one - Governance and the media: exploring the linkages

Summary

Anyone who has been at least half awake for the past several decades would find it difficult to deny that the media has a significant impact on the capacity to govern and the style in which governance is produced. This influence can be seen most readily in electoral politics, but it is also pervasive in other aspects of governing. Presidents and prime ministers have news conferences, and they and other ministers invest substantial energy in ‘spin’ and in attempting to shape the coverage of public affairs to suit their own political and policy objectives. And even further down in public organisations seemingly lowly public servants may find themselves the subject of media attention if there appears to be a good story (see Schillemans, 2012).

To understand contemporary governance one needs to be cognisant of the manner in which media, and perhaps more generally information, is used as a component of the process. The fundamental contention of the mediatisation literature is that institutions and organisations adapt to the pervasive role of the media (Pallas et al, 2014), and this chapter argues that the same is true for the processes of governance. Thus, contemporary governance reflects the extent to which the formal and informal actors in governance have adapted their behaviours to the media environment within which they function. Whatever the goals of a government, they must pursue those goals within the environment shaped (in part) by mediatisation.

At the same time that the media do appear to be a pervasive component of governance, there are also some pressures to ‘demediatise’ governing. This reflects something of a populist urge of leaders to connect directly to the people. This pattern may involve social media, but may denigrate most broadcast media. The most obvious exponent of this attack on the conventional media is President Donald Trump, but other populist leaders are having their own skirmishes with the media (Frej, 2018). For these politicians the task is not so much to adapt to the role of the media as to undermine the central place of media in governance.