Lecture 1

Question 1

Five Principles in Political Communication

Answer 1

1. Political power can usually be translated into power over the news media.
2. When authorities lose control over the political environment, they also lose control over the news.
3. There is no such thing as objective journalism (nor can there be).
4. The media is dedicated more than anything else to telling a good story. This can often have a major impact on the political process.
5. The most important effects of the news media on citizens tend to be unintentional and unnoticed.

Question 2

Chapter 1: political power and power over the media

How does media coverage work?
Important to exist in the media

Answer 2

Those who have political power: much easier to get coverage and better position to get their messages across.

The news media: more interested in elites, and this preference has far reaching consequences for the role the media play in politics

Media attention, the rich get richer and the poor remain poor.

The nature of what we call the ‘media’ may have changed considerably after the creation of the Internet, but the need to be heard remains a central part of the political game.

If you don’t exist in the media, you don’t exist politically

• Become known
• Mobilize supporters
• Influence public opinion
• Influence policy

Question 3

Media and politics: competitive symbioses

Answer 3

Each side of the relationship attempts to exploit the other, while expending a minimum amount of cost. Each side has assets needed by the other to succeed in its respective role.

Question 4

Mutual dependence: How are politicians and journalists dependent on each other

Answer 4

• Politicians need good media coverage
• Journalists need information and justification
• 2 theories: Mediatisation and Indexing (HC2)

Question 5

Does the fact that powerful elites get covered more mean that they get covered more positively?

Two doors

Answer 5

yes. There are basically two doors for getting into the news Front and back door.
1. Front door: VIP’s: people with political power (usually treated with respect). They are covered because of who they are as much as for what they are doing or sayin

2. Sidedoor: civil disobedience
   Getting your issue discussed in the media
   - There is one strategy that weaker groups can sometime use to provide news people with drama without completely sacrificing legitimacy: civil disobedience
3. Back door:
   - Reserved for weaker political actors who only become newsworthy if they do something especially weird or deviant.
   - The powerful can be pretty boring and still get into the news. But if you are not important you better be interesting.

Inequality is not accidental: but structural (also in media)

Question 6

Noam Chomsky: The political economy of mass media Model Chomsky & Herman argued:

Answer 6

Developed the propaganda model of media criticism, “arguing that market forces, internalized assumptions of self-censorship”, motivate newspapers and tv network to stifle dissent.

They describe US media as business that sell a product (audiences = consumers) to other business.

Liberal model of democracy: naïve: not a watchdog, but a lapdog

Question 7

Media as “democratic watchdog” (Bennet & Serrin, 2005)

Answer 7

Liberal idea

Media take initiative

Investigative reporting

Independent scrutiny

Documenting, questioning, and investigating

Provide public and official with timely information

Question 8

A well-functioning media is a paramount importance for democratic societies when

Answer 8

Repost events objectively as they occur, to allow citizens to make informed political choices.

Control power-holders and unearth abuses of power through investigative journalism.

Herman and Chomsky: US media fails to perform democratic task and are basically akin to propaganda system in totalitarian states.
They consider that the media is often involved in misinformation, and argue that the media has ‘extended’ the Cold War.

Chomsky: media is in essence against democracy

Question 9

Which principles suits the best for Herman and Chomsky propaganda model

Answer 9

1. Political power can usually be translated into power over the news media.
2. The most important effects of the news media on citizends tend to be unintentional and unnoticed.

Question 10

Panopticism

Answer 10

= the systematic ordering and controlling of human populations through subtle and often unseen forces (surveillance techniques).

Question 11

Micheal Foucault: “Power is everywhere”

Answer 11

diffused and embodied in discourse, knowledge and ‘regimes of truth’.

Norms are embedded beyond our perception – causing us to discipline ourselves without any wilful coercion from others.

Question 12

Power

Answer 12

“the intentional production of causal effects”

• Power is the ability to achieve one’s goals or objectives.
• Power is (also) the ability to overcome opposition, to exercise control over people
• Power is hierarchical: A gets B to do something that B would not otherwise have done

Question 13

Principle & Subaltern

Answer 13

Power relations are hierarchical/ asymmetric relations between a superior (principle) and a subordinate (subaltern).

In power relations there is intentional action of a superior. The subordinate always has some room to manoeuvre, some freedom and choice to resist.

Question 14

4 forms of power:

Answer 14

1. (Physical) force or coercion on decisions or compliance (zero-sum): literally limiting options.
   - Physical coercion based on negative bodily and emotional sanctions.
   - Violent actions directed against the body or mind of the subaltern (VB: torture, beating)
   - The principal reduces the options of the subaltern to practically zero
   - Non-violence directed at limiting the freedom of the subaltern (VB: humiliation)
2. Manipulation and propaganda: The ability or disposition to change social relationships or to leave them intact, through manipulation, agenda-setting and non-decisions: changing the basis of choices so it becomes ‘rational’ to comply.
   - Persuasive forms (Affecting the REASONS for actions)
   - The principal changes the bases on which the subaltern perceives the rational bases of action without the subaltern noticing it.
   - Subaltern chooses on ‘rational’ grounds what the principal wants (VB: propaganda, advertising and political campaigns)
3. Signification and cognitive symbolism Preference-shaping via institutions: ‘signification’ or cognitive symbolism: shaping the ‘meaning’ and significance of things.
   Power relations are articulations of meaning (a particular logic of the signification process)
   - Framing = the core idea: frames ‘shape individual understanding and public opinion concering an issue by stressing specific elements or features of the broader controversy (Nelson, Clawson & Oxley, 1997).
   - Frames are ideologically laden packages of truth claims about reality
   - Frames compete (in the pluralistic view)
4. Values-shaping: dominant ideology ‘through control’: the spectrum of actions of the subaltern is limited via ideological and discursive hegemony and disciplining.
   Ideological hegemony = a situation where a particular ideology is pervasively reflected throughout a society in all principal social institutions, and permeates dominant cultural ideas and most social relationships.
   Ø Herman and Chomsky (private as well as public) US media function as a mechanism of propaganda through ‘five filters’. Most news that are being broadcast have been filtered to express the dominant ideology and interests.

Question 15

The Herman–Chomsky Propaganda Model: A Critical Approach to Analysing Mass Media Behaviour : 5 filters

Answer 15

1. Size and ownership of media companies
2. Advertising
3. Sourcing
4. Flak
5. Anti-ideology and fear

Question 16

Filter 1: Size and ownership

Answer 16

In capitalist democratic societies, mainstream media is trapped by ownership. The interests of advertisers and the authority of the government.

Size and profit-seeking imperative of dominant media corporations create a bias

Since mainstream media outlets are currently either large corporations or a part of

Question 17

Filter 2: Advertising as main income

Answer 17

News is merely a filler to get privileged readers to see the advertisements

Ø Herman and Chomsky argue that the people buying newspapers/magazines are the actual product which is sold to the businesses, that buy advertising space: the news has only a marginal role as the product.

Profit orientation:

• Other consequences: lower income audiences and smaller ‘market’ niches are less interesting for advertisers.
• increasing dependence on advertising revenue drives media-concentration and results in the demise of more radical media outlets catering to lower income and marginalised groups (with limited resources and conflicting interests and ideology).
• content becomes increasingly geared towards the commercial needs of the corporate funders.
• Serious criticism of the economic and political system or the ‘military- industrial complex’ is rare (if not absent)

Question 18

Filter 3: Sourcing

Answer 18

• Mass media need stable and reliable news-material flow (particularly as the news cycles get faster and faster)
• Economics dictate concentration of recourses when significant news is most likely to occur: media-outlets are commercial companies, simply unable and unwilling to spend too much resources on reporting.

Churnalism:
- pre-packaged and ready-to-use news
- Powerful bureaucracies are professional producers of routine news
- Media mainly refers to power-holders: government officials, political leaders, police etc.
Non-routine often ignored
Deviant opinions marginalised
Media are gatekeepers

Question 19

Filter 4: Flak and enforcers

Afweeggeschut = Flak

Answer 19

Flak = negative responses to a media statement or a TV/radio programme
Responses may range from phone calls, to letters, to text messages all the way to threats and court cases.
Also orchestrated complaints, petitions and protests, or funding think-tanks or PR/media-campaigns
They work because they involve costs: either withdrawal from advertisers or loss of viewers/listeners.

Undermining credibility of critics: Texaco used PR companies to attack the credibility of climate scientists and brand scientific evidence about global warming as ‘scare stories’.

Question 20

Filter 5: Anti-ideology and fear

Answer 20

Afraid people will not go against the systems

Dominant ideology is inside the head of people: For the West: Islam is the enemy

Politics of fear: accept everything that’s on your side

When we talk about the firth filter: we mean the way artificial fears are created with a dual purpose, partly to get rid of people you don’t like but partly to frighten the rest. Because if people are frightened, they will accept authority.

Question 21

Critique on Chomsky:

Answer 21

• overstated the power of the ‘propaganda system’, media more plural than assumed by Chomsky and Herman
• downplayed popular opposition to elite preferences (LeFeber 1988)
• presented a conspirational view of the media (Lemann 1989, Entmann 199- en Nelson 1990)
• constituted a blunt instrument for analysis
• was political; herman and chomsky were seeking to make a political point in presenting their empirical data and suggested that the autors neglected to provide information about their sampling and coding procedures.
• was deterministic, functionalist and simplistic
• neglected the impact of journalistic profesionalism
• media production processes are negotiated products and not controlled
• similarity to the gatekeeper model
• failure to theorize media effects
• assumption of unified ruling class interests: also Lang’s point that relations frequently become adversarial when interest diverged. There is much interaction, both collaborative and confrontational, between conveyors and sources.
• Herman and Chomsky did not inquire how events became news and charged that they assumed that information existed but had been screend out of media production systems.
  USA model: not applicable applied in other countries with very different media systems, more state media and more representative/proportional political structures.
• the five filters were assumed to function without much, if aany need for furter specification or qualitfication and resulted in a totalizing and finallizing view of media performance
• does the filtering process itself produce the resulting media messages or merely served to modfy what has been already been produced?
  PM did not: “identify methodologies for determining the relative weight of independent filters in contexts; lamented the lack of precision in the characterization of some of the filters in the PM, bemoaned the fact that the PM privileged structural factors and eschews or marginalized intentionality.