From Competing Institutional Logics to the Action Horizons of Mediatised Political Performance: A New Approach to the Relationship between Media and Political Action

Abstract

This article introduces a new approach aimed at capturing three essential action horizons of mediatised political action. The proposed approach focuses on how institutional, discursive and argumentative horizons come together to form a historically specific and issue-dependent publicity that influences how political actors communicate their power and aims. We argue that by studying the interplay of these three horizons in different times and contexts, we can better understand the media’s changing role in politics than by focusing only on the alleged characteristics of media logic (e.g. personalisation and negativism), often proposed in the debates about mediatisation and media interventionism.

KEYWORDS:

• journalism
• political communication
• mediatisation of politics

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. By action horizons, we mean contextual dimensions that condition action. For media texts, we analyse these horizons “outside,” not from the actor perspective in the sense of how political actors themselves understand and experience these horizons. However, it is also possible to study these horizons from a stricter “actor perspective” by interviewing or surveying political actors. With the concept of “mediatisation of politics,” we refer to a process in which the media’s role as an arena for political action changes in time. “Mediatisation” thus differs from “mediation,” which refers “to the more neutral act of transmitting messages and communicating through different media” (Strömbäck and Esser 2014, 4). We do not understand mediatisation only as the media’s increasing influence. Instead, we argue that all the action horizons together influence how politics is mediatised in different times and in different issues.

2. From a political standpoint, the media is an important arena (amongst many) in which politicians perform and legitimate their authority. In their performances, they seek to associate themselves with civil qualities, “embodying truth, narrating honesty, projecting fairness, and doing so in a persuasive way,” while associating their opponents with “anticivil qualities that profane political life, undermine liberty, court repression, and open the door to corruption” (Alexander 2010, 12). These performances influence “what people accept from a government and what they accept as authoritative from those who (try to) govern” (Hajer 2009, 50).

3. We thus knowingly bracket out the epistemological discussion about potential discrepancies between discourse theoretical argumentation concerning reality as a construction (e.g. Foucault, Laclau and Mouffe) and the elevation of communicative structures to the position of a universal base for rational argumentation (Habermas’ theory of communicative action).

4. This exemplifies of how media logic is built by the interaction of journalism and other political actors. Thus, media logic here is not set against political logic; it is seen as a co-product of the media and politics that evolve historically.

5. For a more detailed treatment of the Lievestuore case, see Kumpu (2018). For details of Finnish industrial wastewater policies at the time, see Konttinen (1998).

6. For details of environmental awakening as an international phenomenon, see e.g. Hajer (1997) and Jamison (2011). For details of environmental awakening in Finland, see Konttinen (1998, 1999) and Suhonen (1993).

7. The most vivid expression of this metaphor—and a manifestation of the way the controversy spoke to popular imaginaries—was a caricature published in HS (9 May 1971). In the caricature, a mill worker, tightening his belt, says to a roach peeking from the lake: “We’ll see which one of us survives … ” (see Kumpu 2018).

8. A case in point is the omission of comparisons to other pulp mills around the country operating without wastewater permits. They were often referred to in the coverage, but there was only one story in the two newspapers’ coverage that aimed to contextualise the Lievestuore conflict from a more general perspective by connecting it to the water authorities’ decisions in similar cases. This story, the only one providing a synchronic background to the events, focused on a mill, without any cleaning systems, that had filed for a wastewater permit seven years ago but was still operating without one. Characteristic of the time, this story was based on a complaint made to the chancellor of justice by a politician, not a journalistic initiative to investigate the unclear execution of the Water Act.

9. When operationalising this, we applied a rule: in order to qualify a speech act in the news as a dispute, we assumed that the target of the dispute had to be clearly identified. We admit that focus on such disputes leads to a narrow view on how actors actualise different kinds of resources of legitimation in their argumentation. However, we can argue that explicit disputes are particularly dense moments that are highly significant in shaping the direction of the debate.

10. A much telling detail of the conflict was that the most attention an environmental actor received was when the head of the national environmentalist group, The Finnish Association for Nature Conservation (FANC), announced that he would allow the mill to operate because people needed work. The local environmentalist group and two landowners frequently appeared in the letters to the editors section of the regional paper. The landowners also participated in public meetings and organised them. However, their presence was minimal in news texts. Contrary to the mill workers, for example, landowners were not interviewed.

11. Identifying and analysing these three action horizons might also be useful in arenas other than media and for sociological questions other than mediatisation. For example, some group identity or political processes might be studied from the point of view of these action horizons—with or without the media connection.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ville Kumpu

Ville Kumpu is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Tampere Research Centre for Journalism, Media and Communication, University of Tampere, Finland.

Risto Kunelius

Risto Kunelius is a Professor in communication research, University of Helsinki, Finland. Email: [email protected]

Esa Reunanen

Esa Reunanen is a Senior Researcher in the Tampere Research Centre for Journalism, Media and Communication, University of Tampere. Email: [email protected]