Political communication in a high-choice media environment: a challenge for democracy?

Abstract

During the last decennia media environments and political communication systems have changed fundamentally. These changes have major ramifications for the political information environments and the extent to which they aid people in becoming informed citizens. Against this background, the purpose of this article is to review research on key changes and trends in political information environments and assess their democratic implications. We will focus on advanced postindustrial democracies and six concerns that are all closely linked to the dissemination and acquisition of political knowledge: (1) declining supply of political information, (2) declining quality of news, (3) increasing media concentration and declining diversity of news, (4) increasing fragmentation and polarization, (5) increasing relativism and (6) increasing inequality in political knowledge. ARTICLE HISTORY

The Chick Diffusion: How Newspapers Fail to Meet Normative Expectations Regarding Their Democratic Role in Public Debate

“…While these authors focus on disinformation, our study suggests another mechanism speaking to a diffusion of public debate and systemic contestation that are theorised as crucial to functional democratic public spheres. In particular, our findings regarding the episodic coverage of specific issues related to chicken meat production in relative isolation and in the absence of either systemic references or structural problematization echo the fragmentation of newsworthy political events (Blumler 2018), as well as that of information environments more generally (Van Aelst et al 2017). Our findings of diffusion as emerging political effect lend further evidence to claims that public debate is largely noisy, disconnected and disrupted (Pfetsch 2018).…”

“…In particular, they may not be a watchdog (Hackett 2005;Hallin and Mellado 2018). Studies question the quantity, quality, and accessibility of the political information provided by newspapers, as well as the expectation that they provide citizens with the substantial, factual and diverse views that are necessary for informed public debate (Curran 2005;Schudson 2005;Van Aelst et al 2017). Further, newspapers may not facilitate structural and systemic critique and contestation (Bennett 2003;Freedman 2014;Fenton 2018) or hold those in power to account.…”

Fight or flight? Attributing responsibility in response to mixed congruent and incongruent partisan news in selective exposure media environments

“…In times of information overload, people are frequently confronted with conflicting messages, or information that is first presented as true but later argued to be inaccurate or 'fake' in nature (Van Aelst et al, 2017). One example of such mixed exposure is the recent surge of fact-checkers as an online journalistic instrument to test the claims made in political communication (e.g., Thorson, 2016).…”

“…The effects of partisan political news and counter-attitudinal attacks In a time of increasing levels of information overload, people are exposed to a great variety and frequency of political content at relatively short amounts of time (e.g., Van Aelst et al, 2017). Hence, on a daily basis, people are confronted with both congruent and incongruent pieces of information that follow up on each other in a fast pace.…”

The vaccination debate in the “post‐truth” era: social media as sites of multi‐layered reflexivity

“…Sunstein ), contribute to a faster and deeper polarisation of opinions, whilst allowing for factually incorrect, misleading or entirely fabricated information to gain the kind of prominence and impact that previous communication technologies could never have provided (Iyengar and Massey , Van Aelst et al . ).…”