From Media Logic to a Logic of the Public

The final plenary on this somewhat eccentrically scheduled Saturday at ECREA 2014 begins with Kees Brants, who says his intention today is to debunk himself. There is a dominant discourse of mediatisation at present, and politicians have to respond to this – we may therefore be seeing a shift from a political to a media logic, as Kees has suggested in previous work. But is that perspective correct, or may it be challenged?

Historically, the concept of media logic emerged in 1979, twenty years later, mediatisation emerged properly as a concept. However, mediatisation must necessarily precede media logic: the increased shaping and domination of society by the media makes only possible the emergence of media logics. Witho mediatisation, we would not see European football competitions, Ebola panics, or the global response to the downing of MH17.

But perhaps the media live us more than we live the media; the media's modus operandi dominates. Politics depends on media because its operations have become mediated; media are increasingly independent from political and social institutions (this is seen as a precondition for a thriving and independent public sphere); but this has also meant that politics has become subject to media logic, given the growing power of the media (politicians can try to ignore, play along with, or fight such logics through spin); politicians are thus finally adjusting their own behaviours to this media logic.

Media markets themselves are changing considerably, however: traditional media are in decline, while online, new, and social media are rising to prominence; the traditional producers of news no longer solely decide what news the public should consume, and the demands of the public themselves are becoming more central. This may lead to more media populism, but also means that journalists are taking the public more seriously now.

Political parties are also changing, for related reasons: the political mass party, and the party-democratic system, are in decline, and we are transitioning instead to an audience democracy that is less about the party programme and more about permanent campaigning and personal style. Campaigning is more candidate-centric, and again triggers more populist tendencies. Politicians are no longer approached in a sacerdotal fashion, and journalists are no longer taking an entirely objective and unbiased approach.

In audience democracy, a media logic reigns – this is less motivated by the interests of the public, and more by what the public are interested in; more by attracting than by informing an audience. Some politicians go to extremes to guarantee positive exposure, as successive British candidates have done in courting Rupert Murdoch's papers.

But how to we measure and operationalise such media logics? How do we assess the activities and performance of journalists and politicians? A plethora of descriptions of and complaints about media logics have emerged in the literature, and media logic runs the risk of becoming a container for all the complaints about contemporary media and their performance.

There are several problems with this. First, the empirical evidence only partly supports these hypotheses, and the evidence is often limited to election campaigns. Specific studies highlight the good as well as the bad; there is no universal decline of media and journalistic standards, and no outright shift towards populist politicia and media coverage.

Second, such analyses often lump together all media forms. In a highly competitive market, different media tend to respond differently, however, and they need to be treated separately. Internet media, in particular, represent a very wide range of journalistic models and approaches. And further, traditional news media are no longer the universal gatekeepers of news: many other actors and stakeholders have also emerged online.

Third, media logic discourses tend to assume a linear inevitability. Much research talks about phases or generations of developments towards contemporary media logics, and this creates its own logic which sees alternative arguments as deviant and alternative models as mere intermediate stages towards a full-blow media logic. But it is possible to observe divergent pathways: watchdog and fact-checking journalism approaches are emerging in many countries, for example.

Finally, the negative undertone about media logics as undermining public trust in politicians and institutions is not necessarily supported by empirical research; media logic is thus normatively loaded. The call for well-informed, rationally deliberating citizens which is common to such work implies that things were better in the good old days before media logic; but research sometimes indicates the contrary. And is the focus of media logic on the personal qualities of candidates necessarily a bad thing, for example? Does a focus on conflict between parties necessarily trivialise democratic processes?

And there is a more fundamental problem with media logic, relating to the relationships between the differing stakeholders in democracy. Within media logic, the professionalism of politicans and journalists tends to place these two groups at a distance from the public, and lets them remain amongst themselves; but media phenomena from Big Brother to social media have given the public a greater voice and forced the professionals to share the media platform with everyday people, with the vox populi.

There is now a new cultural cleavage, between a cosmopolitan elite whose opinions are almost automatically publicised in the news, and the losers of globalisation who object to what they see as the negative effects of internationalisation. Politicians are perceived by the latter as self-interested personae with no interests beyond the next election.

Anti-establishment, anti-immigration, and a different-Europe feelings have become accepted and are being taken seriously by political parties, and politics Is now being adapted less to media logic than to the logic of the populus; the political elite and journalistic opinion leaders no longer have a sole claim to the truth, and can no longer assume to represent the public interest. Without coercion, politicians and journalists now increasingly do what they think the public want – a shift towards the logic of the public, towards a populist democracy.

But this is only one side of the story: the losers of globalisation have gained in power, but rarely use it effectively. Interest in government and politics has not increased proportionally, so that populist politicians are able to exploit public sentiments without involving these publics in decision-making processes. The genie of the logic of the public is out of the bottle, and has given rise to a harsher, more abusive form of political expression, while the conventional stakeholders continue to demand rationality and civility.

We witness a logic of the public more than a logic of the media these days, then, as anticipated but also resisted by politics and the media. There is no single dominant strategy at play here, but this is a dialectical logic for now – but as this is a contradiction in terms, further change must follow.