Mass Media and Political Issues

The relationship between politics and mass media has existed since the inception of the notion of state. It is a complex, often fraught, relationship, in which audiences, discursive actors, and agendas shift frequently. Mass media provides a dual function when it comes to political issues. Some articles featured in this book will deal with the traditional relationships between politics and mass media, including propaganda, expose, and hegemony. Traditional top down media, such as newspapers and television broadcasts, inform the populace of what is occurring in politics; the newer forms of citizen-generated platforms, such as social media, can also inform the politicians of their constituents’ concerns. Here, we will be examining these dual roles: how the media shape citizens’ attitudes and behaviors in relation to politics, and also how citizens are in turn able to influence the political process in new, and sometimes revolutionary, ways. Different aspects of the interplay between audience and politics, including agenda setting, and targeting demographics will be highlighted in several case studies.

No consideration of the relationship between politics and mass media is complete with¬out a discussion of the use of mass media as propaganda, or a tool of manipulation, by politicians, as “Mass media’s manipulative potential in political discourse” will illuminate. The use of the Internet and mass media for propagation of ideas and propaganda is not limited to intra-national contexts, but is also relevant on the geopolitical level, as “Information warfare technologies in political discourse” shows. Nations have their own agendas on the world stage, even when it comes to seemingly non-political events like the Olympics, which will be investigated in “The Interference of Politics in the Olympic Games, and How the US Media Contribute to It.”

New media enables new ways of agenda-setting, as discourse analysis reveals in “Internet Aggregators Constructing the Political Right Wing in Japan.” The misrepresentation of distant events can have a direct effect on how audiences perceive those events, and thus on how policy is shaped, as evidenced by “Misrepresentation of the Bosnian War by Western media.” Nowhere has mass media been more instrumental in shaping public opinion than in cases of political corruption. The relationship between news coverage and political corrup¬tion in Western democracies will be considered in the article, “Journalistic...