Politics Lost, Politics Transformed, Politics Colonised? Theories of the Impact of Mass Media

In recent years, there has been a substantial increase in the literature on the relationship between politics and mass media, mainly in discrete topic areas such as the impact of mass media on electoral behaviour, the emergence of new forms of political communication, or media political economy. At the same time, this diverse literature has often focused on a single general issue, typically characterised in terms of the 'transformation' of politics. Despite this common theme, there has been relatively little attempt to connect and compare the different approaches. Looking at the theoretical differences in the new literature on politics and mass media reveals three perspectives – pluralist, constructivist, and structuralist. These approaches have too often tacitly co-existed, instead of more competitively striving to advance knowledge in the three main topic areas above.     

Tradition and Change: Four People A Response to the Politics of Paradox

Helen Goodman, the Member of Parliament for Bishop Auckland has responded to the Blue Labour Publication The Politics of Paradox, with Tradition and Change: Four People. Blue Labour's thesis is that a return to the ideas and practices prevalent at the foundation of the Labour Party—solidarity and reciprocity, can form the basis of significant social change. Helen views the thesis from the perspective of two communities—first the hill farmers of Teesdale, a paradigmatic community whose rights and way of life on the Commons have existed for over 600 years. Then she looks at the Durham Miners’ Gala and the needs of the former coalfields. Helen argues that in both cases, only government can take the national and international action they need. Secondly she looks at the stories of a mother and a priest. The importance of the welfare state in providing security and opportunities becomes clear. Helen confronts Blue Labour's criticism of women's independence and prays in aid the Archbishop of Canterbury on the need for a feminist analysis. She accuses Blue Labour of ‘drum and trumpet jingoism’.     

Politics, Robinson Crusoe, Harold Laski and Plato: A Response to Burns

In a recent article, Tony Burns (2000) challenged the traditional view that politics is necessarily restricted to relations between human beings. However, what such a challenge does not take into account is that the values of non-human nature cannot be conveyed from their source to the humans that represent them. Indeed, such values are estimated by nature's human representatives. The ideas of Harold Laski and Plato can be invoked to support the argument that Robinson Crusoe's relation to nature is not a political one.     

A Better Press: A Response to John Lloyd's ‘Regulate Yourself’

Writing recently in The Political Quarterly, the journalist John Lloyd took issue with regulatory remedies for ‘bad journalism’ in the United Kingdom that were proposed by the Leveson inquiry of 2011–12 and endorsed by Parliament in 2013 in the form of a Royal Charter. State action will fail, he asserted, because only journalists can change journalism, and he urged British journalists to undertake this transformation. This response argues that Lloyd dismisses the Leveson process too lightly and takes too little account of the many victims of press abuses, who are entitled to better protection. A decent society had to do something about this, and the Leveson Charter process was a measured and constructive response that offers the best hope of higher press standards and of protection for ordinary citizens while safeguarding freedom of expression for journalists. Lloyd's proposal for action by journalists, by contrast, is impractical, not least because it ignores powerful forces preventing journalists from taking control.     

Televised Exposure to Politics: New Measures for a Fragmented Media Environment

For many research purposes, scholars need reliable and valid survey measures of the extent to which people have been exposed to various kinds of political content in mass media. Nonetheless, good measures of media exposure, and of exposure to political television in particular, have proven elusive. Increasingly fragmented audiences for political television have only made this problem more severe. To address these concerns, we propose a new way of measuring exposure to political television and evaluate its reliability and predictive validity using three waves of nationally representative panel data collected during the 2008 presidential campaign. We find that people can reliably report the specific television programs they watch regularly, and that these measures predict change over time in knowledge of candidate issue positions, a much higher standard of predictive validity than any other measure has met to date.