Communicating Power and Resistance in Democratic Decline: The 2015 Smear Campaign against Serbia's Ombudsman (original) (raw)
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The disinformation order: Disruptive communication and the decline of democratic institutions
Many democratic nations are experiencing increased levels of false information circulating through social media and political websites that mimic journalism formats. In many cases, this disinformation is associated with the efforts of movements and parties on the radical right to mobilize supporters against centre parties and the mainstream press that carries their messages. The spread of disinformation can be traced to growing legitimacy problems in many democracies. Declining citizen confidence in institutions undermines the credibility of official information in the news and opens publics to alternative information sources. Those sources are often associated with both nationalist (primarily radical right) and foreign (commonly Russian) strategies to undermine institutional legitimacy and destabilize centre parties, governments and elections. The Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump in the United States are among the most prominent examples of disinformation campaigns intended to disrupt normal democratic order, but many other nations display signs of disinformation and democratic disruption. The origins of these problems and their implications for political communication research are explored.
Rethinking Political Communication in a Time of Disrupted Public Spheres
Political communication in many democracies reflects the disconnection of publics from institutions of press and politics due to the hollowing of center parties and growing social divides. It is time to rethink assumptions—long grounded in idealized normative conceptions of democratic politics—about media systems and press/politics interactions. A proposed reformulation of research frameworks puts more focus on the implications of disrupted public spheres in interaction with and beyond the traditional media. This rethinking also entails better conceptualization and measurement of the political influences of information flows from social media and digital networks. Reformatting the field involves changing such core concepts as gatekeeping, framing, indexing, agenda-setting, and media effects in light of disrupted relations among media, publics, and democratic institutions. Political communication and related areas of press/politics have been defined historically by the interplay of social conditions that define audiences, the communication processes that send messages to them, and the effects of those processes. The focus on democratic societies occupies much of the field, and core theories and concepts have emerged from assumptions about broadly inclusive and relatively well-functioning public spheres in which communication from legitimate institutions passes through press organizations to affect the opinions and actions of citizens. Such assumptions made sense for most democracies in Europe and North America in the last half of the twentieth century, when modern press/politics systems were formed and center political parties governed with high levels of popular support. By contrast, many democracies today are experiencing varying forms of legitimacy crises, as center parties have become " hollowed out " by pressures related to globalization, social fragmentation, and loss of traditional social support. As a result, many societies face growing inequality , disruption of labor markets, immigration pressures, and citizen discontent across the political spectrum. While political institutions and press systems continue to
Epitheōrīsī koinōnikōn ereunōn, 2023
Communication and democratic erosion: The rise of illiberal public spheres
European Journal of Communication, 2023
In recent years, many once stable democracies have experienced various degrees of disruptive communication, along with the erosion of core institutions such as the press, elections, courts, and the rights of citizens. We propose a framework to compare the logics of illiberal and liberal democratic communication and contrast traditionally dominant communication norms of tolerance, civility, responsiveness, and reasoned resolution of differences in liberal democracies with transgressions of those norms by illiberal rightwing movements, parties, leaders, and voters. We suggest that unlike 'counter publics' that seek inclusion in liberal democratic systems, engagement with illiberal communication creates "transgressive publics" that attempt to exclude others in the process of promoting ethnic and religious nationalism. This framework offers a corrective to recent scholarship on democratic public spheres that focuses mainly on why the ideals of more inclusive and egalitarian communication are ever more remote. We shift the focus to the systematic disruptions of mainstream public communication and the authority of public institutions. Our analysis develops a broader theoretical context in which interactions between illiberal leaders and publics occur, with the aim of understanding national variations in how communication systems contribute to democratic erosion.
PATHOLOGIES AND DYSFUNCTIONS OF DEMOCRACY IN THE MEDIA CONTEXT
PATHOLOGIES AND DYSFUNCTIONS OF DEMOCRACY IN THE MEDIA CONTEXT - 2ND VOLUME by João Carlos Correia, Anabela Gradim and Ricardo Morais Collection: LabCom Books Year of edition: 2020 ISBN: 978-989-654-648-9, 2020
Democracy and political practices are suffering a major shift. Political participation and deliberation take place in the context of strategically manipulated information. Opportunities to mobilize data, in order to reinforce manifestations of panic or alarm, are becoming more evident. Concepts such as "information", "agenda-setting " and "participation" are being challenged today by an almost belligerent mobilization of media resources. Recent developments on the recognition of women’s rights and promotion of new affirmative policies intended to improve gender equality coincides with an ever-increasing controversy around the concept of "political correctness". At the same time, while affirmations concerning human dignity appears to be progressively incorporated in political discourse, phenomena such as xenophobia, misogyny, racism, cultural, racial and ethnic confrontation, and, at the limit, the proliferation of genocides, rise to a previously unimaginable proportion and extent. Emphasis was placed on empirical and theoretical works involving relatively recent political debates, such as the creation of the "left majority" (or "geringonça") in Portugal; the Brexit; the Brazilian process; the American elections; the debates on the political correctness, the emergence of illiberal democracies and the political impact of migratory fluxes. Index Part 2 - Leadership, transgression, manipulation and new political campaigns - 9 Deliberative framings and the constitution of “Geringonça”: from media frames to readers’ comments. The case of “Observador” - 11 João Carlos Correia & Ricardo Morais Political communication and electoral strategy in Donald Trump´s Campaign - 37 José Antonio Abreu Colombri The Performance of Power and Citizenship: David Cameron meets the people in the 2016 Brexit campaign - 61 Peter Lunt Hungarian media policy 2010 – 2018: the illiberal shift - 81 Monika Metykova The agri is tech, the agri is pop, the agri is politics: the “rural world” and the rise of the agripolitician in Brazil - 97 Pedro Pinto Oliveira Part 3 - Identities and life politics in a hyper-mediated society - 113 Dystopian fiction as a means of impacting reality and initiating civic commitment among fans: “The Handmaid’s Tale” series case - 115 Marine Malet Australia’s immigration policy and the scapegoating of Lebanese migrants - 127 Mehal Krayem & Judith Betts The construction of feminine, technofeminism and technological paradox - 145 Êmili Adami Rossetti & Renata Loureiro Frade Educational Superavit: Human rights versus Education Policies - 159 Ana S. Moura, João Seixas, M. Natália D. S. Cordeiro & João Barreiros Aylan Kurdi as the awakening image of the refugee crisis:the framework of the Iberian press - 173 Rafael Mangana
Post-Truth, Polarization and Other Emotional Threats to Democracy
«Nordicum-Mediterraneum. Icelandic E-Journal of Nordic and Mediterranean Studies», 2020
Why do emotions shape the arena of contemporary politics? Are post-truth and polarization the most powerful tools of the populist approach to politics? Do they pose a challenge to liberal democracy? How can we bring back rationality in public deliberation and political discourse? In this short paper I will try to answer these questions focusing on the role of emotions in contemporary democracies and the connections between post-truth, polarization and populism, while assessing a provisional proposal hopefully useful in building a working paradigm to bind politics to a more rational and prospective approach.
Journalism and Media, 2022
Electoral contests around the world are suffering from an increasing distrust triggered by the dissemination of conspiracy theories. Extant research on political communication has largely studied this phenomenon, but, in some cases, it has neglected the relationship between social and legacy media in the breakthrough of a radicalized populism. Based on a wide literature review of liberal democracy and the roots of populism, this study addresses the right-wing populist communicative actions as one of the causes of the fragmentation of the democratic system, defining a journalistic and fact-checking standard to promote a well-informed society. Specifically, our research focus is to illustrate the impact of populist rhetoric on the traditional media system through a multiple-case study applied in European countries affected by right-wing populist discourse following the last United States elections (2020). The results show a connection among the strategies (game frames) used on Twitter, being less clear in the number of retweets and the presence on the front pages of newspapers. These data serve as a guide to build a journalistic indicator, arguing that high-quality information could be the key for democratic systems to minimize populist rhetoric and tackle the disinformation that endangers their future.
Populism is politics' buzzword and its impact is being felt across the globe, but beyond a widespread concern about its explosive appearance, there's little agreement about what the phenomenon is, the reasons behind its surge, what factors in our current conjuncture facilitated it, and what it indicates about 'the human condition'. The Populism Specialist Group seeks papers that confront these questions, paying particular attention to: what populism indicates about the role of representation and antagonism in politics; whether there are different variants of populism such as right-wing and left-wing, or even a populism of the centre; the impact of communication and mediation on the populist explosion; the advantages of qualitative and quantitative methods in researching populism; and more general considerations about the relationship between populism and politics and/or the political at the local, national and trans-national level.
A virtuous circle: Political communication in post-industrial democracies
2000
Is the process of political communications by the news media and by parties responsible for civic malaise? A Virtuous Circle sets out to challenge and critique the conventional wisdom. Based on a comparative examination of the role of the news media and parties in 29 postindustrial societies, focusing in particular on Western Europe and the United States, this study argues that rather than mistakenly'blaming the messenger'we need to understand and confront more deep-rooted flaws in systems of representative democracy.