Political Culture and Media Genre

This book explores the forms and meanings of mediated politics beyond the news cycle. It encompasses genres drawn from television, radio, the press and the internet, assessing their individual and collective contribution to contemporary political culture through textual analysis and thematic review, including attention to audience responses and reflections. The academic study of political communication usually focuses on political journalism - the challenges it faces, the economic, political and social conditions under which it operates, and the implications for a healthy public sphere. But mediated politics goes well beyond the news coverage. Politicians and their activities are evaluated by columnists and bloggers, lampooned in cartoons, narrativised in dramas, satirised in broadcasting panel shows, and discussed, in different ways, by citizens themselves. Through these genres and others, the world of politics is kept at the forefront of mediated culture. 'Beyond the news' is where judgments are publicly made, the imagination gets to work and emotion as well as information is mobilised, variously addressed to different parts of the national audience, and variously relevant to citizens' understandings of, and feelings towards, politics itself.