Page 75 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION

and political decision-making in terms of an ‘ecological’ model,
based on ‘a need for working models which include, not only ways
of understanding how public and policy actors form their agendas
and perspectives, but how journalistic agendas are shaped as well,
and how these two sectors of reality-making are interlinked’ (1987,
p. 28) [their emphasis]. They add that ‘media effects are embedded
in the actions of the policy actor, just as the policy actors’ own
behaviour comes to be reflected in journalists’ formulations. Media
and policy are part of a single ecology in which cultural materials
cumulate and dissipate, often imperceptibly, throughout a media-
policy web’ (ibid.).

SOME CRITICISMS OF THE MEDIA

To say that the media have important cognitive and agenda-setting
effects in modern democracies in perhaps, by this stage in our
history, a statement of the obvious. More contentious, however, is
the benign view of the media’s role described in the previous section.
Many observers have challenged the liberal democratic notion of
the ‘public sphere’ and the media’s contribution to it (Entman,
1989). For some, the very form of media output militates against
understanding on the part of the audience, while others perceive the
media as ideological institutions in societies where political power
is not distributed equitably or rationally but on the basis of class
and economic status.
The former criticism is voiced by Colin Sparks who notes the
importance for media culture, in Britain and in other capitalist
societies, of ‘popular’, ‘tabloid’ journalism, with its focus on issues
‘not normally associated with the public sphere, such as sex
scandals, human interest, and bizarre crime stories’ (1992, p. 22).
‘Quality’ journalism, in the words of one observer, produces
information ‘required for the smooth operation of the public sphere
and of governmental party politics. It is a generalised knowledge
of policy – of broad social events and movements that is distanced
from the materiality of everyday life’ (Fiske, 1992, p. 49). By
contrast, argues Sparks, the popular press ‘offers an immediate
explanatory framework [of social and political reality] in terms of
individual and personal causes and responses’ (1992, p. 22). This
fragmentation and trivialisation of complex social reality, he claims,
tends to undermine the audience’s ability to make sense of events,
and hence to think and act rationally.

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