Introduction to the Special Issue: New Media, Old Money: Digital Technology, Social Media, and the Challenges to Campaigning and Democracy

Abstract

Electronic media have played a central role in politics almost since their introduction. The role of media in election campaigns is often seen as the origin of media and communication studies. The variety of political systems worldwide, the wide range of media systems that operate within them, and the extensive array of regulatory schemes that govern this association raise thought-provoking questions about the role of media in democracy. The media–politics–capital triad has raised concerns about the effect of money on the health and fairness of political and media structures. The use of digital technologies and collaborative media has now become a critical part of these complex relationships.Increasingly, political campaigns are built around digital strategies rather than traditional broadcast ad buys. The Internet offers many additional groups cheap access to the public sphere and new possibilities for information and discussion. Accordingly, much of the most “impactful” money is spent “online,” calling on expertise in building networks, conversations, and communities using social networking platforms, combined with applications designed to amplify messaging. At the same time, volunteers and users generate their own content. In addition, the ability to find, analyze, and apply personal information from “big data” is becoming more important than market research and the focus has shifted to the development of comprehensive social media strategies for young, ethnic, gendered, and special interest groups. Finally, legacy media and their traditional business models are affected by change as well, raising questions about implications of the Internet for journalism and democracy.As a result, any current understanding of campaign spending and political communication must incorporate not just traditional advertising, but equal spending on Internet and social networking platforms, and the use of information technologies to identify and reach voters through multiple platforms. The same “Old Money” is being used to try to gain influence, but new media offer new approaches both to enhance and conceal its effects. Moreover, the same media brands with the same powerful owners prevail online as well.In order to discuss these issues, the Institute for Information Policy at Penn State, the Department of Communication and Media Research at the University of Fribourg, and the Journal of Information Policy held a two-day workshop at the Embassy of Switzerland in Washington, DC, in September 2015. The three articles presented in this special issue were first presented at that workshop.In the first, Linards Udris, Mark Eisenegger, and Jörg Schneider examine whether money talks in political campaign coverage, using the unique Swiss system of direct-democratic campaigns as their context. They conclude that votes involving expensive campaigns and populist proposals correlate with high media attention, favoring large parties—in the Swiss case, the populist right-wing Swiss People's Party. With the addition of the effect of the media's self-interests, the result is that the news media in Switzerland fail to cover a truly wide diversity of actors and topics.In the next article, Christopher Ali takes a broad view on the value of local journalism for political discourse. He argues that while local journalism is often categorized as a public good, the discourse of public goods is insufficient to fully capture their social democratic importance. He proposes to regard them as merit goods, which may lead to increased regulatory support for their sustenance and encourage efforts to support their viability.In the final contribution, John Fortunato and Shannon Martin discuss how the agenda-setting function of the media has transformed with the rise in importance of social media networking applications as purveyors of political communications, as well as as a result of the makeover of campaign financing practices following the US Supreme Court decision in Citizens United. Both changes have made political advertising more central in setting the agenda.