MP L1

• Media


  Plural form of 'medium', an intermediate agency that enables communication to take place
• While the media are a distinct institution in society, informed by specific interests, practices, norms, and values, but highlighting their separateness is not truly appreciating how integral they are to a society's meaning-making process
• Forms of media


  • Television
  • Newspapers
  • Internet
  • Radio
  • Magazines
• Importance of media


  • Can be evaluated in terms of ownership, policy, and regulation, as well as new technologies
• Modern public life is a mediated phenomenon: opinions, debates and protests assume a generalized public status when they are aired on television or reported in the newspapers or on radio
• The media have been criticised for a variety of reasons: they are said to focus too much on conflict and personalities, they are involved in unnecessary intrusions of privacy, they exacerbate the distance between the public and those who govern them, and they do not facilitate a great diversity of viewpoints
• Politics is practiced at various levels in society: from the neighborhood to the regional and state levels, through to the national and international arenas
• Modern politics are largely mediated politics, experienced by the great majority of citizens indirectly, through their print and broadcast media of choice
• Any study of democracy in contemporary conditions is therefore also a study of how the media report and interpret political events and issues; of how they facilitate the efforts of politicians to persuade their electorates of the correctness of policies and programmes; of how they themselves (i.e., editorial staff, management and proprietors) influence the political process and shape public opinion
• The political process, in its public manifestation, reaches citizens as the product of a set of journalistic codes and practices - which interact with and are shaped by politicians and their professional communication advisors as they seek to influence political media output in ways favourable to themselves
• The accounts of political reality provided by the media are complex constructions reflecting the communicative work of both groups, which ideally should, but need not always meet the standards of information accuracy and objectivity expected of political communication in a liberal democracy
• Public sphere


  Communal communicative space in which 'private people come together as a public'
• Public sphere is where public opinion is formed
• The notion about 'public' also change with the emergence of the public sphere. 'Public' no longer described as the representation of authority through a lord but it came to mean the legitimizing regulations of an institutional system that held governing powers
• Public sphere is an idealistic model of democracy – in reality, it is not actually existed in its idealistic forms, many factors affecting its function
• The media are significant political organizations, which exert great influence over the political process – the media being the Fourth Estate
• Mainstream media are big business and, as part of the corporate world, they have and promote particular ideological and corporate interests
• The media do not simply transmit the messages of political organizations and actors but are themselves active contributors to political debate
• Despite journalistic conventions of objectivity and balance, the media contribute to the political process in a variety of ways (as in the selection of news topics and the priority assigned to stories)
• The media also contribute directly to political debate, through editorials and 'commentary' journalism
• The media arise out of, and are located within, particular political systems
• The media are a consequence of a democratic political system that promotes freedom of speech and the principle of informed citizens participating in public life
• The structure and the practices of the media are also informed by the political system
• Media policy is not simply implemented by government but is a process whereby corporations, trade unions, thinktanks, public-interest advocacy groups, international regulatory bodies and many other groups engage in public debate and lobbying in order to bring about change
• Politicians have the power to enact legislative changes, and they can bring considerable public pressure to bear on media organizations
• The influence of political actors over journalists on an everyday basis is more readily observed and realized
• Politicians and their staff know that the journalists are dependent on a supply of information, and considerable political power is exercised through decisions about what information to release and the timing of its release
• The close relationship between political actors and journalists is compounded by their physical working environments. Unlike many journalistic 'rounds', where the journalists work in separate physical locations from their sources, political journalists often work in the parliamentary building (or other government building)
• On the one hand, the journalists have close scrutiny of the political actors, which provides them with a greater opportunity to discover the true state of affairs. On the other, the closeness of their relationship with sources can mean they do not have sufficient critical distance from the information they receive
• Political management of the media is further exercised through a range of specific forms of political communication, from the elaborate spectacles of party conferences through to the humble press release
• Politics, of course, is constituted through a wide range of actions and behavior, much of which remains hidden from the general public gaze. But the public significance of politics is revealed through these forms of political communication
• Political journalism


  Branch of journalism that covers all aspects of politics
• Political journalism can be considered as enjoying a 'noble' status in the field
• The prestige of the political newsbeat also contributes to the transformation of this specialization into a fast track towards power in the newsroom
• As soon as the raw material of news focuses on the public debate, it is caught in a process of transfer whereby it is taken from the hands of specialized journalists and is placed into those of political journalists
• The quantity of what is usually described as 'serious' political journalism circulating in the public sphere has steadily declined, and its substantive political content been diluted, to the detriment of the democratic process
• Jurgen Habermas on the dumbing down thesis, argues that the public sphere, while it has expanded in the course of the twentieth century, it has at the same time been degraded by the growing influence of private, commercial interests on the output of media organizations
• In the process, the pursuit of profit has replaced that of serving the public interest as the driving force of journalism
• Infotainment


  Journalism in which entertainment values take precedence over information content, presented at an intellectual level low enough to appeal to the mass audiences which comprise the major media markets
• Another criticism, contradiction to dumbing down notion, is there is just TOO much political information. Politic is always at the heart of the Western news agenda - as the space available to news media has increased, so too has coverage of politics. Political information overload could diminish public interest in politics