Political Journalism in Transition

Western Europe in a Comparative Perspective

Raymond Kuhn, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Raymond Kuhn, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781780766775
• eBook ISBN: 9780857734792
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The 21st century has already seen dramatic changes affecting both journalism and politics. The rise of a range of new digital and networked communication technologies combined with the stagnation and decline of many traditional mass media has had a profound impact on political journalism. The arrival of new digital media has affected the ways in which political actors communicate with the public, with or without journalists as intermediaries. Newspapers that once held political leaders to account are now struggling to survive; broadcasters that once gathered whole nations for the evening news are now fighting for relevance faced with innumerable new competitors on cable and digital television; online-only media, such as blogs and social networking sites, are changing how we communicate about politics. News media remain central to political processes, but the ways in which journalists and politicians interact are changing. This book examines how and provides a comprehensive and comparative analysis of the state of political journalism in Western Europe today, including the many challenges facing journalists in this important period of transition.

1

Political Journalism in Western Europe: Change and Continuity

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Raymond Kuhn

The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm. The publication of the debates, a practice which seemed to the most liberal statesmen of the old school full of danger to the great safeguards of public liberty, is now regarded by many persons as a safeguard tantamount, and more than tantamount, to all the rest together. (Macaulay, 1828)

Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact. … [Publishing] is equivalent to Democracy. … Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority. (Carlyle, 1841)

Introduction

In its self-conception, the popular imaginary, and the social sciences, political journalism is regarded as a key part of democratic politics and at the very heart of the journalistic vocation. The venerable notion of the ‘fourth estate’, attributed to the eighteenth-century conservative politician and philosopher Edmund Burke (though probably first developed by Thomas Macaulay and then later ascribed to Burke by Thomas Carlyle) still captures the ideal and to some extent the actual position of political journalism. It is a formally independent institution that is part and parcel of representative politics, engaged in criticising those in positions of power, promoting particular political actors, issues, and views, keeping people at least to some extent informed about public affairs and mobilising citizens for political action – all often done in concert with other estates, but never simply as their instrument. Political journalism is about professional achievement, personal fulfilment, and often money – especially after the commercialisation of the press and later broadcasting – but it is also about politics, power, and what Macaulay called ‘the safeguards of public liberty’. It is, in short, as much about democracy as it is about the media.

In its paradigmatic late twentieth-century form of mass politics pursued by mass parties covered by mass media, political life in Western European democracies was intimately intertwined with different, distinct national varieties of political journalism, developed within newspapers and broadcasters that reached far wider audiences than the nineteenth-century reporters Macaulay and Carlyle wrote about. Today, in the early twenty-first century, journalism is still, for good and ill, at the heart of politics. Yet many parts of the equation are changing across Europe. Popular political participation is on the decline (or at least changing) in many countries. Parties have lost both their mass membership and the firm loyalty of previously committed voters in a process of partisan de-alignment evident across different political systems. Consolidated mass media environments defined by print and broadcast media have begun to give way to much more diverse, fragmented, and digital media landscapes that give audiences many more options for active engagement and selective use. Just as politics today is different from the politics of the immediate postwar period and the media of today are different from the media of the 1970s, political journalism today is different in many respects from that of previous generations. It remains deeply shaped by historical legacies and is still practised in the shadow of inherited norms and ideals associated with an earlier age, supported by news organisations developed in another time and oriented towards predominantly national political systems that reflect centuries-old political and constitutional theories and distinct paths to democracy. But political journalism is also changing and reinventing itself as a craft and as a profession. Journalists find themselves faced with audiences that are often more sceptical, less interested, and more scattered; they work on their own or for media companies facing ever harsher competition and a rapidly changing business environment; and they confront a political world undergoing its own profound changes. In short, political journalism in Western Europe is in transition.

What we know about political journalism in Western Europe

This book presents an overview of the combination of change and continuity that characterises political journalism in Western Europe in the early twenty-first century, a time of considerable turmoil especially in the media industries that have traditionally underpinned reporting, but also in how political actors and ordinary citizens relate to journalism. It is concerned with political journalism broadly understood as including at its core the coverage produced by dedicated political reporters who in many countries do their daily work in constant and close contact with elected officials and their aides. It also embraces running political commentary provided by various pundits, news coverage by general assignment reporters and others that deal with issues of political importance, and even some coverage labelled as ‘foreign affairs’ or ‘international news’ that actually overlaps with domestic democratic politics (for example, news about the European Union). While political communication is a much broader phenomenon, including activities such as grassroots canvassing, professionally produced campaign communications aiming to circumvent journalistic scrutiny, and the mediation of politics through entertainment shows and other forms of political culture, conventional news coverage remains the single most important source of information about public affairs for most European citizens (Bennett and Entman, 2001; Richardson et al., 2013). Political journalism is thus worth examining in its own right.

In this book we ask a set of simple but important questions about political journalism. How does it work in our selected countries? What are the similarities and differences in how it operates? How is it changing? Finally, which issues cut across national borders? We address these questions by covering both national developments in five different Western European countries (France, Italy, Germany, Denmark, and the United Kingdom) and a range of cross-cutting issues including coverage of the European Union, the role of public service broadcasting, and long-term trends in reporting styles and international news. Throughout the book we examine political journalism as it is practised at the intersection between political and media systems, as part of politics as much as part of the media (Blumler and Gurevitch, 1995; Cook, 1998; Kuhn and Neveu, 2002). The focus is on how political journalism, understood primarily as the product of interactions between professional journalists and political actors and oriented towards a popular audience still generally seen as consisting of mostly passive receivers, operates in Western Europe today, and how it has changed in recent decades as part of wider economic, social, and technological transformations sweeping across the continent.

Self-reflexive journalistic scrutiny of political coverage, personal accounts by prominent political journalists and politicians, and a growing body of academic work focused on political journalism mean we know much more about this topic than we did. Comparative studies of political journalism allow us to outline from the outset a number of shared characteristics of Western European political journalism at the turn of the century. It is a form of journalism that has become increasingly independent of narrow party-political or proprietorial agendas and is increasingly driven by its own professional, organisational, and – in the case of private-sector media – commercial logics. It generally covers politics in ways that are focused on personalities and political manoeuverings more than parties and policies, on successions of individual events more than drawn-out processes, and on conflict more than compromise and cooperation. It focuses overwhelmingly on a narrow and partial range of political issues, actors, and institutions, subjecting to the light of publicity only a small subset of the political processes playing out at any given point in time, paying attention only to a small minority of those involved, and covering leading figures from national parliaments and governments far more than other important arenas like local government, interest groups, and the governance networks they are part of or, for that matter, European Union-level institutions. Yet, for all its shortcomings, it also keeps those who actually follow the news consistently better informed about public affairs than those of their peers who do not (Curran et al., 2009).

Political journalism is a journalism that generally shares with the majority of politicians, social scientists, and European citizens a ‘legitimist vision’ of electoral politics, accepting the latter’s basic legitimacy as indisputable and its importance as a given, and often by implication regarding any outside challenge to this system with considerable scepticism (whether confronted by the populist comedian-turned-anti-politician Beppe Grillo in Italy, the Pirate Party in Germany, or the Occupy movement in the United Kingdom). It is a form of journalism that is, all talk of ‘citizen journalism’ aside, overwhelmingly practised by salaried white-collar professionals working for legacy news media organisations such as newspapers and broadcasters (including their online operations). It is a journalism that in Western Europe is deeply shaped by the particular combination of private-sector elite newspaper journalism with often pronounced partisan overtones (in Northern Europe combined with a pronounced populist streak in the form of widely read tabloids) and a generally strong tradition of widely used public service broadcasting that differentiates it from, for example, American political journalism. All these characteristics have been highlighted in academic studies of political journalism especially from the 1990s onwards (Blumler and Gurevitch, 1995; Brants and Voltmer, 2011; Kuhn and Neveu, 2002; Norris, 2000). All of these features remain relevant today, underlining how contemporary political journalism is in many key respects a continuation of well-known decades-old trends.

Different models of Western European political journalism

Just as broadly similar developments rooted in the 1990s or even before continue to define the practice and output of contemporary political journalism, older, deeper-rooted institutional differences also continue to shape the news produced. Throughout the book, chapter after chapter confirms that historically inherited national differences remain pronounced even within the relatively similar family of Western European democracies. Europe is not internally homogenous. Even after more than half a century of European political and economic integration, different countries have significantly different domestic political systems, economic structures, and nationally oriented news media. While on-the-ground variation is considerable and does not always neatly follow national borders or theoretical expectations, comparative media researchers interested in political journalism often use a conceptual typology developed by Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini (2004) to categorise European media systems on the basis of: (a) how developed their media markets are, (b) the extent to which media organisations are directly or indirectly intertwined with the political system, (c) the development of journalistic professionalism, and (d) the degree and character of state intervention in the media sector. On the basis of these four variables, Hallin and Mancini offer three ideal types that several contributors return to in later chapters, but are worth introducing briefly here. The first is a ‘liberal’ model, characterised by the relative dominance of market mechanisms and commercial logics across the media sector. The United States is seen as the clearest example of this model; it is not common in Europe, where virtually every country has some sort of public service broadcasting provision and many newspapers have stronger roots in politics than in the market. The second is a ‘democratic corporatist’ model, characterised by the co-existence of commercial media, media with roots in civil society and political groups, and public service media. Germany is seen as a particularly important example of this model, the Low Countries and the Nordic countries also. The third is a ‘polarised pluralist model’, characterised by weakly developed commercial news media, a high level of interpenetration between media and politics, and substantial state intervention in most media sectors. Many Mediterranean countries, including Italy, Spain, and Portugal, are seen as close to this model.

Although some countries, including France and the United Kingdom, are hard to place, Hallin and Mancini’s typology offers a useful way of thinking about high-level differences and similarities even within – from a global perspective – a relatively homogenous region like Western Europe. (All the countries covered here are by global standards affluent and politically stable, as well as enjoying high levels of media freedom.) The three stylised models capture important variations in the structure of media industries and their relations to politics – and thus the structural frameworks within which political journalists operate – though research suggests that one should not assume that such systemic differences always translate directly into parallel differences in terms of news media use, news media content, or indeed into professional journalistic self-conceptions (Dalen, 2012; Esser et al., 2012; Hanitzsch, 2011; Pfetsch, 2004; Shehata and Strömbäck, 2011). Media environments and their relations to the political system are important in shaping political journalism, but professional milieus also have their own internal dynamics and ultimately the impact of political journalism also depends on how citizens relate to it – whether they pay attention to it, whether they feel it is relevant for them, and whether they trust it.

Structural changes affecting Western European political journalism

While the shared trends of personalisation, an emphasis on politics over policy, some tendencies towards popularisation, and the enduring importance of inherited institutional differences represent important continuities, change is also afoot. Western European political journalism is changing in response to both external and internal factors. In this opening chapter we focus principally on those external variables that are largely shared across different national Western European systems. The individual national case study chapters deal in greater detail with the internal factors that vary from one country to another. Political journalists across Western Europe have to contend with a structural transformation in the industries that have sustained and constrained the profession for decades (especially in the case of newspapers); with changing audiences who are less credulous, deferential, and patient, as well as increasingly empowered by various digital media and a growing number of media options to choose from; and with political actors who often dedicate more and more resources to handling their media relations (often in part by hiring experienced journalists as advisers).

All five Western European countries dealt with in detail in this book have increasingly diverse media markets, high levels of social media use, and far more internet users per capita than the global average. All have newspaper industries undergoing a rapid and often exceedingly painful transition as print circulation declines and advertising revenues erode, in many cases with direct consequences for the number of journalists covering politics. All of them have seen political parties, interest groups, government agencies, and major corporations invest in expanding their public relations efforts. A few quantitative indicators provide a sense of the scale and scope of change in the media sector. Figure 1.1 charts the decline in paid printed newspaper circulation in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom from 2000 to 2009. (The figure in parentheses is the accumulated drop in circulation over this ten-year period.) While inherited differences in newspaper circulation continue to shape these national media systems, clearly separating countries with historically strong commercial newspaper industries from those without, overall print circulation is declining. This is undermining the business models of many newspaper companies even as they reach more readers online than ever before (newspapers dominate online news provision in France, Germany, and Italy, and loom large in Denmark and the United Kingdom, though public service broadcasters dominate the sector in the UK in particular).

While paid print newspaper readership has declined over the last decade, overall television viewing has remained stable. What has changed is what people watch. Most Western European countries have moved from limited channel choice and a few big audiences as recently as the late 1990s to a multi-channel environment first with cable and satellite pay-TV and later with digital terrestrial free-to-air transmission. In the early 2000s a limited number of channels still attracted substantial audiences, but many more channels drew limited niche audiences. In terms of the number of people reached and the time spent engaged, television remains the single most important and most extensively used source of news across Western Europe, while print, though still important, is in decline. On the rise, in contrast, are digital media, as people get news online – often from legacy media companies like broadcasters or newspapers – via deskto...

Table of contents

• Author Biography
• Blurb
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Tables and Figures
• Contributors
• 1. Political Journalism in Western Europe: Change and Continuity
• 2. What’s So French About French Political Journalism?
• 3. Will Italian Political Journalism Ever Change?
• 4. German Political Journalism Between Change and Stability
• 5. The Emergence of an Increasingly Competitive News Regime in Denmark
• 6. The Impact of Market Forces, New Technologies, and Political PR on UK Journalism
• 7. Reporting the European Union: A Study in Journalistic Boredom
• 8. Do Public Service Media (Still) Matter? Evaluating the Supply, Quality, and Impact of Television News in Western Europe
• 9. Americanisation Revisited: Political Journalism in Transition in the United States and Western Europe
• 10. Changing Political News? Long-Term Trends in American, British, French, Italian, German, and Swiss Print Media Reporting
• 11. International Journalism in Transition
• Bibliography
• Series Page