Comparing Political Communication: Theory, Methods and Case Studies

Abstract

Over the last two decades, political communication, journalism and the media have gradually been integrated into political science issues. Nowadays it seems not possible to study political processes and systems without considering not only traditional political actors (State, political parties, interest groups, social movements, etc.), but also the media. Nevertheless studies are usually planned from a national point of view. Recently things have been changing. Thirty years later after their first study on comparative political communication, Blumler and Gurevitch (2004) notice: “A fundamental change has taken place in attitudes to comparative research from the earlier periods of our writing. There is no longer that need urge others to ‘go comparative’, to proselytize for more involvement in comparative political communication research, which animated us in 1975 and 1990. There is now a widespread appreciation of its potential”. Driven by this increased awareness, this panel proposition wants to enlarge the debate on the use of comparative perspective in sociology of journalism and communication. More precisely, it will focus on three major goals. First, we would like to trigger a theoretical discussion on the contributions of a comparative perspective to political communication research. Special attention should be devoted to prevalent orientations such as the differentiation and de-differentiation theory (Hallin and Mancini 2004) and the journalistic field theory (Benson and Neveu 2005), discussing relationships between political, economic and media systems. Giuliano Bobba will propose a critical state of the art. Furthermore, he will present the first results of a comparative “theory driven” research between the French and Italian media systems. Second, we would like to discuss the current hypothesis of a homogenisation of journalism. Indeed, some comparative studies suggest a convergence process of journalism in western democracies. The journalistic model based on a core work ethic consisting mainly of objectivity, fairness and detachment, of which the United States would embody the “purest” form (Schudson 1978 ; Donsbach 1995), would become dominant (Hallin and Mancini 2004). Yet, some other authors propose a concept of hybridisation (Esser and Pfetsch 2004) as opposed to the concept of Americanisation: it suggests that the American model is facing strong factors of resistance. On the basis of a national case study about the Italian daily press, Benedetta Cappellini will analyse the transformation of the peculiarities of the Italian journalistic field through one example: Il Corriere della Sera. By comparing case studies in France and Italy, Eugénie Saitta, will discuss the current idea of a decline of political journalism and media interest in politics, highlighting the differences among national daily newspapers. Third, while the papers mentioned above underlined the importance of the political system model on the forms of political communication and on the journalistic field, we would like to stress the interactions with other social spheres, such as the intellectual/academic one and the scientific one. This opening-up aims to emphasize other specificities and/or similarities between national media. Fabio Pereira and Arnaud Le Gall will present papers concerning the relationship between intellectuals and the media in Brazil and France, and between experts and television in the USA and France, where the diversity of these social groups’ media strategies will be illustrated. Bibliography: Benson R., Neveu E. (2005), Bourdieu and the journalistic field, Cambridge, Polity press. Blumler J. G. and Gurevitch M. (1995), The Crisis of Public Communication, London, Routledge. Blumler J. G. and Gurevitch M. (1975), Towards a Comparative Framework for Political Communication Research, in S. H. Chaffee (ed.), Political Communication. Issues and Strategies for Research, Beverly Hills, Sage. Donsbach, W. (1995), “ Lapdog, Watchdogs and Junkyard Dogs ”, in Media Studies Journal, IX, 4: 17-31. Esser F. and Pfetsch B. (eds.) (2004), Comparing Political Communication. Theories, Cases and Challenges, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Hallin D.C., Mancini P. (2004), Comparing Media Systems. Three Models of Media and Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge university press. Schudson, M. (1978), Discovering the News : A Social History of American Newspapers, New York, Basic Books.

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