164	 ANNALS, AAPSS, 625, September 2009
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.
Keywords:  new media; television; politics; democracy;
Internet
From the earliest days of television research,
the new medium was regarded as having
potential to contribute to a more informed, inclusive,
and nonpartisan democracy. John Scupham,
the BBC’s first controller of educational broadcasting,
writing in 1967, argued that “radio and
television have shifted the emphasis of political
controversy in the democratic countries from
abuse to argument” (p. 136). Blumler declared
in 1970 that television “conveys impressions of
the world of politics to individuals whose access
to serious coverage of current affairs is otherwise
quite limited” and could “promote the development
of more effective patterns of ­citizenship”
(p. 100). In his 1972 manifesto for television
as a vehicle for participatory democracy, Brian
Political
Communication
—Old and New
Media
Relationships
By
MICHAEL GUREVITCH,
STEPHEN COLEMAN,
and
JAY G. BLUMLER
DOI: 10.1177/0002716209339345
NOTE: Michael Gurevitch was originally commissioned
to write this article and drafted the opening
section before his death in March 2008. Jay Blumler
and Stephen Coleman took on the task of completing
the text.
POLITICAL COMMUNICATION—OLD AND NEW MEDIA RELATIONSHIPS	 165
Groombridge suggested that the medium could “be considered as candidate for a
major part in the civilising of our arid communal existence and in the improvement
and enlivenment of our democracy, such that more people have the opportunity, the
aptitude, the incentive, and the desire to play an active personal part in what is with
unconscious irony called ‘public life’” (p. 25). These were not merely speculative
assessments. Early studies on the effects of televised election coverage (Trenaman
and McQuail 1961; Blumler and McQuail 1968) showed quite clearly that through
exposure to political broadcasts, voters (including initially less informed ones)
acquired significant information about campaign issues and policy proposals.
But as the new medium became settled, ubiquitous, and seemingly invulnerable,
it came to seem as if politics in electoral democracies—a game of power,
persuasion, mobilizing support for policies and politicians, and aggregating
votes—could not take place without or beyond the mediating gaze of television.
Thus, television and politics became indeed complementary institutions, existing
in a state of mutual dependence. Politics provided the raw materials and television
packaged it, subtly reconstructed it, and delivered it to audiences. The
rules of the journalistic game precluded any major repackaging of political messages
and hence allowed the political sources fairly wide latitude if not full
control of their messages. But over time, the rules of the game began to gradually
shift. A series of historical events (e.g., the Vietnam War, Watergate) as well
as political and technological changes moved television reporters, editors, and
executives to adopt more skeptical, less deferential, and often more adversarial
stances toward politics and politicians and hence a more actively interventionist
role in the presentation of political issues and stories. The balance of power
between the two began to shift gradually toward a more even situation.
The late Michael Gurevitch was an emeritus professor at the Phillip Merrill College of
Journalism of the University of Maryland, having previously taught and researched at the
Open University (England), the Centre for Television Research (University of Leeds), and the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. With James Curran, he coedited a series of influential texts on
mass media and society from the 1970s through to the 2000s. With Jay Blumler, he received the
2005 Murray Edelman Distinguished Career Award.
Stephen Coleman is a professor of political communication and codirector of the Centre for
Digital Citizenship, Institute for Communications Studies, University of Leeds. New publications
include (with Jay G. Blumler) The Internet and Democratic Citizenship: Theory;
Practice; Policy (Cambridge University Press 2009); (with Karen Ross), The Media and the
Public: Them and Us in Media Discourse (Blackwell 2009); and (with David Morrison and
Scott Anthony), Public Trust in the News: A Constructivist Study of the Social Life of News
(Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism 2009).
Jay G. Blumler is an emeritus professor of public communication at the University of Leeds and
an emeritus professor of journalism at the University of Maryland. He is a leading, internationally
recognized figure in political communication, having published numerous books, including
(with Denis McQuail) Television in Politics: Its Uses and Influences (Faber and Faber 1968);
(with Elihu Katz) The Uses of Mass Communications: Current Perspectives on Gratifications
Research (SAGE Publications 1974); and (with Michael Gurevitch) The Crisis of Public
Communication (Routledge 1995). He is a fellow and former president of the International
Communication Association. In 2006, he was given a lifetime achievement award by the
American Political Science Association.
166	 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
The changing rules of the game had some significant consequences, both for
the political players as well as for the terrain of television’s coverage of politics. It
thus had several long-range effects on the political processes and their outcomes.
First, television moved into the center of the political stage, assuming a “coproducer”
role of political messages instead of the earlier journalistically sanctioned
“reporter” role, that is, that of transmitting and relating political events to the
audience as if from outside the events. Television gradually moved from the role
of observer of events and provider of accounts (stories) and emerged as definer
and constructor of political reality. Without necessarily breaching journalistic
norms, television came to have an impact upon the events it covered.
Second, while television became an integral part of the political process, it
ironically contributed to its depoliticization. The accusation that television has
shifted the focus of the political discourse from issues to personalities is by now
quite familiar. Policy issues and concerns are more often associated with the faces
of political leaders rather than with their political, ideological, and philosophical
underpinnings. The educational value of election campaigns, which was once
regarded as a key benefit of televised politics, was allegedly diminished by this
focus on spectacle rather than ideas. It is, perhaps, an inevitable product of the
visual character of the medium, in which faces are more easily recognizable by
and accessible to mass audiences than abstract arguments about policies. The
democratic ideal of conducting election campaigns as platforms for national
debates, as an opportunity for societies to discuss their present and future directions
(and indeed to examine their past), has been replaced by the familiar notion
of the campaign as a horse race or political beauty contest.
Third, television transferred politics to the living room. Since, by definition,
politics takes place in the public domain, involving societies in discussions, negotiations,
and struggles over public issues and concerns, its natural locus must be
in the public arena. Yet, television imported it into the living room and turned it
into a parlor game played by small and quasi-intimate circles. The societal aspect
of politics was thus diminished and the bonding effects of public debates attenuated.
The public/private, outdoor/indoor dualities of the conduct of politics had
ironically contradictory consequences. On one hand, by bringing politics into the
home, television undoubtedly contributed to the expansion of the audience for
politics. It incorporated into the political process individuals and groups in society
that in pretelevision times did not regard themselves as participants in the
political process, since their exposure to it was at best minimal and marginal. At
the same time, the multiplication of television and other media outlets offering
diverse contents has allowed viewers to escape from political content into a vast
range of diversionary offerings.
Next, while changes in the scope and composition of television audiences
require further documentation, the conventional wisdom is that one of the
effects of television’s forays into politics has been a dilution of the level of partisanship
among audience members. The argument hinges on the assumption that
changes in the formats of political television, first among them the introduction
of televised debates between political leaders, have limited the ability of viewers
POLITICAL COMMUNICATION—OLD AND NEW MEDIA RELATIONSHIPS	 167
to exercise selective exposure to political messages. The familiar format of sideby-side
presentation of partisan positions, designed, among other things, to display
and preserve the medium’s claim for balance and impartiality, resulted in
“forced exposure” of viewers to both sides (occasionally three or more sides) of
political arguments.
Finally, television’s entry into the political domain inevitably led to the formation
of professional cadres working for the political parties, designed to fashion
the parties’ messages and the public personae of political actors in ways that are
compatible with the medium. Thus, the communicative activities on both sides
of the political-media relationship were handed over and conducted by professionals
working within and deploying the same set of professional journalistic
practices. The professionalization of politics thus constitutes a response and an
adaptation to the challenges of professionalized political media.
New Media: Displacement or Reconfiguration?
Does “the end of television” as we know it imply that the intimate relationship
between television and politics that has dominated the past half century is fading
away? There are some indications that this might indeed be the case.
The most significant change has been the encroachment of the Internet on the
terrain hitherto dominated by television. Audiences for television, as well as for
other mass media, are on a downward trend. Newspapers are losing readers and
the main television outlets are losing viewers. While this is the case for mass
media use generally, it is strikingly visible in the figures for audiences relying on
television for political news. According to research conducted by the Pew
Internet & American Life Project (Pew 2008), the number of Americans citing
the Internet as their first source of presidential election campaign news has
increased by 23 percent since 2004, while at the same time the number relying
on television has declined by 4 percent (see table 1).
The Pew researchers note that “while mainstream news sources still dominate
the online news and information gathering by campaign internet users, a majority
of them now get political material from blogs, comedy sites, government websites,
candidate sites or alternative sites.” Moreover, the survey data show that
younger people are more heavily represented among new media users, suggesting
that the trend will accelerate (Pew 2008).
Rather than seeing these changes as a process of displacement, with new,
digital media becoming dominant as analogue, print-broadcast media atrophy,
they may be interpreted as evidence of an ecological reconfiguration, recasting
roles and relationships within an evolving media landscape. As citizens gain
access to inexpensive communication technologies through which they can
interact with the media, generate their own content, and create alternative networks
of information dissemination, the gate-keeping monopoly once enjoyed
by editors and broadcasters is waning. While never merely passive recipients of
television’s account of political reality, audiences are increasingly becoming
168	 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
active participants in public communication, as senders as well as addressees of
mass-circulating messages. This profound role change is taking place alongside
the continued presence of professional media production aimed at traditional
mass audiences. But everywhere, from interactive news Web sites that receive
tens of thousands of comments from the public each day to YouTube videos
challenging government policy, it is apparent that media producers can no longer
expect to operate within an exclusive, professionalized enclave. Media audiences
are now able to intervene in political stories with a degree of effectiveness that
would have been unthinkable ten or twenty years ago.
Politicians have also become aware of these altered roles and, ever sensitive to
shifts in their audiences’ media use, have adapted the channels of their message
delivery to connect with Internet users wherever they may surf. Already twenty
or so years ago, political operatives attempted to reach voters directly by mailing
video cassettes containing political messages, thus attempting to supersede the
mediation of television. Now they see the Internet as offering a new way of
detouring the mass media. In the United States, Barack Obama’s presidential
campaign relied considerably upon the viral capabilities of social networking sites
as a way of overcoming perceived mass-media obstacles. In Britain, Tom Watson,
the minister for transformational government, has stated that “the challenge is
for elected representatives to follow their customers and electors into this brave
new world. . . . As well as blogs, there are many more MPs using Facebook and
Yahoo Groups to communicate their ideas and listen to others” (see Tom Watson’s
blog, http://www.tom-watson.co.uk/?p=1899, March 10, 2008).
As well as destabilizing the traditional roles of analogue political communication,
digital technologies have modified the communicative balance of power by
reconfiguring “access to people, services, information and technology in ways that
substantially alter social, organizational and economic relationships across geographical
and time boundaries” (Dutton et al. 2004, 32.). As access broadens to
TABLE 1
PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN NEWS: INTERNET
BOOM IN 2008 (IN PERCENTAGES)
First or Second Mention	 October 2004	 October 2008a	
2004 to 2008 Change
Television	 76	 72	 -4
Internet	 10	 33	 +23
Newspapers	 28	 29	 +1
Radio	 15	 21	 +6
Magazines	 2	 3	 +1
Other	 3	 2	 -1
Don’t know	 2	 1	 -1
SOURCE: Pew (2008).
NOTE: Figures add to more than 100 percent because multiple responses were allowed.
a. Based on combined surveys conducted October 17-20 and October 24-27, 2004.
POLITICAL COMMUNICATION—OLD AND NEW MEDIA RELATIONSHIPS	 169
provide an extensive choice of media platforms, channels, and content, and
unprecedented opportunities to store and retrieve media content, new patterns of
media use are emerging with distinct sociocultural advantages for some groups.
For example, the young, the housebound, and diasporic minorities are three
groups that have in many cases benefited from the reconfigured social connections
that the Internet affords. In the context of political democracy, voters who
go online to seek information, interact with campaigns, and share their views with
other citizens are likely to feel better informed, more politically efficacious, and
more willing to participate in the democratic process (Shah, Kwak, and Holbert
2001; Johnson and Kaye 2003; Kenski and Stroud 2006; Xenos and Moy 2007;
Shah et al. 2007).
However, traditional forms of political communication persist. Television
remains dominant as the most highly resourced and far-reaching medium of mass
communication; it thus continues to be the locus for “media events” (Dayan and
Katz 1992) and the main source of political information for most people (Graber
1990; Chaffee and Frank 1996; Sanders and Gavin 2004; Jerit, Barabas, and
Bolsen 2006). But the media ecology that surrounds television is being radically
reconfigured with major consequences for the norms and practices of political
communication. What exactly has changed?
Channel Multiplication; Audience Fragmentation
The mass television audience is in decline. Viewers are faced with more choices
than ever before about what to watch, when to watch it, and how to receive it.
Until the early 1980s, the British television audience had access to only three terrestrial
television channels: BBC1, BBC2, and ITV. The 85 percent of British
television viewers who in 2008 had digital sets have access to more than two hundred
digital channels, as well as five terrestrials. In the last year of the twentieth
century, the five terrestrial channels accounted for 86 percent of the annual
share of the television audience. By 2007, their share had fallen to 63 percent. As
Britain’s public service broadcaster, the BBC’s two channels had a combined audience
share of 39 percent in 1999; by 2007, it had fallen to 31 percent (BARB,
Annual Shares of Individual Viewing, http://www.barb.co.uk/). The collapsing centrality
of terrestrial-based television channels coincides with significant changes in
the spatial arrangement of domestic viewing (most homes now have several sets)
and growing technological convergence between television and other, once separate
technologies, such as telephones and computers. Watching television is a
much less distinctive cultural activity than it was in the days when families gathered
around the box to watch the same programs as most of their neighbors. As
Livingstone (2004a, 76) has observed, “The activity of viewing . . . is converging
with reading, shopping, voting, playing, researching, writing, chatting. Media are
now used anyhow, anyplace, anytime.” In the face of intensified competition for
public attention and information, political news and analysis that might in the past
have reached most people in the course of a week’s viewing can be easily missed.
170	 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
Channel choices and time-shifting options lead not only to fragmentation of
the mass audience but to the emergence of distinct issue publics: people who
only want to be addressed on their own terms in relation to issues that matter to
them. For example, MTV or Sky Sport viewers might not want to hear about
crises in the global economy or the causes of international tensions; they can
exclude themselves from exposure to issues and forms of address that they find
unappealing, disturbing, or bewildering. Television’s role as a public sphere is
diminished by these easy opt-outs, and democracy suffers from the absence of
socially cross-cutting exchanges of experience, knowledge, and comment.
“Publicness” Transformed
Television emerged as a mass medium at a time when cultural boundaries
between public and private life were unambiguous. Constituting a new kind of
communicative space in which the debates, dramas, and decisions of politics
could be played out daily, television brought the vibrancy of the public sphere to
the domestic intimacy of millions of private homes. At the same time, it made
public hitherto private lifeworlds through documentaries, plays, and dramatized
serials that allowed the public to witness its own multidimensionality. Reviewing
the political role of television in the late 1970s, Anthony Smith (1979, 4) could
say that television confers publicity and influence once enjoyed by parliamentary
assemblies:
The media which have come to dominate mass communication since the 1950s have
acquired roles of historic proportions and have even provided the society with a wholly
new elite sector. In a sense broadcasting sits astride all other groupings and institutions.
A little like the House of Commons of the eighteenth century, it is both barometer of
influence and lever of power. It is a yardstick of social visibility and at the same time the
essential magnifying glass of prestige.
And while much of that power remains intact, with mass-media agendas still
key to the wielding of political influence, there is a sense in which other public
spaces are now encroaching upon television’s historic management of public
visibility. It is no longer only television cameras, studios, and formats that politicians
need to focus upon as they seek to promote their messages and control
their images. The viral energy of the blogosphere, social network sites, and
wikis constitutes a new flow of incessantly circulating publicity in which reputations
are enhanced and destroyed, messages debated and discarded, rumors
floated and tested. From Senator Trent Lott’s incautiously disparaging remarks
about the civil rights movement at what he thought was a private gathering, to
Senator George Allen’s offensive mockery of an Indian opponent at a campaign
rally, the slips, gaffes, indelicacies, insults, and errors that were once confined
to relative invisibility are now captured and circulated through online media in
ways that can disrupt elite agendas and ruin political reputations. The ubiquity
of media technologies, from mobile phone cameras and pocket recorders to
POLITICAL COMMUNICATION—OLD AND NEW MEDIA RELATIONSHIPS	 171
always-on Internet connections, are eradicating traditional barriers between
public and private. As Meyrowitz (1985, 271) has observed, “When actors lose
part of their rehearsal time, their performances naturally move toward the
extemporaneous.” As a consequence, mediated publicity has become a 24/7
presence; from reality TV (in which the private is publicized) to political interviews
(in which the impersonal is increasingly personalized), the contours of
the public sphere are being reshaped in ways to which political actors must
learn to adjust.
Interactivity and Remixing
Television is the quintessential broadcast medium: it transmits messages to a
mass audience expected to receive or reject what it is offered. The inherent
feedback path of digital media subverts this transmission ethos by allowing message
receivers to act upon media content. The digital text is never complete; the
fluidity of bits and bytes makes digital communication radically different from
broadcasting. In the context of political communication, this has entailed a profound
shift in the process of message circulation. Whereas political actors were
once concerned to produce polished, finished performances for public consumption,
contemporary politicians are compelled to think about interactive
audiences and their capacity to question, challenge, redistribute, and modify the
messages that they receive. In the era of digital interactivity, the production of
political messages and images is much more vulnerable to disruption at the
point of reception.
Of course, interactivity is not entirely new. Radio phone-ins have existed for
half a century, and even in their high-profile television appearances politicians
have encountered critical studio audiences and telephone callers putting them on
the spot. Media interactivity has provided a vernacular tone to political debate,
allowing lay voices into what was once deemed to be a highly exclusive discourse.
Television’s recent obsession with interactive content has often been unfocused
and seemingly pointless, marred in the United Kingdom by a series of phone-in
scandals in which viewers were invited to vote for outcomes over which producers
never intended to cede control. Despite this failure by television producers
to understand the psychological commitments entailed by interactive communication,
it is here to stay. Interactivity is neither an add-on nor a novelty but an
innate property of digital media. One cannot credibly establish a Web site, blog,
or e-mail list with a view to simply transmitting messages without taking account
of the consequent feedback.
The Internet has expanded the range of political sources. On one hand,
agenda setting is no longer a politician-journalist duopoly; on the other, the commentariat
is no longer an exclusive club. This has led to a radical expansion of
the political realm to include aspects of the mundane and the popular, such as
celebrity behavior, football management, domestic relationships, and reality TV
conflicts. Beyond the subject matter, the style of public interest content has
172	 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
tended to depart from the professional forms that once dominated “high politics.”
And yet it cannot be ignored by political elites, who are increasingly engaged in
efforts to monitor the blogosphere, control the content of wikis, and make their
presence felt in unfamiliar environments such as Facebook and YouTube.
As well as the need to respond to the buzz of media interactivity, political
actors must consider the possibility that their messages will be modified once
they are launched into mediaspace. The digital media environment does not
respect the integrity of information; once it has been published online, others are
at liberty to remix content, in much the same way as music fans are able to reorder
and reconstruct beats, melodies, and lyrics. A good example of such remixing
is TheyWorkForYou, a Web site launched in 2004 by independent social hacktivists
with the aim of aggregating content from the official Hansard reports so that
the British Parliament’s proceedings could be more comprehensible and accessible
to the lay public. The site (http://www.theyworkforyou.com) allows users to
track a particular issue or MP, comment on parliamentary proceedings, and register
for regular updates on selected themes. This process is known as a
“mash-up”: a rearrangement of original data with a view to making it more meaningful,
usable, or entertaining. For political communicators long used to attaching
value to their ownership and control of information, mash-up culture presents
a formidable challenge.
The Consequences for Political Communication
Our argument that television remains a significant medium for political communication,
but is situated within a reconfigured media ecology, has significant
consequences for all of the key actors. It is to the new pressures facing each of
these actors that we now turn.
Consequences for the mass media
Producers of political coverage on television, from news broadcasts to election
campaign reports and issue analyses, are under intense pressure to compete for
the attention of the fragmented audience. Television news viewing has declined
significantly in recent years, as have audiences for major political occasions, such
as candidate debates and election results. Now that viewers have far more
options, there is an increased premium on the production of arresting content.
Top political broadcasters are projected as stars. Some journalists respond by
simplifying political complexities to expand their audience. They have tried to
engage viewers in making and commenting upon political narratives, as well as
injecting a more compelling dramaturgical flavor to coverage. Politics is often
projected as an arena of gamesmanship, failure, scandal, and gaffes rather than
the deliberative discussion of issues.
Faced with an array of bloggers, citizen-journalists, and contributors of usergenerated
content, professional journalists are increasingly on the defensive
POLITICAL COMMUNICATION—OLD AND NEW MEDIA RELATIONSHIPS	 173
(Lowrey 2006), needing to redefine the nature of their contribution to the political
public sphere beyond “simply telling the story.” In the crowded contemporary
media space they now inhabit, journalists have a unique opportunity to
provide authoritative interpretation, free from the most obvious distortions of
partisanship; decipher the vast daily swarm of official and partisan political messages
with a view to separating information from propaganda; and filter the vast
amount of data, news, rumor, and conversation that is now readily accessible,
with a view to presenting a broad and balanced account of political events and
ideas. But will they be able to seize it?
In addressing audiences that are still larger than those ever reached by
Web sites or blogs, professional television journalists have a vital role in
reflecting public concerns and speaking to their viewers as a general public
rather than as fragmented and segregated audience segments. In short, television
still performs a public service function, but this function is struggling
to survive in an increasingly market-driven, competitive media environment.
Political broadcasters are under pressure to operate across media platforms
and engage collaboratively with a broad spectrum of off-line as well as online
communities. This pressure takes its toll in terms of working hours required
to produce 24/7, cross-platform content, sometimes at the cost of journalistic
depth and even accuracy.
Alongside these myriad domestic pressures, television journalists find themselves
more exposed than ever before to global issues that impinge upon their
coverage of domestic politics. As news budgets diminish, the need to be physically
present in more parts of the world increases. As political coverage moves
online, there is an added pressure to reach out to international audiences that are
able to access content without regard for borders.
Consequences for governments/politicians
Governments and other political actors are forced to deal with more spaces of
mediation than ever before. Whereas in the relatively recent past, political communication
strategists had a limited range of press, television, and radio bases to
cover, they are now involved in multidimensional impression management. This
leads to an inevitable loosening of their control over the political agenda, forcing
politicians into an increasingly responsive mode rather than the proactive, agendasetting
role they would prefer to adopt. To cover the broad, dynamic, and often
unpredictable media environment in which they now operate, political actors are
compelled to adopt elaborate cross-media strategies, which may amount to little
more than keeping up with the incessant flow of relevant information and hoping
to spot embarrassing media content before it damages them.
As political discourse takes a more vernacular, quotidian form, politicians are
under pressure to present themselves as personalities with whom citizens would
want to interact. The need to construct sincere, authentic personas capable
of inspiring trust and generating conversational (parasocial) interaction places
new communicative burdens upon political actors who must develop skills
174	 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
in ­appearing “just like you” and seeming to address “everyone as someone”
(Coleman and Moss 2008; Scannell 2000).
At the same time, as citizens increasingly experience interactive relationships
with supermarkets, banks, travel companies, and music stores, they express frustration
when local councils, members of parliament, and government departments
seem incapable of engaging with them online. While governments now
deliver numerous services online and provide a wide variety of local, national,
and supranational information portals, they tend to offer few interactive features
for citizens wanting to provide feedback (Dunleavy et al. 2005). In the interactive
era, government has not proved to be a particularly good conversationalist.
Politicians speak with increasing frequency about the need for government to
listen to and converse with the public, but there are very few examples of good
practice; many politicians lack confidence in entering into public discussion
beyond the protective walls of the broadcasting studio.
Consequences for citizens
It has never been easy for citizens to become informed and make their voices
heard. While the Internet offers an unprecedented opportunity for people to
access useful information and engage in civic activities (Bimber 2003; Shah et al.
2005), clear evidence shows that the new media environment is blighted by problems
of information overload (Livingstone 2004b; Couldry and Langer 2005) and
uncertainty about what to trust (Uslaner 2004; Welch, Hinnant, and Moon 2005;
Dutton and Shepherd 2006). There is a need, therefore, for sources of interpretive
clarity. While search engines, recommender systems, and wikis are used
pragmatically to find, filter, and scrutinize the abundant stores of online information
that are now available, these are no substitute for the strong, authoritative
signals that television traditionally afforded seekers of political knowledge.
Moreover, while citizens have access to more information and communication
resources than ever before, these are not distributed equally. Access differentials
reflect patterns of social inequality, with poorer, less educated people least likely
to have access to or skills in using the Internet. The growing importance of the
online environment could serve to strengthen the voices of the privileged, leaving
citizens with limited resources, skills, or confidence reliant upon a narrowing
range of mass-media sources providing shallow political information.
Citizens who do have access to the Internet are increasingly energized by the
many opportunities for them to ask questions, enter dialogue, raise issues, tell
stories, and investigate current affairs; but at the same time, they experience traditional
frustrations of political inefficacy. While the Internet offers unparalleled
chances to interact with government, elected representatives, and institutions of
supranational governance, such as the European Commission, there is meager
evidence that their inputs have much impact on policy formation. A disorientating
sense of being technologically connected, but politically disconnected, fuels civic
disengagement; citizens come to believe that politicians are bound to resist the
democratic potentiality of interactive communication technologies (Muhlberger
2003; Kenski and Stroud 2006; Coleman, Morrison, and Svennevig 2008).
POLITICAL COMMUNICATION—OLD AND NEW MEDIA RELATIONSHIPS	 175
Television and Politics—A More
Ambivalent Relationship
In the digital era, the relationship between television and politics has
become less clear-cut and more ambivalent. While television remains the principal
constructor and coproducer of political messages, the systemic entanglement
between journalistic and political elites is threatened by new players in
the media game. This “fifth estate” (Dutton 2007) sees itself much more in the
position of the eighteenth-century fourth estate: reporting, scrutinizing, and
commenting from a critical distance, rather than entering into the portals of
institutional power. In contrast, broadcast journalists, having become political
insiders capable of shaping agendas, find themselves handicapped by their
closeness to power.
At the same time, television’s emphasis upon political personalization continues
unabated. Political leaders who do not look right on television and do not
understand its implicit grammar face major disadvantages. In the new media
ecology, political actors are under greater pressure than ever to construct rounded
media images, not only on television and in the press, but across a range of outlets.
In doing so, however, they have to compete with many others who are in
search of public attention, on far more equal terms than previously. In Italy, the
radical comedian Beppe Grillo has established the country’s most popular blog,
attracting far more public comments than those sent to the major political parties.
Politicians, parties, and governments cannot expect to attract public attention
simply because of the legitimacy of their positions; authority within the new
media ecology has to be earned by demonstrating commitments to interactive
and networked communication that do not come easily to elite political actors.
While television continues to be the principal conduit between the home and
the public sphere, both of these spaces have changed since the heyday of broadcasting.
Television remains central to the routines and securities of everyday life
(Silverstone 1994), but domestic spaces have become more fragmented, as families
disperse within and beyond them. Grand televisual events still bring people
together, but the experience of media access is now much more individualized,
as particularly younger people spend more time using personalized, hybrid forms
of public-privatized media technologies. A negative effect of family breakdown
has been the reduction of the interpersonal communication about politics that
has traditionally been a key force for socializing political participation. The public
sphere, as mediated through television and newer communication technologies,
has taken an anti-institutional turn, focusing more earnestly upon forms of informal,
communitarian, and networked public presence. In many respects, the
digital media networks are more sensitive to this circulatory public sphere than
television, with its centralized distance from the grassroots, is capable of being.
And whereas televised coverage of politics diminished partisanship by reducing
possibilities for selective exposure, the new media ecology makes it easier to
establish partisan patterns of media access by creating more scope for selectivity
176	 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
and more opportunities for group herding and opinion polarization (Sunstein
2001; Mutz 2006; Feldman and Price 2008). The absence of an online equivalent
to the public service broadcasting ethos raises profound risks for democracy.
Television production might have been industrially top-heavy, unaccountable,
and often authoritarian, but it was susceptible to regulation likely to generate
some semblance of balanced political coverage.
In the new media ecology, communication strategists need to work harder
than ever to cover the expanded media landscape and to adopt new styles in
order not to seem contrived, insincere, and heavy-handed. Vast spin operations
have turned political marketing from a means of conveying policies and images
to a means of determining them. An emphasis upon generating apparently spontaneous
discussion is now preferred to didactic declarations about policy. The
cultural appeal of the media amateur, posting spontaneously, sporadically, and
incompletely contrasts with the clinical efficiency of the party war room. In an
age when politicians do not benefit from seeming to be politicians, affected
unprofessionalism may well hold the key to successful communication. Explicitly
or otherwise, politicians probably remain yet more dependent upon professional
campaign and image management and under pressure to find novel ways of presenting
themselves within the ever-expanding spaces of the media.
The future of this ambivalent relationship between television and politics, and
of political communication more generally, entails normative policy choices.
Contrary to the forceful rhetoric of technological determinism, new means of
producing, distributing, receiving, and acting upon information do not in themselves
shape or reshape the media ecology. Unanticipated and misunderstood,
technological innovations not only disrupt settled cultural arrangements but also
appear to possess teleological propensities of their own. In the early days of
television—and before it, radio and the printing press—many commentators
assumed that culture could not withstand their inherent effects. But this is a
mistake: technologies are culturally shaped as well as shaping. In these first years
of the twenty-first century, policies to shape the new media ecology in a democratic
direction are still in their infancy. It is high time for such a policy to be
devised, debated, and implemented.
Shaping the New Media Ecology
This emerging complex new media ecology presents several worrying implications
for democratic citizenship that warrant policy intervention. An initial concern
is that media contain little civically useful political content. Although users
have more content to choose from, more channels and platforms from which to
receive it, and more opportunities than ever before to comment upon the political
events and issues of the day, the overall amount and quality of in-depth, thoughtprovoking,
deliberative, or investigative political news and analysis is atrophying in
a media landscape that is increasingly dominated by a focus upon celebrity, rumor,
and attack. Politics is presented to the public as a cynical game. Jamieson’s (1993,
POLITICAL COMMUNICATION—OLD AND NEW MEDIA RELATIONSHIPS	 177
186) contention that a media focus upon polls and strategy serves to distort the
agenda and distract the electorate is supported by subsequent experimental
research (Cappella and Jamieson 1997; Moy and Pfau 2000).
Another concern lies in the weakening of public service obligations upon media
producers, which has resulted in a marginalization of the citizen role. At the same
time, there is a pervasive conception of audience members and new-media users
as self-seeking consumers, free-floating individuals, or sensation-seeking hedonists
rather than active and responsible members of political communities.
Sunstein’s (2001, 177) concern about “like-minded people who talk or even live,
much of the time, in isolated enclaves” is relevant here, for a fundamental prerequisite
of a democratic public sphere is the possibility of encountering others whose
positions, perspectives, and values differ from one’s own. Without exposure to
cross-cutting networks of pluralistic information and opinion, traditionally provided
by non-demand-led media formats, it becomes difficult to nurture potentially
informed and engaged citizens.
Also worrisome is the gap between the energy and creativity of what Dutton
(2007) has called the fifth estate and the powers wielded by the other four
estates. In short, the spaces and networks of digital media are at risk of being so
disconnected that institutional elites forming policies and making decisions can
afford to ignore them. A subterranean universe of blogs, wikis, YouTube videos,
and virtual communities cannot compete with the mass media’s elite-molded
agendas; exclusive access to policy makers; and capacity to frame, measure, and
represent public opinion. A paradox of recent media trends has been the increasing
incorporation of “the public” into media productions, such as phone-ins,
studio debates, online forums, and reality TV, while citizens are left feeling more
excluded than ever from influence over the media, government, or public affairs
in general (Entman 1989; Bucy and Gregson 2001; Pattie, Seyd, and Whiteley
2003; Syvertsen 2004; Coleman and Ross 2009).
These trends can be reversed, but it will require policy directed toward a more
democratic integration of media and politics. Just as it was deemed necessary in
the early days of the twentieth century to ask fundamental questions about the
potential of broadcasting to enhance, diminish, or reshape citizenship, so in the
reconfigured media ecology of the early twenty-first century such questions must
be revisited. In doing so, communication scholars can help policy makers to avoid
some of the more crass assumptions that misguided the earlier debates. Media
effects are not direct and undifferentiated; civic norms cannot be injected into
populations through patrician strategies; there cannot and should not be a single
public sphere in which the nation would gather “as one man” (Reith 1949, 4); it
should not be imagined that media content will be received by patriarchal families,
gathered around the domestic set, and journalists should not see themselves
as the sole authors of the first draft of history. Broadcasting shaped and was
shaped by a set of beliefs about the communication of citizenship that would be
likely to distract us from making sense of the new media ecology. Instead, contemporary
policy thinking needs to acknowledge a number of significant changes
in the complexion of public communication. These include the following:
178	 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
•	 The ubiquity of information and communication technologies, which are no longer
monopolized by industrially centralized, professional organizations. As more people
have gained access to media technologies, the capacity to gather information, set agendas,
and hold the powerful to account has broadened. But this broadening has not usually
been accompanied by opportunities to deliberate collectively about matters of
common concern. In short, media production has expanded alongside a fragmentation
of public reception.
•	 A more diffuse notion of the public. No longer defined simply in terms of national subjectivity,
the public has become more culturally fractured, politically postdeferential, and
volatile in its consumption choices. The notion of a singular public sphere, dominated by
codified standards of civility, is less realizable than a space of pluralistic interaction
within and between diverse social networks. Out of such interactions may come a range
of interpretations and enactments of citizenship.
•	 Less emphasis upon television as the provision of a public service and more emphasis
upon its ability to open up a public space. Whereas the important role of public service
broadcasting has been to develop and promote common knowledge, the expanded role
of public communication space is to become an open arena for the production and distribution
of potentially universal value.
•	 A recasting of the idea of citizenship to take into account the terms of a new relationship
between public and private life. Civic and political roles have percolated into homes,
schools, workplaces, shops, and nightclubs. The political no longer relates only to institutions
of the state but has come to describe a range of daily encounters with power that
give rise to civic—and uncivic—responses. If the media are to promote citizenship in the
early twenty-first century, this must embrace much more than occasional moments of
voting in elections or being addressed by politicians.
•	 An acknowledgement by governments at different levels (local, national, and supranational)
that the risks and complexities of governance cannot be managed without drawing
upon the experience, expertise, and networked linkages of the represented public. While
this is widely recognized by smart governments and politicians, mechanisms capable of
capturing, filtering, summarizing, and acting upon public knowledge remain crude and
inefficient, resulting in a pervasive sense that government consultations and “listening”
exercises cannot be trusted.
These new features of political communication present formidable challenges
for media policy makers. Thus far, governments, regulators, and mass-media
executives acknowledge that the media ecology is changing but cling to longstanding
paradigms and models to explain and regulate it. The broadcast ethos
still prevails in most policy thinking, with many-to-many interactivity, social networking,
and user-generated content regarded as a secondary tier of public communication.
This approach pays too much attention to technological changes that
seem to be revolutionizing the media, while neglecting the cultural and political
reconfigurations that are much more far-reaching.
New technologies are most certainly implicated in the changes we have
described, but they do not determine the direction and do not possess teleological
propensities. In short, the Internet is not “good” or “bad” for democracy. But from
a normative perspective, which regards communication media as always having an
emancipatory, democratic potential, the pressing requirement is to base policy
upon theoretical and empirical knowledge.
Our approach to the current policy challenge, which we have outlined and
revised over the past decade (Blumler and Coleman 2001; Coleman and Blumler
POLITICAL COMMUNICATION—OLD AND NEW MEDIA RELATIONSHIPS	 179
2008), is to nurture the emancipatory potential of the new media ecology by
carving out within it a trusted online space where the dispersed energies, selfarticulations,
and aspirations of citizens can be rehearsed, in public, within a
process of ongoing feedback to the various levels and centers of governance. The
civic commons, as we have called it, would be an enduring structure that would
serve as a protected space of civic interaction, in all of the pluralistic senses that
this is now understood. It would be a space in which individuals and groups
could campaign to set legislative agendas, parliamentary and council committees
could consult with citizens online, government departments and agencies could
be held to account by service users, and the most pressing and sensitive questions
of the day could be opened up to well-moderated and consequential public deliberation.
The civic commons, as we understand it, would be a space of agonistic
politics as well as consensus-seeking, of rational discourse as well as many other
ways of expressing views and values, and of institutional as well as grassroots
citizenship. Creating an online civic commons would involve the establishment
of an entirely new kind of public agency, funded by government but independent
from it in its everyday work, charged with forging fresh links between communication
and politics and connecting the voice of the people more meaningfully to
the daily activities of democratic institutions.1
Within such a space, television and
politics will continue to be mutually dependent. But this complementarity will
converge increasingly with an array of other information and communication
technologies that reconfigure access to the institutions, events, and debates that
once took place exclusively on the other side of the screen.
Note
1. The terms and shape of this institutional arrangement are outlined more fully in Coleman and
Blumler (2008).
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