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"Mediatization" of Politics: AChallenge for Democracy?GIANPIETRO MAZZOLENI & WINFRIED SCHULZVersion of record first published: 06 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: GIANPIETRO MAZZOLENI & WINFRIED SCHULZ (1999):"Mediatization" of Politics: A Challenge for Democracy?, Political Communication,16:3, 247-261

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Mediatization of Politics:A Challenge for Democracy?

GIANPIETRO MAZZOLENI and WINFRIED SCHULZ

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 massmedia will usurp the functions of political institutions in the liberal state. However,close inspection of the evidence reveals that political institutions in many nationshave retained their functions in the face of expanded media power. The best descrip-tion of the current situation is mediatization, where political institutions increas-ingly 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 commu-nication, political parties

American politics tends to be driven more by political substance . . . than by the anticsof Media Politics. This straightforward conclusion of John Zallers (1998, p. 187) analysisof 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 ex-cessive intrusion of the media into the domestic political arena.

A similar position is held by W. Lance Bennett (1998), who concedes that televisionand related media of political communication are implicated in various political crimesand misdemeanors but does not think that the media should be blamed for a supposeddeath of civic culture (p. 744), which in fact is not dead in American society.

The theses of Zaller and Bennettthat voters and public opinion are far from beingdeeply affected in their political outlooks and behaviors by the medias treatment of political reality and are primarily and constantly concerned about peace, prosperity,and moderationare similar to conclusions reached by scholars who have investigatedthe intriguing interactions between media and political actors in several other countries.

The ideas of the irresistible power of the mass media and of media powers nega-tive consequences for the democratic process often have been shared by the academiccommunity around the world. Cases such as candidate Fernando Collor de Mellos re-markable television-fueled victory in the 1989 Brazilian presidential elections; the suc-cessful performance of Silvio Berlusconi, a media tycoon, in the 1994 Italian generalelections; and the 1997 electoral victory of Labour leader Tony Blair in the UnitedKingdom, who employed shrewd communication strategies, all provided ammunition to

Gianpietro Mazzoleni is Associate Professor of the Sociology of Mass Communication at theUniversity of Genova, Italy. Winfried Schulz holds the Chair in Mass Communication and Politi-cal Science at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany.

Address correspondence to Gianpietro Mazzoleni, DiSA-Dip. to di Scienze Antropologiche,Universit di Genova, Via Balbi 4, I-16126 Genova, Italy.

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Mediatization of Politics 249

some common pattern of media-driven democracy. Instead, the concept of mediati-zation of politics is a more sensible tool for addressing the question of whether themedia 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 atdifferent speeds. However, it has in all cases proved impossible to contain because themedia have assumed the character of necessity in the political domain. The massmedia 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 necessar-ily coincide with, and indeed often clash with, those of political communicators. Be-cause of the power of the media, political communicators are forced to respond to themedias 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 nego-

tiate with the medias preferred timing, formats, language, and even the content of thepoliticians communication (Dayan & Katz, 1992). Some even hypothesize that legiti-macy of the exercise of power increasingly might lie in the ability of rulers to communi-cate through the media (Cotteret, 1991).

The mediatization process has been under way for many years, stretching from thefirst age of political communication (see the article by Blumler and Kavanagh in thisissue), when communication systems were based on few press and electronic channelsand cohabited with political systems, through the second age of tumultuous changes inthe nature of both systems and of relations between them.

In the third age of multichannel communication, the mediatization of the politicalsphere has accelerated to the point that the subordination of the media system to thepolitical system in the first age seems to have changed into the acquisition by the mediaof great power in the public sphere and the political arena. However, this power, al-though far-reaching, is not so pivotal that it puts the media complex in the place of thepolitical parties, narcotizes the public, or diverts citizens from civic engagement, as Zallerand 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 con-texts in order to determine whether the general trend is toward a media-driven repub-lic, as critics claim, or toward innocuous forms of mediatized democracy, as weargue.

Mediatization Processes

The process of mediatization of political actors, political events, and political discourseis a major trend in political systems of the 1990s. It is a phenomenon that dates back atleast to the introduction of television, but it has certainly gained speed with the expan-sion and commercialization of media systems and the modernization of politics.

The term mediatization denotes problematic concomitants or consequences of thedevelopment of modern mass media. It is distinguished from mediation , which refers ina neutral sense to any acts of intervening, conveying, or reconciling between differentactors, collectives, or institutions. In this sense, mass media can be regarded as a medi-ating or intermediary agent whose function is to convey meaning from the communi-cator to the audience or between communication partners and thereby sometimes sub-

stitute for interpersonal exchanges. As an intermediary or mediating system, massmedia have the potential for bridging the distance between actors in both a physical

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250 Gianpietro Mazzoleni and Winfried Schulz

sense and a social psychological sense, that is, reconciling unacquainted or even con-flicting parties.

To speak of modern politics as being mediated is merely a descriptive statement.Communication, including mass mediated communication, is a necessary prerequisitefor the functioning of any political system (Almond & Powell, 1966). Inputs to thepolitical systemthe demands of citizens as well as their expressions of system sup-portmust be articulated by communication, channeled into the political arena by massmedia, and converted into system output. In a similar way, system outputpoliticaldecisions and actionshas to be communicated to the public, and in modern societiesthe mass media are essential for this function.

Nowadays more than ever, politics cannot exist without communication. Some scho-lars even hold that politics is communication (Deutsch, 1963; Meadow, 1980). Politicsincreasingly 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, andindependent of its substantive or symbolic value, sooner or later must go through thepublicity stage, which entails use of the media (for example, to make known the termsof a policy decision), resort to the means of persuasion, and exposure to scrutiny by thepress.

To characterize politics as being mediatized goes beyond a mere description of sys-tem requirements. Mediatized politics is politics that has lost its autonomy, has becomedependent in its central functions on mass media, and is continuously shaped by inter-actions with mass media. This statement of the mediatization hypothesis is based onobservations of how mass media produce political content and interfere with politicalprocesses. Walter Lippmanns seminal work set the tone for what became one of themost fertile areas of communication research (Lippmann, 1922). Of the processes thathave been identified as contributing to the mediatization of politics, the following areamong 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 fordetermining news value. Only part of the criteria of news value are intrinsic to thenews events. Often the selection process is determined more strongly by journalisticworldviews and by media production routines. However chosen, the medias selectivesample of events that are reported defines what appears to be the only reality for mostcitizens and often also for the political elite, particularly in those domains of activitywhere most people have no direct, personal access to what has happened. Almost every-thing 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 ordinarycitizens. Moreover, news value criteria such as proximity, conflict, drama, and personal-ization 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 themedia reality of politics because news reports typically accentuate the features that makean event newsworthy (Galtung & Ruge, 1965).

Second, in contrast to the ancient Greek polis where every citizen was able to par-ticipate in public life in the agora , as we are told by romantic histories that glorifydemocracy, 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

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actors and spectators. Political protagonists on the media stage act in front of more orless passive audiences and consumers of politics. It is left to the media to decide whowill get access to the public. In the same way that media select and frame events, themedia 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 publicsphere. 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, themedia also assign political relevance and importance to social problems by selecting andemphasizing certain issues and neglecting others.

Third, media logic (Altheide & Snow, 1979), the frame of reference within whichthe media construct the meaning of events and personalities they report, increasingly hascome to reflect the commercial logic of the media industry, mixing the structural con-straints of media communication with the typical aims of commercial communication

activity. One major implication for politics is the spectacularization of political com-munication formats and of political discourse itself. The adaptation of political languageto the medias commercial patterns has been observed in three domains: (a) the commu-nication outlook of political actors, be they the government, the parties, leaders, orcandidates for office; (b) the communication techniques that are used; and (c) the con-tent of political discourse. For instance, U.S. politicians almost became voiceless ontelevision during recent decades; in television news coverage of political campaigns, thesoundbites 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 amongthe 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. Never-theless, the adoption and use of high doses of media-borne communication elements,such as television techniques and production styles, in the information agencies of gov-ernments and in the propaganda machines of political parties bring along with themrevision of the old communication tools and habits. In a number of European countries,

especially the largest countries, election campaigns increasingly have come to resembleU.S. campaigns (Swanson & Mancini, 1996). Today, the resort to external campaignexpertise, to professional consultancy, is normal practice for many European parties andcandidates. Television debates and talk shows, spot ads, staged events on the campaigntrail, marketing research techniques, growing propaganda expenditures, and the like arecommon features. In short, the language of politics has been married with that of ad-vertising, public relations, and show business. What is newsworthy, what hits the head-lines, what counts in the public sphere or in the election campaign are communicationskills, 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 medias attention rules, production routines, selection crite-ria, and molding mechanisms are well known in the world of politics, thanks not least tothe efforts of communication scholars, political actors know and are able to adapt theirbehavior to media requirements. Such reciprocal effects may be seen as a special kindof media impact on reality (Lang & Lang, 1953). If political actors stage an event inorder to get media attention, or if they fashion an event in order to fit to the mediasneeds 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 beseen as attempts by political actors to gain control over the media. In other words, we

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are facing a symbiotic relationship that is characterized by a mediatization of politicsand, at the same time, politicians instrumental use of mass media for particular politicalgoals. The use of methods for engineering public opinion and consent, such as politicalopinion polling, marketing strategies, proactive news management, and spin doctoringwhich have been studied and discussed extensively in recent yearsis indicative of thisphenomenon.

Finally, the mass media have genuine, legitimate political functions to perform invoicing a distinct position on an issue and engaging in investigative reporting to per-form their watchdog or partisan role. News partisanship is a European tradition thatgoes back to the close linkages between newspapers and political parties in the 19thcentury. It is still quite common that a newspapers editorial position colors its newscoverage, and broadcast journalism has adopted this style in many European countries.However, journalistic partisanship becomes particularly problematic under two condi-

tions: (a) when the political beliefs of journalists deviate substantially from the beliefsof their news audiences, which seems to be the case in countries like Italy and Germanywhere journalists view themselves as more liberal than their audience (Patterson & Dons-bach, 1996), and (b) when the mass media exaggerate their control functions and focusexcessively on the negative aspects of politics, which also is an obvious trend on theEuropean scene.

Societal Trends and Changing Political Cultures

Two societal trendsthe crisis of the party system and the rise of a sophisticated citi-zenryare independent variables in the changing conditions between mass media andpolitical institutions and are factors that relativize, or shape in different ways withindifferent contexts, the effects of excessive mediatization. Both have strong bearing onthe structure and content of political communication in society. Since the latter trend hasto 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 inrecent decades is characterized, among other things, by a change of value orientationsand an increase of political skills among the population. Ingleharts postmodernizationhypothesis 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 topostmaterial values (Inglehart, 1977, 1997). Inglehart contends that the growing economyand the establishment of a comprehensive welfare system altered the value preferencesof certain segments of the population. As peoples basic subsistence needs were metin advanced industrial societies, material values receded into the background. Politicalissues linked to economic growth, crime prevention, and national defense became lesssalient. Instead, people placed higher priority on postmaterial values such as individualfreedom, 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 accom-modate 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

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in the issues featured in political debates, a shift that reflects, to some extent, structuralchanges in the belief systems particularly of the younger, higher educated urban popula-tion. Postmodern concerns for environmental protection, individual freedom, socialequality, civic participation, and a higher quality of life have been added to the traditionalpolitical agenda of economic and security issues (Dalton, 1996). The mass media, whichare strongly committed to topicality and constantly are in search of new trends, are thepacesetters of these developments.

A second trend contributes to the change in value preferences and at the same timehas an independent effect on the political culture. All industrial societies have beenexperiencing an enormous expansion of higher education. Between 1950 and 1975, uni-versity enrollment increased by about 350% in the United States. An even more dra-matic increase took place in Europe, where the figures in Britain, West Germany, andFrance, 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 skillsand a higher degree of political sophistication. Political sophistication determines a personscapacity to process information and to make meaning of the political issues encounteredin mass media. Political sophistication also expands the horizon of peoples interestsand raises their level of attention to public affairs and participation in politics.

Empirical data provide a mixed picture of the development of the publics politicalsophistication and attention over the past decades. On the one hand, the level of politicalinformation holding has not increased considerably, as measured by factual questionsasked of samples representative of the U.S. population (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996).Levels of voter turnout in national elections have even declined in most liberal democ-racies since the 1960s. On the other hand, measures of interest in politics have beengoing up during the same period, as have civic engagement, especially on the commu-nity 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 symp-toms of a general change in the publics 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 thepositions of the political parties. Sophisticated citizens have included unconventionalmodes in their repertoire of political participation and, for instance, may judge referen-dums 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 publics political knowl-edgefactual questions about traditional political institutionswhich have changed littlesince they were first introduced in U.S. surveys in the 1940s, may have lost their rel-evance, and it is doubtful that such questions are indicative of peoples understanding of politics (Graber, 1994).

In addition to political sophistication, the ubiquitous availability of information viamass media is an important resource that self-mobilized citizens use for developing theirpolitical orientation individually and independently of party ideology. As a result of anever-expanding media system, the press, radio, and television provide a steadily increasingabundance of politically relevant information. Recently, the diffusion of the Internet hasprompted 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

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the possibility of electronic democracy (Street, 1997). Because the Internet representsa shift from mass media to interactive media, and from monological to dialogical com-munication, 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 citizensare the early adopters of these new media.

Although societal changes gave rise to a growing segment of self-mobilized citi-zens, there remains a large group of people who are poorly informed and not muchinterested in politics, the chronic know-nothings who have worried political scientistssince 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 motiva-tion, 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 cleav-

ages and prevailing group interests, the parties acquired a profile that served as evidenceof political competence for many voters. However, with the general trend toward declin-ing party identification in advanced industrial democracies, the parties have lost muchof their former orientation function, particularly for apolitical citizens.

Dalton (1996) presents survey data that show that over a period of four decadesritual 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 thesame period the new independentshighly mobilized citizens without a party identifi-cationincreased from 16% to 24%, while apolitical citizens remained stable at 16%.

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

When citizens rely heavily or exclusively on the media for their political nourish-ment, 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 sensi-tive to current issues, to images of political leaders, and to the changing zeitgeist . Be-cause a partys showing in elections increasingly has come to depend on its ability notonly 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 be-come a primary goal of modern election campaigns. Voters have to be re-won in everyelection by use of sophisticated communication means and messages, and with publicopinion management tied in with the world of communication and the news media. Andin all of this, it is obvious that the polls have become highly important oracles for partyleaders and government officials. They serve as a basis for shaping the political agendaand framing campaign issues.

These changes are seen by some critical analysts as a deformation of rational citi-zenship. Increasingly, we have to deal with a society composed of a majority of whatSchudson (1995) calls informational citizens, those who are saturated with bits andbytes of information abundantly and chaotically provided by the media, and a minorityof informed citizens, who have not only information but a point of view and prefer-ences 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 perfor-mance, but of political culture (pp. 27, 169).

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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 majorparts of the population. The traditional social cleavagesconflicts between social classes,

the center versus the periphery, and the State versus the Churchthat gave rise to po-litical ideologies and parties in the 18th and 19th centuries have been leveled or havelost much of their formative influence. This is manifested, for example, in the continu-ous decline of class-based party choice, which for a long period was a distinctive votingpattern in many countries. As can be seen from a comparative analysis of party pro-grams of 10 democracies over four decades, party systems have adjusted only reluc-tantly to social changes (Klingemann, Hofferberg, & Budge, 1994). Despite all of thechanges in citizens orientations to politics and political institutions, the traditional left-right dimension is still the dominant dimension along which parties try to differentiatethemselves from each other, even though some socialist and social-democratic partieshave moved slightly to the center.

Although the weakening of party ties affects most advanced democracies, this gen-eral trend has different roots and has taken different paths in different countries. Com-paring the United States and West Germany, Klingemann and Wattenberg (1992) dis-tinguished between decaying and developing party systems. The United States is theprototype of a decaying system in which the candidates no longer need the parties toreach 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 accom-modation of the party system to societal changes. The decline of the mass parties inmany countries, which was under way long before the fall of the Berlin Wall, combinedwith the latest changes, generating new and sometimes unprecedented forms of politicalconsent-gathering and power-managing structures. It became quite common to see therapid rise (and rapid disappearance) of new political movements, single-issue parties,and light parties (the major example being Berlusconis Forza Italia, assembled in afew weeks of heavy media build-up) holding very loose organizational ties with theirgrass roots. The environmental movements and peace activists of the 1970s, which canbe seen as manifestations of the postmaterialist turn, have in some countries crystallizedto Green party organizations and now participate in political coalitions, mostly on thecommunity level but also on the national level as in France and Germany. On the otherside of the political spectrum, right-wing and racist parties found their constituenciesamong adherents of old materialist values who have been suffering from economic inse-curity or decline. The success of Le Pen in France, of Fini in Italy, and of the FlemishNeo-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 com-pletely detached from the electorate, is seeking a stable structure, and is continuouslychallenged by Berlusconis populist movement. Anti-party sentiments are rising in theelectorates of most countries, and party affiliation, including party membership, isdeclining. To illustrate the current situation, Table 1 presents a Eurobarometer resultfrom 1997 data that shows that in each member state of the European Union, peoplestrust in the political parties is lower than their trust in other political institutions. Trust inparties often falls appallingly far behind the trust given to nonpolitical institutions, par-ticularly to television, a fact that has been noticed for quite some time in the UnitedStates (Wattenberg, 1990) and that seems to have become global (Inglehart, 1997).

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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 ex-amination, 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 whatand to tell them what they should be for or against. And people no longerlook to the parties to provide them with parades, marching bands, and Thanksgivingturkeys. Nor do the parties offer their constituents soapboxes on which to airtheir views. Television and talk radio have taken on that job. (pp. 121122)

The demise of political parties, as Kalb (1992) has described the American partysystem, gives rise to candidate-centered and highly personalized campaigns that relyheavily on the mass media. In the U.S. system, a candidate can run for office virtuallyindependent of any party, but the candidate is completely dependent on support by massmedia. The situation in Europe is different. Although political leaders may run indepen-dently of the traditional party system, as the Berlusconi case demonstrated in a spec-tacular way, the usual pattern is still that candidates are nominated by party organiza-tions and that the campaigns depend to a high degree on the party organizations. EvenBerlusconi, after he won the elections, found it necessary to establish a partylike organi-zation with his Forza Italia . European parliamentary systems allow much less room

than the American presidential system for personalization of election campaigns focusedon individual leaders or candidates (Kaase, 1994).

Table 1Trust in institutions, by country

Question: I would like to ask you a question about how much trust you have in certaininstitutions. For each of the following institutions, please tell me if you tend to trust it ortend not to trust it.

Percentage of Europeanrespondents Union:who tend Average of Unitedto trust . . . 15 countries France Germany Italy Netherlands Spain Kingdom

The government 37 37 29 27 67 41 46The parliament 40 38 35 29 64 45 46Political parties 16 12 13 13 40 20 18The church 50 36 47 55 43 49 54Justice, legal

system 43 36 50 31 54 39 48Trade unions 38 36 39 29 62 36 36The press 40 51 42 34 61 50 15Radio 63 62 62 49 78 68 67Television 56 46 59 42 75 49 65

Note . Figures for four other institutionsthe European Union, civil service, the police, and thearmyhave been omitted to make the table less complex. EU averages for trust in these institu-tions are, respectively, 37%, 40%, 62%, and 61%. Data were derived from European Commission(1998).

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Parties still play an important role in the typical European campaign. But the massmedia have appropriated several of their functions and have transformed traditional partycampaigns into media campaigns, at least to some extent. Deep mutations that postCold War political systems in Europe are facing go beyond the context of electoralcampaigning and contribute to a weakening of the traditional party-centered politics.The disappearance of strong ideological tenets from the forefront of political debate hasforced the parties to reshape their outlooks and practices, and even their names andsymbols.

Trends in the News Business and Profession

The media industry is undergoing epochal changes both on the global level and in indi-vidual countries. The rapid spread of the new information and communication technolo-

gies (ICTs) and the industrial and financial interests of the media and telecommu-nication trusts are prompting a revolution also in the conventional mass media. Theadjustment by the news media and journalism to the new scenarios is progressing atdifferent speeds in different national and continental contexts, but some changes havealready 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 pres-ence of public service broadcasting, which meant there was some form of governmentalcontrol, direct or indirect, over the entire newsmaking process, from recruitment of jour-nalists to production policies. In the late 1970s, public television monopolies in manycountries began to be challenged by newly born local, private, community, and mostlycommercial radio and television channels that familiarized the domestic audiences withalternative and often successful news offerings. Today, this process is much broader andmore dramatic: New information outlets, such as satellite and cable channels, are in-creasing in number and engage in fierce competition with public broadcasting channels.One important side effect of the rush to commercialized communication and news hasbeen a decrease (but not the disappearance) of the formerly high level of politicizationof both the public media organizations and the outlook of news professionals.

Second, the process of commercialization of the public and private news mediaindustry is clearly seen in the preferences noted earlier of news organizations for spec-tacular and sensationalistic coverage of political events and leaders. The game schema(Patterson, 1993), election reporting focused on the horse race, and the gusto for cam-paign hoopla are but two examples of the increasing drift of journalism toward infotain-ment and the disenchanted, superficial treatment of politics.

Third, in addition to a widespread journalism that pursues commercial objectivesand frames political reality accordingly, we can also observe in various national con-texts the rise of an adversarial type of news media that does not fit the traditional modelof the role relationships linking the press and politicians (Blumler & Gurevitch, 1981).There is growing evidence that a number of news media organizations try to competewith the political parties and political actors for public consent and legitimation in thesame political arena. The signs of anti-party or anti-politics sentiments and of attentionto neo-populist issues are numberless in almost all countries. Bill Clintons sexgateaffair also could be seen as an example of this development. In some cases, such asItaly during the 19921994 investigations of political corruption, the revitalization of the medias 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, andpresidents. Another sign is the bullying of political candidates and paranoia by certain

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media in election campaigns (Patterson, 1993). The effects of this conduct can be seenin dramatic events such as the resignation of high public figures, the angry libel suits bythe personalities who have been attacked by the media, the embarrassed reactions of thepowerful, and even suicides (like that of the former French premier P. Brgovoy). Thistrend in the news profession is well captured by the concept of dmontage of politicsdiscussed by Kleppinger (1998).

Finally, the new media, the Internet, and the information superhighway are literallyrevolutionizing the news industry and profession and represent a serious challenge to itssurvival. They could undermine the traditional mediation function of journalism, bypass-ing 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 newsmedia; it is directed to special publics whose information needs are not fulfilled byconventional 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 withthe constraints and logics of traditional news organizations. Increasingly in election cam-paigns, 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 and a search for greater media independence from politicalinstitutions by means of commercialism, and on the other hand, evidence of the tradi-tional medias decreasing influence and power over politics.

Conclusion

Do such transformations in the societal, political, and media domains provide evidenceto support the concerned alarms of an irresistible drift toward a media-driven democ-racy? 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 crit-ics apocalyptic views are probably based on misinterpretation of the real latitude orextent of certain key trends. In other words, some of the scholarly research in politicalcommunication that has led to critics alarm seems too focused on the distortions pro-duced by the media-politics complex in the United States and tends to infer from theU.S. experience that there is a global decline of democratic institutions assaulted byintrusive media. In fact, despite general trends, the experiences of other countries havebeen significantly different from the experience of the United States. Moreover, someproponents of critical perspectives seem to have difficulty in distinguishing betweenphenomena that reflect the sheer mediatization of politics and phenomena that raiselegitimate concerns.

Our brief account of trends in the European context shows a simple but significantreality, that the media systems and political systems in European countries interact withpatterns that protect each from excessive influence of the other. The existence of un-doubted media power is counterbalanced and quite often exceeded by the power of political parties and institutions. In the European experience, there is some limited evi-dence 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 monopolyof the political game, much like in previous times.

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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. Thisis not to deny that consent is organized through the media. To argue that the polls canbe means of manipulation of opinion does not mean that they are in all cases and in allplaces. In other words, opinion trends in society can be initiated by the media andthrough the media, but they find political representation only through and in politicalorganizations, whether they be the old parties (as the CDU-CSU and SPD in Germanyand PSF in France), the reconceived and reorganized parties (such as the Labour Partyin the United Kingdom and the DS in Italy), the newly born parties, or coalitions thatgather a number of single-issue movements. According to Zaller (1998), even Ameri-can 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 Conventionsare 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 allegedking-making power of the media is fictional. Critics look at the press and see Super-man when its 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 turninto 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 theBritish case where, according to Blumler, Kavanagh, and Nossiter (1996), there existsensible signs of politics resistance to being absorbed by the media. This means thatcertain political cultures have the capacity to hold media pressures in check and tomaintain the centrality that politics has traditionally held in a nations life.

Moreover, the growing hostility of many news media to political leaders and partiesis 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 independencefrom it (Blumler & Gurevitch, 1987). The several cases of harsh conflict can be seeneasily as normal dialectics in the political arena, not as rehearsals of an imminent me-dia dictatorship. It is significant that cases in which governments and politicians are

implementing effective news management policies are increasing in number, includingin the United States.

Finally, if we concede that the new communication technologies may weaken po-litical institutions traditional functions of socialization and organization of consent, weshould also admit two contextual processes: a diminished effectiveness of the traditionalmass media in mobilizing mass audiences (Bennett, 1998) and a weakening of the tradi-tional editorial and critical functions and roles of the news media themselves due to thediffusion of interactive communications and the growing preference of the news indus-try for instrumental journalism (Bardoel, 1996). This evidence combines with thatpreviously noted to invalidate the interpretation of the trends in the political, social, andcommunication worlds as indicating a possible takeover of politics by the media.

In conclusion, political systems in most liberal democracies are facing momentouschanges on the communication front that raise serious challenges to the old order. Therisks of downfall of many founding institutions, sucked in by ersatz agents of politicaldynamics, are real and should not be minimized. Excessive mediatization of politicalleadership and political practice, citizens forced to become consumers and spectators,and fragmentation of political participation induced by the new information and com-

munication technologies all can distort the proper functioning of democracy. But tomaintain that we are heading toward a media-driven democracy, that is, toward the

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dissolution of the primacy of politics in the polis , is an unwarranted conclusion relyingon erroneous estimates of phenomena that are simply connatural to modern politics,largely and deeply interwoven with communication. In brief, media politics does notmean politics by the media .

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