Book Review: Silvio Waisbord (ed.) Media sociology: A reappraisal

Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 105846099198613, 2010

ABSTRACT 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.

Two concepts that have been used to describe the changes with regards to media and politics during the last fifty years are the concepts of mediation and mediatiza-tion. However, both these concepts are used more often than they are properly defined. Moreover, there is a lack of analysis of the process of mediatization, although the concept as such denotes a process. Thus the purpose of this article is to analyze the concepts of mediated and mediatized politics from a process-oriented perspective. The article argues that mediatization is a multidimensional and inherently process-oriented concept and that it is possible to make a distinction between four phases of mediatization. Each of these phases is analyzed.The conclusion is that as politics becomes increasingly mediatized, the important question no longer is related to the independence of the media from politics and society.The important question becomes the independence of politics and society from the media.

Journalism Studies

Partecipazione E Conflitto, 2014

Work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non commercial-Share alike 3.0 Italian License

The paper via discussing the political mediatization, which considers as the characteristic of relationship between media and politics power aims to highlight briefly the concepts of media-twisted and media logic that have been used in analysing of media development. It further probes the relationship between mediatization and society development that influence some other social institutions in society and makes them dependent on media. Through analysing the historical development of media and media development in the last decade, the paper discusses the factors that strengthening or weakening political institutions and political adoption of the news media's criteria, format demands and dramaturgy.

Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook

2010

The exercise of political power in a democracy is primarily made through communication with institutions, civil society and individuals. What happens if governments have to deal with an enormous increase of mass, personal and interactive communication like the latest "explosion of communication"? The new media landscape arises issues in the relation of democratic governments with society, specially when it comes to the exercise of its power. In the past, media influenced not only the way government spoke with citizens but the political process and the media-politics relationship. Now it seems governments all over the world are successfully changing the media and the news. New attacks on the freedom of the press and journalists happen all over the world in either liberal or conservative regimes. This article with look for examples from several countries, as France, Italy, Portugal, Venezuela, Argentina, the United States and Russia, and will try to draw a picture and not just to gather a sum of anecdotical evidence. Can these strains and limitations result from the "excess" of nongovernment communications, leading governments to overtake the media, by legal procedures, exerting economic pressure, interfering in the media or upgrading their own marketing, propaganda and misinformation? The present day governmental hyperpropaganda and the constraints on journalists activity hint at the emergence of a new paradigma in the governments-media relation: severe constraints within a formal democracy. It is widely accepted that "attempts by governments to control and manipulate the media are universal because public officials everywhere believe that media are important political forces" and that, in consequence, nowhere are the media totally free from formal and informal government and social controls, even in times of peace. On the whole, authoritarian governments control more extensively and more rigidly than nonauthoritarian ones, but all control systems represent a point of continuum. There are also gradations of control within nations, depending on the current regime and political setting, regional and local variations, and then nature of news. The specifics of control systems vary from country to country, but the overall patterns are similar (Graber, 2010: 16). Hallin and Mancini (2004) theorised media systems with a mutual dependency between political and media institutions and practices, avoiding the paradigma of media always being the dependent variable on relation to the system of social control which it reflects: "media institutions have an impact of their own on other social structures" (Hallin and Mancini, 2004: 8). Considering that mutual dependency, they proposed three models of media systems: the Mediterranean or Polarized Pluralist (including Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain), the North and Central European or 1 Please do not quote without consulting the author.

(The phenomenon of mediatization of politics, its theoretical framework, its implications for the democratic process and its connections to research on political effects of political communication.} From Middle Eastern uprisings to iPad apps news sources, various dynamic democracies around the world have seen the transformative culture of the media and how impacts politics. Specifically, technology and it's increasingly low cost value of consumption allow persons to transcend space, time and political opinions. Access to the internet is practically a human rights now in this era, additionally so has been the right to consume news. As younger generations move away from party association and single source consumption, a breed of 'thinkers' has emerged by creating political ideas based on consumption of various media sources from the internet, television, radio and iPads. Traditional media sources now face market tests of new sources of perfect competition. New source possibilities are endless, now we must ask the question of how this internally affects the political culture. Despite it's multidisciplinary and debated definition, 'mediatization' had proven to have crystal clear effects on politics. Thus collaborating contents precipitate a unique phenomenon of the 'mediatization of politics'. One can argue that the 'mediatization of politics' directly threatens the framework of a modern democracy by the presence of 'media logic' while another projects the various outlets of information and rise of informed citizens as progressive democracts.)