree to which they are governed
by media logic or political logic. As political actors are always located within political
institutions, this dimension also includes political institutions and how they
are governed, although the process of mediatization arguably has less impact on
political institutions than on political actors. The four dimensions are depicted as
continuums. First, while the four dimensions of are highly intercorrelated,
the breakdown of the concept into separate dimensions might help clarify the concept and aid
in assessments of the degree to which politics in a particular
setting is mediatized. Second, as the mediatization of politics should be understood
as a process, it should be possible to distinguish between different phases
of mediatization.This does not, however, implicate that the
process of mediatization must be linear or unidirectional. It is certainly conceivable
that the impact of media logic on political actors, located within political
institutions, varies both within and across countries and across time and circumstances. others.
There might
also be important differences across countries depending, among other things,
on political news cultures and on whether they belong to the liberal,
the democratic corporatist, or the polarized pluralist model of media and politics.
Media interventionism: it is through media interventionism, intended or inadvertent, that
media
logic trumps political logic with respect to how the media cover politics. Media interventionism
helps shape and reshape politics as it is covered by, the media and consequently understood by,
the people. But it also affects how political actors actually think and act, and how political
processes are played out. Increasing mediatization forces politicians to adapt to, and even adopt
media logic and the media’s standards of newsworthiness. The end result in such cases is that
“politicians may then win the daily battles with the news media, by getting into
the news as they wish, but end up losing the war as standards of newsworthiness
begin to become prime criteria to evaluate issues, policies, and politics” media interventionism
refers to a media-centered political
reporting style in which, increasingly, journalists and media actors become the
stories’ main newsmakers rather than politicians or other social actors. It can be
interpreted as a professionally motivated behavior by journalists to increase their
influence, authority and prestige—and, ultimately, their control over the news
content.
Impact of media interventionism on dimensions of mediatization: Media interventionism
refers directly to the third dimension of mediatization
and has indirect implications for the fourth dimension. The third dimension asks whether media
content is governed mainly by political
logic or media logic. The third dimension thus approaches mediatization from
a symbolic interactionist perspective: It asks how political reality is defined and
constructed by the news media and, due to increasing mediatization, expects this
construction process to be guided by media-specific frames and formats that will
influence readers’ political worldviews.
Blumer and Gurevitch 2 factors of structural environment and 2 cultural factors: The
seminal studies by
Blumler and Gurevitch point at two factors of the structural environment
that aid journalistic intervention, and hence mediatization along the
third dimension, to spread. The first is a political system characterized by weak
party organizations, weak party loyalties in the electorate, and weak influence of
party ideologies. Two crucial
cultural factors. First, they claim that journalistic attitudes toward interventionism
thrive in political cultures where public opinion is more cynical and distrustful
of political institutions. This is because it creates a climate in which adversarial
journalism seems socially acceptable. Second, they argue that it will grow in news
cultures that do not consider politicians’ statements as intrinsically important,
and rather insist that political material should fight its way into news programs
on its news value alone, and in consideration of the newsworthiness of competing
stories.
Professional determinants, Blumer and Gurevitch: Journalistic intervention is
more likely to be triggered by a campaigning industry that exhibits high level
of professionalization in their use of media manipulation and news management
strategies. On the media side, the level of professionalization is also a factor.
Interventionism is more likely to expand in journalistic communities that have
achieved a high degree of professional independence.
Media system typology, Hallin and Mancini: media system typology of Hallin and Mancini
leads us to classify the United States as a national news culture whose contextual
setting favors the largest degree of journalistic intervention. At the other extreme of the
spectrum is France, a prototype of the polarized pluralist model of media–politics
relations , where we would expect the least inclination
to journalistic intervention. France’s history of government-controlled broadcasting
hindered the development of a strong and independent journalistic culture
and, up to this day, has bred a symbiotic, nonadversarial connivance between
journalists and politicians.
Why is media interventionism important + engine of mediatization of politics: concept of
media interventionism is useful and even
crucial for a full understanding of how, and through what venues, the media shape
news content according to media logic and consequently create strong incentives
for political actors to adapt to or adopt media logic and the media’s standards of
newsworthiness. Or, alternatively, it is important in understanding how media
intervene in the dimensions that form part of political logic. This also suggests
that, conceptually, mediatization and media interventionism are closely related
and can help inform each other, while media interventionism simultaneously can
be conceived of as an engine of the mediatization of politics.
Political advertising
Going negative thesis: Ansolabehere and
Iyengar’s influential ‘going negative’ thesis has set the agenda on
this point: content analysis of political advertising typically distinguishes
between positive and negative appeals, and audience research focuses
heavily on testing, and contesting, their thesis that positive content
promotes engagement, while negative engenders cynicism.
Why is political advertising impotant? Regardless
of effects on election outcomes, advertising is important political communication:
by virtue of its journalistically unmediated nature it offers the
clearest evidence of how parties/candidates choose to present themselves to
the mass of voters. It is documentary evidence of the state of modern
political persuasion.
At the same time, political advertising is the most derided form of
political communication. Its form, the highly condensed commercial-type
slot, is often said to be trivializing, inevitably butchering complexity and
reducing politics to clever tricks. It is criticized as
deliberately anti-rational, designed to play upon our weaknesses as cognitive
misers, with a host of devices to elicit a
quick and easy emotional response.
Why is political advertising disliked? In principle, advertising should
offer perfect opportunities for politics to engage in popular discourse.
One obvious explanatory candidate is audience research, which tells us
repeatedly that voters especially dislike negative advertising. Despite mixed evidence of
effectiveness, attack ads have become a staple of US
campaigning. International comparative research suggests that the predominance of
negativity is a peculiarly US phenomenon. Kaid’s analysis
of advertising in 13 democracies found that the US was the only country in
which negative appeals outweighed positive. Voters’ distaste
for attack ads, then, can not be the complete answer, at least outside the
US.
Analysis of advertising, Corner: Corner’s analysis of advertising as a special, and often
problematic, form of
public address offers valuable insight. He describes advertising as a
particular combination of aesthetics and influence, a kind of game played
across knowledge and pleasure, within cultural ground rules well understood
by makers and consumers. Commercials, he argues, must contain
some sort of knowledge about the product if they are to work at all, even if
minimal (product name/quality). Equally, they must generate some sort of
pleasure. Corner describes commercial advertising as in one sense an extraordinary
form of television because of the ultra-short time-frame, and explicit
commitment to sell something to the viewer. In another sense, commercials
are a very ordinary form of television; pervasive and drawing from
television culture conventions of speech, image and genre, all highly
condensed in micro-format. Their positioning, confined to breaks within
television schedules, promotes both their ordinariness and extraordinariness;
they must flow with regular programming, while at the same time
competing for attention with it and other advertisements.
Political ads and UK PEB system Corner: Political ads are
more extraordinary in that they are not so pervasive, restricted largely to
election campaign periods, and therefore are not the same everyday
experience. They are also more extraordinary in that they are protected by
the principle of freedom of speech. UK PEB system
differs from US paid advertising in that the number of broadcasts is
rationed according to criteria of party competitiveness. and
their length is strictly controlled (just under three minutes in 2001). They
must be labelled – ‘there now follows a party election broadcast on behalf…
Audience awareness and changes in commercial form, Corner: that audience awareness and
literacy in reading ads has led to a
move towards aesthetics/pleasure in the commercial form. As audiences,
we are acutely conscious of the form and purpose of advertising; its
distinctiveness as a persuasive mode of communication, and many of its
selling devices; its exaggeration, selective use of information, aligning of
the product to desirable qualities (value transfer) and so on. This awareness
effectively produces a double-edged discount in viewers. On the one hand
it means that we do not believe literally in the ‘promise’ of the ads. On the other hand, this
audience discount effectively allows
ads to claim general and grand goodness for their products without seeming
to make any literal promise. The combination of audience awareness and
discount, coupled with consumer protection regulatory codes, which require
honesty in substantive product claims, have propelled advertisers away
from ‘hard sell’ sincerity claims toward aesthetics; to attract consumers’
attention through the pleasure/entertainment value of advertisements as
self-contained texts.
Commercials as art, Nava: Nava and Nava (1990) suggest that
commercials are now so aesthetically innovative that they can be considered
contemporary art. Moreover, they suggest that audiences, especially
young people, engage critically with ads as though they were indeed art
products.
Popular genres in commercials, Corner: lists a wide variety of popular genres at work in
product commercials:
sitcoms, soaps, thrillers, sci-fi, travel and pop music videos to name but a
few, plus an increasing tendency to pastiche and parody of cinema,
fantasy and other advertising formats themselves. Political advertising as itself a type of genre
with its own repeated
patterns: documentary-style, person-in-the street, biog-ad, attack ad and so
on.
Genres of political advertising in PEBs: News/documentary was easily the single most
common: 46 percent of all
PEBs. Horror/thriller was the second most common (18 percent), reflecting
the tendency to negative advertising, especially by the Conservative Party.
Comedy/spoof ads were the third largest category at 14 percent; romantic
drama 7 percent; pop video 4 percent (see Table 4).
The predominance of the news/documentary genre reflects the dominance
of knowledge (issue information) in political advertising. It is the
most obvious genre for conveying ‘fact’; the replication of TV news/
documentary styles is intended to lend the authority of ‘news’ to the factual
claims of the political advertisement. Further, the most common fictional (as
opposed to news) genre was horror/thriller, a genre whose object is fear,
and whose relation to ‘pleasure’ depends upon audience invitation/
agreement to be scared. Most popular: By popular genre, half of the Conservatives’ 10 PEBs
were classified
horror/crime/thriller. They were the only party to use this genre; it was
their standard narrative vehicle for negative ads. Of their others, two were
news/documentary style while three did not use any identifiable popular
genre at all. The format was that of a ministerial broadcast, with the
politician looking and speaking directly to camera. The Liberal Democrats
were dominated by news/documentary at 75 percent (six of their eight
spots). They also used comedy for two broadcasts.
Cultural rules of political ads: This might lead to the extraordinary conclusion that the cultural
rules of
political advertising work to restrict its possibilities of popularity, by
comparison with product commercials. One door opens to the prospect of a
genuinely popular political discourse, another closes. Politics is limited
from being too entertaining; it dare not elevate pleasure over knowledge if
it wishes to be taken seriously. It is not clear to what extent this constraint
is actually derived from the audience, but it seems to reflect politicians’
perceptions of the audience. The politicians’ response to audience scepticism,
and the common view that they will say anything to get elected, has
tended to be, not entertainment as for commercials, but plausibility; to
make specific promises smaller and more credible, to take care not to leave
a hostage to fortune, to attack the promises, reputation and record of
opponents.
Liberals vs Conservatives political ads: Labour’s willingness to develop narratives as micro-
dramas also marks
them out from the rest. The Liberal Democrats were almost wholly reliant
on news documentary. The Conservatives, while they made ample use of
the horror/thriller/crime genres, did not develop tight and united stories;
rather there was a succession of often unrelated scary sequences, occasionally
awkward changes of gear from crime to horror, and strange use of
horror conventions of music to accompany mundane images of, for
example, petrol pumps. In short, both in use of popular genre and in
construction of mini-stories Labour was noticeably closer than the other
parties to the ‘ordinary television’ style of commercial advertising highlighted
by Corner.Moreover, Labour tended to be more imaginative
within genre types.
Core emotions in entertainment, Damasio: fear, happiness,
sadness, anger/disgust, hope/utopia and national pride/patriotism. This list
was developed from Damasio’s (1994) categorization of ‘core’ universal
emotions and from Dyer’s (1992) analysis of standard emotional appeals in
entertainment. To these we added the one typical appeal that was missing
from their lists: national pride/patriotism. In addition, these appeals were
categorized into four broad types, The first two types can be
associated with classic propaganda appeals: those that try to frighten, not
simply by attacking the record and credibility of opponents but more
importantly by emphasizing through audio-visual cues the devastating
consequences of opponents’ policies; and, second, those that attempt to
transmit a sense of enthusiasm through feelings of pride, happiness, hope
and utopia. The third
and fourth types refer to whether the emotional appeals were connected to
individual human dimensions. The third type attempts to show the ‘human’
consequences of policies on real people. ‘Person-in-the-street’ interviews
are often used with the same aim. The Liberal
Democrats ran strongly logical, largely unemotional campaigns. The Conservatives, by
contrast, relied overwhelmingly on the use of fear
(7 of the 10 ads used fear), reinforced with appeals to dystopia, anger,
sadness and disgust. They waged outstandingly negative campaigns. Labour, distinctively, took
advantage of the full range of emotional
appeals, using all four types.
Emotions and democratic discourse: emotion
and the relation between them and proper (rational) democratic discourse.
The emotional point, at one level, is relatively more easily dealt with. far from being
an oppositional dichotomy, the relationship between feeling and reason is
one of deep interconnection and complementarity. To invite emotional
engagement is to facilitate rational discourse, not to banish it’.
Emotions and political mobilization, Marcus: The key point is the necessity of emotional
involvement for political mobilization. Marcus and colleagues found that enthusiasm,
expressed by affect-charged terms such as pride, hope and sympathy, has a distinct effect on
political involvement. We may be fairly sure that emotion matters not only in how it colors
people’s voting choices but also in how it affects the way they regard the electoral contest.
Affective investment in politics, then, is a necessary condition for political involvement and
participation, and it is not detrimental to the idea of the rational citizen. what is it that emotional
appeals are motivating us to do must be a key consideration.
Emotional intelligence: Emotional intelligence is defined as the capacity to access and
generate
feelings that motivate and facilitate cognitive activities, and the ability to appraise, express and
manage emotions in a way that promotes growth, well-being and functional social relations.
Emotion may both help and harm our ability to make sense of the world, or to function
effectively. However, it does bring together valuably the concepts of both emotion and
intelligence, and this encourages us to judge not just whether emotion is used, but how it is used
and to what extent the audience is assumed as emotionally intelligent.
Aestethic evaluation of political ads: This is less to do with the
possibility of aesthetic judgement and more about combining this with
some idea conformity with democratic ideals: ‘democratic aesthetics’.
Notwithstanding some intricate philosophical problems here – what is
beauty, are aesthetic values objective or subjective – (Hospers, 1969), there
are workable canons of art criticism (unity, complexity, intensity), and
agreed great works which stand as shared reference points. It is probably
not difficult to agree at least a limited canon of great political advertising,
works that stand out as landmarks of style. This is an important point to
make because it suggests the possibilities of aesthetic judgement separate
from personal taste and ideological preference. Likeability of ads is not
only determined by partisanship. Nevertheless, criteria of aesthetic evaluation
are undeveloped in political advertising research generally.
2 stands on propaganda: The study of propaganda essentially
encompasses two broad strands. One, often employing the craft of art
criticism, reveals the ancient history and pervasive entwining of art and
political knowledge. Propaganda, unlike modern political communication,
is analysed precisely as political art. The second strand is more concerned
with the deconstruction and identification of persuasive strategies and
persuasive devices.
Fascinating fascism, aesthetics of Nazis, Sontag: The art criticism strand implicitly rejects
the neutral propaganda view.
Susan Sontag’s (1990) essay on ‘fascinating fascism’ makes the point clear.
Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda documentaries for the Nazis (Triumph of the
Will and Olympia) are, in Sontag’s view, ‘thrilling’ and beautiful. But they
are not neutral art; they are not merely fascinating works of design that
might be applied equally to any political project. They are specifically
imbued with ‘fascist aesthetics’: beauty as (male) physical perfection,
identity as biology, anti-intellectualism, the dissolution of alienation in
community, the cult of the warrior, unity under heroic leadership. She is not talking about
modern political campaigns, but it is a logical step to say that the combined use of these
aesthetics in political advertising would be prima facie evidence of undemocratic intentions.
Grbeša
Personalisation of politics: it refers to an increased media interest in candidates and party
leaders and their rise to prominence within the party structures and election campaigns which
primarily evolved as a consequence of the demise of cleavage politics, the emergence of new
media technologies and the rapid expansion of the media market In the presidential systems
personalisation primarily refers to a more intensive public focus on the president, and in the
parliamentary regimes it signifies an important shift in the public focus from collective players
(parties) to individuals (leaders). More specifically, the term refers to the notion that not only
do individual candidates become more visible, but their personality traits come to occupy ever
more attention of the media, and come to play an ever more prominent role in election cam-
paigns and party communications.
Privatisation of politicans or politicisation of private persona: media spotlight not only
leaders’ political qualities but their private qualities as well. Candidates at the same time
willingly expose some of their privacy – private selves, private lives – to advance their political
goals. This particular aspect of personalisation became known as ‘privatisation of politicians’
(Holtz-Bacha, 2004) or ‘politicisation of private persona’.
Forms of privatisation: The process of ‘privatisation’ may take many different forms. Holz-
Bacha (2004: 49-50) for instance highlights four directions through which ‘privatisation’ oper-
ates: ‘humanisation’, simplification and distraction, ‘emotionalization’ and acquisition of
celebrity status.
Humanisation: is a classic image strategy to which politicians resort when they try to appear
more ‘personable’, more familiar and in touch with ordinary people. For instance, the visibility
of politicians’ families seems to be quite important in constructing a politicians’ ‘human’ image.
Simplification: basically refers to the notion that programs and ideas and are easier to
comprehend when embodied in physical persons.
Distraction: on the other hand, implies that the focus on people – and presumably, information
about their private life – may help distract attention from unpleasant issues. Emotionalization
is aimed at generating sympathy and building emotional ties with voters as the long-term party
attachments dissolve.
‘Heading for a celebrity status’: refers to the notion that politicians want and have the
potential to acquire celebrity status normally reserved for the show business stars which
consequently may make them more attractive to broader audiences.
Van Zoonen and Bacha study of talk shows: They argue that private discourse has
irreversibly infiltrated the political persona: ‘Politicians need to be able to operate smoothly in
personal discourse in order to construct themselves as likable individuals which is a necessary
part of the political persona’. While doing so, it is not necessary for them to completely step
out of their political discourse. They speak from political positions, but do so in a private
language which then ‘personalizes’.
Videostyle’ of creation elections, Grbeša: (Kaid and Johnston, 2001; Kaid and Holtz-Bacha,
2006) in Croatian parliamentary elections was designed to: 1) examine the predominant context
in which the leaders appear; 2) detect leaders’ attempts to ‘familiarize’ with voters by appearing
‘human’, and 3) identify techniques used to achieve this particular goal.
Humanisation Holtz Bacha: ‘classic image strategy which makes politicians appear more
personable, more like the lay person, and thus seemingly close and familiar to voters’.
Types of informal activities in video ads, Grbeša:types of ‘informal’ activities: a) performing
casual, everyday activities (for instance, playing ‘balote’, Croatian folk variant of balling); b)
interacting in an informal way with other actors in the spot or directly, with audiences (such as,
giving a ‘high five’ to a youngster in the street); c) appearing in an informal everyday setting
(such as, walking the streets blended in a long stream of accidental passers-by) or d) wearing
casual clothes.
The key findings of the research, Grbeša: First, leaders were generally quite well represented
in both years, especially when compared to the other party officials. Second, the research has
indicated that the leaders for the most part appear to advocate or underline values, traditional
issue positions or the ideological stance pursued by their parties. Third, in both examined years
only five ads (4.8% of all analysed ads) made a direct reference to some aspect of leaders’
private life, though much more in 2003 (8.9%) than in 2007 (just one or 1.7%). On the other
hand, other, more subtle humanisation techniques, such as the informal interaction between
leaders and voters .
Ivo Sanader: HDZ released 15 different ads in 2003 and 19 ads in 2007. Ivo Sanader is in all
but one ad – a short excerpt from a rally – predominantly featured in relation to his political
profile. Examination of the ‘humanisation’ attempts in 2003 revealed that in six ads Sanader is
predominantly featured as ‘one of us’ while in half that many he is predominantly featured as
a statesman and again in another three as a member of the party. The remaining two cases were
hard to determine. Moreover, nine commercials contain at least one technique identified as an
attempt to familiarize with voters: in nine commercials Ivo Sanader informally interacts with
voters, either indirectly (via actors, as voters’ surrogates) or directly (referring to voters as to
‘dear friends’); in eight commercials he is placed in an informal, everyday setting; in three
commercials he involves into informal, casual activities.
Ivica Račan and Zoran Milanović:SDP released 9 ads in 2003 and 11 in 2007. In 2003 the
leader of the party, Ivica Račan was present only in two ads. In one of them he appeared
predominantly in relation to his party’s image, values and ideology, rather than his persona.. In
the second one he was featured in relation to his political and private profile. The latter one is
probably the most exquisite example of using private life for campaigning purposes in the whole
body of the examined material. This ad entwines ‘Račan the Politician’ and ‘Račan the Man’.
Although Račan is sitting in his office – his political environment – he displays some private
emotions: he smiles warmly while speaking on the phone, closes his eyes to rest and finally
engages in an intimate conversation with his wife. Aside from the more obvious elements of
‘privatisation’, other humanisation efforts include engaging in informal activities in both ads
and the use of jargon and informal interaction in one of them. In terms of the overall portrayal,
Račan is once featured as a statesman and another time as both a statesman and ‘one of us’.He
did have image-problems that his advisors seemingly tried to resolve with a distinctively
‘humanized’ approach and frequent exposure to the voting audiences. Second, both image ads
were intensively broadcasted in the third week of the campaign which possibly might have
come as a response to aggressively personalised HDZ campaign. Generally, SDP’s 2003
campaign was much more in line with the ‘traditional’ notion of parliamentary campaigns than
HDZ’s – it was for the most part focused on party values, at least in terms of the dominant
content. Yet, towards the end of the campaign – whether in response to HDZ campaign or not
– Ivica Račan emerged as the central point of the SDP campaign. Moreover, the campaign was
not only focused on Račan as a leader but it clearly aimed at portraying him as ‘an ordinary
man’. In 2007 no commercial made a single reference to the character of the newly elected
party leader, Zoran Milanović,. In 80% of the cases he is featured supporting or underlining
values promoted by his party while in 20% of the cases he is featured in relation to specific
issues advocated by his party. In four ads (40% of all ads in which he appears) Milanović is
portrayed as ‘one of us’, wearing casual clothes, and walking the streets with a long stream of
anonymous passers-by.
Results of Grbeša study: Examination of the party television ads suggest that Croatian
politicians were generally not willing to expose their privacy for political purposes. They were
more likely to incorporate private cues into the party messages in more subtle ways, using less
explicit humanisation techniques such as the informal interaction with citizens, use of the
informal language, appearing in everyday, informal situations, etc. Straightforward references
to leaders’ private lives (family, personal feelings, hobbies etc.) were very rare. Humanisation
was in general mostly exercised by the leaders of the two major parties, HDZ and SDP.
Interestingly, although they used different techniques, it seems that they resorted to
humanisation for the same reason: all three leaders tried to ‘appear ordinary, as one of us’
(Finlayson, 2002: 14) and embody a personable style of leadership in order to distance
themselves from stiff and authoritarian ruling style. humanisation in broader sense was present,
although it was basically concentrated in the ads of the two major parties. This intention to
portray leaders as ‘human beings’ strongly departs from the prevailing public images of the
leaders known to Croatia throughout the 1990s. The examination of the media reports suggest
that the overall visibility of the leaders has generally increased between elections. Like in the
video ads, the growing visibility of the leaders was accompanied by the decreasing visibility of
all other party officials. However, although the growing visibility of the leaders may indicate
that the newspaper coverage of elections has been increasingly personalised, analysis of the
overall focus of the stories has revealed that the percentage of articles that were primarily
concerned with the leaders’ personal profile.
Street
Crisis of representation: What is Blair doing pretending to be Eric Clapton; what do pop
stars know about foreign policy? The assumption is that the political use of popular
culture is a cynical expression of a desperate populism, one in which presentation
and appearance substitute for policy and principle. What is being signified is a crisis
of representation, not a realisation of it. By this account, the world of celebrity
politics is one in which politicians, acutely aware of their loss of credibility and
trust, resort to new forms of political communication, but in so doing further
damage the very credibility and trust that they sought to salvage. One image
Celebrity: The word ‘celebrity’ refers to those people who, via mass media, enjoy ‘a greater
presence and wider scope of activity and agency than are those who make up the
rest of the population. They are allowed to move on the public stage while the rest
of us watch.
5 categories of celebrity politicians, West & Orman: Darrel West and John Orman (2002, 2–6)
identify five categories,
covering those who acquire celebrity status by birth (the Kennedys), to those
embroiled in political scandal, to those who, like Jesse Jackson, become celebrities
through their charismatic public performances. They also include those ‘famed
non-politicos’ who move from careers in show business into politics.
Famed non politicos: those ‘famed nonpoliticos’—
Sonny Bono or Jane Fonda—who move from careers in popular culture
to politics, and those with careers in politics (‘politicos’) who make use of the
artefacts, icons and expertise of popular culture. By focusing on the connection
between popular culture and political representation, I hope to show how each
draws on elements of the other in the relationships they establish.
Street, types of celebrity politician: CP1 : The first refers to the traditional
politician—the legitimately elected representative (or the one who aspires
to be so)—who engages with the world of popular culture in order to enhance or
advance their pre-established political functions and goals. This is the celebrity
politician (CP1). They can be captured in the following ways: 1. An elected politician (or a
nominated candidate) whose background is in entertainment,
show business or sport, and who trades on this background (by
virtue of the skills acquired, the popularity achieved or the images associated)
in the attempt to get elected. Examples of this would include Schwarzenegger,
Ronald Reagan, Clint Eastwood, Jesse Ventura (the professional wrestler who
became governor of Minnesota) or ex-athlete and now peer, Sebastian Coe.
2. An elected politician or candidate who uses the forms and associations of the
celebrity to enhance their image and communicate their message. Such techniques
include:
i) the use of photo opportunities staged to link entertainment stars with
politicians (Tony Blair posing with the England football team; the exploitation of non-
traditional platforms or formats to promote the
politician: Bill Clinton playing the saxophone on the Arsenio Hall Show, or the adoption of the
techniques and expertise of those who market celebrities.
CP2: The second kind of celebrity politician (CP2) describes a phenomenon that was
perhaps less visible at the time Postman was writing. It refers to the entertainer
who pronounces on politics and claims the right to represent peoples and causes,
but who does so without seeking or acquiring elected office. Their engagement
tends to take the form of public gestures or statements aimed at changing specific
public policy decisions.1 Thus, the key features of CP2s are:1. They use their status and the
medium within which they work to speak out
on specific causes and for particular interests with a view to influencing political
outcomes. This includes the many stars of show business who signed the
published petitions against the war in Iraq and who used the other platforms
to which they had access to draw attention to their political views. They
also include people like Bono who has had audiences with President George
W. Bush, President Chirac and Pope John Paul in his campaign to reduce third
world debt, as well as touring Africa with the US Treasury secretary. 2. The celebrity politician
(CP2) is taken seriously in respect of their political
views. The measure of this might be found in:
i) media focus on their politics (as opposed to their art);
ii) political attention (e.g. a willingness by politicians to meet to discuss the
particular concerns);
iii) audience support, measured by a willingness to contribute money to the
cause (as with Live Aid) or other gestures beyond those typically required
of a fan.
Critique of celebrity politics, CP1 and CP2: criticism which focuses on the ways
that particular accounts of representation are privileged over others. The gist of the
complaint is that celebrity politics undermines any claim to ‘representativeness’.
This is either because the elected politician (CP1) impoverishes the relationship
between representative and represented by marginalising issues of political substance
in favour of irrelevant gestures and superficial appearances (e.g. Franklin
1994). Or it is because the celebrity (CP2) boasts irrelevant qualities and superficial
knowledge that do not justify their claim to ‘represent’. Postman (1987,
4, 129), had come to dominate politics, so that ‘we may have reached a point where
cosmetics have replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician
must have competent control’. In such a world, he continues (1987, 7), politics is
diminished: ‘You cannot do political philosophy on television’. It is not, therefore,
arguments that decide whether voters will support one candidate rather than
another, but ‘style’; that is, ‘how they [the politicians] looked, fixed their gaze,
smiled, and deliver one-liners’. Meyrowitz’s (1985) elegy for
traditional forms of political leadership. He claimed that the increasing reliance on
television as a medium of communication tends to shift the criteria by which politicians
are judged and by which they operate. Television’s intimacy, its use of closeups
and one-to-one conversations, focuses attention on politicians’ ‘human’
qualities. The result is that populist empathy rather than elite leadership becomes
valued. In such a world, either politicians learn the skills of the medium or those
already skilled in it (the celebrity) come to dominate it. This anxiety is still present.
Thomas Meyer (2002, 79), for example, has written:
If democracy is nothing but legitimation by the most successful form of
communication, then the communication artist is the best democrat. West and Orman (2002,
112) argue that the rise of
celebrity politics has seen the displacement of traditional political skills (bargaining,
compromise) and their replacement by those of media management and
fundraising. The qualities of the celebrity politician are ill-suited to the duties of
statecraft which representatives owe their constituents. These inadequacies are
compounded by ignorance. Celebrities lack the knowledge of, or expertise in,
public policy: ‘Serious political issues become trivialized in the attempt to elevate
celebrities to philosopher-celebrities’.
Symbolic realities and celebrity politics, Mancini and Swanson: According to Paolo Mancini
and David Swanson (1996), the
breakdown of traditional social structures under the strains of modernisation have
created the need for a form of political communication in which new ‘symbolic
realities’ have to be created, containing ‘symbolic templates of heroes and villains,
honored values and aspirations, histories, mythologies, and self-definition’
(Mancini and Swanson 1996, 9). In such a world, the focus shifts on to individual
politicians and, with this, politics is ‘personalised’. This trend is accentuated by a
mass media whose generic conventions favour this form of politics (Mancini and
Swanson 1996, 13). The new styles of political communication are logical extensions
of this reality. The advertisement (and the conventions of advertising) come
to define political communication. Politicians become stars, politics becomes a
series of spectacles and the citizens become spectators.
Celebrity politics as marketing: The logic of this is explored in the literature on the connection
between politics
and marketing (Lees-Marshment 2001; see also Scammell 1999). The suggestion
is not that politics just makes use of the practices and techniques of marketing, but
that politics is marketing. As the logic of marketing takes hold, it necessarily shapes
the conception of ‘representation’. Representatives sell themselves to their market;
successful parties are like successful entrepreneurs, and this is a fact to be welcomed,
not condemned. To the extent that celebrity politics is a form of marketing,
then the celebrity politician is simply making use of the techniques of
marketing, either—as with CP1s—selling themselves, or as with CP2s, endorsing a
product (a policy or a politician).
Can celebrity politics strengthen representative government? Coleman, Big brother vs
government
link being established between the represented and the representative.
Can the involvement of popular culture strengthen the representative relationship?
Stephen Coleman (2002, 254), for example, argues that forms of popular culture
can resonate with people in ways that traditional forms of political communication
cannot. The popularity of Big Brother, he suggests, owes much to the fact that
the contestants were seen as ‘representative’, as ‘people like us. They spoke and
behaved in ways that appealed to sections of the public who traditionally feel intimidated
by the language and discourse of politics’. It may be, as Coleman (2003, 31)
acknowledges, that the Big Brother housemates are no more typical of the population
than are MPs, but what is important to the perception of them as ‘representative’
is ‘the ordinariness of their preoccupations: what to eat; when to sleep;
wanting to be liked’. These constitute the realities of daily life which condition the
legitimation of representation. The Big Brother contestants are scrutinised by their
audience in respect of their authenticity, itself a measure of integrity and trustworthiness.
Appereance as basis for evaluation of representatives: One of the assumptions of the critics of
celebrity politics is that judging by appearance
is an inappropriate basis for the evaluation of representatives. Rather, they
claim that representatives should be judged in terms of the quality of their policy
proposals, the ideological coherence of their manifesto, the sophistication of their
political skills or the legitimacy of their selection procedures. they do not
exhaust its character and content. Working within rational choice theory, Geoffrey
Brennan and Alan Hamlin (2000) argue that ‘appearance’ has a legitimate place
within the relationship. In their defence of the argument that representative
democracy is not to be seen as a ‘second best’ to direct democracy, they argue that
voting has to be seen as an ‘expressive act’, indeed as a ‘speech act’, and not as an
instrumental act (in the Downsian sense) directed to specific policy outcomes. As
an expressive act, the vote is understood as allowing the voter to identify with
politicians and to seek out what they (the voters) find ‘politically attractive’.
Although ‘attractiveness’ can be measured along many axes, included amongst
them is ‘appearance’. Brennan and Hamlin write (2000, 178): ‘it would be perfectly
rational (in the strict sense) to vote on the basis of a candidate’s appearance. ‘Appearance’ may
stand as a proxy for such things, but
it is the appearance of competence, not the fact of it that is being discerned. In this
context, the repertoire of gestures associated with celebrity politics assumes a
greater importance for CP1s who use them to demonstrate their political character
and CP2s who use them to establish their authenticity or integrity.
Aesthetic account of political representation, Ankersmit: Ankersmit has developed an aesthetic
account of political representation. His
argument begins from the observation, first, that political representation predates
democracy and, second, that it borrows its meaning from aesthetics, from the way
works of art stand in relation to some notion of reality. Ankersmit (2002) begins
with the two familiar, competing accounts of representation. The first is representation
as resemblance; the second is representation as substitution. Ankersmit dismisses
the ‘resemblance’ version on the grounds that it is incoherent to claim that
marks on a canvas or words on a page ‘resemble’ the things to which they refer.
They are ‘substitutes’; they literally re-present objects or ideas. Furthermore, the
suggestion that reality can only exist in representational form is used to underpin
Ankersmit’s claim that politics too can only exist in representational form. ‘without political
representation we are without a conception
of what reality—the represented—is like; without it, political reality has neither face nor
contours. Without representation there is no represented’.
Political style, Pels, Ankersmit: Style is the way in which politicians and parties communicate
their relationship to the electorate and to their future public goals. As
Dick Pels (2003, 50) puts it: ‘Political style ... enables citizens to regain their grip
on a complex political reality by restoring mundane political experience to the
centre of democratic practice’.
Celebrity politics as extension of democratic representation: It is not
to be dismissed as a betrayal of the proper principles of democratic representation,
but as an extension of them. Celebrity politics is a code for the performance of representations
through the gestures and media available to those who wish to claim
‘representativeness’. It does not follow from this that all forms of celebrity politics
are to be welcomed (any more than all forms of art or political ideology are to be
welcomed).4 What it does suggest is that we need to approach differently the analysis
and understanding of political representation.
Corner, construction of political persona: The process as it applies to CP1s is captured in John
Corner’s (2000) account of the construction of a political persona, a process which he contends
has been over
looked by political scientists. Corner argues that the contemporary representative
politician has to be understood in terms of the persona that they construct or that
is constructed for them. A politician engages in a performance that is intended to
establish him- or herself as ‘a person of qualities’ within the public space of ‘demonstrable
representativeness’ (Corner 2000, 396, original emphasis). Rather than
siding with those who bemoan the ‘personalisation’ of politics, Corner argues
(2000, 401) that the individual political figure serves to ‘condense “the political” ’
for those they represent. Through a mediated public performance, politicians try
to demonstrate certain political qualities and to connect them to political values.
For Corner, the analysis of a political persona depends on an understanding of both
the intentions of the politician and of the interaction between him or her and the
available media systems. The analysis is of a performance that involves demeanour
and posture, voice and appearance
Marshall , politicians as celebrities: in politics, a leader must
somehow embody the sentiments of the party, the people, and the state. In the
realm of entertainment, a celebrity must somehow embody the sentiments of
an audience’. Marshall argues that the existence of politicians as celebrities has
to be understood as part of a process of filling out political rationality to include
the affective relationships as well as the instrumental ones. If they are to be the
objects of affection, to be ‘attractive’, then this intent informs the way in which
they seek to communicate.
Live 8: The implications of these connections for celebrity politics can best be illustrated
through the case of Live8 and its leaders Bob Geldof and Bono. The set of concerts
that constituted Live8 were timed to coincide both with the 20th anniversary of
Live Aid and with the G8 summit in Gleneagles in July 2005. Where Live Aid in
1985 took the form of two concerts (in London and Philadelphia) to raise money for
the victims of famine in Ethiopia, Live8 was designed to create political pressure,
and to give force to the campaign to end the debts of the developing world, a
campaign that had been initiated by Jubilee 2000 and Make Poverty History (Nash
2008).
Much has been said about Live8, and especially about its impact. The focus,
however, has been on whether the G8 decision did indeed benefit developing
countries, on whether celebrity-led initiatives marginalise established NGOs to the
detriment of the causes they represent, and on the politics of the discourses that
campaigns like Live8 articulate.
Spectacularization of politics, Bono and Crouch: spectacularisation’ of
politics in the writings of Danilo Zolo (1992) and Colin Crouch (2004). For both of
these latter writers, the emergence of the celebrity politician is linked to the
emergence of a post-democratic order in which politics is transmuted into a spectacle
that is to be performed to an audience, not of citizens, but of spectators.
Celebrity politics and everyday markers, Marsh: Actually Crouch
and Zolo and others (see Corner and Pels 2003) have done just this, but Marsh et al.
do provide a more detailed account of how celebrity politics is associated with key
features of governance in late modernity: the move from hierarchies to networks,
the hollowing out of the state, the fluidity of identity, the increased importance of
the media and so on. They draw, in particular, on the work of Henrik Bang, and his
suggestion that citizens act increasingly as ‘Everyday Makers’, which is to say that
they participate in their societies, but not within the state or according to established
ideological positions.
Celebrity politics, Davis: In his recent collection, Political Communication and Social Theory,
Aeron Davis (2010)
locates celebrity politics within forms of political communication, rather than forms
of governance. For Davis, celebrity politics represents a particular aspect of the
means by which politicians communicate with citizens, rather than being symptomatic
of a paradigm shift in governance. To this extent, Davis’ approach to
celebrity draws inspiration from media and cultural studies (see Evans and Hesmondhalgh
2005; Holmes and Redmond 2006). His argument applies Bourdieu’s
notion of capital to the political field. He argues that political and media actors
struggle to accumulate and allocate forms of symbolic capital, and the outcome of
their tussles determines the character of political communication and the interests
it serves. He sees celebrity politics as a product of these skirmishes around symbolic
capital.
While Davis’ approach, like that of Marsh et al., represents a theoretical innovation,
it has the added value of being empirically grounded. As he writes (Davis 2010, 94): ‘a strong
political field results in
media reproducing the symbolic meta-capital of the institutions and personnel of
the state. A strong journalistic field indicates that media and capital are more likely
to constitute forms of capital in their own right within the political field’. The
comparison may be baldly stated, but it does suggest a way forward in refining our
understanding of how celebrity politics emerges at the interface between media and
political systems.