EBSCOhost 31-01-16 18:05

Record: 1
Title: `Mediatization' of politics: A challenge for democracy?
Authors: Mazzoleni, Gianpietro
Schulz, Winfried
Source: Political Communication. Jul-Sep99, Vol. 16 Issue 3, p247. 15p.
Document Type: Article
Subject Terms: *MASS media -- Political aspects
*POLITICAL communication
Abstract: Examines the intrusion of mass media into political domain in
the United States. Approach of the `media-driven republic';
Usurpation of the functions of political institutions in the liberal
state; Impact of media coverage of the Lewinsky-Clinton affair.
Full Text Word Count: 8470
ISSN: 1058-4609
Accession Number: 2287282
Database: Communication Source
`MEDIATIZATION' OF POLITICS: A CHALLENGE FOR DEMOCRACY?
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.

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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," "democratie mediatique," and even "coup d'etat mediatique"--all are symbolic
depictions of the feared consummation of improper developments in the relationship of media and
politics, hi 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

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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 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

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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

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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 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

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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 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

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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,
which are 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

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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 possibility of "electronic democracy" (Street, 1997). Because the Internet represents a shift from
mass media to interactive media, and from monological to dialogical communication, it can be seen as
an important enlargement of the possibilities for participation. As studies of media use behavior show,
well educated and politically sophisticated citizens are the early adopters of these new media.

Although societal changes gave rise to a growing segment of "self-mobilized" citizens, there remains a
large group of people who are poorly informed and not much interested in politics, the "chronic know-
nothings" who have worried political scientists since they were discovered by Hyman and Sheatsley in
1947 (for more recent accounts, see Bennett, 1988; Neuman, 1986). Because of their low level of
education and motivation, these people lack the cognitive resources for more active participation in
politics. In previous times, the majority of this group relied on political parties to relieve them of the
need for individually deliberated choices. By aligning themselves with social cleavages and prevailing
group interests, the parties acquired a profile that served as evidence of political competence for many
voters. However, with the general trend toward declining party identification in advanced industrial
democracies, the parties have lost much of their former orientation function, particularly for apolitical
citizens.

Dalton (1996) presents survey data that show that over a period of four decades "ritual partisans," as
he labels the less sophisticated citizens who feel attached to one of the political parties, have declined
from 42% to 20% of the U.S. population. During the same period the "new independents"--highly

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mobilized citizens without a party identification--increased from 16% to 24%, while apolitical citizens
remained stable at 16%.

In addition to their weak or nonexistent party identification, the apoliticals and the sophisticated
citizens have one other thing in common: They turn to the mass media for political orientation and
guidance. There is a plethora of empirical evidence that mass media--and especially television--some
time ago became the "main source" for political information in general and for opinion formation during
election campaigns in particular (Chaffee & Kanihan, 1997; Corbetta & Parisi, 1997; Robinson & Levy,
1986).

When citizens rely heavily or exclusively on the media for their political nourishment, there is a
metamorphosis in the ways they approach and do politics. In recent years, first public opinion and
then electorates have become more volatile, more sensitive to current issues, to images of political
leaders, and to the changing zeitgeist. Because a party's showing in elections increasingly has come
to depend on its ability not only to activate the traditional party supporters but also to win the volatile
citizens of both types, the apoliticals as well as the new independents, voter mobilization has become
a primary goal of modern election campaigns. Voters have to be re-won in every election by use of
sophisticated communication means and messages, and with public opinion management tied in with
the world of communication and the news media. And in all of this, it is obvious that the polls have
become highly important oracles for party leaders and government officials. They serve as a basis for
shaping the political agenda and framing campaign issues.

These changes are seen by some critical analysts as a deformation of rational citizenship.
Increasingly, we have to deal with a society composed of a majority of what Schudson (1995) calls
"informational citizens," those who are "saturated with bits and bytes of information" abundantly and
chaotically provided by the media, and a minority of "informed citizens," who have "not only
information but a point of view and preferences to make sense of it" and who appear "in a society in
which being informed makes good sense, and that is a function not of the individual character or news
media performance, but of political culture" (pp. 27, 169).

The Crisis of Political Parties

An obvious consequence of changing value preferences and the emergence of the self-mobilized
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 left-right 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.

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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

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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).

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

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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. Beregovoy). This trend in the news
profession is well captured by the concept of "demontage 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, ism 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

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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.

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 Conventions are 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

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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."

Political Communication, 16:247-261, 1999

Copyright (C) 1999 Taylor & Francis

1058-4609/99 $12.00 + .00

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.

Legend for Chart:

A - Percentage of respondents who tend to trust...

B - European Union: Average of 15 countries
C - France
D - Germany
E - Italy
F - Netherlands
G - Spain
H - United Kingdom

A B C

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D E
F G
H

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

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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 tour 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).

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~~~~~~~~
By Gianpietro Mazzoleni

Gianpietro Mazzoleni is Associate Professor of the Sociology of Mass Communication at the

University of Genova, Italy

Address correspondence to Gianpietro Mazzoleni, DiSA-Dip. to di Scienze Antropologiche, Universita

di Genova, Via Balbi 4, I-16126 Genova, Italy

Winfried Schulz holds the Chair in Mass Communication and Political Science at the University of

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Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany.

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