PolCom and journalism
Week 1
Lecture
Political Communication= “the interactions between politics, media and the public” (IMPORTANT)
- It deals with the relationship between political actors, media/journalists and the citizens
- Research is driven by the Q who ‘shapes’ these relationships, and ultimately who controls whom?
o Focus on power relations!
Functions of media in a democratic society (McNair, 2003) (IMPORTANT)
1) Information (monitoring, inform the citizens)
2) Education (explaining what events and facts mean)
3) Platform function: Exchange of ideas & opinions Public sphere
4) Watchdog function: Control over politics, governments, big companies publicity for what they
do (wrong)
5) Channel function: Political, ideological opinions needs to find their way to the people
Role conceptions of journalists (how do they see themselves functioning):
1) Disseminator of information
2) Interpreter (explaining)
3) Adversarial (versus politicians and business) (like watchdog)
4) Populist mobilizer (mobilizing people) putting things on the agenda, taking stances
Superpac attack dogs (no actual connection to politician, therefore they can be as nasty as they want)
Negative campaigning (attack politics, mudslinging):
- The “tone” of the message (direction)
o Negative: attacking/criticizing the opponents programs, ideas, policies, record, ...
o Positive: promotion of one’s own programs, ideas, policies, record...
o Tone = direction of the message
- A “campaign” is negative depending on the proportion of negative messages
Majoritarian system: one party wins.
Subtypes of negativity:
- Policy attacks - Character attacks
Beware of false friends
- Incivility: "Explicit use of harsh, shrill, or pejorative adjectives describing candidates, their
policies, or their personal traits” (Fridkin and Kenney 2011: 311-312)
- Negative emotional appeals: Fear, anxiety inducing campaign messages (e.g., your brain on
drugs)
- Populism: Anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism (two main components)
Negativity has a clear normative deficit: voters in general dislike negativity
,Why negative campaigning
- In a majoritarian system:
o A decrease in support for the other (target)
= profit for the sponsor (zero sum game if other loses support, you gain)
o (But also: try to engage/disengage to go to vote at all)
- In a system with proportional representation:
o Often multiple parties, so: The target may lose on negative campaigning, but the sponsor
is much less likely to benefit from it. no zero sum game.
Others than you could benefit (other parties)
Backlash effect for the sponsor: people don’t like negative campaigning
Haselmayer et al. (2019)
Negative campaigning not only to influence political support, but also to gain media attention.
Media like negativity, so negative campaigning easily gets media attention.
= Opportunity, especially for less powerful politicians (‘rank-and-file politicians’)
Best: not to attack on your own best issues, but on the issues owned by the target.
Issue-ownership: when a political actor or political party is considered as best suitable to deal with a
certain issue. E.g. a green party about the environment
When negative campaigning?
Best when:
- you are an opposition candidate (loss-frame)
- you are behind in the polls
- when there are few or no third parties to profit from it (zero sum game)
- On issues owned by the other party
- When others have started to be negative (reaction)
- 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)
- Early in the campaign, you can attack on an issue you own, if you can make the campaign about
this issue.
Valli & Nai
Negative campaigning also occurs outside US
Conclusions
- Challengers use it more
- Extreme candidates use it more
- Right wing candidates use it more
- Generally, context with more female MPs – less negative interactions with the electoral system
General evaluation
- Negative campaigning is a powerful tool (at least to get media attention), that needs to be
handled with care
- Generally, it doesn’t make a sponsor popular, backlash effects are likely.
- It can engage and mobilize against somebody, but also disengage by reducing trust in politics,
painting a negative picture of politics in general.
- Mixed proof about effectiveness. The use and effect is probably very context-dependent.
- Never engage in negative campaigning lightly (ref. PolComProject).
,Factors determining negativity (according to alli and Nai)
- Role of politician (incumbent/challenger) (e.g. rank & file)
- Extremism
- Right-wing candidates
- Female representation
- Electoral system (proportional/majoritarian system)
, Literature
*Bennet: the politics of Illusion
The Daily Me: delivers what each of us wants to know about, when, where, and how we like it.
The Daily Us: (old mass media) t brought people in society together around pretty much the same
reporting of common problems, threats, and triumphs. The size of ‘us’ is shrinking.
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.
The advertising dollars that once supported local news media are flowing to digital platforms such as
Google that target consumers in more refined and personalized ways. 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
Will publics in this mixed information environment be less in the know, more polarized, and less able to
come together to decide what to do about important issues? Scholar lament
- the decline of traditional news based on investigations by journalists and distributed by news
organizations as what citizens need to know about their world.
- Meanwhile, others argue that the legacy news media have seldom lived up to the watchdog
journalism ideal of holding officials accountable.
- Besides, there is so much information available online that it is easy to become informed if one
really cares
But how do we establish the accuracy of much of what passes for political information online? Or, is The
Daily Me based on what people want to believe, making facts and evidence less important?
When people share the information that pulses through their devices, they often edit and add
commentary to help it travel over particular social networks. 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.
“Do the media provide us with the kinds of information that helps individual and collective decision-
making?’’
Why journalism matters
Many of the blogs, webzines, and online news organizations are merely recycling the shrinking journalism
content produced by increasingly threatened news organizations
Tracking the origins of actual news items showed that 95 percent of the stories containing original
information “came from traditional media—most of them from the newspaper.
While remedies such as putting up paywalls for access to online information may work for specialized
publications such as the Wall Street Journal, they do not seem destined to save journalism in general. The
immediate problem is that as long as there are free news outlets, those charging for the same information
will not likely attract many paying customers.
