Page 53 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Americanization, Globalization, and Secularization

devote more attention to campaigning through the media (Dalton
and Wattenberg 2000, 11–12).

The growth of electronic media, especially television, has tended
to diminish the role of the party. The electronic media also make it
easier to communicate events and issues through personalities ...
(Dalton et al. 2000, 55).
In most cases, however, media system change is not analyzed with the
same rigor as other variables, either conceptually or empirically, and
we are left with many ambiguities about what exactly has changed in
media systems and how those changes are related to the wider historical
process.

“EXPANSION OF THE MEDIA”
In what sense has the media system “expanded”? Certainly, it has not
done so in a unilinear manner: there are various countertrends during
the late twentieth century, the most significant of which is probably the
reduction in the number of newspapers that characterizes most coun-
tries, resulting in a disappearance of newspaper competition in many
markets. Nevertheless, it is accurate in many ways to say that there has
been an expansion of media in the post–World War II period. There
are fewer newspapers but they are bigger enterprises, with more pages;
the number of journalists has increased; and, most dramatically, new
forms of media have evolved. The most important form of media ex-
pansion is clearly the growth of electronic media. It is very plausible that
the unprecedented reach of electronic media, and their ability to carry
messages to the entire population simultaneously, across social and po-
litical divisions, changed political communication in important ways,
encouraging political parties and other organizations to abandon earlier
forms of communication in favor of centralized use of mass media as
well as to target audiences outside their original social bases. (Other new
information technologies may also have encouraged the shift toward
more professionalized and individualized patterns of political commu-
nication, including the development of polling, direct mail marketing,
and eventually the Internet.) It is also very likely that the increased reach
of electronic media, combined with the increased assertiveness of jour-
nalists and with commercialization – both of which will be discussed
in the following text – have made the media an increasingly central so-
cial institution, to a significant extent displacing churches, parties, trade

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