Political Communication & Journalism Summary (Lectures + Literature)
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Course
Communication Science
Institution
Universiteit Van Amsterdam (UvA)
The notes are a comprehensive summary of the information from the literature and lectures of the Political Communication and Journalism course. As they include references for all scientific articles that were exam material, these notes are especially helpful for open-book exams. The notes helped se...
POLITICAL COMMUNICATION = The interactions between politics, media and the public
It 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?
Focus on power relations
(Free) Media as the Forth Estate
Functions of media in a democratic society
1. Information
- Monitoring, informing the citizens
2. Education
- Explaining what events and facts mean
3. Platform function
- Exchange of ideas -> Public sphere
4. Watchdog function
- Control over politics, publicity for what politics does (wrong)
5. Channel function
- Political, ideological opinions need to find their way to the people
Journalists’ role conceptions
, 1. Disseminator of information
2. Interpreter
3. Adversarial (versus politicians and businesses)
4. Populist mobilizer
NEGATIVE CAMPAIGNING
(ALEXANDRO NAI GUEST LECTURE)
Going negative
The “tone” of the message (direction)
- Negative: attack against the opponents programs, ideas, policies, record etc
Policy attacks
Character attacks
- Positive: promotion of one’s own programs, ideas, policies, record etc
TONE = The direction of the message
What is “negative campaigning”? (attack politics, mudslinging)
- A “campaign” is negative depending of the proportion of negative messages
1. Incivility
- Explicit use of harsh, shrill, or pejorative adjectives describing candidates, their
policies, or their personal traits
2. Negative emotional appeals
- Fear, anxiety inducing campaign messages (e.g., your brain on drugs)
, 3. Populism
- Anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism (two main components)
Negativity is in the eye of the beholder
Negativity has a clear normative deficit
- Voters dislike negativity
Why negative campaigning?
In a majoritarian system
- A decrease in support for the other (target) = Profit for the sponsor (zero sum game)
- But also: try to engage/disengage to go to vote at all
In a system with proportional representation
- Often multiple parties, so
The target may loose on negative campaigning, but the sponsor is much less
likely to benefit from it.
- Others could benefit (other parties)
- Backlash effect for the sponsor
People don’t like negative campaigning
When negative campaigning?
1. You are an opposition candidate
2. You are behind in the polls
3. When there are few or no third parties to profit from it
4. On issues owned by the other party
5. When others have started to be negative (reaction)
, 6. Late in the campaign (when the target can’t strike back anymore), but not too late (looks
fake and desperate, and may not spread far enough)
7. Early in the campaign, you can attack on an issue you own, if you can make the campaign
about this issue.
ARTICLE 1 - NEWS IN A CHANGING INFORMATION SYSTEM (Bennett, 2016)
While we are not likely to see the legacy news media disappear, the dominance of that
system is being challenged by new forms of content production and distribution that
involve more audience participation and even bypass traditional journalism in content
creation.
- As these changes play out, the emerging information order still retains some echoes
of what we once thought of as news: important information delivered in timely
fashion to people who want to know it
This involvement of audiences in producing and distributing information changes the
neat one-to-many communication logic that defined the mass media era.
- Social media employ a many-to-many logic that involves people more interactively
in the communication process.
Many critics worry that the quality of reporting is deteriorating, contributing to the
growing numbers of citizens who have stopped following news produced by conventional
journalism organizations
- Roughly one-third of people surveyed have dropped a legacy news source because of
declining quality
Part of this discontentment surely due to an overriding discouragement with
the mean tone of politics today—a tone that inevitably saturates conventional
news reporting.
- As the balance tips toward The Daily Me, social media sites are increasingly popular
as news feeds, with some 30 percent of the public getting news from Facebook
In addition to providing a sketchy impression of the day’s events, social media
news feeds enable people to select their own versions of just the topics that
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