Making sense of political ideology in mediatized political communication

Abstract

Abstract Political discourse becomes more and more ‘mediatized’ nowadays but, as I argue in this article, mediatization should be considered neither as a testament to ‘de-ideologization’ nor as a restyling of the ‘inherently ideological’ contemporary political communication. Ideology, I claim, is a potentiality of mediatized political discourse and as such, it rests with the generic capacity of the latter to recontextualize symbolisms from the institutional past serving the ordering of the institutional present. How is the recontextualization of symbolic meanings facilitated by the aesthetic and affective qualities of different media genres? In what ways does recontextualized discourse serve the neoliberal order of the present? Lying at the heart of the ideological analysis of political communication, these are questions which can be insightfully addressed through a discourse analytics of mediatization as the one I apply here on two political advertisements from the Greek general election of January 2015.