Media Logics and Changes in News Reporting

Abstract

While the previous chapter focused on the political power attributed to the media in political communication, this chapter attempts to describe how political communication actors perceive changes in news reporting and peculiarities of media logic. In discussions about political communication and its implications for the structures and cultures of political decision-making and democracy, changes in news reporting, such as personalization, commercialization, entertainment-orientation and negativism, are frequently mentioned as playing a vital role. Habermas, for instance, fears that “issues of political discourse become assimilated into and absorbed by the modes and contents of entertainment” and maintains that “besides personalization, the dramatization of events, the simplification of complex matters, and the vivid polarization of conflicts promote civic privatism and a mood of antipolitics” (Habermas, 2006, p. 422). According to Gurevitch, Coleman and Blumler (2009, pp. 172; 175), “politics is often projected as an arena of gamesmanship, failure, scandal and gaffes rather than the deliberative discussion of issues”, and “television’s emphasis upon political personalization continues unabated”. Furthermore, the empirical evidence of a general trend toward changes such as personalization is not as clear as it seems. Critics emphasize that content analyses of changes such as personalization are often unsystematic and ahistorical, and that in some cases there is evidence that personalization does not actually take place (Karvonen, 2010).