“Mediatization” of
Politics:
A Challenge for Democracy?
GIANPIETRO MAZZOLENI and WINFRIED SCHULZ
The
growing intrusion of media into the political domain in many countries has led critics
to worry about the approach of the “media-driven republic,” in which mass media
will usurp the functions of political institutions in the liberal state.
However, close inspection of the evidence reveals that political institutions
in many nations have retained their functions in the face of expanded media
power. The best description of the current situation is “mediatization,”
where political institutions increasingly are dependent on and shaped by mass
media but nevertheless remain in control of political processes and functions. Keywords democracy, mass
media, media power, mediatization, political
communication, political parties
“American
politics tends to be driven more by political substance . . . than by the antics of
Media Politics.” This straightforward conclusion of John Zaller’s
(1998, p. 187) analysis of the impact of media coverage of the Lewinsky-Clinton
affair might seem paradoxical when set against the backdrop of much American
political communication scholarship, which in the last two decades has been
distinguished by its severe criticism of the excessive intrusion of the media
into the domestic political arena.
A similar
position is held by W. Lance Bennett (1998), who concedes that “television and
related media of political communication are implicated in various political
crimes and misdemeanors” but does not think that the media should be blamed for
a supposed “death of civic culture” (p. 744), which in fact is not dead in
American society.
The theses of Zaller and Bennett—that voters and public opinion are far
from being deeply affected in their political outlooks and behaviors by the
media’s treatment of political reality and are primarily and constantly
concerned about “peace, prosperity, and moderation”—are similar to conclusions
reached by scholars who have investigated the intriguing interactions between
media and political actors in several other countries.
The ideas of the
“irresistible” power of the mass media and of media power’s negative consequences
for the democratic process often have been shared by the academic community around the world. Cases such
as candidate Fernando Collor de Mello’s remarkable television-fueled
victory in the 1989 Brazilian presidential elections; the successful performance
of Silvio Berlusconi, a media tycoon, in the 1994
Italian general elections; and the 1997 electoral victory of Labour leader Tony Blair in the United Kingdom, who
employed shrewd communication strategies, all provided ammunition to critics
who blamed the “media complex” for distorting the democratic process. The
catchwords of the debate about media power triggered especially in European
political communication scholarship by such cases—“videocracy,”
“démocratie médiatique,”
and even “coup d’état médiatique”—all are symbolic
depictions of the feared consummation of improper developments in the relationship
of media and politics. In its concrete declension, a media-driven democratic
system is thought to cause the decline of the model of political organization
born with the liberal state, as the political parties lose their links with the
social domains of which they have been the mirrors and with the interests the parties
traditionally have represented.
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 (Entman,
1989; Jamieson, 1992; Patterson, 1993; Sartori, 1997).
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’ concerns
extend to the newest media to enter the arena of political communication (see
the review by Street, 1997). Because they create the possibility of direct and
instant “electronic democracy,” the new media have given rise to several fears described
by critics: 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.
In short, 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 of those
who see the media as one of the most crucial factors in the crisis of politics
and political leadership in postmodern 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
(governments, parties, leaders, movements). Moreover, 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 “Mediatization” of Politics 249
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
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 (Altheide & Snow, 1979).
One of the most significant results is that politicians who wish to address the
public must negotiate with the media’s preferred timing, formats, language, and
even the content of the politicians’ communication (Dayan
& Katz, 1992). Some even hypothesize that legitimacy of the exercise of
power increasingly might lie in the ability of rulers to communicate through
the media (Cotteret, 1991).
The mediatization process has been under way for many years,
stretching from the “first age” of political communication (see the article by Blumler and Kavanagh in this issue),
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, as Zaller and Bennett have
demonstrated for the American milieu.
Critics’ argument
that the media are taking over political actors in the political process calls
for an assessment of the empirical evidence in a variety of national contexts in
order to determine whether the general trend is toward a “media-driven
republic,” as critics claim, or toward innocuous forms of “mediatized
democracy,” as we argue.
Mediatization
Processes
The process of mediatization of political actors, political events, and
political discourse is a major trend in political systems of the 1990s. It is a
phenomenon that dates back at least to the introduction of television, but it
has certainly gained speed with the expansion and commercialization of media
systems and the modernization of politics.
The term mediatization denotes problematic
concomitants or consequences of the development 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.
To speak of
modern politics as being mediated is
merely a descriptive statement. Communication, including mass mediated
communication, is a necessary prerequisite for the functioning of any political
system (Almond & Powell, 1966). Inputs to the 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, and in modern societies the
mass media are essential for this function.
Nowadays more
than ever, politics cannot exist without communication. Some scholars even hold
that politics is communication
(Deutsch, 1963; Meadow, 1980). Politics increasingly has been molded by
communication patterns. There is no doubt that much “politics of substance” is
still practiced away from media spotlights, behind the scenes, in the discreet
rooms of parliament and government. Yet, politics by its very nature, and independent
of its substantive or symbolic value, sooner or later must go through the “publicity”
stage, which entails use of the media (for example, to make known the terms of
a policy decision), resort to the means of persuasion, and exposure to scrutiny
by the press.
To characterize
politics as being mediatized goes beyond a mere
description of system requirements. 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. Walter Lippmann’s
seminal work set the tone for what became one of the most fertile areas of
communication research (Lippmann, 1922). Of the
processes that have been identified as contributing to the mediatization
of politics, the following are among the most important.
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, commonly understood as the criteria for determining
“news value.” Only part of the criteria of news value are
intrinsic to the news events. Often the selection process is determined more
strongly by journalistic worldviews and by media production routines. However
chosen, 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, particularly
in those domains of activity where most people have no direct, personal access
to what has happened. Almost everything that happens in the political world,
except for a few aspects of local affairs, composes one such domain that is
distant from the day-to-day experience of ordinary citizens. Moreover, news
value criteria such as proximity, conflict, drama, and personalization not only
determine what events come to the attention of the media and hence of the
public through news reports; these criteria also impose a systematic bias upon
the media reality of politics because news reports typically accentuate the
features that make an event newsworthy (Galtung &
Ruge, 1965).
Second, in
contrast to the ancient Greek polis
where every citizen was able to participate in public life in
the agora,
as we are told by romantic histories that glorify democracy, 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 “Mediatization” of Politics 251 actors
and spectators. Political protagonists on the media stage act in front of more
or less passive audiences and consumers of politics. 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” (Altheide
& Snow, 1979), 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
of political discourse itself. The adaptation of political language to the
media’s commercial patterns has been observed in three domains: (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. For instance,
expertise,
to professional consultancy, is normal practice for many European parties and candidates.
Television debates and talk shows, spot ads, staged events on the campaign trail,
marketing research techniques, growing propaganda expenditures, and the like
are common features. In short, the language of politics has been married with
that of advertising, public relations, and show business. What is newsworthy,
what hits the headlines, what counts in the public sphere or in the election
campaign are communication skills, the style of addressing the public, the
“look,” the image, even the special effects: All are typical features of the
language of commercial media. 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 (Lang & Lang, 1953). 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. In other words, we are facing a symbiotic
relationship that is characterized by a mediatization
of politics and, at the same time, politicians’ instrumental use of mass media
for particular political goals. The use of methods for engineering public
opinion and consent, such as political opinion polling, marketing strategies,
proactive news management, and spin doctoring—which have been studied and
discussed extensively in recent years—is indicative of this phenomenon.
Finally, the mass
media have genuine, legitimate political functions to perform in voicing a
distinct position on an issue and engaging in investigative reporting to
perform their watchdog or partisan role. News partisanship is a European
tradition that goes back to the close linkages between newspapers and political
parties in the 19th century. It is still quite common that a
newspaper’s editorial position colors its news coverage, and broadcast
journalism has adopted this style in many European countries.
However,
journalistic partisanship becomes particularly problematic under two
conditions: (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 (Patterson & Donsbach,
1996), 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.
Societal
Trends and Changing Political Cultures
Two societal
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 and are factors that relativize, or
shape in different ways within different contexts, the effects of excessive mediatization. Both have strong bearing on the structure
and content of political communication in society. 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.
Self-Mobilized
Citizens and Volatile Voters
The process of
transformation that Western industrial societies have been undergoing in recent
decades is characterized, among other things, by a change of value orientations
and an increase of political skills among the population. Inglehart’s
postmodernization hypothesis is one of the most
recognized conceptions of these changing value priorities. In a number of
studies he has provided empirical evidence of a shift from material to postmaterial values (Inglehart,
1977, 1997). 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.
Because social
values are the most basic structuring principles of human behavior, political
processes, including political participation and communication, have to
accommodate to changing value orientations if political systems are to remain
stable and continue to function. In many Western European countries there has
been, in fact, an obvious shift in the issues featured in political debates, a
shift that reflects, to some extent, structural changes in the belief systems
particularly of the younger, higher educated urban population.
“Postmodern”
concerns for environmental protection, individual freedom, social equality,
civic participation, and a higher quality of life have been added to the traditional political
agenda of economic and security issues (
A second trend
contributes to the change in value preferences and at the same time has an
independent effect on the political culture. All industrial societies have been
experiencing an enormous expansion of higher education. Between 1950 and 1975,
university enrollment increased by about 350% in the
Empirical data
provide a mixed picture of the development of the public’s political sophistication
and attention over the past decades. On the one hand, the level of political information
holding has not increased considerably, as measured by factual questions asked
of samples representative of the
Levels of voter
turnout in national elections have even declined in most liberal democracies since
the 1960s. On the other hand, measures of interest in politics have been going
up during the same period, as have civic engagement, especially on the
community level, and unconventional modes of political participation such as
signing petitions, taking part in demonstrations, and joining boycotts
(Bennett, 1998; Dalton, 1996).
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
Thus, over time,
election turnout has become a weak indicator of political participation.
For the same
reason, conventional survey questions measuring the public’s political
knowledge —factual questions about traditional political institutions—which
have changed little since they were
first introduced in U.S. surveys in the 1940s, may have lost their relevance, and
it is doubtful that such questions are indicative of people’s understanding of politics
(Graber, 1994).
In addition to
political sophistication, the ubiquitous availability of information via mass
media is an important resource that self-mobilized citizens use for developing
their political orientation individually and independently of party ideology.
As a result of an ever-expanding media system, the press, radio, and television
provide a steadily increasing abundance of politically relevant information.
Recently, the diffusion of the Internet has prompted a number of mutations in
the domain of political communication as the new media join the “old” media in
molding a new public sphere (Verstraeten, 1996) and raising
The
Crisis of Political Parties
An obvious
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, which for a
long period was a distinctive voting pattern in many countries. As can be seen
from a comparative analysis of party programs of 10 democracies over four
decades, party systems have adjusted only reluctantly to social changes (Klingemann, Hofferberg, &
Budge, 1994). Despite all of the changes in citizens’ orientations to politics
and political institutions, the traditional leftright
dimension is still the dominant dimension along which parties try to
differentiate themselves from each other, even though some socialist and
social-democratic parties have moved slightly to the center. Although the
weakening of party ties affects most advanced democracies, this general trend
has different roots and has taken different paths in different countries.
Comparing the
Despite such
developments, European party systems are facing a severe crisis of legitimacy.
The extreme case is
States
(Wattenberg, 1990) and that seems to have become
global (Inglehart, 1997).
The crisis of the
parties has only expanded the political function of the mass media. Referring
to the
Table 1
Trust in
institutions, by country
Question: I would
like to ask you a question about how much trust you have in certain
institutions.
For each of the following institutions, please tell me if you tend to trust it
or
tend
not to trust it.
Percentage of
European
respondents
who
tend Average of United
to
trust . . . 15 countries
The government 37
37 29 27 67 41 46
The parliament 40
38 35 29 64 45 46
Political parties
16 12 13 13 40 20 18
The church 50 36
47 55 43 49 54
Justice, legal
system
43 36 50 31 54 39 48
Trade unions 38
36 39 29 62 36 36
The press 40 51
42 34 61 50 15
Radio 63 62 62 49 78 68 67
Television 56 46
59 42 75 49 65
Note.
Figures for four other institutions—the European Union, civil service, the
police, and the army—have been omitted to make the table less complex. EU
averages for trust in these institutions are, respectively, 37%, 40%, 62%, and
61%. Data were derived from European Commission (1998).
“Mediatization” of Politics 257
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, at least to some extent. Deep mutations
that post– Cold War political systems in
Trends
in the News Business and Profession
The media
industry is undergoing epochal changes both on the global level and in
individual countries. The rapid spread of the new information and communication
technologies (ICTs) and the industrial and financial
interests of the media and telecommunication trusts are prompting a revolution
also in the conventional mass media. The adjustment by the news media and
journalism to the new scenarios is progressing at different speeds in different
national and continental contexts, but some changes have already occurred that
are significant for our discussion of the mediatization
of politics.
First, the news
business in
One important
side effect of the rush to commercialized communication and news has been a
decrease (but not the disappearance) of the formerly high level of
politicization of both the public media organizations and the outlook of news
professionals. 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. The “game schema” (Patterson, 1993), election reporting
focused on the “horse race,” and the gusto for campaign hoopla are but two
examples of the increasing drift of journalism toward “infotainment” and the
disenchanted, superficial treatment of politics.
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 (Blumler & Gurevitch, 1981).
There is growing
evidence that 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. The signs of
anti-party or anti-politics sentiments and of attention to neo-populist issues
are numberless in almost all countries. Bill Clinton’s “sexgate”
affair also could be seen as an example of this development. In some cases,
such as
Finally, the new
media, the Internet, and the information superhighway are literally revolutionizing
the news industry and profession and represent a serious challenge to its survival.
They could undermine the traditional mediation function of journalism,
bypassing the crucial phases of media selection and interpretation of events.
For the most part, the information that circulates on the Internet is not
produced by journalists and news media; it is directed to special publics whose
information needs are not fulfilled by conventional mass media. A significant
effect of this new situation is that political actors can circulate their
messages directly to the public without having to come to terms with the
constraints and logics of traditional news organizations. Increasingly in
election campaigns, political candidates and parties reach voters directly by
resorting to the “back
channels”
(Selnow, 1994) that are not under the editorial
control of the news media.
Trends in the
news media show a mixed picture in which there are, on one hand, signs of
political activism and a search for greater media independence from political institutions
by means of commercialism, and on the other hand, evidence of the traditional media’s
decreasing influence and power over politics.
Conclusion
Do such
transformations in the societal, political, and media domains provide evidence to
support the concerned alarms of an irresistible drift toward a “media-driven
democracy”? Or do these trends provide evidence for our hypothesis that the
“third age” of political communication witnesses an intense yet harmless
process of mediatization of politics?
As we have seen,
the evidence is far from clear cut; it seems to offer support for both
interpretations. However, the core of the phenomenon allows us to argue that
critics’ apocalyptic views are probably based on misinterpretation of the real
latitude or extent of certain key trends. In other words, some of the scholarly
research in political communication that has led to critics’ alarm seems too
focused on the distortions produced by the “media-politics complex” in the
Our brief account
of trends in the European context shows a simple but significant reality, that
the media systems and political systems in European countries interact with patterns
that protect each from excessive influence of the other. The existence of
undoubted media power is counterbalanced and quite often exceeded by the power
of political parties and institutions. In the European experience, there is
some limited evidence that politics has migrated from the old party-centered
arena to party-free arenas.
But in both the
old and the new arrangements, political forces still retain their monopoly of
the political game, much like in previous times. “Mediatization” of Politics 259
In addition,
there is no convincing evidence of the existence of a global “party of the
media,” that is, a planned organization of political consent by the news media. This is not
to deny that consent is organized through
the media. To argue that the polls can be means of
manipulation of opinion does not mean that they are in all cases and in all places.
In other words, opinion trends in society can be initiated by the media and through
the media, but they find political representation only through and in political organizations,
whether they be the old parties (as the CDU-CSU and SPD in Germany and PSF in
France), the reconceived and reorganized parties (such as the Labour Party in the United Kingdom and the DS in Italy),
the newly born parties, or coalitions that
gather
a number of single-issue movements. According to Zaller (1998), even “American politics . . . continues, as
much in the past, to be dominated by political parties” (p. 1). In U.S. presidential elections, the
Republican and Democratic National Conventionsare
certainly events staged according to media production patterns, but the real
power game that takes place there is not in the hands of the media. So, much of
the alleged king-making power of the media is fictional. “Critics look at the
press and see Superman when it’s really just
The tendency of
politics to turn into a sort of mediatized politics,
of parties to turn into mediatized parties, is not
going unchallenged by the existing political institutions. In certain political
systems, a number of factors strongly withstand the process, as in the British
case where, according to Blumler, Kavanagh,
and Nossiter (1996), there exist sensible signs of
politics’ resistance to being absorbed by the media. This means that certain
political cultures have the capacity to hold media pressures in check and to maintain
the centrality that politics has traditionally held in a nation’s life.
Moreover, the
growing hostility of many news media to political leaders and parties is not
universal, and it is countered by other evidence that shows that, at least in
Europe, the typical patterns of media-politics relations are more those of
alliance than of war (Morgan, 1990), of sacerdotal service to politics rather
than pragmatic independence from it (Blumler & Gurevitch, 1987). The several cases of harsh conflict can
be seen easily as normal dialectics in the political arena, not as rehearsals
of an imminent “media dictatorship.” It is significant that cases in which
governments and politicians are implementing effective news management policies
are increasing in number, including in the
Finally, if we
concede that the new communication technologies may weaken political institutions’
traditional functions of socialization and organization of consent, we should
also admit two contextual processes: a diminished effectiveness of the
traditional mass media in mobilizing mass audiences (Bennett, 1998) and a
weakening of the traditional editorial and critical functions and roles of the
news media themselves due to the diffusion of interactive communications and
the growing preference of the news industry for “instrumental journalism” (Bardoel, 1996). This evidence combines with that previously
noted to invalidate the interpretation of the trends in the political, social,
and communication worlds as indicating a possible takeover of politics by the
media. In conclusion, political systems in most liberal democracies are facing
momentous changes on the communication front that raise serious challenges to
the old order. The risks
of downfall of many founding institutions, sucked in by ersatz agents of
political dynamics, are real and should not be minimized. Excessive mediatization of political leadership and political
practice, citizens forced to become consumers and spectators, and fragmentation
of political participation induced by the new information and communication technologies
all can distort the proper functioning of democracy. But to maintain that we
are heading toward a media-driven democracy, that is, toward the dissolution of
the primacy of politics in the polis,
is an unwarranted conclusion relying on erroneous estimates of phenomena that
are simply connatural to modern politics, largely and deeply interwoven with
communication. In brief, “media politics”
does not mean “politics by the media.”