Demagogic populism and media system: A preliminary articulation

2021 ◽  
pp. 026732312199953
Author(s):  
Paul K Jones

Political communication studies has a long tradition of ‘crisis talk’ regarding the fate of public communication. Now, however, the field itself faces a kind of existential crisis as its core assumptions of ‘normal’ political communication are daily undermined. This ‘liberal normalcy’ shares much with orthodoxies in populism studies, most notably a tendency to bracket out demagogic communication, both in historical fascist regimes and democracies. Yet correcting these failings is not simply a matter of rejecting liberal models for left-populist ones. Rather, both fields need to broaden their historical parameters and deepen their theoretical frameworks. The article draws on the Weberian conception of modern demagogy and its revision in the wake of 'modern media' by Shils and Adorno. It further argues that a critical reworking of Hallin and Mancini’s media systems approach could benefit both fields. For Hallin and Mancini’s socio-historical use of Weberian ideal-typification complements Worsley’s never-completed plan for an ideal-typification of modes of populism and demagogic leadership.

2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (s2) ◽  
pp. 53-69
Author(s):  
Birgir Guðmundsson

Abstract My main objective in this article is to examine the importance of political parallelism in Iceland through establishing the extent to which political parallelism is perceived to char-acterise political communication in Iceland by politicians and voters. Political parallelism is one of the defining elements of Hallin and Mancini's typology of media systems. Based on candidate surveys from five elections and a voter survey, indexes of perceived political parallelism are configured for politicians and voters. The analysis suggests a high degree of perceived political parallelism and that the perceptions are reflected in partisan ideological views of individual media outlets. The same – or at least similar – perceptions about political parallelism in the media system seem to penetrate the system irrespective of age and at the national, local, and individual level of politics. However, voters and candidates of social democratic and liberal internationally oriented parties perceive a significantly lower degree of parallelism than others.


Author(s):  
Paolo Mancini

In the early days of media studies researchers essentially devoted their attention to the effects of the media message. This has led to a major focus on the choices of single individuals while the analysis of more complex entities and phenomena has often been given secondary importance. This has created a delay in dealing with the aggregate level of system that had already been at the core of sister scientific fields such as political science. From these fields, communication studies has derived many possible directions for a systems approach, in particular a focus on the complex framework of interactions with other systems and their reciprocal influences. Comparative research in particular has gained from the adoption of a systems approach. Nevertheless criticism has not been lacking and has pointed out some major weakness in the systems approach: the difficulty in setting the borders of a system and the risk of underestimating the processes of globalization that makes the identification of media systems with the nation state difficult.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (19) ◽  
pp. 161-179
Author(s):  
Laura Cervi

The article analyzes the media treatment of two sex scandals: the “Stormy Daniels scandal”, which involved the current US President Donald Trump in 2018 and the “Ruby scandal”, which involved Silvio Berlusconi in 2010, while he was Italy’s Prime Minister. By combining both quantitative and qualitative methodologies the aim is to discover whether the media treatment is different, as we can expect since the two countries belong to two different media systems, or if, following the theory of Americanization of political communication, the Italian media will tend to emulate the American model. Furthermore, another aim of this study is to detect whether a shift towards a more Polarized Pluralist model can be identified in the USA, as some authors have started foreseeing. The results will show that both countries’ media behave coherently with the traditional feature of their media system, the Polarized Pluralist and the Liberal.


2021 ◽  
pp. 174804852110290
Author(s):  
Sookyung Cho ◽  
Ziyi Wang

Due to the relative lack of media comparison studies within Asian contexts, theoretical frameworks based in Western societies have been applied to knowledge production in the global South. Using a ‘most different’ design, this study compares the dimensions of media systems reflected in two Chinese and two Korean newspapers in their initial coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Content analysis showed statistically significant differences in distribution of sources, topics and valence, usage of frame types, and actors including domestic government and foreign entities held responsible between the two groups of media. Based on political implications of crisis on Chinese and Korean news content, we mainly discuss political instrumentalization and parallelism in the media in an Asian context. Finally, we open up the dimensions of media system from an Asian perspective and address the need for future research.


2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 638-657 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Thibault ◽  
Frédérick Bastien ◽  
Tania Gosselin ◽  
Colette Brin ◽  
Colin Scott

AbstractIn their much-quoted typology of Western media systems, Hallin and Mancini (2004) associate Canada's media system with what they call the “Liberal model,” given its strong professionalization and limited politicization. They also hypothesize the existence of a more professional and more politicized media subsystem in Quebec. This article tests their hypothesis with data from a 2018 survey of 209 experts across Canada. The findings do not support the hypothesis of a media subsystem in Quebec. However, they show a diversity of ideological and political orientations among news media organizations, which has important empirical and theoretical implications for the study of political communication in Canada.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 659-682 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Wells ◽  
Dhavan Shah ◽  
Josephine Lukito ◽  
Ayellet Pelled ◽  
Jon CW Pevehouse ◽  
...  

How populists engage with media of various types, and are treated by those media, are questions of international interest. In the United States, Donald Trump stands out for both his populism-inflected campaign style and his success at attracting media attention. This article examines how interactions between candidate communications, social media, partisan media, and news media combined to shape attention to Trump, Clinton, Cruz, and Sanders during the 2015–2016 American presidential primary elections. We identify six major components of the American media system and measure candidates’ efforts to gain attention from them. Our results demonstrate that social media activity, in the form of retweets of candidate posts, provided a significant boost to news media coverage of Trump, but no comparable boost for other candidates. Furthermore, Trump tweeted more at times when he had recently garnered less of a relative advantage in news attention, suggesting he strategically used Twitter to trigger coverage.


2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (001) ◽  
pp. 118-128
Author(s):  
Yelena GORYACHEVA

SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 215824402110101
Author(s):  
Xheni Simaku

The global society which we live in nowadays makes us rethink about media system, global dynamics, and the operation of the influences that these dynamics have on national media systems. Starting from the book by Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics, and under the Polarized Pluralist Model they proposed, the aim of this work is to compare Turkish and Italian journalists’ professionalization. This research has been conducted under the concept of professionalization that these authors suggested in their work and, more specifically, under the Polarized Pluralist Model, in which Hallin and Mancini recognize countries like Italy have the main characteristics described by the model; Turkey can also be included. The main goal of this work is to underline not only the similarities but also the differences that are encountered in these two countries in the journalistic professionalization. The methodology used is in-depth interviews with 10 journalists: five Italian and five Turkish journalists chosen from the biggest journals in their respective countries. Main topics taken into consideration were autonomy, clientelism, and professionalization in journalism based on ethics values. Even if the Polarized Pluralist Model seems to fit in both countries from a macro perspective, with the in-depth interviews, it is clearly seen that different cross-national nuances come out.


2021 ◽  
pp. 194016122199966
Author(s):  
Philipp Bachmann ◽  
Mark Eisenegger ◽  
Diana Ingenhoff

High-quality news is important, not only for its own sake but also for its political implications. However, defining, operationalizing, and measuring news media quality is difficult, because evaluative criteria depend upon beliefs about the ideal society, which are inherently contested. This conceptual and methodological paper outlines important considerations for defining news media quality before developing and applying a multimethod approach to measure it. We refer to Giddens' notion of double hermeneutics, which reveals that the ways social scientists understand constructs inevitably interact with the meanings of these constructs shared by people in society. Reflecting the two-way relationship between society and social sciences enables us to recognize news media quality as a dynamic, contingent, and contested construct and, at the same time, to reason our understanding of news media quality, which we derive from Habermas' ideal of deliberative democracy. Moreover, we investigate the Swiss media system to showcase our measurement approach in a repeated data collection from 2017 to 2020. We assess the content quality of fifty news media outlets using four criteria derived from the deliberative ideal ( N = 20,931 and 18,559 news articles and broadcasting items, respectively) and compare the results with those from two representative online surveys ( N = 2,169 and 2,159 respondents). The high correlations between both methods show that a deliberative understanding of news media quality is anchored in Swiss society and shared by audiences. This paper shall serve as a showcase to reflect and measure news media quality across other countries and media systems.


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