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Summary Lectures and Readings for Political Communication & Journalism
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this is a summary for the course Political Communication and Journalism at the University of Amsterdam.
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POLITICAL COMMUNICATION AND JOURNALISM,Week 1
What is political communication?
• The interactions between politics, media and the public
• Deals with the relationship between political actors,
media/journalists and the citizens
• Research is driven by the question who ‘shapes’ these
relationships, and ultimately who controls whom? à focus on power relations
Functions of media in a democratic society (McNair)
1. Information (monitoring, inform the citizens)
2. Education (explaining what events and facts mean)
3. Platform function (media should be the place where people can exchange of ideas
à public sphere = all different opinions in society come together)
4. Watchdog function (control over politics and government, publicity for what politics
does (wrong), prevent corruption scandals etc. à we count on the journalist that
he/she would expose if something is going wrong à this function is expected but
journalists don’t get paid for it)
5. Channel function (political, ideological opinions needs to find their way to the
people à politicians can say what they mean, and this reaches the audience à thus,
the media is the channel)
Role conceptions of a journalist (David Weaver)
1. Disseminator of information
2. Interpreter (explaining)
3. Adversarial (versus politicians and business) à watchdog function à being critical
about the information they are receiving
4. Populist mobilizer (mobilizing peole
What s ‘negative campaigning’? (attack politics, mudslinging)
• e.g. “Heil Trump” à 2016, was not certain yet that Trump was a nominee for
president. à regardless of what we think of Trump, negative campaigning with
Hitler is extreme
• negative campaigning is a characteristic of the message. Thus, the term is slightly
misleading because it is a characteristic of one specific message and not the
campaign itself.
o the ‘tone’ of the message (direction). à Tone = direction of the message
§ negative: attack and criticism against the opponents’ programs, ideas,
policies, record etc.
§ positive: promotion of one’s own programs, ideas, policies, record
§ NOTE the US has e majoritarian system: only 1 person wins so these
methods can help lifting your votes or lowering the opponents’ votes
o A ‘campaign’ is negative depending of the proportion of negative messages
,• There are different kinds of attacks: policy attacks and character attacks:
• Beware of false friends à there might be messages that seem like they are ‘negative
campaigning’ but they are not. Negative campaigning is JUST attacking the
opponent!
o Incivility
§ “explicit use of harsh, shrill, or pejorative adjectives describing
candidates, their policies, or their personal traits” (Fridkin and Kenney
2011)
§ Not respectful with insults
o Negative emotional appeals
§ Fear, anxiety inducing campaign messages (e.g. your brain on drugs)
, o Populism
§ Anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism (two main components) à like to
attack the elites and the intellectuals
• Negativity is in the eye of the beholder
• Negativity has a clear normative deficit: voters dislike negativity à because maybe
deep down we like to think of politics with nice and kind people (because they rule
over us) à a study showed that people were more interested in the 2016 US
elections than in 2020 because the candidates fight harshly this year.
Why negative campaigning?
• In a majoritarian system:
o A decrease in support for the other opponent = profit for the sponsor à zero
sum game
o But also: try to engage/ disengage to go vote at all
• In a system with proportional representation (often multiple parties)
o The target may loose on negative campaigning, but the sponsor is much less
likely to benefit from it
o Others could benefit (other parties)
o Backlash effect for the sponsor: people don’t like negative campaigning
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