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  3. Communication, Society and Politics

Communication, Society and Politics is a series that probes the political and social impacts of communication processes and systems in national, comparative, and global contexts. The series adopts a broad definition of politics as the exercise of power within and between nations, which includes the social, cultural, psychological, and institutional underpinnings of politically significant communication. The series includes a diversity of methods and views, with an emphasis on questions about democracy, equality, justice, and other normative concerns. In recent years, politics in societies across the world have been transformed by communication technologies that blur traditional definitions of news, the nature of citizenship, and the boundaries between public and private life. Many democracies face challenges due to disruptive communication processes operating in the context of declining levels of trust in public institutions, including legacy journalism. One result of these trends is the spread of disinformation by illiberal movements and parties that aim to undermine science, the press, civil society organizations, and other traditional public information sources. A related trend involves the growth of authoritarian regimes that rely on media systems and communication strategies to manage publics. Within these broad trends are many other important communication developments in which communication technologies and networked organization have impacted human rights, climate change, new forms of citizenship and inclusion, and personal political expression. Communication, Society, and Politics provides a platform to explore how people in different societies engage with the ideas that organize their lives.

  • General Editors: W. Lance Bennett, University of Washington, Regina Lawrence, University of Oregon
  • Founding Co-Editor, Emerituss: Robert M. Entman, George Washington University, Washington DC

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46 results in Communication, Society and Politics

Page 1 of 3

The House that Fox News Built?
  • Representation, Political Accountability, and the Rise of Partisan News
  • Kevin Arceneaux, Johanna Dunaway, Martin Johnson, Ryan J. Vander Wielen
  • Published online:
    06 February 2025
    Print publication:
    13 February 2025
  • The influence of partisan news is presumed to be powerful, but evidence for its effects on political elites is limited, often based more on anecdotes than science. Using a rigorous quasi-experimental research design, observational data, and open science practices, this book carefully demonstrates how the re-emergence and rise of partisan cable news in the US affected the behavior of political elites during the rise and proliferation of Fox News across media markets between 1996 and 2010. Despite widespread concerns over the ills of partisan news, evidence provides a nuanced, albeit cautionary tale. On one hand, findings suggest that the rise of Fox indeed changed elite political behavior in recent decades. At the same time, the limited conditions under which Fox News' influence occurred suggests that concerns about the network's power may be overstated.

Digital Sovereignty in the BRICS Countries
  • How the Global South and Emerging Power Alliances Are Reshaping Digital Governance
  • Edited by Min Jiang, Luca Belli
  • Published online:
    31 December 2024
    Print publication:
    02 January 2025
  • In a world where digital development and policymaking are dominated by Silicon Valley tech giants, the BRICS countries - Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa - play an increasingly important role. With forty percent of the world's population and twenty-five percent of global GDP, these nations possess vast troves of personal data. Yet, their conceptions, narratives, and initiatives of digital sovereignty remain understudied. This volume is the first to explore digital sovereignty from a Global South perspective and offers a forward-looking take on what a world less dependent on Silicon Valley might look like. It brings together excellent analyses of BRICS digital sovereignty issues, from historical imaginaries to up-to-date conceptualizations, e-payment to smart cities, legal analysis to geopolitical assessment. By offering neglected perspectives from the Global South, this book makes important contributions to the digital sovereignty debate. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

In the Shadow of the Global North
  • Journalism in Postcolonial Africa
  • j. Siguru Wahutu
  • Published online:
    13 November 2024
    Print publication:
    07 November 2024
  • In the Shadow of the Global North unpacks the historical, cultural, and institutional forces that organize and circulate journalistic narratives in Africa to show that something complex is unfolding in the postcolonial context of global journalistic landscapes, especially the relationships between cosmopolitan and national journalistic fields. Departing from the typical discourse about journalistic depictions of Africa, j. Siguru Wahutu turns our focus to the underexplored journalistic representations created by African journalists reporting on African countries. In assessing news narratives and the social context within which journalists construct these narratives, Wahutu captures not only the marginalization of African narratives by African journalists but opens up an important conversation about what it means to be an African journalist, an African news organization, and African in the postcolony.

Information and Democracy
  • Public Policy in the News
  • Stuart N. Soroka, Christopher Wlezien
  • Published online:
    20 January 2022
    Print publication:
    03 February 2022
  • Around the world, there are increasing concerns about the accuracy of media coverage. It is vital in representative democracies that citizens have access to reliable information about what is happening in government policy, so that they can form meaningful preferences and hold politicians accountable. Yet much research and conventional wisdom questions whether the necessary information is available, consumed, and understood. This study is the first large-scale empirical investigation into the frequency and reliability of media coverage in five policy domains, and it provides tools that can be exported to other areas, in the US and elsewhere. Examining decades of government spending, media coverage, and public opinion in the US, this book assesses the accuracy of media coverage, and measures its direct impact on citizens' preferences for policy. This innovative study has far-reaching implications for those studying and teaching politics as well as for reporters and citizens.

News Hole
  • The Demise of Local Journalism and Political Engagement
  • Danny Hayes, Jennifer L. Lawless
  • Published online:
    08 September 2021
    Print publication:
    16 September 2021
  • In recent decades, turnout in US presidential elections has soared, education levels have hit historic highs, and the internet has made information more accessible than ever. Yet over that same period, Americans have grown less engaged with local politics and elections. Drawing on detailed analysis of fifteen years of reporting in over 200 local newspapers, along with election returns, surveys, and interviews with journalists, this study shows that the demise of local journalism has played a key role in the decline of civic engagement. As struggling newspapers have slashed staff, they have dramatically cut their coverage of mayors, city halls, school boards, county commissions, and virtually every aspect of local government. In turn, fewer Americans now know who their local elected officials are, and turnout in local elections has plummeted. To reverse this trend and preserve democratic accountability in our communities, the local news industry must be reinvigorated – and soon.

Rethinking Media Research for Changing Societies
  • Edited by Matthew Powers, Adrienne Russell
  • Published online:
    18 September 2020
    Print publication:
    20 August 2020
  • This agenda-setting volume brings together leading scholars of media and public life to grapple with how media research can make sense of the massive changes rocking politics and the media world. Each author identifies a 'most pressing' question for scholars working at the intersection of journalism, politics, advocacy, and technology. The authors then suggest different research approaches designed to highlight real-world stakes and offer a path toward responsive, productive action. Chapters explore our 'datafied' lives, journalism's deep responsibilities and daunting challenges, media's inclusions (and non-inclusions), the riddle of digital engagement, and the obligations scholars must attempt to meet in an era of networked information. The result is a rich forum that addresses how media transformations carry serious implications for public life. Original, provocative, and generative, this book is international in its orientation and makes a compelling case for public scholarship.

Trump and Us
  • What He Says and Why People Listen
  • Roderick P. Hart
  • Published online:
    24 February 2020
    Print publication:
    14 February 2020
  • Why did 62 million Americans vote for Donald Trump? Trump and Us offers a fresh perspective on this question, taking seriously the depth and breadth of Trump's support. An expert in political language, Roderick P. Hart turns to Trump's words, voters' remarks, and media commentary for insight. The book offers the first systematic rhetorical analysis of Trump's 2016 campaign and early presidency, using text analysis and archives of earlier presidential campaigns to uncover deep emotional undercurrents in the country and provide historical comparison. Trump and Us pays close attention to the emotional dimensions of politics, above and beyond cognition and ideology. Hart argues it was not partisanship, policy, or economic factors that landed Trump in the Oval Office but rather how Trump made people feel.

Media Ethics and Global Justice in the Digital Age
  • Clifford G. Christians
  • Published online:
    18 March 2019
    Print publication:
    21 March 2019
  • Today's digital revolution is a worldwide phenomenon, with profound and often differential implications for communities around the world and their relationships to one another. This book presents a new, explicitly international theory of media ethics, incorporating non-Western perspectives and drawing deeply on both moral philosophy and the philosophy of technology. Clifford Christians develops an ethics grounded in three principles - truth, human dignity, and non-violence - and shows how these principles can be applied across a wide range of cases and domains. The book is a guide for media professionals, scholars, and educators who are concerned with the global ramifications of new technologies and with creating a more just world.

Fox Populism
  • Branding Conservatism as Working Class
  • Reece Peck
  • Published online:
    14 December 2018
    Print publication:
    03 January 2019
  • Fox Populism offers fresh insights into why the Fox News Channel has been both commercially successful and politically effective. Where existing explanations of Fox's appeal have stressed the network's conservative editorial slant, Reece Peck sheds light on the importance of style as a generative mode of ideology. The book traces the historical development of Fox's counter-elite news brand and reveals how its iconoclastic news style was crafted by fusing two class-based traditions of American public culture: one native to the politics in populism and one native to the news field in tabloid journalism. Using the network's coverage of the late-2000s economic crisis as the book's principal case study, Peck then shows how style is deployed as a political tool to frame news events. A close analysis of top-rated programs reveals how Fox hails its audience as 'the real Americans' and successfully represents narrow, conservative political demands as popular and universal.

From Media Systems to Media Cultures
  • Understanding Socialist Television
  • Sabina Mihelj, Simon Huxtable
  • Published online:
    23 August 2018
    Print publication:
    23 August 2018
  • In From Media Systems to Media Cultures: Understanding Socialist Television, Sabina Mihelj and Simon Huxtable delve into the fascinating world of television under communism, using it to test a new framework for comparative media analysis. To understand the societal consequences of mass communication, the authors argue that we need to move beyond the analysis of media systems, and instead focus on the role of the media in shaping cultural ideals and narratives, everyday practices and routines. Drawing on a wealth of original data derived from archival sources, programme and schedule analysis, and oral history interviews, the authors show how communist authorities managed to harness the power of television to shape new habits and rituals, yet failed to inspire a deeper belief in communist ideals. This book and their analysis contains important implications for the understanding of mass communication in non-democratic settings, and provides tools for the analysis of media cultures globally.

Civic Hope
  • How Ordinary Americans Keep Democracy Alive
  • Roderick P. Hart
  • Published online:
    27 April 2018
    Print publication:
    22 March 2018
  • Civic Hope is a history of what everyday Americans say - in their own words - about the government overseeing their lives. Based on a highly original analysis of 10,000 letters to the editor from 1948 to the present published in twelve US cities, the book overcomes the limitations of survey data by revealing the reasons for people's attitudes. While Hart identifies worrisome trends - including a decline in writers' abilities to explain what their opponents believe and their attachment to national touchstones - he also shows why the nation still thrives. Civic Hope makes a powerful case that the vitality of a democracy lies not in its strengths but in its weaknesses and in the willingness of its people to address those weaknesses without surcease. The key, Hart argues, is to sustain a culture of argument at the grassroots level.

Networked News, Racial Divides
  • How Power and Privilege Shape Public Discourse in Progressive Communities
  • Sue Robinson
  • Published online:
    20 November 2017
    Print publication:
    30 November 2017
  • Against conventional wisdom, pervasive black-white disparities pair with vitriolic public conversation in politically progressive communities throughout America. Networked News, Racial Divides examines obstacles to public dialogues about racial inequality and opportunities for better discourse in mid-sized, liberal cities. The book narrates the challenges faced when talking about race through a series of stories about each community struggling with K-12 education achievement gaps. Media expert Sue Robinson applies Bourdieusian field theory to understand media ecologies and analyze whose voices get heard and whose get left out. She explores how privilege shapes discourse and how identity politics can interfere with deliberation. Drawing on network analysis of community dialogues, interviews with journalists, politicians, activists, and citizens and deep case study of five cities, this reflexive and occasionally narrative book chronicles the institutional, cultural and other problematic realities to amplifying voices of all people while also recommending strategies to move forward and build trust.

Young People and the Future of News
  • Social Media and the Rise of Connective Journalism
  • Lynn Schofield Clark, Regina Marchi
  • Published online:
    14 September 2017
    Print publication:
    21 September 2017
  • Young People and the Future of News traces the practices that are evolving as young people come to see news increasingly as something shared via social networks and social media rather than produced and circulated solely by professional news organizations. The book introduces the concept of connective journalism, clarifying the role of creating and sharing stories online as a key precursor to collective and connective political action. At the center of the story are high school students from low-income minority and immigrant communities who often feel underserved or misrepresented by mainstream media but express a strong interest in politics and their communities. Drawing on in-depth field work in three major urban areas over the course of ten years, Young People and the Future of News sheds light on how young people share news that they think others should know about, express solidarity, and bring into being new publics and counter-publics.

News Frames and National Security
  • Covering Big Brother
  • Douglas M. McLeod, Dhavan V. Shah
  • Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    29 December 2014
  • Did media coverage contribute to Americans' tendency to favor national security over civil liberties following the 9/11 attacks? How did news framing of terrorist threats support the expanding surveillance state revealed by Edward Snowden? Douglas M. McLeod and Dhavan V. Shah explore the power of news coverage to render targeted groups suspicious and to spur support for government surveillance. They argue that the tendency of journalists to frame stories around individual targets of surveillance - personifying the domestic threat - shapes citizens' judgments about tolerance and participation, leading them to limit the civil liberties of a range of groups under scrutiny and to support 'Big Brother'.

America's Battle for Media Democracy
  • The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform
  • Victor Pickard
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    27 October 2014
  • How did the American media system become what it is today? Why do American media have so few public interest regulations compared with other democratic nations? How did the system become dominated by a few corporations, and why are structural problems like market failures routinely avoided in media policy discourse? By tracing the answers to many of these questions back to media policy battles in the 1940s, this book explains how this happened and why it matters today. Drawing from extensive archival research, the book uncovers the American media system's historical roots and normative foundations. It charts the rise and fall of a forgotten media reform movement to recover alternatives and paths not taken. As much about the present and future as it is about the past, the book proposes policies for remaking media based on democratic values for the digital age.

Political Journalism in Comparative Perspective
  • Erik Albæk, Arjen van Dalen, Nael Jebril, Claes H. de Vreese
  • Published online:
    05 June 2014
    Print publication:
    21 April 2014
  • Political journalism is often under fire. Conventional wisdom and much scholarly research suggest that journalists are cynics and political pundits. Political news is void of substance and overly focused on strategy and persons. Citizens do not learn from the news, are politically cynical, and are dissatisfied with the media. This book challenges these assumptions, which are often based on single-country studies with limited empirical observations about the relation between news production, content, and journalism's effects. Based on interviews with journalists, a systematic content analysis of political news, and panel survey data in different countries, this book tests how different systems and media-politics relations condition the contents of political news. It shows how different content creates different effects and demonstrates that under the right circumstances citizens learn from political news, do not become cynical, and are satisfied with political journalism.

Consumer Democracy
  • The Marketing of Politics
  • Margaret Scammell
  • Published online:
    05 June 2014
    Print publication:
    10 February 2014
  • This book argues that marketing is inherent in competitive democracy, explaining how we can make the consumer nature of competitive democracy better and more democratic. Margaret Scammell argues that consumer democracy should not be assumed to be inherently antithetical to 'proper' political discourse and debate about the common good. Instead, Scammell argues that we should seek to understand it - to create marketing-literate criticism that can distinguish between democratically good and bad campaigns, and between shallow, cynical packaging and campaigns that at least aspire to be responsive, engender citizen participation, and enable accountability. Further, we can take important lessons from commercial marketing: enjoyment matters; what citizens think and feel matters; and, just as in commercial markets, structure is key - the type of political marketing will be affected by the conditions of competition.

Shaping Immigration News
  • A French-American Comparison
  • Rodney Benson
  • Published online:
    05 November 2013
    Print publication:
    19 August 2013
  • This book offers a comprehensive portrait of French and American journalists in action as they grapple with how to report and comment on one of the most important issues of our era. Drawing on interviews with leading journalists and analyses of an extensive sample of newspaper and television coverage since the early 1970s, Rodney Benson shows how the immigration debate has become increasingly focused on the dramatic, emotion-laden frames of humanitarianism and public order. In both countries, less commercialized media tend to offer the most in-depth, multi-perspective and critical news. Benson challenges classic liberalism's assumptions about state intervention's chilling effects on the press, suggests costs as well as benefits to the current vogue in personalized narrative news, and calls attention to journalistic practices that can help empower civil society. This book offers new theories and methods for sociologists and media scholars and fresh insights for journalists, policy makers and concerned citizens.

Media Commercialization and Authoritarian Rule in China
  • Daniela Stockmann
  • Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    17 December 2012
  • In most liberal democracies commercialized media is taken for granted, but in many authoritarian regimes the introduction of market forces in the media represents a radical break from the past with uncertain political and social implications. In Media Commercialization and Authoritarian Rule in China, Daniela Stockmann argues that the consequences of media marketization depend on the institutional design of the state. In one-party regimes such as China, market-based media promote regime stability rather than destabilizing authoritarianism or bringing about democracy. By analyzing the Chinese media, Stockmann ties trends of market liberalism in China to other authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and the post-Soviet region. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Chinese journalists and propaganda officials as well as more than 2000 newspaper articles, experiments and public opinion data sets, this book links censorship among journalists with patterns of media consumption and the media's effects on public opinion.

Comparing Media Systems
  • Three Models of Media and Politics
  • Daniel C. Hallin, Paolo Mancini
  • Published online:
    05 September 2012
    Print publication:
    12 April 2004
  • Building on a survey of media institutions in eighteen West European and North American democracies, Hallin and Mancini identify the principal dimensions of variation in media systems and the political variables which have shaped their evolution. They go on to identify three major models of media system development (the Polarized Pluralist, Democratic Corporatist and Liberal models) to explain why the media have played a different role in politics in each of these systems, and to explore the forces of change that are currently transforming them. It provides a key theoretical statement about the relation between media and political systems, a key statement about the methodology of comparative analysis in political communication and a clear overview of the variety of media institutions that have developed in the West, understood within their political and historical context.

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