Comunidades Autónomas

Below, research dealing with media representations of politics and especially the question of political responsibility will be presented. This is followed by a discussion on why politics is represented this way and especially how a neoliberal tendency of depoliticization might influence the journalistic understanding of the role of politics.

Previous research has looked at how journalism manages to hold politicians responsible when it is covering issues and events that are understood as

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“political”, in other words, situated within the realm where politics has/is perceived to have the ability to influence the order of things. The mention of “understood as” is significant and plays an important part in the question regarding journalism and political accountability. Numerous studies have pointed to difficulties arising within the neoliberal context in terms of recognizing a question as a political issue (Harman, 2011; Mylonas, 2012, 2015; Murray-Leach et al., 2014; Bickes, Otten and Weymann, 2014; Kelsey, 2014; Triandafyllidou et al., 2013; Mercille, 2013; Marron, 2010; Miller, 2009;

Kotz, 2009). One example from this cluster of critical research focusing on the crisis of capitalism that started to become apparent in 2007/2008 is Mylonas’ (2012) study of mainstream media in different Western countries.

The study identifies the core of neoliberal depoliticization in an act of blame-shifting where journalism constructs crisis discourses “by objectifying the crisis as something caused by the supposed reckless, exploitative and sly behavior of specific people” rather than addressing it from a structural perspective.

In a Swedish study, Ekström et al. (2015) examine the question of depoliticization from a historical perspective focusing on journalists’

interviews with politicians in times of crisis. The analysis of prime-time national and regional public service television news identifies a shift in the way journalism approaches politicians in different historical and political contexts. The study concludes that the questioning is oriented to different expectations of government interventions and responsibilities in different political regimes. Another Swedish study (Djerf-Pierre et al., 2014) on political responsibility and journalism focuses on changes in the concrete practices of news reporting and in the relations between media and politics.

Swedish local, regional and national press is analyzed to investigate how journalism manages to hold politicians accountable in different contexts.

The study shows similar results as the previously mentioned study; that journalism, when situated in a more complex and blurred sociopolitical context, is less inclined to hold politicians accountable. Yet another study in a Swedish context (Olson and Nord, 2015) that examines journalism and the question of political responsibility claims that the Swedish press is not only

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less inclined to hold politicians accountable but also plays a legitimizing role in terms of the government’s treatment of and response to what was labeled

“the financial crisis” in 2008. The study identifies journalistic representations portraying leading politicians as credible crisis managers, which according to the study contributes greatly to an image of these politicians as trustworthy and competent.

As the second substudy of this dissertation examines the relational dynamics between journalism and politics and focuses on political discourses and arguments during the crisis in the car industry I wish to mention briefly some of the research that has taken an interest in the constitutive elements of political discourse. Studies analyzing political rhetoric with the aim of unmasking the ideology behind it often spring from the critical discourse tradition, focusing on the methods by which the political arguments are put forward and how its content can give us clues about the reason why something is being said in a certain way (see for example Wodak, 2011;

Chilton, 2004; Chilton and Schäffner, 2002; van Dijk, 2002; Reisigl and Wodak, 2001). Hall’s study (1988) about the language and ideology of Thatcherism mentioned above could perhaps be seen as breaking the ground for the point of departure within CDA where the importance of language is given more attention than within previous critical research.

Following this research tradition, Fairclough (2016) in her study of British newspaper coverage of the austerity policy in 2010 aims at further developing an analytical framework for evaluating political discourse and how this is defended, questioned or criticized in the journalistic choice of arguments put forward. Her empirical analysis shows the British government’s successful framing of austerity measures as a logical answer to ongoing overspending on the poor and how this framing made austerity measures directed at this group to appear not only as inevitable but even morally right. The question of morality and what role this plays in crisis news discourses concerning economy and the market, how market interpretations of events have become more dominant and how the voices and opinions of market actors are represented as undisputable, will be

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discussed in the following section which concludes this chapter on previous research. First, however, I discuss why the question of political responsibility seems so hard to capture within today’s media reporting.

Common to much of the previous research is that, in attempting to explain why the question of political responsibility seems to disappear from the news media, the focus is on depoliticization. Neoliberal logics appear to influence the way societal issues and crises are to an increasing extent seen as unavoidable, as an outcome of built-in mechanisms in an inevitable chain of events governed by an impartial “market” instead of political decisions.

Harvey (2005) argues that neoliberalism has been and is successful in the act of becoming invisible as a political strategy. Instead this highly political idea has been naturalized into common sense, often perceived to be a natural condition without alternatives, which can then serve as an answer to why journalism fails to raise the question of political responsibility. This is in line with how Ekström et al. (2015) interpret the results of their study; pointing to a more depoliticized journalistic understanding today where journalism does not seem to expect politicians to take responsibility in matters that were considered highly political a few decades ago. Djerf-Pierre et al. (2014) also follow the same reasoning when concluding that the blurriness which makes political responsibility hard to distinguish for journalism is the outcome of a process of depoliticization that signifies the neoliberal and globalized society. A neoliberal blurriness wherein political choices, decisions and actions are difficult to distinguish and the question of political accountability is less clear-cut is also recognized in other studies (e.g. Behn, 2001; Lord, 2004; Papadopoulos, 2007).

Another explanation that emphasizes the lack of journalistic power or abilities to hold politicians responsible finds the answer within the “nature”

of journalistic practice, as identified by, for example, Tuchman (1978). The journalistic practice is claimed to encourage a kind of manipulation where journalism is identified as the party being manipulated. To scrutinize the elite sources on which it is dependent is deemed to establish a situation

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where journalism is never in full control of the story-telling process (see also Entman, 1989; Franklin, 1994; Negrine 1994).

Previous research on the question of media representations of politics and political responsibility has been discussed above. Different studies identify a decline in discourses focusing on political responsibility when the media covers complex societal issues like different kinds of crises. The studies relate this to neoliberalism and the way this logic make societal issues seem unavoidable. The perception of unavoidability makes journalists less inclined to hold politicians responsible. Other explanations locate the answer within the journalistic practice pointing to how journalists depend on politicians as elite sources and therefore are less willing to scrutinize them.