Mediatization

Even if the term mediatization refers to a broader set of societal phenomena, in the scholarly literature it is commonly associated with the media-driven process that affects politics and political communication patterns.

The mass media have brought about significant changes in several precincts of contemporary society, such as extension, substitution, amalgamation, and accommodation. Television especially has been credited to have deeply shaped today's public and individual life.

Since their diffusion the press and the broadcasting media have molded the way politics is performed in the different political arenas around the world, to different extents and at a different pace.

Conceptually, mediatization means something more extensive than the related concept of mediation. Beside playing the role of “mediator” between political institutions and the citizenry, the media have increasingly become a key player in the political arena, to the point that today's politics is unimaginable without the presence and action of the media. Similar terms are those of “media politics,” “mediated politics,” all emphasizing the “media dependence” of most political action. It is not clear that this is true in all political environments. Some scholars prefer to speak in terms of “interdependence” of media and politics. One significant example is the one considered by T. E. Cook, who argues that political news can be seen as the result of a “negotiation of newsworthiness” between media and political institutions. In this sense “mediatization” is the effect of the encounter of two very diverse and often opposing logics, those of the “media complex” and those of the political system. While the media are themselves affected by, for example, legislation, pressures and/or symbiosis with political subjects, the media produce important changes in the political systems by way of imposing their languages on the communication patterns of political players. The dramatization of political events has been for centuries a feature of political action. In the era of the mass media, in contexts where media respond primarily to industrial and commercial imperatives, the drama dimension of politics takes the form of spectacularization, following the canons of show business. This is especially typical of “postmodern” election campaigns where image building, sensationalism, seduction, conflict are the communication tools of the [Page 448]candidates. Other effects of mediatization of politics can be seen in the phenomenon of sound bites, through which political discourse undergoes a simplification process to respond to the peculiar patterns of news reporting, and in the individualization/personalization of much political activity—as opposed to the traditional model of party-centered politics. The media narratives have a preference for stories in which the players are real persons with their own temperaments, idiosyncrasies, ideas, outlooks, better if capable of sparking controversy.

Further effects are the agenda-shaping and agendasetting functions of the mass media. Besides often determining what are the issues of public relevance that eventually politicians are obliged to respond to, the media affect the positioning of certain issues and themes in the public opinion.

In brief, mediatization is a process that is implied in several media-politics relations.