Political Discourse in the News: Democratizing Responsibility or Aestheticizing Politics?

Abstract

This article considers the influential social theoretical argument that relates the proliferation of mediated knowledge and information with the emergence of `mediated' democracy, a new form of democracy based on nondialogical deliberation rather than collective decision making (see for example Thompson, 1995). Drawing on sociological theory, media studies and discourse analysis, the paper uses empirical material to argue that the facilitation of deliberative processes among audiences is a matter not only of changing institutional arrangements (towards a regulation of marketized media) but also of changing the mode of articulation of media discourse itself; even though the latter may be a consequence of the former, each is a sine qua non for deliberative democracy. The meta-argument of this paper is that high social theory, which engages centrally with information flows and structures, should also incorporate a theoretical account of the discursive aspects of information, and of the symbolic resources that constitute aspects of the social world in the field of media.