Frank Esser's Reader for the 6TH INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON

JOU0010.1177/1464884918754850JournalismBlumler and Esser research-article7548502018

Original Article

Journalism 18–1 Mediatization as a © The Author(s) 2018 Reprints and permissions: combination of push and pull sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884918754850DOI: 10.1177/1464884918754850 forces: Examples during the journals.sagepub.com/home/jou 2015 UK general election campaign

Jay G Blumler University of Leeds, UK

Frank Esser University of Zurich, Switzerland

Abstract This article introduces a dual perspective to the study of mediatization of politics, a political actor-centric and a media actor-centric perspective. It applies both perspectives to a case study of the 2015 UK General Election campaign. The media actor- centric perspective focuses on push forces of mediatization, manifested in proactive, interventionist reporting methods. The political actor-centric perspective focuses on pull forces of mediatization, referring to how candidates and parties purposefully draw media logic into the political world in order to achieve better their campaign goals. We argue that the Conservative Party and Labour Party, when exposed to equal push forces, employed different pull strategies in the 2015 UK General Election Campaign. The article uses a set of five indicators to recognize push forces that focus on the style of questions used by journalists when interrogating politicians on TV election programmes (reflecting media actor-centric mediatization). It finds clear indications of assertiveness, adversarialism and accountability in the news approach of the BBC. To recognize pull forces, the article uses a set of seven indicators developed from the literature on campaign professionalism (reflecting political actor-centric mediatization) and finds a considerable imbalance in the effective use of pull strategies between the Conservative and Labour Parties. This latter point leads to what we call lop-sided mediatization. The

Corresponding author: Frank Esser, Department of Communication and Media Research, University of Zurich, Andreasstrasse 15, 8050 Zurich, Switzerland. Email: [email protected] 2 Journalism 00(0) concluding section discusses inplications for mediatization research in times of Brexit and Trumpism.

Keywords Elections, journalism (profession), mediatization, politics/political communication/ political journalism, research methods: qualitative, television news

Introduction The interactional relationship between news media and political actors can be examined from several perspectives. The currently most popular perspective discusses this relationship within the framework of the mediatization of politics. Strömbäck and Esser (2014: 6) define the mediatization of politics as a process through which the importance of the media and their spill-over effects on political actors and their behaviours has increased. Applied to campaign communication, it asks to what extent election discourse is shaped by political actors compared to how far it is framed by the news media (Cushion, 2015). In an attempt to develop the mediatization literature further, we would like to propose that it is useful to distinguish between a political actor-centric perspective and a media actor-centric perspective. A political actor-centric mediatization perspective places parties, governments and campaign teams at the centre of the analysis. Consequently, Donges and Jarren (2014) define mediatization as ‘a reaction’ of political actors to ‘their perceptions’ that news media have become an influential factor in their environment (p. 188). These ‘reactions’ become evident empirically in, for instance, the expansion of public relations units and the prioritization of publicity experts and techniques of news management and message control. According to this understanding, it is not the news media which cause changes in political organizations, but it is the organizations themselves that decide, on the basis of their own perceptions, to make changes. Put differently, in this view, the mediatization of politics is not forced upon politics from the outside but is self-effected or internally initiated through the strategic utilization of media services (Donges and Jarren, 2014; Marcinkowski and Steiner, 2014). The political actor mediatization perspective pre- sumes a reflexive understanding of media impact that has been theorized in previous work as ‘self-mediatization’ or the ‘anticipatory behaviour of political actors’ (Strömbäck and Esser, 2014: 21). It views the mediatization of politics as a pull process whereby political actors deliberately draw news media logic into their own considerations and action rationales. In short, although mediatization may pressurize political actors to carry out strategic adaptations, this does not lead them automatically to lose power to the media (Marcinkowski and Steiner, 2014; Van Aelst et al., 2014). The opposite position, a media actor-centric mediatization perspective, is based on concepts of journalistic interventionism or media intrusion. These concepts symbolize the push qualities of the news media – and an understanding of news media as proactive actors (i.e. organizations pursuing their own interests) and independent institutions (i.e. a trans-organizational field following its own news logic). As an adherent of this view, Blumler and Esser 3

Mazzoleni (2014) defines mediatization as ‘the result of media-driven influences in the political domain’ (p. 43). He argues that in the current multichannel news environment, political actors are losing ‘their central position’ and growing ‘more dependent than ever’ on the media (Mazzoleni, 2014: 44). What fuels the hegemony of the news media, in this view, is the fact that no other institution can compete with the news media’s reality con- structions in terms of social reach, relevance, binding character, diversity and timeliness. A key source of media power is the fact that all other systems in society depend on the scarce resource of public attention and are therefore motivated to adapt to news logic and to incorporate some of its elements into their own action programmes (Donges and Jarren, 2014; Marcinkowski and Steiner, 2014). Several indicators of journalistic interventionism have been suggested by previous research. De Vreese (2014) links news media logic to the process of journalistic frame-building and frame-setting; he emphasizes ‘that there is considerable leeway and autonomy on the side of journalism when deciding how to frame issues’ (p. 148). Strömbäck and Dimitrova (2011) relate journalistic interventionism to the extent to which news reporting is interpretive as opposed to descriptive, while others link it to growing media negativity (Lengauer et al., 2012) and a declining willingness to grant politicians authoritative voice or communication control in news (Esser, 2008). All this is to conceive mediatization as a process that expands the voice and values of news professionals and tries to push back efforts by politicians to limit journalists’ reporting options.

Dual perspective on mediatization Both perspectives have been presented here for analytical purposes as monolithic contrasts but in reality, they are not. In fact, we wish to argue that they operate simultaneously in a dynamic interplay of ebb and flow moments, and that each perspective incorporates many elements of the other. This interplay was evident during the UK General Election of 2015. In order to understand the behaviours of political and media actors in that election, both mediatization as a pull process (parties make strategic use of communication services to achieve campaign goals) and as a push process (journalists interfere with the self-presentations of the parties) need to be considered. We contend that in order to advance mediatization theory, both processes need to be studied in interaction. In the following distillation of key features of the 2015 election campaign, both perspectives are incorporated. Furthermore, we will highlight two aspects of mediatization theory that so far have not yet drawn proper scientific attention. First, regarding the push perspective, we propose that interventionism can derive from quality media, not just commercial media as suggested in some of the extant literature, and that the style of questions journalists use when interrogating politicians is a convenient and meaningful approach for capturing journalistic intervention. We are sug- gesting a set of five indicators designed to complement previous research on media actor-centric mediatization processes. Second, regarding the pull perspective, we argue that self-mediatization is not a con- stant on the side of political actors. Even if exposed to similar push forces, campaign politicians may employ different pull strategies in their dealings with a media-saturated environment. For the exploration of political actor-centric mediatization processes in the 4 Journalism 00(0) context of elections, we are proposing a set of seven indicators developed from the professionalization literature.

Our approach Methodically speaking, our study is a contribution to qualitatively oriented mediatization research. We follow the approach of Cushion et al. (2015) who used a British case study to examine television coverage of the European elections in 2014 and relied on close textual analysis. They found that the BBC applied a ‘combative and interpretative and form of journalism’ in their treatment of the UK Independent Party and argued that a purely quantitative approach would not have adequately captured the interventionist quality of news reporting (Cushion et al., 2015: 1538–1539). Our study combines three qualitative methods. First, by means of textual analysis, we examine the question types used in BBC interview programmes aired during the last 3 weeks before the election day on 7 May 2015 (further details will follow) and construct a theory-guided typology of ‘push questions’ in British election news coverage. Second, by means of document analysis, we examine key campaign activities by the Labour and Conservative Party and construct a theory-guided typology of ‘pull’ strategies of party communication (more details will follow). Third, a group interview with senior political journalists (on 16 September 2015 in BBC Broadcasting House) served to obtain explanations for our findings on the interaction between media professionals and campaigning professionals. We had to grant anonymity but provide more details further below. Election campaigns are crystallization points of political communication and particularly suitable for observing mediation processes as if under a magnifying glass. It is with these methodological and theoretical broodings in mind that we will now itemize relevant contextual features of mediation processes in the 2015 UK General Election campaign – after which we will discuss how ‘push’ and ‘pull’ forces manifested themselves, respectively, in it.

Contextual conditions: The UK political communication system Like many other political communication systems in the Western democratic world, the UK one has been ever in transition, dynamically changing over time. Consistent with international trends, the United Kingdom’s main political parties have become increasingly professionalized. In the run-up to the 2015 election, the parties further refined their tactics for influencing media coverage. However, the efforts of the Conservative and Labour Party to shape the campaign agenda have not become any easier because the rise of new challenger parties (UK Independence Party, Scottish National Party (SNP), Green Party) have made the daily battle for whose interpretation of political issues prevails more competitive. We also observe increasing professionalism in the media. Among other things, it is reflected in journalists’ growing desire to demonstrate their independence from the parties’ publicity efforts. British journalists’ desire for distance and scepticism is coupled with strong pride in their inquisitorial and reporting skills. The United Kingdom is Blumler and Esser 5 further known for political parallelism of the newspaper industry, involving a press that has ‘always mirrored the divisions of party politics fairly closely’ (Hallin and Mancini, 2004: 208), tending to disadvantage the Labour Party – more so than ever before during the 2015 campaign (Deacon et al., 2017). In the 2015 election campaign, the press was quite successful at setting the agenda for the broadcasters (Cushion et al., 2016a). Particularly, the narrative that a minority Labour government dependent on the SNP would plunge the country into chaos – a story constantly fed by the Tories and right- leaning newspapers – caused Labour so many difficulties in communicating their policy message that officials complained to the BBC about its journalists’ obsession with the ‘Scottish line’ (Cowley and Kavanagh, 2016). At the BBC, scholars noticed an increased resort to interpretive journalism. The BBC employs a large cadre of subject specialist correspondents, regularly deploying their contextual commentary within story reports and in two ways with bulletin presenters (Cushion, 2015). In addition to its regular political programmes, the BBC also broadcast a series of special programmes during the 2015 election campaign, which were moderated by its most prominent journalists (such as John Humphrys, Andrew Marr, Andrew Neil, Evan Davis, Kirsty Wark, James Naughtie, Nick Robinson and Jeremy Paxman) and focused in particular on interviews with politicians.

Outcome: Lop-sided mediatization It may be concluded from the sum of these factors that in 2015, the United Kingdom hosted a highly mediatized political communication system. The relations of political actors to this system and their roles within it may vary, however, including their disposi- tions and abilities to self-mediatize. For the purpose of the following analysis, we understand mediatization as a combination of push forces (where news media demonstrate autonomy from political considerations) and pull forces (where political behaviour is expanded in scope by integrating media logic-related activities in a calculated move). This twin-track perspective considers direct and indirect media effects. A direct media effect would be an interview style by a journalist that limits the response options of a politician; an indirect (or reciprocal) media effect would be a political decision to profes- sionalize campaign communications in response to a media environment that is perceived as uncertain, dangerous or powerful. A contention of our analysis is that both major British parties were exposed to similar push forces of mediatization but that the Conservative Party employed their available options of pull strategies much more effectively than the Labour Party during United Kingdom’s 2015 General Election. To what extent the British news media adjusted their own treatment of the parties to their unequal pull capabilities – eventually to the disadvantage of Labour in the final campaign days – has triggered some debate in the after- math of the election. Our conclusion is that the 2015 general election campaign was an example of lop-sided mediatization. One party failed to use media-oriented campaigning strategies for its own purposes, while the other party was very successful at it. Most observers of and commentators on the 2015 campaign concur with this verdict. For example, Scammell (2015), after characterizing the Conservative campaign as ‘consistent, comprehensible and apparently resonant’, goes on to contrast its combination of a 6 Journalism 00(0)

‘relentless attack on Labour’s weak points with strong core messages’ against Labour’s disregard of ‘the importance of news management and instant rebuttal’ (p. 39). The most comprehensive election study, based on interviews with 300 key players from all parties, contrasts the ‘clear direction and discipline’ of the Conservative campaign with the ‘brand failure’ of Labour’s effort, the often popular individual policies of which ‘were not con- nected into a persuasive or even coherent narrative’ (Cowley and Kavanagh, 2016: 61, 81). Labour’s own review of its 2015 campaign performance, the so-called Beckett (2016) report, also contrasts the Conservatives’ ability to stick to ‘their mantras’ with Labour’s lack of ‘early adoption of a consistent over-riding narrative or theme, which could be simply expressed and conveyed on the doorstep and in the studio’ (pp. 10–11).

Understanding push forces of mediatization: Examples of interventionist media strategies The push perspective on mediatization draws on the ‘adversary model’ of the media. This model is an outgrowth of two trends outlined above – increased critical professionalism and growing interpretivism – that reflect an increasingly autonomous attitude towards politicians. Such an autonomous outlook connects with the professional norms of ‘watchdog journalism’, according to which journalists regard themselves as guardians of the public interest and ombudsmen for the audience (Eriksson and Östman, 2013; Hallin, 1992; Patterson, 1993; Strömbäck and Esser, 2014). An important conclusion from US-based research is that the ‘journalistic initiative’ has expanded greatly over the last 40 years, becoming more adversarial particularly towards US presidents (Clayman and Heritage, 2002; Clayman et al., 2010). An instructive site for studying such adversarialism is question-and-answer sessions between journalists and politicians, for instance, in televised interview or debate programmes. As Voltmer and Brants (2011) have stated for the UK context, political interviews follow the principles of news media logic rather than political logic with journalists determining the choice of topic, the selection of interviewees, the dramaturgy of the encounter, and the conditions of studio production. The roles are clearly allocated: it is the journalist who asks the questions and therefore has considerable control over the course of the conversation. An important motivation for an aggressive interview style is, according to Voltmer and Brants (2011), not so much the journalists’ imagined expecta- tions of the audience but the hoped-for recognition of professional peers. The point is that even if journalists have respectful and friendly relationships with politicians off-air, this changes on-air when journalists become aware of their public image and feel a need to safeguard their professional integrity and demonstrate their independence, which may lead them to more aggressive questioning. To understand the extent to which British journalists used interview situations as an opportunity to exercise professional discretion during the 2015 UK General Election campaign, we analysed the choice of question styles by BBC journalists when quizzing Conservative and Labour politicians. The interviews we examined took place during the last 3 weeks before Polling Day on the Corporation’s current affairs programmes (such as Newsnight), extended news programmes (such as Today) and certain cross-party Blumler and Esser 7 inquisitions closely controlled by BBC presenters (such as a series of eight debates on a selection of key policy areas among four or five party spokespersons on BBC 2). We picked these programmes because the BBC serves as a benchmark for standards in British news production. In line with case study theory, we consider the BBC’s approach towards election campaign coverage as an exemplary case (Hague and Harrop, 2010: 45). In this role, the BBC is an archetype of highly professional journalism that influences the understanding of professionalized journalism way beyond the United Kingdom and serves as a reference for quality journalists throughout Europe. As a theoretical framework, we use five dimensions of interventionist question types: assertiveness, aggressiveness and accountability (developed by Clayman and Heritage, 2002); threat to public image (developed by Bull and Elliott, 1998); and challenging answers (developed by Voltmer and Brants, 2011). We found all of these styles repre- sented in the corpus of question types used by BBC journalists, and without striking differences regarding Labour and Conservative party targets. While ‘adversarialism’ was the most widely used technique and ‘threats to public image’ the least common one, the boundaries between these two categories were sometimes particularly hard to draw, and we are inclined to conclude that these two categories should be considered together. Nevertheless, in the following, we present all five categories separately, together with selected examples to illustrate each question style.

Assertiveness Assertiveness concerns the extent to which questions are prefaced in a manner that restricts the range of possible answers, thereby promoting an agenda controlled by the journalist rather than the politician. They are usually exhibited in the form of closed questions (yes/no) and often formulated negatively (don’t you think, isn’t it time). Examples that we recorded from BBC programmes include the following:

•• Don’t people have a right to know how Labour would relate to the SNP if it were to form a minority government? •• By playing the Sturgeon card, aren’t you putting the Union at risk? •• Your right-to-buy offer to social housing tenants won’t solve the housing crisis. Won’t it exacerbate it? •• Since your inheritance tax proposal will benefit already advantaged middle-class kids and not disadvantaged working-class ones, won’t that limit social mobility?

Such negative interrogatives can be seen as an expression of the watchdog role, with the journalist setting out to dig out the hidden truth. However, they are also trying to push the response in a particular direction. As Clayman and Heritage (2002) state, this question type is ‘less information-seeking and more opinionated and assertive’ (p. 766).

Adversarialness Adversarialness captures instances where the questioning implies a standpoint that is in opposition to the agenda advanced by the politician being questioned: 8 Journalism 00(0)

This form of journalistic aggressiveness is often performed in prefaces to questions, where journalists may describe problems with policy proposals, highlight discrepancies between politicians’ words and their actions, or refer to opinions that run counter to views presented by the politicians being questioned. (Eriksson and Östman, 2013: 310)

Examples recorded from BBC programmes include the following:

•• Isn’t your pledge not to raise value added tax (VAT), income tax and national insurance irresponsible? What if the economy was thrown off course by some unforeseen event? You will have closed off your policy options for dealing with it? •• Although you say under Labour there will be no top-down reorganization of the National Health Service (NHS), the proposals in your manifesto sound like one! •• You seem to be making all sorts of promises – on NHS expenditure, freezing rail fares and so on. Aren’t you living in a world of fantasy promises? •• You are clear about the ‘give-aways’, the nice stuff, but not about the nasty stuff!

All these questions express a critical stance towards policy proposals and present them as extravagant, implausible or misguided. Oftentimes, they are not even questions in the strict sense but provocative invitations to respond to criticism. They come closer to accusations.

Threat to public image Closely related is the idea that questions can also lead to, create or confirm a negative impression about a politician or party, for instance, by casting doubts on motivations or capabilities in policies, statements, actions, aims and principles. The boundaries to the previous category are fluid but the following examples seem good illustrations:

•• How would you deal with the huge deficit? Presumably not by spending cuts only. Your sums don’t add up! •• Your past record of economic management doesn’t suggest that you can get your sums right! •• By when would Labour clear the deficit? Given your past economic record, how much credence can we give to your pledge on that? •• Why should the voters trust you?

Although these questions are closely linked to policy discussions, they seem to enter the territory of personal character and thereby carry a larger risk of questioning the reputation of a politician or party.

Challenging an answer Depending on how the politician responds, a journalist can accept or reject an answer. Rejection can be indicated by expressing doubt as to the accuracy, honesty or validity of Blumler and Esser 9 the information provided by the interviewee. While this happened frequently, we confine ourselves to just two examples:

•• Where will the money come from to pay for your promised injection of an extra sum of eight billion pounds into the NHS? Is it based on an assumption that economic growth between now and 2010 will suffice to support that? [A: I’m confi- dent that can be achieved.] Q: ‘Confidence’ is not a ‘commitment’? •• Your NHS spending pledge seems unfunded. Where will the money come from? [A: We won’t raise taxes.] Q: That’s not an answer!

Accountability Accountability questions ask politicians to offer an explanation for taking a particular course of action or adopting a policy position. The first type (Why did you …?) asks for a rationale, whereas the second type (How could you …?) asks for a rationale with the implied expectation that it is not possible to offer a reasonable justification. Both forms usually imply that the politician is responsible for a state of affairs assumed in the framing of the question to be undesirable:

•• What does the inheritance tax ‘give away’ say about your values when you have nothing to offer to poor people worrying about how to make ends meet? •• In your proposed welfare reforms, why won’t you tell us where the 12 billion pound benefit cuts will fall? •• Why won’t you spell out where you would make cuts in welfare expenditure? •• People on disability benefits need to know what is in store for them. Why won’t you tell them? You must know what you intend to cut?

The more hostile variant of How-Could-You questions were not recorded by us. Still, even the Why-questions in the present form are intended to put a politician in a position to defend himself or herself. In our view, these five question styles (arguably four if adversarialism and threat to public image are collapsed) represent an important indicator of journalistic interventionism. Both Conservative and Labour politicians were in our estimation exposed to the same degree of journalistic scrutiny or aggression in the programme formats examined for this qualitative assessment. It is important to stress that we do not mean to condemn this form of journalism; it also has encouraging elements to it. BBC journalists seem to have become markedly less inclined to accept politicians’ pronouncements at face value, and more inclined to challenge politicians and hold them accountable for their actions – an important democratic media function in the ‘Age of Trumpism’. We wondered whether this approach of scrutinizing politicians in the 2015 UK election more vigorously had derived from pre-election policy thinking in the Corporation or had just happened that way in response to campaign-period events. From an extensive discussion with sources at the BBC, in which an executive responsible for oversight of the Corporation’s current affairs provision joined his news colleague, the first interpretation indubitably emerged. It had been a considered and important part of the BBC’s prior thought about and planning for its 2015 election campaign coverage. 10 Journalism 00(0)

Campaign policy thinking within the BBC had begun about two and a half years before the election. Especially ‘tricky’ was the question of how to realize the BBC’s supreme political norm of ‘impartiality’ (also termed ‘fairness’ and ‘balance’ by our informants) with the emergence of more electorally significant parties on the scene and two coalition government parties. But to that norm had to be added ‘fairness’ to the now highly sceptical audience, whose members deserved, in present-day conditions of communication abundance and social media presence, greater consideration than they had been accorded in the past. In order to maintain audience trust in the BBC, it was essential not only to present campaign news accurately, clearly and accessibly, and to place it in some relevant explanatory context, but also to hold the campaigning politicians to account for what they had done in the past and intended to do in the future. A Corporation-wide determination persistently to probe the veracity and credibility of the parties’ campaign promises and claims followed from this – to ‘go hammer and tong at their assertions’ (as one of our informants put it), to ‘press them hard’. It had been thought in retrospect that in 2010, ‘we may not have dug deep enough’ into leading politicians’ assertions. At the same time, our informants were troubled by what they called ‘the big problem of the political interview’. This had arisen because politicians were now so ‘trained in tactics of evasion’, in abilities to present only ‘the messages they wanted to roll out’. More tough questioning this time round was therefore called for. In line with this was the advent of interpretive journalism, entailing a view of the journalist’s role as that of an ‘expert’ (Barnhurst and Mutz, 1997; Hallin, 1992; Patterson, 1993). So long as he or she got across the key facts about controversial issues and politicians’ positions on them, BBC journalists would not only be ‘allowed’ but also be ‘encouraged’, be ‘given free rein’, to mount lines of questioning geared ‘to get to the quick’. Helpful in this connection had been the rise to prominence by 2015 of several respected non-partisan think-tanks, such as the Institute of Fiscal Studies, whose occa- sional data-based analyses of economic and other trends could be reported in the news as objective backing for the doubts and reservations that BBC personnel would be voicing about the parties’ policy positions when interviewing their spokespersons. Our informants did not depict this more interventionist outlook as entirely unique to the BBC, however. Much of it, they said, was ‘part of the ether’ of the UK journalism culture overall. These statements confirm earlier arguments by Esser (2013) according to which interventionist news media logic has grown to considerable degree out of critical professionalism and the self-perception of journalism as the (better) representative of the public will. This style of more assertive, sceptical reporting and interpretation turns at times adversarial when journalists feel threatened in their reporting options – often caused by a highly professionalized approach towards news management and campaign communication. This brings us to the pull forces of mediatization.

Understanding pull forces of mediatization: Examples of professionalized party strategies Like in many countries, British parties have responded to growing journalistic interventionism by professionalizing their campaign strategies vis-à-vis the media. Tenscher et al. (2012, 2015) have tried to identify specific areas of activity where campaigns have Blumler and Esser 11 responded with increased professionalism to increasing mediatization. To group them, the authors differentiated between a communicative (‘strategic’) component and an organizational (‘structural’) component, among which they specified 15 indicators of campaign professionalism. We shall first deal with communicative-strategic indicators where the media-oriented pull process can be clearly seen, before we delve into organizational- structural indicators of professionalized campaign management where the advantage over Labour can be clearly seen. Since we cannot address all 15 factors identified by Tenscher et al. (2012, 2015), we feel obliged to select the most important ones, and to recombine and reformulate others without losing sight of their original meanings.

News management Although both major parties supplemented message fashioning for media consumption with efforts to reach individual voters over social media and on doorsteps, the Conservatives were undoubtedly committed, first and foremost, to the mounting of a highly considered, thoroughly worked-out and determinedly pursued campaign of news management, based partly on confidence in David Cameron’s ability smoothly and artic- ulately to announce initiatives, respond to events, counter criticisms and answer challenging questions. Widely regarded as having been successful, two academically conducted content analyses of 2015 campaign news showed that Conservative-promoted issues were covered more frequently than Labour ones both in the press and on television (Cushion et al., 2016a, 2016b; Deacon et al., 2017). In contrast, Labour seemed more doubtful of the pay-off value of mainstream news- based campaigning. This was expressed in Communication Director Tom Baldwin’s opinion that ‘quick wins and point-scoring over every policy will not convince the elec- torate’ and in Ed Miliband’s intention to turn his back on New Labour’s ‘celebrity politics’, his disdain for the Conservatives as a ‘virtual party’ and his often-stated wish to be known as the Prime Minister (if elected) who had ‘under-promised but over-achieved’. This was allied to a belief that by party activists conducting a large number of doorstep interviews with ordinary voters (five million such conversations were claimed), the Conservatives’ news-management advantages could be counteracted.

Event management The Conservatives seemed more attuned than Labour to the imperatives of media logic, particularly in how they timed and paced their news publicity efforts and in their aware- ness of other events likely to be, favourably or unfavourably, in the news on a given day. Labour’s attempts to top the news sometimes seemed ham-fisted, as in the erection of its much-ridiculed (especially in social media) ‘Ed Stone’, a high concrete pillar of 12 slabs, each of which was intended to symbolize the rock solidity of each of the Party’s campaign pledges. Professionalization contrasts were particularly noticeable in the parties’ responses to television as a visual medium. Liz Sugg, the Conservative official responsible for coping with this, was widely praised for the attractive pictures she continually supplied to background the news appearances of David Cameron and other Party spokes- people. Places of presentation were often chosen for their visual symbolism (e.g. in 12 Journalism 00(0) school rooms, factories, and building sites) in contrast to Labour’s tendency to rely on scenes of leaders standing behind podiums in halls.

Strategic use of media appearances Televised political debates are typical examples of ‘media events’ set up to suit the demands of the broadcasters. An incumbent should have little incentive to provide the main opponent with a platform to present himself on an equal footing and attack him – together with the moderator – on his previous record. In the 2015 election campaign, the Conservative Party rejected anything smacking of a head-to-head encounter between David Cameron and Ed Miliband. In the end, the BBC, on behalf of itself and the other broadcasters (ITV, Channel 4 and Sky News), acceded to the Conservatives’ demands. No head-to-head top leader debate was arranged. And although Mr Cameron did agree to appear in two of the three programmes that were eventually scheduled, in one, he was flanked by the leaders of five other parties, and in another, debating as such was set aside in favour of the presentation of questions from studio audience members to each of Cameron, Miliband and Nick Clegg (Liberal Democratic Party leader) separately. The Conservatives thus managed to avoid the risk that Mr Miliband would come across more positively than he had been painted in their campaign denigrations and in much media commentary. The debates’ potential to deflect attention away from the messages the Conservatives wanted to plant in news reports had also been ‘de-fanged’.

Unified campaign goal and strategy The Conservative campaign was single-minded in purpose. Leader David Cameron issued a ‘very clear, simple, direct, unambiguous instruction’ to Lynton Crosby, his campaign supremo, that his job was to win the election (Myerscough, 2015). All else was subordinate to that single goal. In contrast, Labour’s campaign seemed to have been shaped by multiple purposes – to send leader Ed Miliband to 10 Downing Street of course but also to foster popular engagement in politics, especially among women and young people; to promote civic education through innovative and encompassing societal critiques; and to avoid doing anything that might worsen electoral mistrust of politics and politicians. Put differently, Labour seemed torn between impulses of idealism and realism, marketing its wares and movement-building (Gilbert, 2015), normative logic versus market logic (Landerer, 2013).

Centralized campaign management Unified command was a hallmark of the Conservatives’ publicity apparatus (Cowley and Kavanagh, 2016: 74, 86): Lynton Crosby was in full charge of all its operations, and all would-be party communicators were accountable to him. In contrast, the direction of Labour’s campaign was more dispersed. A triumvirate of three chiefs was installed at its top (Tom Baldwin, Director of Communications; Greg Beale, Director of Strategy; Bob Roberts, Head of Press), who were said not always to have seen eye-to-eye about tactics or to be on mutually good personal terms. Their roles were overlaid by the hiring of US Blumler and Esser 13 consultant David Axelrod as a part-time advisor, who every now and then made recom- mendations, sometimes from afar. Whereas message discipline was a sine qua non in the Conservative team, Labour was open to more plural approaches, with Ed Miliband sometimes encouraging the several heads of campaign publicity to put up alternative ideas for him personally to choose from. And whereas Conservative advisor Lynton Crosby enjoyed the reputation of a consummate professional, Tom Baldwin, though personally liked by many journalists, was described by one commentator as having been ‘unorganised’ in ‘style’ and as ‘anything but a polished PR man’ by another.

Opposition research and rapid response Self-mediatization requires not only the tailoring of a party’s core messages to journalistic predilections but also rebuttals of rivals’ criticisms of its own positions. The Labour Party demonstrably failed to recognize and act upon this need by not confronting and refuting at an early stage the Conservatives’ repeated accusation that its profligate spending policies under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had been responsible for the financial crash of 2007–2008. Labour took account of this so late in the day – for example, in a last-minute inclusion on the front page of its election manifesto of a commitment to reduce the country’s deficit year-by-year – that when Ed Miliband rejected the charge during the campaign’s third televised debate, he was roundly jeered by the studio audience. In contrast, the Conservatives were more alert to this need. To neutralize their perceived weakness over the NHS, they promised to invest £8bn over the next 5 years. To counter Labour’s claim that it would have to increase taxes in order to fulfil its spending promises and to meet its deficit reduction target, they promised to pass a law that would prohibit increases in income tax, VAT and national insurance contributions in normal conditions. And when Labour attacked the coalition government’s toleration of tax loop- holes enjoyed by non-domiciled UK residents, they promised to abolish them if returned to power. For Lynton Crosby, the tactic to follow, when faced with an unfavourable report or accusation, would be to ‘deflect, dismiss and deny until the story ebbs away’ (Mason, 2016).

Negative campaigning Although both major parties waged hard-hitting campaigns, over communication ethics they differed greatly. Conservative publicity strategy was arguably governed by the prin- ciple that, ‘So long as it works, anything goes!’ Believing that most voters only need to know and are able to process just a few essential points, the Conservatives relentlessly rubbished Ed Miliband’s perceived ideological and personal weaknesses (Delaney, 2016). A Conservative poster, reproduced many times in the media and described by Delaney (2016) as ‘simple, powerful funny and brutal’, showed Ed Miliband in the vest pocket of former SNP leader, Alex Salmond. But quintessentially, most characteristic of the Lynton Crosby touch was the sensational episode of the ‘dead cat on the table’. In order to brake Labour’s campaign momentum and to draw journalistic attention away from that Party’s intention on a certain news day to focus on the Conservatives’ failures 14 Journalism 00(0) to curb taxation abuses, Michael Fallon (Defense Secretary) declared in a Times article that, just as Ed Miliband had stabbed his brother in the back to become Labour leader, so too, if elected, would he stab the country in the back by giving up its nuclear deterrent. The reasoning behind this diversionary manoeuvre was to distract media attention from a potentially hurtful issue to a positive issue by staging a newsworthy pseudo-event. For lack of specific terminology, Boris Johnson called it ‘throwing a dead cat on the table’ (quoted in Delaney, 2016). The Labour Party’s approach to campaigning seemed some- what more tempered by ethical scruples. It was as if it was dubious about some parts of the prevailing ‘game’, such as (1) indulgent promise-making, (2) perception is all, (3) electioneering as marketing to consumers and (4) the personalization of politics. We conclude from this seven-point analysis that the Labour Party was less well pre- pared for the demands of mediatization in the 2015 campaign. This was reflected in their response to push forces and – even more clearly – their inept use of pull techniques to make better use of strategic political communication. Labour was less determined in their use of news management and negative campaigning, less effective in their use of event management and rapid rebuttals, less unified in their internal and external communication and less successful in communicating a compelling campaign agenda and hijacking the media agenda. This verdict was confirmed in our extensive post-election interview with BBC executives responsible for news programming. Although generali- zations about the attitudes of UK journalists in general cannot be firmly drawn from a single group interview, the strategic positions of the news executives present that day suggest to us that their views were likely to be representative of the outlook of many BBC news people. The highest ranking executive present described the Conservative operation as ‘slick’, ‘sharp’ and ‘efficient’. The Conservatives’ control of their image had been ‘rigorous’, which he could not complain about since ‘they were just doing their job’. But that mattered, in his view, since that can ‘quietly seep into people’s perceptions of what a party stands for’. He confessed to ‘admiring’ the Conservative Party’s campaign professionalism, an example of which (mentioned more than once in the interview) being its ‘brilliant’ provision of pictures to accompany leaders’ appearances. In contrast, Labour had ‘not been staffed up with TV experience’, and its tactics had not been ‘as clear-sighted, brutal and ruthless’ as the Conservatives’ were.

Conclusion and outlook Our study does not see itself as a contribution to the specific details of the UK General Election of 2015 (see Cowley and Kavanagh, 2016; Cushion et al., 2016a, 2016b; Deacon et al., 2017) but rather as a contribution to mediatization research. Its main purpose is to introduce a dual perspective to the study of mediatization of politics, a political actor- centric and a media actor-centric perspective. We offer a revised understanding of the mediatization of politics consisting of a combination of push forces (expressing an active role of the media in shaping the campaign discourse – by simultaneously adapting to news management) and pull forces (expressing an active role of the parties in shaping the campaign discourse – by simultaneously adapting to the media). We propose two sets of indicators that we deem particularly well suited to capture push and pull processes, and Blumler and Esser 15 we hope that they will enrich the mediatization literature. We want to encourage future studies to consider both sides of the mediatization paradigm jointly. Any normative assessment of media-initiated push factors (in our cases, questions to politicians that express assertiveness, aggressiveness or accountability) should be careful to consider that an interventionist attitude can also represent a welcome contribution to the media’s democratic critique and control function. Esser and Umbricht (2014) had already noted that we should distinguish between a ‘desirable’ form of interpretative journalism that scrutinizes policy positions and contributes to informed citizenry, and a ‘less desirable’ form that merely aims at game-related aspects and could be criticized as a distraction from the real issues. While the BBC offered more of the ‘desirable’ reporting type than, for instance, ITV or Sky during the 2015 campaign, some researchers defend a more interventionist style if it helps to de-spin party tactics (Cushion et al., 2015, 2016b). Any assessment of pull practices (in our case, strategies of campaign professionalism and news management) should take into account that political parties may use them with varying degrees of effectiveness. In highly mediatized political communication environ- ments such as the United Kingdom during the 2015 general election, the news media seemed to have come to appreciate a certain degree of professionalism with regard to news management and to have responded critically to signs of clumsiness or indecisive- ness (by Labour). Future mediatization research may want to pay more attention to the changed, increasingly hard-boiled, relationship between media actors and political actors, and particularly between push and pull factors. Our case study examined a single event but political communication systems continue to undergo change, sometimes at a ‘glacial pace’, sometimes ‘in major cataclysmic bursts’ (Blumler and Gurevitch, 1995: 182). The UK Brexit referendum and the US presidential election of 2016 have evidently ushered in something like the latter. What questions arise from such game-changers for mediatization theory and research? Underlying our answer is Blumler and Gurevitch’s (1995) view that one source of change ‘may be traced to the drives of politicians and journalists to understand each other’s strategies and continually to adjust their mutual relations to the other side’s next steps and ploys’ (p. 205). What about the pull forces by which politicians may be driven? In addition to the seven indicators spelt out above, future research may need to add new ones such as emo- tional appeals, appeals to fear and anger, propagation of a singular view of political reality strongly at odds with others, subordination of political ‘facts’ to that view, and increased resort to ‘disintermediation’ – bypassing press filters for direct access to voters. Or is lop-sidedness likely on these points, with some types of political actors purvey- ing and others eschewing them? What about the push forces by which journalists might be animated? Might some practices of journalistic interventionism be adopted more emphatically in the future – such as adversarialness and threats to public image? Might journalists try more often to hold politicians to account for the factual accuracy of their claims – and do so in news coverage, not just in interviews? Might quality media assume such a vocation more or less uniquely to themselves? Or, alternatively, will such interventions not be pursued all that determinedly in the end – moderated perhaps by adherence to conventional news values or the imperatives of intense competition for audience attention? Blumler and 16 Journalism 00(0)

Gurevitch (1995) depicted politician-journalist relations of the 1990s as in a ‘chronic state of partial war’. Are they approaching something more like a total war nowadays – in some polities at least? If so, on what terms might it be waged – perhaps over the trust- worthiness (or lack of it) and credibility of each side (p. 215)? Questions also arise over the staying power of the hitherto quite firmly entrenched notion of ‘the campaign communication game’. Several campaigns that were based on the established model suffered spectacular defeats recently. This included Hillary Clinton’s ‘Stronger Together’ campaign in the 2016 US presidential election and the ‘Remain’ campaign in the same year’s Brexit referendum. Both lost to political move- ments observable in many Western countries (outside and within party structures) that disdain or otherwise decline to play the established game (initially at least), favouring new forms of mass mobilizing communication efforts instead. Will the standard model ultimately prevail? Will two rival approaches, deemed appropriate and useful for very different reasons, exist and evolve side-by-side? What part might mediatization impulses play in the mixes? Finally, how might all that be perceived by ordinary people? The established approach might seem normatively restricted, barren, even repugnant at times – just a manipulative game. The upstart approach may seem more attractive but lacking in practical solutions to pressing current problems. How all that might play out in citizens’ perceptions of the kind of political communication process they inhabit could be a meaningful basis for new-found research.

Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

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Author biographies Jay G Blumler is Emeritus Professor of Public Communication, University of Leeds, and Emeritus Professor of Journalism, University of Maryland. Frank Esser is Professor of International and Comparative Media Research at the University of Zurich. Cross-National and Cross-Temporal Changes in Political News:

A Multigroup SEM-Model of Mediatized Politics

Abstract

This paper approaches the “mediatization of politics” from a symbolic interactionist perspective by asking how political reality is defined and constructed by the news media.

Drawing on the concepts of media logic and media interventionism, it examines the degree to which newspaper from the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and

France have used indicators of “anti-politics bias” in their public affairs reporting between the

1960s and 2000s. Combining a cross-national with a cross-temporal perspective, the paper aims to uncover the causal mechanism behind an increase in mediatized political news. To test the hypothesized relationships, the paper uses multi-group structural equation modeling

(SEM). It finds a positive effect between “temporal development” (main predictor) and

“mediatized news coverage” (outcome), and finds “interpretative journalism” and “enterprise reporting” (as moderators) to serve as important facilitators and amplifiers in the process. The mediatization process is strongest for the US and British media, followed by the Italian and

French media. These and other results are discussed with regard to their contribution to theory-building in mediatization research.

Mediatization and Self-Mediatization of Politics

Comparative research in the sub-field of political communication has a long tradition but two-country comparisons are still the most often used type. However, in order to fully exploit the comparative rationale, more than just two cases should be considered, and country- comparative and time-comparative designs should be combined. Only this combination

1 allows for the analysis of the truly interesting processes of transformation such as commercialization, professionalization or mediatization.

Mediatization is of special interest to the present study. Research on the mediatization of politics explores the implications of clashes between political logic and media logic. In order to understand the tension between the two logics, it is helpful to understand the process of political communication as consisting of three steps or levels:

 the “production” of politics at the level of program development, problem-solving,

bargaining of interests, and decision making;

 the “self-portrayal” of politics at the level of politicians publicizing their plans and

justifying outcomes – increasingly with the help of communication advisers; and

 finally, the “media portrayal” of politics in the form of news reports.

Under the conditions of mediatized politics, self-portrayal by political actors has gained enormous importance. Whereas political scientists describe the function of self-portrayal as

“communicative representation” (Mansbridge, 2009), others have condemned it as “spin doctoring” (Esser, 2008). However, because democratic politics is dependent on legitimacy through continuous public support, all political actors (including governments, parties, and associations) have a vital interest in presenting their programs, goals, and accomplishments in the media.

The self-presentational skills of politics have become more and more important and professionalized. This phenomenon is called “self-mediatization of politics” (see Asp, 2014).

This term capture the self-initiated stage-management and media-friendly packaging of politics by means of strategic communication in an effort to master the new rules that govern access to the public sphere. It is a reflexive response by the political system to media-related changes in their institutional environment. It can also be described as “reflexive

2 mediatization,” whereby political actors take advantage of media services, anticipate potential effects and exploit the media through strategic communication for their own purposes.

Political Logic

We argue that the “self-portrayal” of politics is an inherent component of the logic of politics (Esser, 2013; Meyer, 2002). But it is only one out of three components. The first component of political logic can be designated as “policy”, describing the production logic of politics. It dominates the stages of policy making and policy implementation, stages that are characterized by coordinating and balancing interests, organizing negotiations, debating alternative policy choices, and – ultimately – finding solutions to substantial issues.

The second component of political logic brings us to the “self-portrayal” or self- mediatization of politics. It relates to the process of influencing others and garnering public support. It is directly tied to the self-presentational side and particularly prevalent when politicians seek to gain office in election campaigns or approach governing as a permanent campaign. Formally speaking, self-presentational politics is dominant in the stages of interest articulation and preference mobilization, problem framing and outcome justification.

Strategies include pseudo-events, image projections, and symbolic politics. The democratic justification behind presentational politics is to publicly visualize responsiveness, demonstrate answerability, personalize responsibility, and give account to a public act. It is thereby inherently political, but dependent on the assistance of the media.

The third and last component of political logic refers to the respective institutional structure of a national system, namely its “polity” framework, the “institutional context of politics.” It limits what political actors can do. From an internationally comparative perspective, differences in government systems, electoral systems, party systems, and political

3 cultures must be accounted for in assessments of political logic, as these institutional polity elements have direct implications for the policy and process dimensions in a given country.

News Media Logic

Before we come to our understanding of media logic, it is useful to explain our understanding of the mediatization of politics. It may be defined as a long-term process through which the importance of the news media and their spill-over effects on political processes, institutions, organizations and actors have increased (see Strömbäck & Esser,

2014). This definition prefers to speak of spill-over effects because it is often not the media which directly cause changes in political organizations but it is the political organizations themselves that decide, on the basis of their own perception, to make media-related changes.

The “presumed” influence and importance of the media is sometimes sufficient for causing real world changes (Strömbäck & Esser 2014). Whenever a grouping of news media organizations follows a largely similar news logic, they can – in theoretical terms – be subsumed under one institution. And international comparative research has delivered empirical evidence that within individual countries the styles of political reporting become very similar from one news outlet to the next. Factors pushing news organizations towards similar routines within any given country include professional consensus, a common media policy and acting in a joint market (Strömback, 2011).

What are about these news media organizations when they encounter politics? Do they report according to political logic? A newspaper article that tries to completely explain the political logic of a political decision or an event would have to give all three components

(policy, polity and power process) adequate consideration. But often the media is accused of doing the opposite:

4 • Offering only an episodic, decontextualizing reporting style that masks the structural

constraints and institutional rules of the polity framework.

• Providing insubstantial, depoliticized news coverage that masks substantive policy

issues or attends to them in very brief and simplified form,

• Or the media is accused of a type of reporting that is only interested in personalities

and strategic motives, which disproportionately exaggerates selected aspects of the

self-presentational process component at the expense of policy and polity elements.

The reason is of course that news organizations report politics according to news media logic. The three core components of news media logic are professionalization and commercialization, followed by technological change. All three are assumed to causally influence the culture of news production. We understand the three components of news media logic as follows (Esser, 2013):

The first component of professionalization refers to the idea of how autonomously from political influence news journalism functions and whether the news outcome is in the interest of the common good and democratic values. Autonomy from political influences is visible in news that is produced according to news values (instead of political values), that is analytical

(instead of passively reproducing political statements), that is critical (demanding transparency, answerability and account-giving) or adversarial (countering attempts of political instrumentalization). Mediatization theory thus expects that with increasing professionalization the news media assume a more autonomous and proactive role in society.

Commercialization as the second core dimension of media logic has a strained relationship with professionalization. Journalists traditionally have insisted on a principal separation between the newsroom and the business department – mainly to preserve their autonomy against commercial forces. However, this wall has largely collapsed. Bennett

(2009) points out that commercial imperatives are more pronounced in the media logic of

5 liberal systems than in democratic-corporatist systems; and that commercial imperatives are more pronounced in tabloids than in upmarket newspapers. Possible effects of commercial imperatives on political communication include confrontainment (focusing on conflict, polarization, scandal), depolitization (marginalizing substantial issue discussion), dramatization (playing up emotion and sensation features) or infotainment (packaging political news in appealing).

With regard to the effects of professionalization and commercialization, scholars point to potentially negative effects for democracy. For instance, a role understanding of “critical” professionalism may drive journalists to a more assertive, skeptical, even cynical or destructive reporting style that can at times turn adversarial towards politicians. With regard to the commercial imperatives of news logic, they can lead to an insufficient supply of substance that no longer allows for an adequate understanding of available policy options. In sum, many scholars are concerned about a potentially disadvantageous mix of certain professional and commercial elements of media logic that may discourage political interest, subvert political knowledge, and impede the formation of informed opinions. A decline in comprehensive policy coverage may undermine the media's capacity to act as an account- holder; and may discourage citizens to get involved.

A third component of media logic is technological change which refers to implications of different media formats (such as print, broadcasting, online) for the production of content.

In the present study to which we would like to turn now only one technology is examined, namely print, with regard to long-term changes.

Rationale of Study

This paper takes account of the findings outlined so far. It analyzes newspaper journalism in six countries across five decades and focusses on the third of Strömbäck’s

6 (2008) dimensions of mediatization. With regard to news logic, it is interested in media interventionism. Mediatization implies a long-term trend and requires a longitudinal research design. However, this limits us to an analysis of newspapers as they are the only data source available that reaches back to the 1960s. The number of longitudinal mediatization studies is still surprisingly small. Even smaller is the number of those studies that combine a comparison over time with a comparison between countries.

Our study focuses on the third dimension of mediatization, namely the question of how political reality is defined and constructed by the news media. It assumes that the media- specific ways in which the news media present political information influence the world- views of readers and viewers, but also the behaviors of politicians who are aware of the media’s large potential impact. Conceptually speaking, media interventionism refers to a media-centered reporting style in which, increasingly, journalists become the stories' main newsmakers, instead of political sources. This reporting style can be traced back to a professionally motivated behavior by journalists to increase their influence, authority and prestige – and, ultimately, their control over news content. Its theoretical underpinnings are the concepts of “media intrusion” developed by Dennis K. Davis (1990) and “media's discretionary power” developed by Jay Blumler and Michael Gurevitch (1995).

Explaining Mediatization of News Coverage

In light of the findings outlined so far, it is plausible to deduce the following conditional factors which seem to influence the extent of news logic used in the media coverage of political affairs.

Temporal development. In terms of development over time, the available studies are not really clear about whether there has been a continuous increase in mediatized news coverage over the past 10–20 years, but most findings support the assumption that political

7 news has become more mediatized compared to 40–50 years ago (Zeh & Hopmann, 2013).

Our study attempts to contribute to the clarification of this issue.

System differences. At the level of countries, journalistic intervention seems to spread faster in political systems characterized by weak party organizations and weak party loyalties.

Interventionism is also aided by only light media regulation and strong commercial considerations and market pressures. Finally, interventionism is facilitated by professional independence which journalists have achieved at a faster rate in liberal and corporatist media systems than in polarized ones (Strömbäck & Esser, 2011). This study aims to clarify the relation between media systems and mediatization.

News organizations. At the level of news organizations, the available evidence so far seem to support the assumption that news media embedded within the same media system constitute a singular institution and follow a similar news logic. Others seem doubtful in the face of a multi-channel environment. While the study cannot say anything about the future, it aims to offer an assessment of how it has been until today.

News culture. At the level of journalism culture, mediatization is closely linked to journalistic initiative and active role perceptions. How do initiative and activism become most apparent? On the one hand through an enterprising reporting style, where stories do not arise from an external cause but from own initiative; on the other hand through an interpretive reporting style, where journalists incorporate their own evaluations, speculations and explanations in their stories. Journalists subscribing to an enterprising and interpretive reporting style should be more susceptible to implanting media logic (rather than political logic) in their political affairs coverage. Their stories should demonstrate a higher degree of media interventionism.

Conceptualization of Media Interventionism

Our conceptualization of media interventionism is based on media autonomy from politics and can in extreme cases express a so-called “anti-politics bias” which depicts politics mainly as untrustworthy and a staged show. Politicians are exposed as pretenders who rely on event management, image management and news management. Anti-politics bias stemming from critical professionalism may motivate journalists to depict the business of politics with an overall negative tonality and express skepticism toward the capabilities and effectiveness of political elites, essentially charging them with incompetence.

However, an “anti-politics bias” could also manifest itself insofar as only those aspects of politics are emphasized that can be emotionalized and scandalized. The aim here would be to concentrate on those aspects of political news that have an “animation benefit” and serve the commercial interests of the media. Anti-politics bias stemming from commercialism may motivate journalists to use scandalization, sensationalization and emotionalization, which can be read as signs of depolitization – where substantial issue discussion is avoided as it may turn-off audiences as ‘boring’. In sum, they seem to indicate a trend toward spectacularization and dramatization in a competitive race for ratings and profit – both serving media interests more than political interests.

Model and Hypotheses

First we developed a theoretical model as shown in FIGURE 1 that we aim to test empirically in a second step.

9 FIGURE 1: THE CONCEPTUAL MODEL

The main predictor for changes regarding the degree of mediatization of political news is “decades” or, more precisely, temporal development – namely with regard to two drivers of media logic. One is “growing professionalism of journalism” and the increasing marking of independence and distance vis-à-vis party politics and instrumentalization attempts. The other is “growing commercialism of media markets.” Our first hypothesis (H1) states that there is an increase of mediatized news coverage over time.

The temporal development was measured through a long-term content analysis covering the 1960s and 1970s as key decades for increased professionalization, and the 1990s and 2000s as key decades for increased commercialism. It is also known that critical professionalism and market orientation developed earlier in “liberal” media systems than in

“mediterranean” systems (see Hallin & Mancini, 2004). And we outlined that there is uncertainty whether different types of news outlets follow the same news logic. Therefore, different newspaper types (national titles, regional titles, and weekly titles) were examined in six countries representing the variety of western media system models by Hallin and Mancini

(2004). From this follows our second hypothesis (H2): The level of mediatization in liberal media systems is higher than in the other two Western media system types. And we add the

10 following research question (RQ): Does the level of Mediatization differ between different newspaper types?

In order to advance theory building further, we must define in greater detail the boundary conditions that can support or hamper mediatization. In formal terms, we must integrate “moderator-variables” in our model.

The first moderator is termed journalistic initiative, measured by whether a story was initiated outside the newsroom (triggered by an external event or actor) or inside the newsroom (triggered by an editorial decision). One way in which coders had to consider this question was whether the story would have been produced, on this day, by other news outlets, or whether it was clearly generated by this particular news outlet.

The second moderator is termed “interpretive journalism” and captures the following three story formats: stories that mix information with interpretation (i.e., stories offering explanation, investigation or speculation about the motivations, tactics and consequences of political events), stories that mix information with opinion (i.e., stories offering peripheral commentary, opinionated perspectives or subjective viewpoints despite not marked as commentary), and commentary (i.e., editorials, leaders, opinion columns). The leads us to the expectation that (H3) a temporal increase of the level of mediatization is further strengthened by enterprise reporting. Similarly, it leads us to expect that (H4) a temporal increase of the level of mediatization is further strengthened by interpretive reporting.

On the right side of the conceptual model in FIGURE 1 you see the indicators used to capture mediatized political news. These variables are also all measured at the story level.

The first indicator, “Negative tonality” captures whether the tonality of a story is pessimistic (irrespective of the topic covered). It takes into account all statements in the story and puts politics in the vicinity of crisis, frustration, decline and disappointment. The second indicator, “skepticism to elites” measures whether a story emphasizes incompetence, inability,

11 incapability (as opposed to competence, ability, capability) of political actors. Sensationalism emphasizes uncommon, extreme or animating elements of attention-grabbing character and deviate from a rational, matter-of-fact writing style. Scandalization refer to intense public communication about a real or imagined defect or misbehavior that provokes widespread indignation or outrage. Finally, emotionalism adds a human-interest component to the presentation of an event by giving it a face, using engaging images or expressions, or displaying and amplifying emotions.

We used these indicators (and not others) because they are at the heart of the interventionist mediatization paradigm. Others are left out that are either explicitly election- related (like game frames) or that have proven fruitless in previous studies (like personalization).

Method and Sampling

We conducted a quantitative content analysis of sixteen news outlets from six press systems (see Table 1). The rationale was to generate sufficient variance in the sample with regard to the explanatory factors outlined above (types of media system and of news cultures as well as types of news organizations). In accordance to Hallin and Mancini (2014) we merge American and British newspapers into one shared model and consider them as liberal press systems. The German and Swiss press systems are good examples of what Hallin and

Mancini have termed the Corporatist Model, at least the liberal variant of it. And France and

Italy are prototypical representatives of the Polarized Mediterranean Model.

12 TABLE 1 SAMPLE OF NEWS OUTLETS

Number of articles

Models Countries News outlets 1960s 1970s 1990s 2000s Total USA New York Times 130 71 105 88 394 St. Louis Post-Dispatch 101 41 53 86 281 Time Magazine 50 61 46 41 198 GBR The Times 124 157 74 65 420 Birmingham Mail 79 36 47 44 206 Observer 114 79 54 67 314 Liberal Liberal Anglo-American

GER Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 120 134 180 193 627 Rheinische Post 142 106 119 147 514 Spiegel 30 109 92 50 281 SWI Neue Zürcher Zeitung 59 78 70 96 303 Berner Zeitung 49 56 114 112 331 Weltwoche 48 104 60 51 263 Corporatist Germanic

FRA Le Monde 76 89 161 128 454 Quest France 89 91 71 74 325 Express 31 42 75 87 235 ITA Corriere della Sera 60 65 182 231 538 Resto del Carlino 57 68 202 154 481 Espresso 46 54 96 93 289 Polarized Polarized Mediterranean

Total 1405 1441 1801 1807 6454

We included all articles that discussed at least one regional, national or international political actor or institution and her or his actions—irrespective of whether he or she offered news, analysis or commentary—that started on the front page (including those continued on the inside pages) or those political stories whose headline was mentioned on the front page but where the story was published inside the newspaper. This is consistent with common practice in comparative international news research (see Benson, 2010; Strömbäck &

Dimitrova, 2006) and ensures that political articles are analyzed which the newsroom considers most important and that readers are most likely to notice. For news magazines, in addition to all stories mentioned on the cover, we also included those stories prominently highlighted in the table of contents, usually with bold letters or a picture. This sampling strategy yielded 873 stories from US newspapers, 940 from British newspapers, 1422 from

13 German newspapers, 897 from Swiss newspapers, 1014 from French newspapers and 1308 from Italian newspapers. In sum we examined 6454 articles.

Our study focuses on routine phases of political affairs coverage that are not bound to specific events or periods that would eventually bias the results. We selected issues from the

1960s, 1970s, 1990s and 2000s in an effort to capture a longitudinal perspective. For each decade, we analyzed two years, namely 1960/61, 1972/73, 1994/95 and 2006/07. In every second month of these four two-year periods, one random issue of each news outlet was sampled. Our five indicators were measured with three-point scales. How they were operationalized was spelt in the previous section where we developed our model and hypotheses.

Bilingual coders were trained intensively for several weeks. All coders employed in the project have detailed knowledge of the country whose news stories they analyzed and they are fluent in the respective languages. For testing the inter-coder reliability, we used Cohen’s kappa as a rather conservative measure that gives credit only to agreement beyond chance.

The average (Cohen’s kappa) coefficients were calculated separately for all language groups

(English, French, German and Italian) and separately for format-based story elements (e.g., placement, story genre) and content-based elements (e.g., style elements, frames). Landis and

Koch (1977) characterize values between .61 and .80 as substantial and between .81 and 1 as almost perfect agreement. For all format-based variables, the average level of agreement was in the “almost perfect” range (.83–.91) and for the content-based variables in the “substantial” range (.62–.70) in the four language groups. These values are in line with kappa tests reported in other cross-national comparative content analyses (see Dimitrova & Strömbäck, 2012).

Results

To test the relationships of our conceptual model, we use structural equation modeling

(SEM). Structural equation modeling has important advantages. The first is that we can perform a confirmatory factor analysis of the latent construct “mediatization” with all its indicators simultaneously with a path analysis in the same model. The second advantage is that – in addition to direct effects – we can study the indirect effects of moderating variables; and the third advantage is that we can test the explanatory character of an entire model versus assessing individual regressions.

The “goodness of fit” of the models presented in the following is good. As main measures of fit, the Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) should be below

.05 and the Comparative Fit Index should be above .95 (see Schreiber et al 2006) – both requirements are easily met by all of our models (see FIGURES 2-5). And to ensure that our analyses are not compromised by non-normal data distributions in some of our variables, we double-checked all our regression coefficients with a bootstrapping analysis and robust clustered standard errors.

Measurement Model

The measurement part of the model works as a confirmatory factor analysis and shows how well the theoretical construct “mediatized political news” is measured with the five indicators (see

15 FIGURE 2). Our outcome variable “mediatized news coverage” is defined as a latent construct underlying the five indicators. The factor loadings of the indicators and the goodness of fit values in the right-hand bottom box indicate that our measurement model works pretty well.

16 FIGURE 2 MEASUREMENT MODEL OF MEDIATIZED POLITICAL NEWS

SEM also has an exploratory component to it. In our case it emerges that the indicators

“negative tone in the presentation of politics,” “skepticism toward political elites” and

“scandalization” form a common factor because of their continued co-occurrence in news coverage. Given its composition, we have termed this common factor “adversarialism”.

Interestingly, “scandalization” seems to serve a double-function with its double loading: It helps to dramatize political news (and has a commercial benefit to it) and it expresses adversarial distance to politics (expressing critical professionalism). This illustrates well the interconnections between the professional and commercial dimension of news media logic.

Mediatization Trend

To test Hypothesis 1, we identified a model that includes all countries and all news organizations. Because mediatization is understood as a temporal process, the temporal change between decades is the main predictor. It is important to stress that in theory mediatization is not understood as proceeding in a linear way. However, there are no well- founded theoretical models explaining how the assumed non-linear curve progression looks 17 like exactly and we do not want to fit an arbitrary curve to the data. Therefore we are examining mediatization here nonetheless as a linear progression. This is conservative insofar as each atheoretical curve-linear adjustment towards the data structure can only lead to even stronger effects.

Despite using a very conservative linear function in FIGURE 3, we find a significant and positive direct effect between “temporal development” and “mediatized news coverage,” meaning that over time journalists increasingly implant elements of news logic in their political affairs coverage. The standardized BETA coefficient is .14 (and would likely be higher if measured with a non-linear model). This confirms our Hypothesis 1.

FIGURE 3 STRUCTURAL EQUATION MODEL FOR EXPLAINING MEDIATIZATION TREND IN ALL

COUNTRIES

Looking at the indirect effects in FIGURE 3, our Hypotheses 3 and 4 are also confirmed: interpretative journalism (positive BETA value of .06) as well as story initiative

(positive BETA value of .15) increase over time. Furthermore, they serve as important 18 facilitators and amplifiers of “mediatized news coverage” – they provide an additional explanation on top of the direct effect (expressed by the BETA values of .38 and .02).

Comparing System Groups

Turning to Hypothesis 2 and testing the assumption that the level of mediatization is higher in liberal media systems than in the other two media system types, we run multi-group

SEMs. Figure 4 shows for the results for the three country pairs, and we will start with the findings for the Anglo-American media systems (marked in red). Indeed, and supporting

Hypothesis 2, the mediatization process is strongest for the Anglo-American countries. The direct trend effect has a BETA value of .21, clearly exceeding the average for all six countries

(which is .14). With regard to our two moderators, both „interpretive journalism” and

„journalistic initiative” also have increased over time, boosting further the trend toward mediatized news coverage in the Great Britain and the United States.1

FIGURE 4 SEM WITH MULTI-GROUPS FOR TYPES OF MEDIA SYSTEMS

1 To enhance readability, some coefficients for national or weekly titles have been omitted if they don’t differ significantly from the values for “all” newspaper types.

Comparing these results with the outcomes for Germany and Switzerland (marked in green in FIGURE 4) it emerges that no linear upward trend is observed – and the direct effect between time and mediatization largely disappears. There is also no increase in “interpretative journalism,” and only a weak one in “story initiative.” For Italy and France, however, the linear trend is again clear and significant (marked in blue in FIGURE 4). To sum it up,

Hypothesis 2 is supported; the trend towards mediatized political news is highest in Anglo-

American newspapers.

Please also note from FIGURE 4 that the explained variance for the construct of mediatized political news is very similar for all country pairs which underscore the robustness of the overall model. R-squares in the range of 15-18 percent may not seem impressive but we could have “improved” our R-square easily by fitting the model closely to the data but that was not our intention. Here we are testing a complex theoretical model that was previously developed with great care. The only exploratory part of the model is the factor

“adversarialism,” everything else was pre-set (or restricted) by our theoretical reasoning. An interesting way of reaching higher R-square levels is by using logarithmic functions instead of linear ones. Nevertheless, we could not find any non-linear theoretical models in the literature which could have guided such an analysis.

Comparing News Organizations

Finally, we are turning to our Research Question which asks whether news logic plays out uniformly across different types of news organizations, or whether there are differences between newspaper types. The measurement model in FIGURE 5 did not reveal any meaningful differences across national, regional and weekly titles, meaning that the ingredients of news logic are the same for all three newspaper types.

20 FIGURE 5: SEM WITH MULTI-GROUPS FOR NEWSPAPER TYPES

Where we do find differences is in the time-sensitive explanation of mediatized political news. The explained variance (expressed as R-square) is twice as high for regional newspapers than for the other newspaper types. That means that our three predictors “time,”

“story initiative” and “interpretative journalism” can explain a rise in mediatized news much better for the regional newspapers. One reason for this is that the values for national newspapers and weekly newspapers were higher and more stable to begin with, and also vary less over time. The same picture holds true for the main direct effect between “temporal development” and mediatized news: the positive linear trend is highest for regionals, because the increase is the steepest. Both moderators “story initiative” and “interpretive journalism” are rising the most for regional newspapers. We conclude from these results that no sector of the press is safe from mediatization trends. Even the so-called boring regional newspapers show a strong inclination to implant news logic in their political affairs coverage. The

21 composition of indicators making up news logic is highly similar, but the explanatory pathway over time evolved differently.

Conclusion

The paper started by clarifying the concept of political logic in mediatization research.

News coverage in accordance with political logic would, with regard to each political topic or event, need to consider the three dimensions polity, policy and power game, specifically the institutional conditions and normative constraints of decisions (polity), the underlying substantial issues, alternative choices, deliberation processes, and possible solutions (policy) as well as interests and strategic maneuvers of the political actors (power game). News stories, however, usually do not offer that because they are guided by news logic.

The paper continued by identifying the main drivers of news logic. The first component “critical professionalism” emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as a new ideal of

“critical scrutiny” in Western journalism which seems to have caused more negativism and skepticism in political news. Criticizing politicians has not only the professional advantage of conveying an image of independence and authority, but also a commercial advantage of catching people's attention and maximizing audiences. “Commercialism” was identified as second component of news logic. In order to sell political news to an indifferent audience, journalists seem to feel tempted to add drama with sensation-triggering emotions. This has become increasingly important since media competition has accelerated in the 1990s and

2000s.

Thirdly, the paper suggested a SEM strategy of data analysis that allows for a temporal explanation of mediatized news coverage. SEM also helps us assess the quality with which predictor and moderator variables contribute to the outcome (mediatized news coverage), as well as to assess how well the outcome is reflected in the indicators used to measure it.

22 Fourthly, we tried to demonstrate the importance of integrating the role of moderators

(that facilitate or hinder mediatization) if we wish to push forward theory building in mediatization research. In a critique of current mediatization research, Stanyer and Downey

(2014) complain that too many scholars fail to employ a longitudinal design, fail to specify the causal mechanism, and fail to demarcate the boundary conditions of mediatization processes – out study tried to adequately account for all three of these issues.

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