JOU0010.1177/1464884918754850JournalismBlumler and Esser 754850research-article2018 Original Article Journalism 1 –18 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 rela- tionship 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 inter- ventionism have been suggested by previous research. De Vreese (2014) links news media logic to the process of journalistic frame-building and frame-setting; he empha- sizes ‘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 journal- istic 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 con- trasts but in reality, they are not. In fact, we wish to argue that they operate simultane- ously 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 inter- action. In the following distillation of key features of the 2015 election campaign, both perspectives are incorporated. Furthermore, we will highlight two aspects of mediatiza- tion 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 litera- ture, 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 pro- fessionalization 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