POLITICS IN MEDIA
01. KEY CONCEPTS IN POLITICS IN
MEDIA ISSUES OF POWER
There are more linear and complex ways to understand power and more complex ones.
This main argument was that ONE-DIMENSIONAL DEFINITIONS OF POWER are limited the idea that those who
hold power are in the condition to make other people do what they want even if it goes against their own
interest.
→THE POWER OF DECISION – MAKING.
o Power does not only entail the dimension of decision making also
because the way power is exercised and manifests itself is not always
visible or transparent.
o We cannot assume that citizens are always in the condition to
understand how power dynamics are played out.
The TWO-DIMENSIONAL understating of power is about not only forcing or controlling the decisions that are
taken and making sure that everyone complies with them, but also about the ability to prevent any challenges or any
alternative claims to arise in the first place → AGENDA SETTING DIMENSION OF POWER.
THREE-DIMENSIONAL POWER has to do with HEGEMONY; in this case the dimension of power also consists
more deeply in the way those who hold power and exercise it are able to persuade us that they are acting in our own
best interest rather than in their more successful form of power.
What is good about this perspective is also to emphasize how it’s not only about rational decision making
but about more latent and invisible forms of power.
We can map the three main ways of understanding media and power in the following three hypotheses:
1. The media as channels/means information and propaganda = linear understanding of power (symbolic) it
is about the media as tools and channels for political power to inform or manipulate citizens.
2. The media as subjects/institutions replacement and complementarity = the medias are not simply
channels but they are institutions in their own rights turned into an industry which has profit to make, the
media in the interest may not coincide with the interest of those who control political power relationship not
linear but could be of conflict or complementarity when the two interests are aligned.
3. The media as an apparatus (dispositive) complexity, hybridization and ambivalence = the three
dimensional view would be to understand that the media only act as institutions, they have agenda setting
power that doesn’t necessarily overlap with those of the government, but also that the media themselves
operate as Foucault would call “apparatus” that has their own rules and norms and this shapes the world that
we live in media participating in the social construction of reality.
ASSUMPTIONS REGARDING PARTICIPATION
In communication and media studies, PARTICIPATION is still used to mean everything and nothing, remains
structurally under- theorized and its intrinsically political nature –as part of a democratic- ideological struggle on the
democratic nature of democracy- remains unacknowledged.
Democracy: because of its concern with the inclusion of people within political decision-making processes, is one
of the key sites of the articulation of the concept of participation
The internet has opened new opportunities for a ‘structural participation within the media’ (Carpentier, 2011a;
Carpentier, Dahlgren and Pasquali, 2013)
Indeed, it is possible to identify forms of structural participation on the internet in the practices of hacktivism, such as
the security breaches of corporate or government websites (like Anonymous’ practice of denial-of-service attacks) and
the development of systems that elude censorship and encrypt data (like WikiLeaks) (Taylor, 2005; Coleman, 2013)
Moreover, a form of structural participation within the internet sphere can be identified in the previously mentioned
case of Indymedia, which was followed by a plethora of contemporary online ‘alternative’, ‘grassroots’, ‘self-
organized’, and ‘citizen’ journalism projects that sometimes serve as an alternative to the mainstream (newer and older)
media in terms of their business model and the hierarchical organization of content production
, Beyond social movements and activist groups, in the 21st century, the so-called web 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2007)
has opened new opportunities for participation on the internet to broader publics.
o From content-sharing sites to social network sites, blogs to wikis, the editing ease introduced by
web 2.0 has indeed transformed the audience into ‘producers’ (Bruns, 2008)
Unlike the broadcast and press media audiences – participating in the meaning-making of media contents but with
limited resources to influence the industrial media strategies (see above) – internet users may produce and distribute
‘mass self-communication’ (Castells, 2009), self-generated and self-directed towards a potential global audience
The ‘networked publics’ (Boyd, 2010) have been understood as directly managing their multidirectional
communication: media representations of ‘lived experience’ (Thompson, 1995) have ceased to be a prerogative
of the broadcast and press media. Publics may activate, in online discursive spaces, their own representations of
their own experiences, following an increasingly ‘performative’ model (Abercrombie and Longhurst, 1998) of
participation in content production, where skilled and reflexive internet users care about the people included in
their networks and produce their communication based on these audiences (Boccia Artieri, 2012).
In this context, a wide range of multidisciplinary social research has studied whether web 2.0 is a space for enhancing
the public sphere, or rather if it encourages the ghettoization and polarization of opinions among like-minded
individuals in different web platforms (Sunstein, 2001; Dahlgren, 2005; Lovink, 2008; Yardi and Boyd, 2010).
WHAT KIND OF PARTICIPATION? THE MINIMALIST VS MAXIMALIST DIMENSION
1) Minimalist democratic participation = media effects on voting
o Focuses on the representation and delegation of power, participation is limited to the elite selection and
focuses on macro-participation.
o There is a narrow definition of politics as institutionalized politics = unidirectional participation
focusing on a homogeneous popular will.
2) Maximalist democratic participation = media effects on public connection
o Balancing representation and participation, attempting to maximize it, and combining macro and micro
participation.
o Broad definition of politics as a dimension of society where there is multi-directional participation,
and it focuses on heterogeneity.
ASSUMPTIOS REGARDING THE POWER AND EFFECTS OF THE MEDIA
The media are “always particular, historically embedded ways of communicating information and meaning”.
Not only does every age have their own media, but also because of the social, cultural, political and economic
particularities of each age, every age understands and lives the media differently. Every interpretation as to how the
media works has to be socially and historically situated.
THE MEDIA AND THEIR INFRASTRUCTURES
Technological artefacts: technologies that enable certain communication practices and that are organized in
and around institutional arrangements → Fits very well with the digital media landscape.
o Before the mass diffusion of the internet, another three-party definition of the media was more effective
and used = production, texts and audiences (something slightly different, broader institutional
arrangement)
Practices:
Institutional arrangement: media system and social order
→ The effects/consequences of technological artefacts depend on the specific configuration of practices +
Institutional arrangements**
→ Acknowledging that the media are services, tools, platforms and technological materiality and also the industry
behind them, as well as the practices through which we use them and make them meaningful. It is not the media alone
that produce social change, and they have consequences if they are incorporated in meaningful practices.
THEORIES OF MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION
Every theory is fit in with a specific moment of the development of the media system, as well as in an
historical/social moment, and every theory rests on a set of fixed ingredients.
EACH THEORY HAS A DISTINCTIVE SET OF FEATURES:
An idea of media effects (strong vs limited, short-term vs long-term)
The conception of the audience (passive vs active)
The methodology employed.
The communicative model they refer to.
,AND EACH THEORY RESTS ON:
A sociological/psychological theory
The socio-historical context where it is generated.
MEDIA EFFECTS AND THE CYCLE OF MEDIA EFFECTS
From strong, direct, effects (1920-40)
To limited, indirect, effects (1940-60)
To the powerful audiences (from the 1908s)
To the powerful media (social media logic, data algorithms, AI) today
Because of ourselves being exposed every day to the media, we become cultivated (= manipulated)
THE THREE HYPOTHESES: THE RELATION BETWEEN THE MEDIA AND POWER
MEDIATIZATION: it is about the relationship between the media and society.
o Rests on the idea of technological determinism
o Technological determinism: idea that the medial alone (or technology more broadly) can
generate social change and are responsible for social change → The idea that a single
change/innovation in the media system is responsible for broader social consequences (EX:
Obama or Trump won the elections because of media campaigns)
Technologies do have consequences and the kind of consequences they have depends on the way they are taken up
and used.
→ **The consequences of technological artefacts depend on the practices + institutional arrangements.
that exist around them.
THE MEDIA LOGIC (ALTHEIDE & SNOW, 1979)
These authors meant to:
1. Acknowledge that the media were not simply channels, but proper institutions.
2. For political communication to be effective in these mediated and media-dominated public sphere,
political messages had to adapt into social expectations around what makes an appealing media
coverage.
o Political actors and the public interiorize media culture.
o The staging of media events: political communication as a media event
PR were born out of the same need: the understanding that if you wanted to be visible in the media, you had on the one
hand to stick to their own language, and on the other hand, to organize events that were suitable for media
representation.
The media as an institution are so powerful and so dominating the public sphere, that if someone wants.
to be visible on the media, they have to adapt to their logic.
The mediatization of political actors, political events and political discourse
The mediatization of politics (MAZZOLENI & SCHULZ, 1999)
o News values
o A media-constructed public sphere
o Media logic as a commercial logic: spectacularizing
o The adaptation of political language to the media’s commercial patterns
Mediatization dates back to the invention of the press. Each mediatization wave is characterized by an elective media
and it comes to be both a quantitative (speed of change and the number of media) and qualitative (influence on the
social world and its complexity) phenomenon.
, The mediatization of political actors, political events, and political discourse. It means that the media as institutions
are now at the center of every process of change and transformation that involves other institutions.
o This institutionalist tradition is strongly mediacentric and puts the media at the center of social change.
The idea is that EVERY social sphere (including politics) has become increasingly dependent upon the logic and
the infrastructure of the media -- everything is now being transformed as to become suitable for media
representation.
“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, politics
communicators are forced to respond to the media’s rules, aims, production logics, and constraints.”
“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.”
→ The general context in which the mediatization of politics is embedded is a context characterized by our cognitive
dependence on the media system which has television at its core, which is highly commercialized and competitive and
is favoring spectacularizing over other news values.
FROM THE MEDIATIZATION OF POLITICS TO THE MEDIATIZATION OF THE SOCIAL
Political actors and the public interiorize media culture.
The staging of media events: political communication as a media event
From the institutionalist to the social constructivist approach of mediatization research
From media-centered and media-driven to non-media-centric
The social world is not just mediated but mediatized: that is, changed in its dynamics and structure by the role the
media continuously (and recursively) play in its construction. We do not mean by this that the social world is totally
colonized by the media (Habermas 984, p.117). We do mean by this that the social world has significantly more
complexity when its forms and patterns are, in part, sustained in and through media and their infrastructures. Even if
we do things without directly using media, the horizon of our practices is a social world for which media are
fundamental reference-points and resources. - (Couldry & Hepp, 2017, p. 15)
DEEP MEDIATIZATION: Mediatization has quantitative and qualitative dimensions: Every act is shaped by
this deep interdependence with the media.
o Quantitative: an increasing number of diverse media enabling ‘anywhere, anytime’ connectivity
o Qualitative: deeper implication of digital media and infrastructures of communication with
societal processes, greater diversity of media and its dynamics. The media generates, and
communicates, data thus participating in the social construction of reality.
DATAFICATION AND AI
BIGDATA
In the contemporary age the term “BIG DATA” refers to the major expansion of the quantities of digital data that
are generated as the product of users’ transactions with and content generation via digital media technologies, as
well as digital surveillance technologies. (Lupton, 2015)
According to Deborah Lupton, in 2015, Walmart was estimated to have data about 60% of the US
population, and that it was trading those data with at least 50 third parties.
Indeed, collecting data used for governance is nothing new, on the contrast, it is a constitutive element of modern
societies, but what is new is the scale, the velocity and variety of such data. As regards, the social geographer R.
Kitchin (2014) has defined big data as:
o Huge in volume, consisting of terabytes or petabytes of data.
o High in velocity since they are created in or near real time.
o Diverse in variety, being structured and unstructured in nature.
o Exhaustive in scope, because they attempt to capture entire populations (everyone, all)
o Fine-grained in resolution and uniquely indexical in identification
01. KEY CONCEPTS IN POLITICS IN
MEDIA ISSUES OF POWER
There are more linear and complex ways to understand power and more complex ones.
This main argument was that ONE-DIMENSIONAL DEFINITIONS OF POWER are limited the idea that those who
hold power are in the condition to make other people do what they want even if it goes against their own
interest.
→THE POWER OF DECISION – MAKING.
o Power does not only entail the dimension of decision making also
because the way power is exercised and manifests itself is not always
visible or transparent.
o We cannot assume that citizens are always in the condition to
understand how power dynamics are played out.
The TWO-DIMENSIONAL understating of power is about not only forcing or controlling the decisions that are
taken and making sure that everyone complies with them, but also about the ability to prevent any challenges or any
alternative claims to arise in the first place → AGENDA SETTING DIMENSION OF POWER.
THREE-DIMENSIONAL POWER has to do with HEGEMONY; in this case the dimension of power also consists
more deeply in the way those who hold power and exercise it are able to persuade us that they are acting in our own
best interest rather than in their more successful form of power.
What is good about this perspective is also to emphasize how it’s not only about rational decision making
but about more latent and invisible forms of power.
We can map the three main ways of understanding media and power in the following three hypotheses:
1. The media as channels/means information and propaganda = linear understanding of power (symbolic) it
is about the media as tools and channels for political power to inform or manipulate citizens.
2. The media as subjects/institutions replacement and complementarity = the medias are not simply
channels but they are institutions in their own rights turned into an industry which has profit to make, the
media in the interest may not coincide with the interest of those who control political power relationship not
linear but could be of conflict or complementarity when the two interests are aligned.
3. The media as an apparatus (dispositive) complexity, hybridization and ambivalence = the three
dimensional view would be to understand that the media only act as institutions, they have agenda setting
power that doesn’t necessarily overlap with those of the government, but also that the media themselves
operate as Foucault would call “apparatus” that has their own rules and norms and this shapes the world that
we live in media participating in the social construction of reality.
ASSUMPTIONS REGARDING PARTICIPATION
In communication and media studies, PARTICIPATION is still used to mean everything and nothing, remains
structurally under- theorized and its intrinsically political nature –as part of a democratic- ideological struggle on the
democratic nature of democracy- remains unacknowledged.
Democracy: because of its concern with the inclusion of people within political decision-making processes, is one
of the key sites of the articulation of the concept of participation
The internet has opened new opportunities for a ‘structural participation within the media’ (Carpentier, 2011a;
Carpentier, Dahlgren and Pasquali, 2013)
Indeed, it is possible to identify forms of structural participation on the internet in the practices of hacktivism, such as
the security breaches of corporate or government websites (like Anonymous’ practice of denial-of-service attacks) and
the development of systems that elude censorship and encrypt data (like WikiLeaks) (Taylor, 2005; Coleman, 2013)
Moreover, a form of structural participation within the internet sphere can be identified in the previously mentioned
case of Indymedia, which was followed by a plethora of contemporary online ‘alternative’, ‘grassroots’, ‘self-
organized’, and ‘citizen’ journalism projects that sometimes serve as an alternative to the mainstream (newer and older)
media in terms of their business model and the hierarchical organization of content production
, Beyond social movements and activist groups, in the 21st century, the so-called web 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2007)
has opened new opportunities for participation on the internet to broader publics.
o From content-sharing sites to social network sites, blogs to wikis, the editing ease introduced by
web 2.0 has indeed transformed the audience into ‘producers’ (Bruns, 2008)
Unlike the broadcast and press media audiences – participating in the meaning-making of media contents but with
limited resources to influence the industrial media strategies (see above) – internet users may produce and distribute
‘mass self-communication’ (Castells, 2009), self-generated and self-directed towards a potential global audience
The ‘networked publics’ (Boyd, 2010) have been understood as directly managing their multidirectional
communication: media representations of ‘lived experience’ (Thompson, 1995) have ceased to be a prerogative
of the broadcast and press media. Publics may activate, in online discursive spaces, their own representations of
their own experiences, following an increasingly ‘performative’ model (Abercrombie and Longhurst, 1998) of
participation in content production, where skilled and reflexive internet users care about the people included in
their networks and produce their communication based on these audiences (Boccia Artieri, 2012).
In this context, a wide range of multidisciplinary social research has studied whether web 2.0 is a space for enhancing
the public sphere, or rather if it encourages the ghettoization and polarization of opinions among like-minded
individuals in different web platforms (Sunstein, 2001; Dahlgren, 2005; Lovink, 2008; Yardi and Boyd, 2010).
WHAT KIND OF PARTICIPATION? THE MINIMALIST VS MAXIMALIST DIMENSION
1) Minimalist democratic participation = media effects on voting
o Focuses on the representation and delegation of power, participation is limited to the elite selection and
focuses on macro-participation.
o There is a narrow definition of politics as institutionalized politics = unidirectional participation
focusing on a homogeneous popular will.
2) Maximalist democratic participation = media effects on public connection
o Balancing representation and participation, attempting to maximize it, and combining macro and micro
participation.
o Broad definition of politics as a dimension of society where there is multi-directional participation,
and it focuses on heterogeneity.
ASSUMPTIOS REGARDING THE POWER AND EFFECTS OF THE MEDIA
The media are “always particular, historically embedded ways of communicating information and meaning”.
Not only does every age have their own media, but also because of the social, cultural, political and economic
particularities of each age, every age understands and lives the media differently. Every interpretation as to how the
media works has to be socially and historically situated.
THE MEDIA AND THEIR INFRASTRUCTURES
Technological artefacts: technologies that enable certain communication practices and that are organized in
and around institutional arrangements → Fits very well with the digital media landscape.
o Before the mass diffusion of the internet, another three-party definition of the media was more effective
and used = production, texts and audiences (something slightly different, broader institutional
arrangement)
Practices:
Institutional arrangement: media system and social order
→ The effects/consequences of technological artefacts depend on the specific configuration of practices +
Institutional arrangements**
→ Acknowledging that the media are services, tools, platforms and technological materiality and also the industry
behind them, as well as the practices through which we use them and make them meaningful. It is not the media alone
that produce social change, and they have consequences if they are incorporated in meaningful practices.
THEORIES OF MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION
Every theory is fit in with a specific moment of the development of the media system, as well as in an
historical/social moment, and every theory rests on a set of fixed ingredients.
EACH THEORY HAS A DISTINCTIVE SET OF FEATURES:
An idea of media effects (strong vs limited, short-term vs long-term)
The conception of the audience (passive vs active)
The methodology employed.
The communicative model they refer to.
,AND EACH THEORY RESTS ON:
A sociological/psychological theory
The socio-historical context where it is generated.
MEDIA EFFECTS AND THE CYCLE OF MEDIA EFFECTS
From strong, direct, effects (1920-40)
To limited, indirect, effects (1940-60)
To the powerful audiences (from the 1908s)
To the powerful media (social media logic, data algorithms, AI) today
Because of ourselves being exposed every day to the media, we become cultivated (= manipulated)
THE THREE HYPOTHESES: THE RELATION BETWEEN THE MEDIA AND POWER
MEDIATIZATION: it is about the relationship between the media and society.
o Rests on the idea of technological determinism
o Technological determinism: idea that the medial alone (or technology more broadly) can
generate social change and are responsible for social change → The idea that a single
change/innovation in the media system is responsible for broader social consequences (EX:
Obama or Trump won the elections because of media campaigns)
Technologies do have consequences and the kind of consequences they have depends on the way they are taken up
and used.
→ **The consequences of technological artefacts depend on the practices + institutional arrangements.
that exist around them.
THE MEDIA LOGIC (ALTHEIDE & SNOW, 1979)
These authors meant to:
1. Acknowledge that the media were not simply channels, but proper institutions.
2. For political communication to be effective in these mediated and media-dominated public sphere,
political messages had to adapt into social expectations around what makes an appealing media
coverage.
o Political actors and the public interiorize media culture.
o The staging of media events: political communication as a media event
PR were born out of the same need: the understanding that if you wanted to be visible in the media, you had on the one
hand to stick to their own language, and on the other hand, to organize events that were suitable for media
representation.
The media as an institution are so powerful and so dominating the public sphere, that if someone wants.
to be visible on the media, they have to adapt to their logic.
The mediatization of political actors, political events and political discourse
The mediatization of politics (MAZZOLENI & SCHULZ, 1999)
o News values
o A media-constructed public sphere
o Media logic as a commercial logic: spectacularizing
o The adaptation of political language to the media’s commercial patterns
Mediatization dates back to the invention of the press. Each mediatization wave is characterized by an elective media
and it comes to be both a quantitative (speed of change and the number of media) and qualitative (influence on the
social world and its complexity) phenomenon.
, The mediatization of political actors, political events, and political discourse. It means that the media as institutions
are now at the center of every process of change and transformation that involves other institutions.
o This institutionalist tradition is strongly mediacentric and puts the media at the center of social change.
The idea is that EVERY social sphere (including politics) has become increasingly dependent upon the logic and
the infrastructure of the media -- everything is now being transformed as to become suitable for media
representation.
“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, politics
communicators are forced to respond to the media’s rules, aims, production logics, and constraints.”
“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.”
→ The general context in which the mediatization of politics is embedded is a context characterized by our cognitive
dependence on the media system which has television at its core, which is highly commercialized and competitive and
is favoring spectacularizing over other news values.
FROM THE MEDIATIZATION OF POLITICS TO THE MEDIATIZATION OF THE SOCIAL
Political actors and the public interiorize media culture.
The staging of media events: political communication as a media event
From the institutionalist to the social constructivist approach of mediatization research
From media-centered and media-driven to non-media-centric
The social world is not just mediated but mediatized: that is, changed in its dynamics and structure by the role the
media continuously (and recursively) play in its construction. We do not mean by this that the social world is totally
colonized by the media (Habermas 984, p.117). We do mean by this that the social world has significantly more
complexity when its forms and patterns are, in part, sustained in and through media and their infrastructures. Even if
we do things without directly using media, the horizon of our practices is a social world for which media are
fundamental reference-points and resources. - (Couldry & Hepp, 2017, p. 15)
DEEP MEDIATIZATION: Mediatization has quantitative and qualitative dimensions: Every act is shaped by
this deep interdependence with the media.
o Quantitative: an increasing number of diverse media enabling ‘anywhere, anytime’ connectivity
o Qualitative: deeper implication of digital media and infrastructures of communication with
societal processes, greater diversity of media and its dynamics. The media generates, and
communicates, data thus participating in the social construction of reality.
DATAFICATION AND AI
BIGDATA
In the contemporary age the term “BIG DATA” refers to the major expansion of the quantities of digital data that
are generated as the product of users’ transactions with and content generation via digital media technologies, as
well as digital surveillance technologies. (Lupton, 2015)
According to Deborah Lupton, in 2015, Walmart was estimated to have data about 60% of the US
population, and that it was trading those data with at least 50 third parties.
Indeed, collecting data used for governance is nothing new, on the contrast, it is a constitutive element of modern
societies, but what is new is the scale, the velocity and variety of such data. As regards, the social geographer R.
Kitchin (2014) has defined big data as:
o Huge in volume, consisting of terabytes or petabytes of data.
o High in velocity since they are created in or near real time.
o Diverse in variety, being structured and unstructured in nature.
o Exhaustive in scope, because they attempt to capture entire populations (everyone, all)
o Fine-grained in resolution and uniquely indexical in identification
