“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, U.S. politicians almost became voiceless on television during recent decades; in television news coverage of political campaigns, the soundbites of presidential candidates shrunk dramatically as journalists appeared to speak for the politicians by presenting paraphrases and summaries of the politicians’ remarks, while the tone of the journalists’ interpretative coverage became increasingly negative (Hallin, 1992). In Europe, however, the “soundbite syndrome” is still uncommon among the media and politicians. On the contrary, the news media carry significant amounts of political content, so much so that at times it is a nuisance to readers and viewers. Nevertheless, the adoption and use of high doses of media-borne communication elements, such as television techniques and production styles, in the information agencies of governments and in the propaganda machines of political parties bring along with them revision of the old communication tools and habits. In a number of European countries, especially the largest countries, election campaigns increasingly have come to resemble U.S. campaigns (Swanson & Mancini, 1996). Today, the resort to external campaign

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 19^th 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 (Dalton, 1996). The mass media, whichare strongly committed to topicality and constantly are in search of new trends, are the pacesetters of these developments.

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 United States. An even more dramatic increase took place in Europe, where the figures in Britain, West Germany, and France, for instance, are in the range of 500% and more (Dalton, 1996). As a result of higher education, many more people than ever before develop higher cognitive skills and a higher degree of political sophistication. Political sophistication determines a person’s capacity to process information and to make meaning of the political issues encountered in mass media. Political sophistication also expands the horizon of people’s interests and raises their level of attention to public affairs and participation in politics.

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 U.S. population (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996).

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 Dalton (1996) calls this new species, formulate their stance on current issues independently of the positions of the political parties. Sophisticated citizens have included unconventional modes in their repertoire of political participation and, for instance, may judge referendums as more important than elections and protest as more effective than party support.

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 United States and West Germany, Klingemann and Wattenberg (1992) distinguished between decaying and developing party systems. The United States is the prototype of a decaying system in which the candidates no longer need the parties to reach the voters but instead rely completely on the mass media (Patterson, 1993). In contrast, in nonmajoritarian democracies such as Germany and other European countries (with the exception of Great Britain), local institutional settings allow for some accommodation of the party system to societal changes. The decline of the mass parties in many countries, which was under way long before the fall of the Berlin Wall, combined with the latest changes, generating new and sometimes unprecedented forms of political consent-gathering and power-managing structures. It became quite common to see the rapid rise (and rapid disappearance) of new political movements, single-issue parties, and “light parties” (the major example being Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, assembled in a few weeks of heavy media build-up) holding very loose organizational ties with their grass roots. The environmental movements and peace activists of the 1970s, which can be seen as manifestations of the postmaterialist turn, have in some countries crystallized to “Green” party organizations and now participate in political coalitions, mostly on the community level but also on the national level as in France and Germany. On the other side of the political spectrum, right-wing and racist parties found their constituencies among adherents of old materialist values who have been suffering from economic insecurity or decline. The success of Le Pen in France, of Fini in Italy, and of the Flemish Neo-Fascists may be mentioned as examples.

Despite such developments, European party systems are facing a severe crisis of legitimacy. The extreme case is Italy, where the party system has become almost completely detached from the electorate, is seeking a stable structure, and is continuously challenged by Berlusconi’s populist movement. Anti-party sentiments are rising in the electorates of most countries, and party affiliation, including party membership, is declining. To illustrate the current situation, Table 1 presents a Eurobarometer result from 1997 data that shows that in each member state of the European Union, people’s trust in the political parties is lower than their trust in other political institutions. Trust in parties often falls appallingly far behind the trust given to nonpolitical institutions, particularly to television, a fact that has been noticed for quite some time in the United

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 U.S. situation, to take an extreme example of the processes under examination, Grossman (1995) describes vividly what is happening in the political arena: Voters no longer have to rely on the parties to signal who stands for what and to tell them what they should be for or against. And people no longer look to the parties to provide them with parades, marching bands, and Thanksgiving turkeys. Nor do the parties offer their constituents soapboxes on which to air their views. Television and talk radio have taken on that job. (pp. 121–122) The “demise of political parties,” as Kalb (1992) has described the American party system, gives rise to candidate-centered and highly personalized campaigns that rely heavily on the mass media. In the U.S. system, a candidate can run for office virtually independent of any party, but the candidate is completely dependent on support by mass media. The situation in Europe is different. Although political leaders may run independently of the traditional party system, as the Berlusconi case demonstrated in a spectacular way, the usual pattern is still that candidates are nominated by party organizations and that the campaigns depend to a high degree on the party organizations. Even Berlusconi, after he won the elections, found it necessary to establish a partylike organization with his Forza Italia. European parliamentary systems allow much less room than the American presidential system for personalization of election campaigns focused on individual leaders or candidates (Kaase, 1994).

 

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 Union:

who tend Average of United

to trust . . . 15 countries France Germany Italy Netherlands Spain Kingdom

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 Europe are facing go beyond the context of electoral campaigning and contribute to a weakening of the traditional party-centered politics. The disappearance of strong ideological tenets from the forefront of political debate has forced the parties to reshape their outlooks and practices, and even their names and symbols.

 

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 Europe was characterized in the past by the strong presence of public service broadcasting, which meant there was some form of governmental control, direct or indirect, over the entire newsmaking process, from recruitment of journalists to production policies. In the late 1970s, public television monopolies in many countries began to be challenged by newly born local, private, community, and mostly commercial radio and television channels that familiarized the domestic audiences with alternative and often successful news offerings. Today, this process is much broader and more dramatic: New information outlets, such as satellite and cable channels, are increasing in number and engage in fierce competition with public broadcasting channels.

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 Italy during the 1992–1994 investigations of political corruption, the revitalization of the media’s activism in civil society suggests that the news media are keen to undertake typical party functions as they engage in direct struggle with government, parties, and presidents. Another sign is the bullying of political candidates and paranoia by certain media in election campaigns (Patterson, 1993). The effects of this conduct can be seen in dramatic events such as the resignation of high public figures, the angry libel suits by the personalities who have been attacked by the media, the embarrassed reactions of the powerful, and even suicides (like that of the former French premier P. Bérégovoy). This trend in the news profession is well captured by the concept of “démontage of politics” discussed by Kleppinger (1998).

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 United States and tends to infer from the U.S. experience that there is a global decline of democratic institutions assaulted by intrusive media. In fact, despite general trends, the experiences of other countries have been significantly different from the experience of the United States. Moreover, some proponents of critical perspectives seem to have difficulty in distinguishing between phenomena that reflect the sheer “mediatization” of politics and phenomena that raise legitimate concerns.

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 Clark Kent,” comments Michael Schudson (1995, p. 17).

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 United States.

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.”