Images of citizenship on television news: constructing a passive public

Abstract

Based on the largest content analysis of its kind, this article analyses the ways in which public opinion and citizenship is referenced or invoked on television news in the United States and Britain. The study is discussed in the context of the debate about declining citizen participation in representative politics. One of the study's main findings is that citizenship and public opinion are generally represented as passive, rather than engaged. This suggests that showing an engaged citizenry conflicts with current journalistic practices, and that any attempt to encourage more engagement will require rethinking those conventions.

Fuentes de información y pluralismo político en la cobertura de asuntos europeos en televisión

“…En ese sentido, los resultados estarían en la línea abierta por las investigaciones practicadas en los medios televisivos anglosajones y que apuntan a que en las noticias de tipo político los ciudadanos aparecen con mayor frecuencia (Lewis, et al, 2004, p. 160) porque los hechos noticiosos afectan cada vez de forma más directa a la ciudadanía (Hjarvard, 2006en Hopmann y Shehata, 2011. Entre las noticias pertenecientes a esta categoría figuraron, entre otras, la posición del gobierno español en el Consejo Europeo sobre el «Brexit», las manifestaciones ciudadanas en España ante la crisis migratoria de los refugiados y las opiniones de empresarios españoles sobre la suspensión temporal del acuerdo Schengen.…”

Invisible Centers: Boris Johnson, authenticity, cultural citizenship and a centrifugal model of media power

“…In media studies, the arguments are more equivocal. Some feel that the public have been rendered invisible, ignorant or mute by media institutions and/or their corporate logic Jhally 1991, 1999;Lewis, Morgan & Ruddock 1992;Dayan 2001;Capella 2002;Wahl-Jorgensen 2002Lewis, Wahl-Jorgensen, and Inthorn 2004). Others counter that ''tabloidization'' opens affective spaces encouraging a new political vigor among citizens (McNair 2000;McNair, Hibberd and Schlesinger 2002;van Zoonen 2003) . Couldry's conception of media power allows a third option, appreciating the creative aspects of media use, while at the same time offering comments on the limitations of public media literacy.…”

“…British newspapers frame political participation as the reception of information disseminated from a center. Opinion pages are thus sequestered as elite playing fields (Wahl-Jorgensen 2004). This is not unique to print media.…”

Mediating Citizenship through the Lens of Consumerism: Frames in the American Medicare Reform Debates of 2003–2004

“…However, Breen (2004) and Cohen (2003) The tendency of the news media to present passive modes of citizenship has been documented by Lewis, Wahl-Jorgensen and Inthorn (2004). This case study raises another layer of questions because the favored representation of engagement in this issue, consumer choice, has the veneer of active engagement and empowerment, but arguably distracts from more collective, and perhaps more powerful, forms of action, be they defined by consumerism or citizenship.…”