Making Sense of Media and Politics

Five Principles in Political Communication

Gadi Wolfsfeld

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000550634
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politischer Prozess

In Making Sense of Media and Politics, Gadi Wolfsfeld introduces readers to the most important concepts for examining the interrelationship of media and politics. Five major principles are used to summarize the major arguments:

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• Political power can usually be translated into power over all forms of media.

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• When the powerful lose control over the political environment, they also lose control over all forms of media.

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• Every political story that appears in every form of media is biased.

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• All forms of media are primarily dedicated to telling good stories, which can have a major impact on political processes.

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• Many of the most important effects of the various forms of media on citizens tend to be unintentional and unnoticed.

By identifying these five key principles of political communication, Wolfsfeld examines those who package and send political messages, those who transform political messages into stories, and the effects this can have on citizens, and how the more active members of the public ("users") can initiate their own stories. The result is a brief, engaging guide to help make sense of the wider world of media and politics and an essential companion to more in-depths studies of the field.

New to the Second Edition

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• Up-to-date coverage of major political events in the last decade, including the landmark US elections of 2016 and 2020.

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• Devotes more attention to the "hybrid media system" that has developed over the last decade, providing a greater balance between traditional "news" and social media in particular.

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• Includes more cross-national research, especially in non-Western and non-democratic countries.

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• Refines the five principles of political communication to better reflect contemporary media trends.

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• Covers key emerging topics including misinformation and threats to democratic institutions, new forms of political engagement, and the economic base of the various forms of media.

Part I Political Actors Compete of the Media

This is where it all starts. Political actors all trying to have an impact: on their communities, on their country, and on the world. They come in all shapes and forms. Some are powerful; others are weak. Some have radical new ideas involving serious change while others prefer either the status quo or some minor reforms. There are political leaders, political parties, political movements, commercial companies, interest groups, lobbies, trade unions, neighborhood groups, terrorist groups, and sometimes just a few individuals who get together because they’re angry about something.

One of the most important things all of these groups share is that they want the use of all the different forms of available media to help them achieve their goals. There are a few exceptions, mostly among those who have the connections to work behind the scenes. For all the rest, however, getting coverage in the traditional news media, especially positive coverage, can bring many benefits.¹ The same can be said about having your messages go viral in social media. Take, for example, what media coverage can do for political movements. Sympathetic coverage can bring new members and supporters, help them raise money, raise their issues onto the public agenda, allow them to form political alliances and put pressure on political leaders. Many times publicity doesn’t bring a group anything more than a nice feeling that one’s name is in the newspaper or in a YouTube clip. But it terms of potential, it is hard to think of many assets that can do so much for any political actor as gaining regular access to various forms of media (although having lots of money doesn’t exactly hurt).

Today, the majority of political actors spend much more time and resources to exploit social media to get noticed and spread their messages. The new technologies provide major advantages for both the politically weak and the powerful. For small unknown movements or political parties, they provide an alternative way to reach people, because weaker political actors come to understand that gaining access to the mainstream media is virtually impossible. For well-known political leaders it provides even more advantages, especially the ability to bypass traditional media and avoid the annoying filter of reporters and editors who have their own way of selecting and interpreting what they are being told. As any political leader will tell you, “what goes in is definitely not what comes out”. There’s a good reason why President Trump loved Twitter!

One of the major problems confronting most political actors is that they must compete with hundreds and sometimes thousands of other actors who also want to get their message out. It is a difficult competition, especially for those without any political standing. The first two chapters are designed to provide you with the basic rules of this competition. Chapter 1 deals with one of the most important rules: the greater an actor’s political power the more likely they are to be able to translate that into power over the media. This one rule, it turns out, has tremendously important ramifications. It has a major impact on who is and is not heard, the size of their audience, and ultimately on their chances for political success.

The second chapter will also look at the topic from the political actors’ perspective, but suggests important factors that can limit their power over the media. As stated in our introduction, when political leaders lose control over the political environment they also lose control over the various forms of media. This chapter will try to provide readers with some helpful insights as to when this is most likely to happen.

Note

1. Some scholars in political communication prefer the term “legacy media” instead of traditional media. I prefer using the term traditional because it is easier for non-scholars to understand.

1 Political Power and Power over the Media

DOI: 10.4324/9781003176657-2

Think about two political actors, each trying to get into the news. For now, let’s talk only about the traditional news media (the digital media will come into play a bit later). Assume, for the sake of argument, that both are from the same political party, both have similar political views, and both look equally good in front of the camera. But there’s one small difference between them: One is the President of the United States and the other is a new Congressperson from North Dakota. Presidents have a huge number of journalists assigned to them and can appear in the news any time they want. They also have millions of followers on Twitter. The Congressperson, on the other hand, has to compete with a horde of other politicians and convince reporters that she has something newsworthy to say and the number of people who follow her on social media is much smaller. The President never has problems getting into the national news, while the new Congressperson will be lucky if she gets covered in the local news.

Other powerful people in the government, whether it be the U.S. Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, or the Speaker of the House also have little trouble getting into the news. If we were to build a ladder of influence from the most powerful people in Washington to the least important we would have a pretty accurate measure of their chance of getting into the national news. Here’s a good illustration of how political power leads to power over the media. Anybody who is reading this book probably knows the name of the Vice President and (hopefully) the Secretary of State (if not, Google it, you should know!). Now try to name the Secretary of Veterans Affairs. Unless you have some reason to be concerned with veterans’ issues, chances are you have no idea (but you could also Google that).

The reason of course is that the Secretaries of Veterans Affairs are simply not considered newsworthy, unless they get in trouble. A good rule of thumb is that journalists run after the politically powerful and politically weak run after journalists. This brings us to the first of the five principles: Political power can usually be translated into power over all forms of media.

We start by considering the traditional media and then we’ll say something about digital media. One reason journalists consider the powerful more newsworthy is that these are the people who are most likely to have an impact on the country and the world. The President, after all, can go to war. The chance that an individual Congressperson can have a major impact on the political process is slim unless they are the deciding vote in an important piece of legislation. Even then, their fame is likely to be brief and they will quickly return to obscurity.

Here’s another way to think of this idea. The relationship between journalists and political leaders can be considered a competitive symbiosis. It is a symbiotic relationship because each depends on the other in order to achieve their goals. Leaders want publicity and the journalists want interesting information they can turn into news. The reason the relationship is also competitive is that each wants to get the most from the other while “paying” as little as possible. Leaders want to get lots of publicity without having to reveal too much and reporters want to get the juiciest information without having to give a free ride to the politician. The more powerful leaders have the best information to “sell” and that’s why journalists compete for the privilege of getting it, especially if they can get the first crack at the story.

The fact that political power can be translated into power over the news media does not mean that the weaker political actors never get into the news. The news media have a need to find conflicts; conflicts are the bread and butter of news. There is also an expectation that journalists will attempt to maintain a certain balance in news coverage. This means that even if they give a great deal of coverage to a Presidential speech they will then allow the opposition to respond. Many talk shows also encourage a lively debate because that always makes the show more appealing.

Nevertheless, there is still something inherently elitist about these debates. Political movements and groups outside of the Washington Beltway are rarely invited to participate. So the journalist’s notion of balance really means finding a balance between Republican and Democratic leaders. Political scientist Lance Bennett has done extremely important work on this issue, and he argues that the best way to understand this is to think of this process as a form of “indexing.”¹ The news media mostly focus on what these elites are saying and doing, and they record it. If neither the government nor the opposition is talking about an issue, even an important issue, the news media will likewise, simply ignore it. Equally important, claims Bennett, this obsession with elites also severely limits the range of opinions that are talked about in the news media.² Researcher Jonathan Mermin makes a similar point suggesting that the news media often seem to serve as “transcribers of official utterances.”³

This does not mean that the Presidents or any other head of state can completely control what is said about them. Just ask former President Trump. While heads of state and other major political figures certainly have some control over how they are covered, being powerful means you will be covered a lot but not always (or even mostly) positively. President Trump certainly had good reason to hate the U.S. press. Apart from those news organs who were known to be in his camp, such as Fox News, most of the mainstream media were extremely negative toward him. We will explore some possible reasons for this later in the book, but it seems pretty clear that the number of negative stories about Trump far exceeded the number of positive stories. Interestingly, however, some of the bad publicity was good for the President. It served to drive home his message that the “elites” were out to get him.

Readers should also know that the antagonism between the President and the press is nothing new. Jack Shafer has written an excellent book on the topic and the (somewhat long) title says it all: The Presidents vs. the Press: The Endless Battle between the White House and the Media – From the Founding Fathers to Fake News.⁴ Examples include President John Adams signing the Alien and Sedition Act to prosecute journalists and none other than Abraham Lincoln who imprisoned scores of editors during the Civil War. As Shafer carefully documents, the list of U.S. Presidents trying to intimidate and harass journalists is very long.

There are times, however, when the President and other heads of state are able to translate their power into taking “control over the narrative” (as people in public relations like to call it). This is especially likely to happen in the first stages of a war. A useful example has to do with the public debate over the Iraq War that began in 2003. President Bush claimed that the major reason for going to war was that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had developed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Within a relatively short amount of time it became clear that this was not the case, yet public support for the war remained surprisingly high for quite some time.⁵

Research on this topic suggests one of the reasons was the lack of much critical coverage in the press. In a book entitled When the Press Fails Lance Bennett, Regina Lawrence, and Steven Livingston attempted to explain this anomaly.⁶ One of the more important explanations was that the Democratic leadership in Congress and the Senate was extremely uncomfortable criticizing the President about the war until much later in the conflict. There were plenty of critics outside of Washington, but the media’s overdependence on elite opinion apparently prevented them from providing the American public with an alternative perspective.

Mermin has a wonderful quote by TV journalist Jim Lehrer that provides a telling demonstration of this point with regard to the war in Iraq:

The word occupation ... was never mentioned in the run-up to the war. It was liberation. This was [talked about in Washington as] a war of liberation, not a war of occupation. So as a consequence, those of us in journalism never even looked at the issue of occupation.

Only after some Democratic leaders began to question whether the war was worth the terrible price the soldiers were paying did the American media begin to present alternative story lines. In other words, unless the political leadership is debating an issue, journalists are rarely able to bring other perspectives to the table. Some might argue that this is how representative democracy should work. These are, after all, the people who were elected to lead. True democracies, however, should have a genuinely independent press who present a wide range of viewpoints for us to consider.

When we turn to less or non-democratic countries the picture is even clearer. Political power in such places is even more likely to translate into power over the media. As noted earlier, it would be a mistake to think of this in terms of just democracies and authoritarian states. It makes more sense to think about a continuum with the most totalitarian systems on one end and the most liberal democracies with the freest media at the other (it is interesting to think about which side should be placed on the “left” and which on the “right” on this imaginary line).

The most interesting cases are countries that have free (or partially free) elections but still employ a variety of methods to harass, intimidate, arrest, or even kill journalists in order to take control of the media. A good example of this is Turkey where President Erdoğan has turned the country into what one scholar has called a “competitive authoritarian” regime.⁷ This supposedly democratic country is ranked 145 out of the 180 countries assessed in that same World Press Freedom Index.⁸ In these countries journalists who express any form of dissent are in real danger. Political...