Jay G. Blumler

Democracy and the mass media: Political communication systems and democratic values

The American media system is presumably animated by certain democratic principles. Some of these concern the relationship of the mass media to government – for example, the proposition that, acting on behalf of the citizenry, the media should guard against abuses of power by officeholders. Others concern the relationship of the mass media to diverse opinion sources – for example, the proposition that the media should provide a robust, uninhibited, and wide-open marketplace of ideas, in which opposing views may meet, contend, and take each others measure. Yet others concern the relationship of the mass media to the public at large – for example, the propositions that they should serve the publics “right to know” and offer options for meaningful political choices and nourishment for effective participation in civic affairs. Yet, a glance at the world of the American media today reveals a landscape dominated by a few giant media corporations. These enterprises may be as remote from the people as are other powerful and dominant institutions in society. Their inner workings are rarely opened to voluntary outside scrutiny. And they seem committed to the presentation, not of a broad spectrum of ideas but of mainstream opinion currents, whose flows are bounded politically by the two-party system, economically by the imperatives of private enterprise capitalism, and culturally by the values of a consumer society. This essay deals with the tensions and disparities between the ostensibly democratic ideals that the mass media are supposed to serve and the communication structures and practices that actually prevail.

Political Communication —Old and New Media Relationships

This article reflects upon the ways television changed the political landscape and considers how far new media, such as the Internet, are displacing television or reconfiguring the political communications ecology. The analysis explores opportunities and challenges facing media producers, politicians, and citizens. The authors conclude by suggesting that the television-politics relationship that emerged in the 1960s still prevails to some extent in the digital era but faces new pressures that weaken the primacy of the broadcast-centered model of political communication. The authors identify five new features of political communication that present formidable challenges for media policy makers. They suggest that these are best addressed through an imaginative, democratic approach to nurturing the emancipatory potential of the new media ecology by carving out within it a trusted online space where the dispersed energies, self-articulations, and aspirations of citizens can be rehearsed, in public, within a process of ongoing feedback to the various levels and centers of governance.

The Floating Voter and the Liberal View of Representation

THE surveys of voting behaviour and political opinions made between 1950 and 1962 yielded a fair amount of data about the role of the voter in the British representative system. The significance of these findings (assuming, for the moment, that they were accurate) depends on the extent to which they enhance our understanding of the nature of the representative system and its place in the process of government, an understanding which has itself been influenced by various liberal views about how the political system ought to operate. In this paper we propose, first, to outline some of the main findings; second, to relate them briefly to liberal views about representation; and third, to report some of the findings of a survey which lead us to modify some of the conclusions which seem to follow from earlier work.

Political Communication in Freefall: The British Case—and Others?

The article designates certain current key features of British political communication, contrasting them with their counterparts two decades earlier. It specifies some systemic sources of those developments, which may be common (or becoming so) in other competitive democracies. It argues why this matters: A Machiavellian view of political communication is increasingly emerging, so emphasising an instrumental pursuit of power that citizenship is in danger of becoming little more than a form of noncommercial consumption. Finally, it proposes some institutional changes intended to counteract these disturbing latter-day trends.

ATTITUDES TO THE MONARCHY: THEIR STRUCTURE AND DEVELOPMENT DURING A CEREMONIAL OCCASIONa

THE Investiture of the Prince of Wales on 1 July 1969 was the most highly publicized royal ceremony to have been held in Britain since the Coronation of the Queen in June 1953. Full details of the advance preparations were reported weeks before the event in all the national newspapers, which on the morning of 2 July lavished from 26. pages (The Guardian) to 123 pages (the Daily Mirror) of stories and pictures on the ceremony itself. Royal portraits graced the covers of many magazines (notably the high-circulation broadcasting weeklies and women’s journals), the contents of which centred on personal and historical features about the life of Prince Charles, the traditions of king-making in Britain, the place of the Monarchy in Wales, etc. But above all else, the Investiture seemed to be a spectacle that had been staged for television, which made its particular contribution to the occasion mainly through four special programmes: a major documentary, Royal Family, which was screened twice in the fortnight before 1 July; a half-hour interview with Prince Charles, which appeared on three different occasions during the same period; live daytime transmissions of the Investiture from Caernarvon Castle on both BBC-1 and ITV, lasting over six hours; and in the evening, 90-minute edited highlights of the ceremony, presented at staggered times on all three channels, and unexpectedly preceded by an unscheduled 5-minute address to the nation by Prince Charles.2 The widespread diffusion by mass communications of materials about the Monarchy at the time of the Investiture created a rare opportunity to undertake an empirical enquiry in a largely unexplored but significant field.3 At the Centre for Television Research at the University of Leeds several studies of the political functions of television had already been carried out, in which attention had been 1 The authors are much indebted for statistical advice to Mr. J. Ives, formerly Research Officer in the Centre for Television Research, and to Mr. A. B. Royse, Senior Lecturer in Social Statistics in the Department of Social Studies, University of Leeds. They are also grateful to Mrs. K. Chew, Research Assistant in the Department of Social Studies, who expertly assumed full responsibility for computer programming and data processing. 2 The Investiture ceremony was also presented on the radio-live during the day and by recorded highlights in the evening. 3 Evidence on the public’s views about royalty has hitherto been collected by the following bodies : A. Opinion poll organisations (latterly by Gallup in the summer, 1970 and by National

Normative perspectives on journalism studies: Stock-taking and future directions

Journalism has advanced greatly as a field in its own right in recent decades. As well as a cause for celebration, however, this may give rise to concerns – in particular that scholars may pay increasing attention to the inner workings of journalistic institutions at the expense of their external ties, impact and significance, including their normative ones. It is true that important normative analyses have appeared in the literature, six of which the article defines and exemplifies. So far, however, these ideas have had relatively little influence on the thought or practice of journalists. The article concludes by suggesting a way in which a closer and more constructive dialogue could be achieved between journalism scholars and practitioners, centring on the normative challenges faced by both sides.

Purposes of Mass Communications Research: A Transatlantic Perspective:

b Overviews of work in progress in some portion of our field are commonly triangular in perspective. They comment, first, on the state of theoretical debate in the reviewed area, singling out those conceptual differences that shape its intellectual controversies; secondly, on the methodologies that guide various strategies of data collection, bearing the freight of our technical improvement hopes; and thirdly, on the emerging body of substantive findings, fixing the shifting boundary line between what we suppose we know and what we know we d o not yet know. In this talk my point of departure is rather different. I t is as if 1 would direct attention to the table on which the triangle rests, a focus that comes naturally into view when strikingly divergent mass communications research styles of different countries-or Continents in our case-are contemplated. Such a transatlantic perspective tends to provoke questions about the purposes of our enterprise. Why may we engage in mass communications research? What are its social purposes? What are the chief alternative forms that answers to this question can take? Are they bound to polarize into two quite antithetical and irreconcilable positions-with one camp radically critical of the prevailing mass communications order, while the other willingly or unwittingly upholds it. and each fails to address the predominant preoccupations of the other? Is there no viable middle course of research purpose falling between such extremes? If there is, how might it be defined, and to what clarification and redirection of our energies might its pursuit call us?

Democracy and the Media—Revisited

The model which dominated twentieth-century analysis of political communication systems is now out of date in many respects. Essential in the authors’ view is a reconsideration of some of the foundational concepts of political communication scholarship. They propose fresh lines of thought on: a communication-sensitive definition of democracy; the purposes of civic communication; evaluations of media roles in terms of those purposes; the politics–media axis; and new citizen roles in new-media conditions. Noting that values are always at stake in how political communication is organised, practiced and received, they distinguish two different conceptualisations of researchers’ policy roles for harnessing and enhancing communication, citizenship and democracy—as a visionary destination and as a journey towards it, respectively. They conclude that both deserve prominent positions on academic road maps.

Media Coverage of the Prime Ministerial Debates

After years of prevarication, non-negotiation and bluster, televised election debates came to the United Kingdom in 2010. For many, this was seen as the worst of times to try such an experiment: in the aftermath of the MPs’ expenses scandal, politicians’ reputations were at a low ebb; in a period of economic crisis and austerity political leaders were accused of not being straight about their policy intentions. Could the televised prime ministerial debates lead to something like a fresh start — perhaps even serving to reduce or alleviate public disenchantment? Or might the debates fall down the sceptical drain, as it were — be dismissed as just ‘more of the same’? With their peak audiences of 10.3 million viewers,1 the televised debates made possible direct appeals from candidates for the premiership to the immediacy of the domestic audience. While we should not overstate the significance of these events (both the most-viewed first debate on ITV and the second most-viewed debate on BBC attracted smaller audiences than Britain’s Got Talent, EastEnders and Dr Who, all shown in the same weeks), there can be little doubt that they reached more voters than any other episode of televised election coverage — and stimulated a considerable amount of reflective commentary and debate both on television and in the wider media.

An Overview of Recent Research into the Impact of Broadcasting in Democratic Politics

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the impact of broadcasting in democratic politics. Many students of mass persuasion asserted that exposure to mass media messages were unlikely to make much difference to the political thinking of audience members. This minimal effects position arose largely from a series of studies, conducted in the 1940s and 1950s, first in the United States and later in Britain, of the role of communication in election campaigns, in which the central focus of investigation was either a comparison of peoples early voting intentions with their recorded votes or the development of peoples attitudes toward the competing parties and leaders over the period of a campaign. The main impressions conveyed by the published outcomes of these early election studies were, that measured campaign change was limited in magnitude and inconsistent in direction, and second, that communication factors had played little part in bringing about those changes that occurred. In their study of the British General Election of 1959, for example, Trenaman and McQuail reported changes of voting intention among less than a quarter of the members of a Yorkshire sample and, further, that no single party had benefited appreciably from those changes that took place.