Political Television Research Articles

Meet the Press: Gendered Conversational Norms in Televised Political Discussion

Meet the Press: Gendered Conversational Norms in Televised Political Discussion

A Comparative Analysis of the Use of the Discourse Marker “But” in a British Televised Political Interview Show: A Socio-Pragmatic Perspective

A Comparative Analysis of the Use of the Discourse Marker “But” in a British Televised Political Interview Show: A Socio-Pragmatic Perspective

“Post-Pandemic Political Television and the End of One Day at a Time”

This article analyzes “The Politics Episode” of One Day at a Time, an animated very special episode produced and aired during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. I focus on two aspects that prompt broader considerations about the role of scripted television in responding to pressing social issues. First, I demonstrate how the episode’s narrative structure appeals to democratic deliberation as an idealized form of conflict resolution. Second, I consider how its production and airing timeline responded to—and failed to account for—the current events its narrative attempted to incorporate. Although the disjuncture between these two elements demonstrate the pitfalls for fictional television to address social issues in a time of constant crisis, I conclude by proposing that these “failures” can also serve to illustrate a specific “post-pandemic” structure-of-feeling, one where futures are perpetually deferred and where dealing with new social realities requires constant speculative iterations.

Gendered framing and representation of women in Irish political television programming during the 2020 formation of the government of Ireland

ABSTRACT The ways in which women are incorporated into Irish political programming is vital in understanding the visibility of women in mainstream media, but also the gendered nature of politics, which tend to be dominated by men. This research investigates how three Irish current affairs television programmes frame and represent women, questioning whether Irish political programmes are gendered. This research employed a quantitative and qualitative content analysis case study of one month of broadcasts from Virgin Media’s The Tonight Show and RTÉ ‘s The Week in Politics and Prime Time. The findings indicate the representation of women was constituted through three dominant themes. Firstly, women are marginalised by being numerically underrepresented. Secondly, women receive significantly less airtime than men, even in relation to their numerical representation and thirdly, female participants are represented in a restrictive and limited manner. Women are more likely to be consulted for their personal experience or opinion, with questions aimed at them centring around “soft” topics. Female participants are also considerably less likely to be portrayed as expert sources. This research outlines the critical need for further and continuous monitoring of political media in Ireland, particularly regarding gender bias and female participation in political programming on television.

The Sky and the Mud. The Art and Politics of Television

The Sky and the Mud. The Art and Politics of Television

Nonverbal communication as argumentation: the case of political television debates

This paper demonstrates how nonverbal communication may perform argumentative functions in television debates by acclaiming and defending the debater’s own ethos and in attacking the opponent’s ethos. We argue that studies of non-verbal communication in debates should not only study what is done nonverbally, but also how it is done. This informs our analyses of excerpts of television debates between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the 2008 primary election campaign. Our analyses establish two main types of nonverbal rhetoric, enacted actio and restrained actio, and show how these may be used argumentatively. We introduce the concept of the personal qualifier to signify how debaters nonverbally can express degrees of certainty and emotional involvement, similar to the function of qualifier in Stephen Toulmin’s argument model.

Book Review: The Delight of Turkish Dizi: Memory, Genre and Politics of Television in Turkey, by Arzu Öztürkmen

Book Review: The Delight of Turkish Dizi: Memory, Genre and Politics of Television in Turkey, by Arzu Öztürkmen

Audience Engagement with Malayalam Television Political Satire Shows: A Qualitative Study


 
 
 
 
 
 Satire is a sword that keeps the audience alert and involved in recent political developments when other forms of traditional media have failed to communicate politics effectively. This qualitative study was done among the people who watch Malayalam political satire shows. This study attempts to throw light on the viewing habits of selected satirical programs in Malayalam news channels. The present study is intended to examine political satire shows’ credibility and trustworthiness. The samples are collected using the purposive sampling method; qualitative in-depth interviews were conducted to strengthen the research objective. Most respondents said that they chose satire to gain information through fun. They also admitted that satirical shows are sources of political information. This study employed uses gratification theory, third-person effect, and agenda-setting theory to explain the reason for choosing political satire.
 
 
 
 
 

Spanish-Portuguese Serial Fiction as a Politainment Tool: Representations of Politics on Iberian Television

This article deals with recent Spanish and Portuguese political television series. Within this sub-genre, it is pertinent to consider the symbolic construction of politics, as well as the differences caused by each series’ geographical adscription. Six Spanish productions have been selected—<em>Isabel </em>(Isabella the Catholic),<em> Carlos Rey Emperador </em>(Charles the Emperor King), <em>La Embajada </em>(The Embassy),<em> Crematorio </em>(Crematorium),<em> Vamos Juan</em>/<em>Venga Juan </em>(Come on, Juan/Let’s go Juan), and <em>El Partido </em>(The Party)—along with three Portuguese productions—<em>A Rainha e a Bastarda </em>(The Queen and the Bastard), <em>Teorias da Conspiração </em>(Conspiracy Theories),<em> </em>and <em>Os Boys </em>(The Boys). The narrative of these audio-visual stories has been examined utilising qualitative content analysis, looking at the plotlines and characters involved. The type of characterisation of politics has been identified by means of the deconstruction of the main characters. The conclusion is that the evaluation is eminently negative, although differential frameworks are present, depending, in particular, on the fiction’s genre, either historical drama, drama-thriller, or comedy.

Why Do Citizens Trust the Government? The Origins of Political Trust in Modern Russia

Political trust is central to the study of political regimes. The level of public support for a government or party is one of the most important indicators of political legitimacy and stability. The article examines the quantitative indicators of the influence of socio-psychological, civic, institutional, and informational factors on political trust. The purpose of the study was to understand the factors influencing trust in the Russian government. The analysis was based on data from the sociological survey of the 7th wave of the World Values Survey (2017-2022). Using the Russian data set, the authors assessed the impact of interpersonal and general trust, involvement in non-profit and non-governmental organizations, citizens’ perceptions of their financial situation, security and corruption, and watching TV news on trust in government institutions. This study shows that high levels of interpersonal and societal trust have a positive impact on political trust. This study proposes and confirms the hypothesis that watching political television programs improves trust in the government. The article complements existing empirical studies on institutional trust and adapts well-known theories explaining the origin of trust to the Russian political context.

Средства акцентности в политическом телеэфире: полевой аспект

The article discusses the functioning of accentuators (means of emphasis) in political tele-vision discourse and their core-periphery distinction. Accentuators are defined as language, speech, and non-verbal means that accentuate fragments of speech being the most significant from the author’s point of view. An accentuator is recognized as core or peripheral depending on two factors: its being intended for semantic emphasis and the frequency of its use in a specific type of speech. Core accentuators are divided into three groups. The center of the core of the accentuation category includes the most emphasis-targeted and frequent means of emphasis –logical and emphatic sentence stress as well as gestural stress (baton gestures). Less emphasis-targeted core units are represented by lexical-semantic emphasis, hypophora, a performative utter-ance, inversion, an emblematic gesture ‘attention’, and expressive vocabulary. Core units that are least in-tended for emphasis include lexical repetitions, some modal particles, and adverbs of degree and measure. Peripheral means of emphasis are language, speech, and non-verbal units that are contextual and occasional. They are divided into two groups: the close periphery (introductory and parenthetical constructions, illustra-tive gestures, some modal particles, emblematic gestures, parallel syntax, direct and free indirect speech, some facial expressions, etc.) and the far periphery (comparatives, pauses, interjections, some structures of a complex sentence and supra-phrasal units, etc.). The research reveals some significant regularities in the use of accentuators: there are patterns of compatibility of their certain types; the usage frequency of accentuators depends on functional and semantic types of speech or the personal characteristics of communicants.

Afrocentric analysis of music in political advertisements of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF)

In 2009, South Africa saw another landmark with the introduction of political advertisements on television. Literature is littered with studies of political advertisements on television. In these studies, 1) background music is merely an accompaniment to advertisement voiceover and images, rather than an argument itself. Little is known about 2) the discursive role of background political music as a means of conveying political messages in political television advertisements, 3) the underlying ideology and 4) Afrocentric rhetoric in political music used in political television advertisements. Considering the above, this paper interrogates the Afrocentric perspective underlying the rhetoric of background music in the political television advertisements of the South African opposition political party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) from 2014 to 2021. This study employs the decolonial thought of the Afrocentric perspective as a theory and a research method to interrogate underlying rhetoric in political music. Findings of the paper revealed that the EFF background music is highly political, Afrocentric and inherently rhetorical.

Синсемантичные экспоненты категории причины в американском политическом дискурсе

The aim of the study is to identify the synsemantic representatives of cause implemented by candidates for the post of the President and the Vice President of the United States. Despite a large number of the works dedicated to the means of expressing causal relations, there is no study of causal synsemantic constructions. The scientific novelty lies in determining the correspondence between semantic types of cause and the synsemantic constructions that implement them in the English language. As a result, it has been revealed that to implement semantic types of cause in the American political television debates, speakers use the following synsemantic constructions: narrowing repetition, modifying repetition, mixed repetition, preceding reference point, question-answer construction, isolated subordinate clause, potentially compound sentences, causal asyndetic adjunction and rhetorical question.

The life and times of media events: A tribute to Elihu Katz

Abstract I have just learnt that Elihu Katz – a dearly loved friend and colleague – has died at the age of 95. This abstract is a valediction forbidding mourning. Media Events, written with Daniel Dayan, was the culminating work of a career spanning six decades – a career launched by Personal Influence, written with his doctoral supervisor, Professor Paul Lazarsfeld, of Columbia University, New York, and published in 1955. In my contribution to this issue, I try to do two things: firstly, to indicate how Media Events opened up a novel way of thinking about television and, at the same time, to think of it as a summa, the distillation of a lifetime’s work in the academic field of communication and media studies. I wanted especially to point towards its stimmung – that untranslatable ordinary German word for mood, or disposition: an attitude to life, the world, and television. I start with Katz’s earliest academic work – his master’s thesis completed at Columbia in the 1940s, felicitously but not accidentally called The Happiness Game. The stimmung of this work is the same as that of Media Events. That vision, as Daniel Dayan has claimed, was not a mirage. What he and Katz saw in La Télévision Céremoniélle (the book’s French title when he translated it) was every bit as true as the dominant academic view of the politics of television whose hegemonic sociological take on “the real world” they both attempted to counter.

“We Will not Get Another Chance if We Lose This Battle Now”: Populism on Ukrainian Television Political Talk Shows ahead of the Presidential Election in 2019

Against a background of increasing electoral support of populist political actors in Europe and beyond, this study offers an exploratory inquiry into modern Ukrainian populism. The article examines populist communication, broadcast on the most highly rated Ukrainian television political talk shows, on the eve of the 2019 presidential election, which was completed in two rounds. A qualitative content analysis of populist communication acts (n=283) shows that Ukrainian viewers were exposed to diverse political discourses containing empty, anti-elitist, emergency, and complete populism, depending on which channel(s) they watched. The dominance of one or another type of populism on the studied channels mirrors the dynamics of media-political parallelism typical of Ukrainian commercial television. The study also examines the roles of different actors—moderators, journalists, and politicians—in either restricting or facilitating populism in the talk show studios. The populism-related reactions collected during this analysis (n=145) are discussed through the prism of normative roles, with a focus on gatekeeping, interpretation, and initiation. Implications for the stakeholders involved in the process of production, moderation, and consumption of political talk shows are presented.

Political Satire TV Shows in the Trump’s Era: Examining Their Impact on Latinx Viewers’ Political Knowledge, Political Engagement, and Trust in Institutions

ABSTRACT The popularity of political satire on American television has led to a significant amount of research on their role in American political life. However, the current political satire television show environment has considerably changed, as has the political environment in the US with the election of Donald Trump. These changes compel us to (re)examine the impact of political satire TV shows on audiences. This study examines the relationships between political satire TV consumption, political knowledge, political engagement, and trust in institutions among a sample of 238 young Latinx adults. The results reveal that political satire TV consumption is positively related to political knowledge. Surprisingly though, political satire TV consumption is not related to trust in institutions.

Trevor Griffiths, Bill Brand and Political Television Drama

Trevor Griffiths, Bill Brand and Political Television Drama

Book Review: Imagining Politics: Interpretations in Political Science and Political Television

Book Review: Imagining Politics: Interpretations in Political Science and Political Television

Relationship between Drug Overdose Mortality and Coverage of Drug-Related Issues in US Television Political Campaign Advertising in the 2012 and 2016 Election Cycles.

Understanding the role of drug-related issues in political campaign advertising can provide insight on the salience of this issue and the priorities of candidates for elected office. This study sought to quantify the share of campaign advertising mentioning drugs in the 2012 and 2016 election cycles and to estimate the association between local drug overdose mortality and drug mentions in campaign advertising across US media markets. The analysis used descriptive and spatial statistics to examine geographic variation in campaign advertising mentions of drugs across all 210 US media markets, and it used multivariable regression to assess area-level factors associated with that variation. The share of campaign ads mentioning drugs grew from 0.5% in the 2012 election cycle to 1.6% in the 2016 cycle. In the 2016 cycle, ads airing in media markets with overdose mortality rates in the 95th percentile were more than three times as likely to mention drugs as ads airing in areas with overdose mortality rates in the 5th percentile. A small proportion of campaign advertising mentioned drug-related issues. In the 2016 cycle, the issue was more prominent in advertising in areas hardest hit by the drug overdose crisis and in advertising for local races.

GENDER FEATURES OF NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION IN TELEVISED POLITICAL DEBATES

LUIZA MARABYAN - GENDER FEATURES OF NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION IN TELEVISED POLITICAL DEBATES The paper examines gender characteristics in nonverbal communication during televised political debates. Nonverbal communication plays an important role in the process of human interaction. Means of nonverbal communication as a kind of language of feelings are the same product of social development as the language of words. Among such means are facial expressions, views, postures, gestures, touches, behavior in the surrounding space. All these types of nonverbal messages interact, sometimes complementing each other, sometimes contradicting each other.