Media in Political Power

Abstract

This article looks at the role of media in political decision making by making use of Parson’s concept of political power. It enables a look at how media is both an essential resource of political power and a crucial factor in the environment in which political power works. Drawing on a qualitative interview sample of 60 elite decision makers and an elite survey (N = 419), Finnish decision making is found to be quite thoroughly mediatized. Mediatization is differentiated in distinct actor profiles found with Latent Class Analysis of the survey data. The most prominent pattern seems to be that mediatization correlates with other power resources. Those who have official status and are actively involved in policy networks also make use of media resources, and to differing extents adapt their actions to the demands of the media. However, there are also groups of decision makers who still seem to be quite independent of the media.

Power and Control in Interactions Between Journalists and Health-Related Industries: The View From Industry

“…Research reexamining these assumptions has pointed to the increasing "mediatisation" of politics. Harking back to Altheide and Snow's work on "media logic" (Altheide and Snow 1979), this model evokes a world in which news has become such an influential medium that politicians and government officials are increasingly forced to shape their communications, activities and potentially even their policies to align with news values and thus the roles of primary and secondary definers are reversed (Cohen, Tsfati, and Sheafer 2008;Davis 2009;Kunelius and Reunanen 2011;Walgrave 2008;Ross 2010;Strömbäck 2011). In this context, efforts by politicians to set the new agenda are often met with resistance by journalists who, based on their desire to publicly assert their independence from official sources, often choose to focus on aspects of politics other than those promoted by politicians and to take their own stance on political issues (Shehata 2010).…”

Rethinking the Logics: A Conceptual Framework for the Mediatization of Politics

“…A growing body of literature has conceptualized the mediatization of politics (Hjarvard, 2013;Kunelius & Reunanen, 2012;Lundby, 2009c;Mazzoleni & Schulz, 1999;Strömbäck, 2008Strömbäck, , 2011aStrömbäck, , 2011b); yet substantial differences persist with respect to terminology, definition, and the understanding of the concept. In the literature, both the terms mediation (Altheide & Snow, 1988;Bennett & Entman, 2001;Couldry, 2008;Nimmo & Combs, 1990) and mediatization (Kepplinger, 2002;Schulz, 2004;Strömbäck, 2008) are used to conceptualize mass media influence in its different varieties, with a (continental) European preference for the latter.…”

“…This conceptualization of the mediatization of politics, however, bears with it the problem that the question of what is actually meant by the process of mediatization (i.e., the adoption of media logic by political actors) is simply transferred to the underlying concepts of political logic and media logic. The reference to a particular form or logic of the media, inherent to many recent conceptualizations of mediatization, has been criticized as reductionist (Couldry, 2008(Couldry, , 2012Hepp, 2009;Lundby, 2009b), but is nevertheless continuously referred to in theoretical discussions on mediatization in the political realm (Kunelius & Reunanen, 2012;Lundby, 2009c;Strömbäck, 2011b;Strömbäck & Esser, 2009). Schrott (2009), for example, argues that the ''core of mediatization consists in the mechanism of the institutionalization of media logic in other societal subsystems" (p. 42).…”

Opposing the Government but Governing the Audience?

“…The mediatization of politics has been conceptualized in a growing body of literature (Esser 2013;Hjarvard 2013;Kunelius and Reunanen 2012;Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999;Strömbäck 2008;Strömbäck 2011a;Strömbäck and Esser 2009;Strömbäck and Van Aelst 2013). It is often defined as a process by which political institutions and actors gradually become dependent on and adapt to the media and their logic (Altheide and Snow 1979;Hjarvard 2013;Lundby 2009).…”

“…Scholars analyzing the mediatization of politics often emphasize the complexity of the interactions between politics and the news media (Kunelius and Reunanen 2012;Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999;Strömbäck 2011a). In this context, to get a better understanding of how different elected political actors try to use and how they perceive the news media will advance the empirical research on the mediatization of politics (Strömbäck 2011b;Van Aelst et al 2008).…”