Page 214 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Hanspeter Kriesi

appealing to the public and urging that such forms are put under public
scrutiny.

MEDIA-CENTERED STRATEGIES
The media increasingly constitute the crucial channel for conveying pol-
itics. In the process, they not only provide information, but they also
become actors of their own in the political process.Asaresult of their
selection function in the production of events, they can assume a lead-
ing role. First of all, the media decide whether they want to report on a
subject at all. Their targeted, active selection of events plays, above all, a
role in areas in which political actors explicitly try to avoid the public.
Where the media try to attract the attention of the public to specific is-
sues against the resistance of at least some political actors, the reporting
becomes an event. In such instances, the mobilization of public atten-
tion serves to exert pressure on political actors, and the media fulfill
a controlling function,whichcorresponds to the traditional role of the
opposition.
In addition, the media also have a crucial structuring and orienta-
tion function.Media commentaries are of particular importance in this
context. Commentaries serve to define and interpret political problems,
they provide analyses of their causes (“diagnostic framing”) and formu-
late solutions (“prognostic framing”). In the context of their structuring
contributions, the media mobilize consensus for their issue- and actor-
specific interpretations. As Neidhardt et al. (1998, 2) point out, only few
issues become the object of commentaries, and we can assume that those
are the issues and problems the editorial staff considers important and
in need of some sort of action. As a result of the mechanism of inter-
media agenda setting, the commentaries of a few quality papers play a
particularly important role. At least for the United States, it was possible
to show that news commentaries (and experts) on television (Page et al.
1987) and in the press (Dalton et al. 1998) have strong agenda-setting
effects.
The impact of commentaries in the media is, according to Neidhardt
et al. (1998), particularly strong if all the media focus on the same is-
sues (congruence of the media agenda) and all adopt the same opinion
(consonance and consensus). Page et al. (1987) suspect that commen-
taries have a strong effect when presidents are weak, and that commen-
tators can under such circumstances serve as substitutes for respected
leaders.Moregenerally,wecouldexpectmediacommentatorstobecome

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