Journalist-Source Relations, Mediated Reflexivity and the Politics of Politics

This essay discusses journalist-source relations but with an emphasis on how such relations influence the understanding and behaviour of politicians. It explores the issue through empirical work conducted at the site of the UK Parliament at Westminster. Findings are based on semistructured interviews with 60 Members of Parliament (MPs) and 20 national political journalists. The research findings initially confirmed many of the observations of earlier studies in the field. UK journalist-source relations still resemble Gans’ (1979) original ‘‘tug-of-war’’ description of an evershifting power balance between the two sides. Such interactions, in turn, are reflected in more compliant or adversarial news coverage. Of greater interest here, the interviews also revealed that such relations have come to play a significant role in the micro-level politics of the political sphere itself. This is because reporter-politician relations and objectives have become institutionalised, intense and subject to a form of ‘‘mediated reflexivity’’. Consequently, politicians have come to incorporate such reporter interactions into their daily thinking and behaviour. As such, journalists are seen as more than a simple means of message promotion to the public. They also act, often inadvertently, as information intermediaries and sources for politicians trying to gauge daily developments within their own political arena

Forget Neoliberalism: Its Financialization, Stupid!

This is the transcript of an interview with Aeron Davis about financialization and it's differences with neoliberalism. The interview was conducted by Daniel Cuonz, Scott Loren and Jörg Metelmann, for their edited collection Screening Economies

Jerry Palmer, Spinning into Control. News values and Source Strategies

Le but principal du livre de Jerry Palmer est de fusionner deux traditions de recherche dans le domaine de la médiologie. La première – la plus courante dans les pays anglo-saxons – est l'analyse des négociations en amont et de leur contribution à la production journalistique. Jusqu'il y a dix ans, de telles analyses étaient plutôt rares, et ce sujet était d'abord considéré comme un épiphénomène dans les études classiques du travail journalistique. En soutenant que la médiologie était devenue..

Public relations, political communications and national news production in Britain 1979-1999

This study looks at the recent rise of the public relations profession and its influence on national news production in Britain. Simply put, has public relations undermined the notion of the fourth estate media in Britain and has it advantaged certain kinds of news source over others? The thesis breaks down into three parts. The first part documents the rise of public relations in Britain, its profile, and distribution amongst a range of institutions and organisations. The developing public relations and media industries are compared and the literature, on the relations between 'news sources', PR practitioners and journalists, is critically evaluated. The second part focuses on corporate public relations generally and, more specifically, on financial and City PR. Industry and fieldwork data are contrasted with radical and liberal accounts of media-corporate source relations. The findings suggest that corporate PR has had limited success in influencing mainstream news but been considerably more adept at managing specialist news sections. It is thus argued that PR has benefited the corporate sector, less by influencing journalists and the general public, and more by excluding them. This pattern is supported with a detailed case study involving Granada's take-over of Forte in 1995/96. The third part discusses 'resource-poor' and 'outsider' groups - more specifically, British trade unions. Fieldwork data is used to test radical and pluralist accounts of the coverage of such groups in the mass media. The findings argue that unions have found new ways to increase their media access using PR - and with rather more success than earlier studies suggested. The conclusion is borne out by a case study of the UCW's (Union of Communication Workers) successful PR campaign to halt Post Office privatisation in 1994. Finally, the separate findings of the thesis are used to develop a fuller description of how public relations affects media production and news source access

Political Communication: A New Introduction for Crisis Times

We are living in a period of great uncertainty. Votes for Brexit and Trump, along with widespread political volatility, are not only causing turmoil; they are signs that many long-predicted tipping points in media and politics have been reached. Such changes have worrying implications for democracies everywhere. In this text, Aeron Davis bridges old and new to map the shifts and analyse what they mean for our aging democracies. Why are volatile, polarized electorates no longer prepared to support established political parties? Why are large parts of the legacy media either dying or dismissed as 'fake news'? How is social media rapidly rewriting the rules? And why do some democratic leaders look more like dictators, and pollsters and economists more like fortune tellers? These questions and more are addressed in the book. Political Communication: A New Introduction for Crisis Times both introduces and challenges the established literature. It will appeal to advanced students, scholars and anyone else trying to understand the precarious state of today's media and political landscape

The changing role of the local news media in enabling citizens to engage in local democracies

Using Leeds City Council in the United Kingdom as a case study, we analyse comparatively the changing role of local journalism in the public communications and engagement strategies of local government. Drawing on over 20 semi-structured interviews with elected politicians, Council strategists, mainstream journalists, and citizen journalists, the article explores perceptions of the mainstream news media's role versus new modes of communication in engaging and communicating with citizens. We evaluate the Council's perceptions of its online and offline practices of engagement with different publics, and focus in particular on their interactions with journalists, the news media, and citizen journalists. The article considers how moves towards digital modes of engagement are changing perceptions of the professional role orientations of journalists in mediating between the Council and the general public

The Passive Journalist: How sources dominate the local news

This study explores which sources are “making” local news and whether these sources are simply indicating the type of news that appears, or are shaping newspaper coverage. It provides an empirical record of the extent to which sources are able to dominate news coverage from which future trends in local journalism can be measured. The type and number of sources used in 2979 sampled news stories in four West Yorkshire papers, representing the three main proprietors of local newspapers in the United Kingdom, were recorded for one month and revealed the relatively narrow range of routine sources; 76 per cent of articles cited only a single source. The analysis indicates that journalists are relying less on their readers for news, and that stories of little consequence are being elevated to significant positions, or are filling news pages at the expense of more important stories. Additionally, the reliance on a single source means that alternative views and perspectives relevant to the readership are being overlooked. Journalists are becoming more passive, mere processors of one-sided information or bland copy dictated by sources. These trends indicate poor journalistic standards and may be exacerbating declining local newspaper sales