This summary includes all relevant material for the Political Communication and Journalism exam, including notes from lectures and literature provided for the course.
Political Communication → interactions between politics, media and the public
→ relationship between the 3; research is driven by who
shapes these relationships and who controles whom
Politics→ decisions → people
- Has a power element - persuade people to take a decision, change attitude and behavior
Politicians (group of actors) - people who execute decisions
Focus on power relations → first dimension of power - to force people
We expect from the media to have a certain responsibility in our system
Democracy → equal division of power
Branches in the government (that constitute a democracy):
1. Legislature → making laws
2. Executive → execute laws
3. Judiciary → wether the laws were followed
4. Media → information; should keep previous ones in balance
5 Functions of Media in society:
1. Information → to inform citizens; monitoring
2. Education → give meanings to events that happen
3. Watchdog function → control over politics; search for problems (e.g. corruption) - publicity for
what politics does
4. Platform function → Horizontal debate; non media actors express their ideas (sociteal debate) →
public sphere
5. Channel function → Vertical communication; what political parties think; ideological opinions
find their way to people
Threats to performing these functions:
1. (threat) Audience not being able/willing to process the information provided or distinguish
news from misinformation (voters)
- Watching TV has a negative effect on the public → Videomalaise
- Cynicism
- Low trust in political institutions
, - Low sense of political efficacy → feeling that you can understand politics and also do
something yourself
- Dumbing down → people cannot or do not want to process political information
Crticisim to Mediamalaise theory:
- Positive effects of media are possible
- Sensationali elements can be good to some extent, to reach more people
- Journalists should focus on the audience as citizens and can try to address them all
Fake news - Functions that are threatened:
- Platform function
- Education function and channel function
- Information and Watchdog function - not as much
Solutions = rebuilding trust in media, avoiding filter bubbles and echo chambers, political satire,
regulations for social media
2. (threat) Jounralists getting stuck into safe routines instead of providing the information the
public needs
- Indexing → who are important people
- Journalists focus on elite opinions; if elites agree, no other opinions are presented
- Reasons: routines, easiness, safety, risk avoidance
Functions threatened:
- Platform and Watchdog function
- Other functions to the extent that some information and interpretation will not make it to the news
Solution = different approach to journalism
- Adverisal role perception - takes more time
3. (threat) Decreased news media quality due to commercialization
- Shift from normative to commercial role (telling you what you want to know)
- Commercialization → maximizing audience by adding sensational elements (ent.
elements)
- Sensational news → news coverage that provokes senses and emotions of audience
members thus attracting attention of larger audience
- News commodity - people can now get it for free
- Business models of traditional journalism fail because of: budget cuts, decreasing
investments in quality, media concentration, market logic takes over, increased
competition for attention of the audience and ad.revenues → lead to sensationalism and
lower news quality
,Pew research:
The information abundance we experience via internet and social media = reality is misleading
- 95% of news traced back to traditional media (information was not original)
Functions that are threatened:
- Less news, less information
- Less education
- Platform function under pressure due to decreased pluralism - because aim at large group; those
who are not in the large group are ignored
- No problem for channel function
Media logic:
- Evaluations go together with larger societal trends (individualization, depillarization, crisis
parties, increased voter volatility, commercialization)
- E.g. partisian logic, public logic, media logic
Mediatization - 4 phase → relationship between the media and politics in the society
4 phases:
1. Mediation → when media becomes the main communication channel between politics and public
2. Media becomes more independent from politics
- Higher journalistic professionalism
- Political system still has the upper hand
- Media do not mediate messages unconditionally anymore (they look what they are telling
the audience)
3. Media becomes so independent that other actors have to adopt them
- Media has the upper hand - external to political system
- Politicians have to increase skills to do this adaptation of the medi alogic (follow the
format, grammar…) - prominent in campaigns
, - Politicians use their knowledge on how media functions to get their message out
4. Politics adopt the media logic
- Standards of media logic/ news worthiness becomes part of the governing process
- Media no longer external
- Politicians who need to answer to people are most affected (because they don’t know
what to answer?)
Mediatization is not a global unidirectional trend
- Media does not take over political funcntions
- Moderation of mediatization depending on political system, media system…
- On social media politicians follow commercial media logic
Powerfulness of the media:
- Ideologies still matter
- Political cleavages matter - what they say and do
- What seems to be media influence may originate from politics
- Initiative may originate from the public NGO’s
4. (threat) Government control over media content
- Lack of independence of media
- Lack of internal pluralism →in 1 new outlet - different voirces
- Lack of external pluralism - media system -(left/ring wing) different news outlets
Silvio Berlusconi - prime minister and owner of TV stations
E.g. censorship:
- State broadcasters
- Political decision over news room
- Selective government advertisement
Governmental control → Propaganda a large problem in liberal democracies
- Forming opinions in support of a particular interest and through media and non-media means with
the intend to produce publick support and.or relevsny action
- Interest coming from people who profit from the current system
- Journalists are not really intentional agents
Indicators of (ideological) propaganda in media:
1. Interest linked frames - highlighting certain perspective (news tends to highlight certain
perspectives thereby legitimising the actions of state-corporate actors)
2. Omission of criticism - not presenting the full picture
3. Labelling and demonising - word choice to infer meaning on actors and events
- To use the concept or ‘war’ to describe events or actions that have the properties of ‘war
crimes’ or ‘stateterrorism’ is propagandistic.
- Similar to Framing → investigate which interest seem to be dominant
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