Mediatization as a combination of push and pull forces: Examples during the 2015 UK general election campaign

Abstract

This article introduces a dual perspective to the study of mediatization of politics, a political actor-centric and a media actor-centric perspective. It applies both perspectives to a case study of the 2015 UK General Election campaign. The media actor-centric perspective focuses on push forces of mediatization, manifested in proactive, interventionist reporting methods. The political actor-centric perspective focuses on pull forces of mediatization, referring to how candidates and parties purposefully draw media logic into the political world in order to achieve better their campaign goals. We argue that the Conservative Party and Labour Party, when exposed to equal push forces, employed different pull strategies in the 2015 UK General Election Campaign. The article uses a set of five indicators to recognize push forces that focus on the style of questions used by journalists when interrogating politicians on TV election programmes (reflecting media actor-centric mediatization). It finds clear indications of assertiveness, adversarialism and accountability in the news approach of the BBC. To recognize pull forces, the article uses a set of seven indicators developed from the literature on campaign professionalism (reflecting political actor-centric mediatization) and finds a considerable imbalance in the effective use of pull strategies between the Conservative and Labour Parties. This latter point leads to what we call lop-sided mediatization. The concluding section discusses inplications for mediatization research in times of Brexit and Trumpism.

Keywords

Elections journalism (profession)mediatization politics/political communication/political journalism research methods: qualitative television news

Introduction

The interactional relationship between news media and political actors can be examined from several perspectives. The currently most popular perspective discusses this relationship within the framework of the mediatization of politics. Strömbäck and Esser (2014: 6) define the mediatization of politics as a process through which the importance of the media and their spill-over effects on political actors and their behaviours has increased. Applied to campaign communication, it asks to what extent election discourse is shaped by political actors compared to how far it is framed by the news media (Cushion, 2015). In an attempt to develop the mediatization literature further, we would like to propose that it is useful to distinguish between a political actor-centric perspective and a media actor-centric perspective.

A political actor-centric mediatization perspective places parties, governments and campaign teams at the centre of the analysis. Consequently, Donges and Jarren (2014) define mediatization as ‘a reaction’ of political actors to ‘their perceptions’ that news media have become an influential factor in their environment (p. 188). These ‘reactions’ become evident empirically in, for instance, the expansion of public relations units and the prioritization of publicity experts and techniques of news management and message control. According to this understanding, it is not the news media which cause changes in political organizations, but it is the organizations themselves that decide, on the basis of their own perceptions, to make changes. Put differently, in this view, the mediatization of politics is not forced upon politics from the outside but is self-effected or internally initiated through the strategic utilization of media services (Donges and Jarren, 2014; Marcinkowski and Steiner, 2014). The political actor mediatization perspective presumes a reflexive understanding of media impact that has been theorized in previous work as ‘self-mediatization’ or the ‘anticipatory behaviour of political actors’ (Strömbäck and Esser, 2014: 21). It views the mediatization of politics as a pull process whereby political actors deliberately draw news media logic into their own considerations and action rationales. In short, although mediatization may pressurize political actors to carry out strategic adaptations, this does not lead them automatically to lose power to the media (Marcinkowski and Steiner, 2014; Van Aelst et al., 2014).

The opposite position, a media actor-centric mediatization perspective, is based on concepts of journalistic interventionism or media intrusion. These concepts symbolize the push qualities of the news media – and an understanding of news media as proactive actors (i.e. organizations pursuing their own interests) and independent institutions (i.e. a trans-organizational field following its own news logic). As an adherent of this view, Mazzoleni (2014) defines mediatization as ‘the result of media-driven influences in the political domain’ (p. 43). He argues that in the current multichannel news environment, political actors are losing ‘their central position’ and growing ‘more dependent than ever’ on the media (Mazzoleni, 2014: 44). What fuels the hegemony of the news media, in this view, is the fact that no other institution can compete with the news media’s reality constructions in terms of social reach, relevance, binding character, diversity and timeliness. A key source of media power is the fact that all other systems in society depend on the scarce resource of public attention and are therefore motivated to adapt to news logic and to incorporate some of its elements into their own action programmes (Donges and Jarren, 2014; Marcinkowski and Steiner, 2014). Several indicators of journalistic interventionism have been suggested by previous research. De Vreese (2014) links news media logic to the process of journalistic frame-building and frame-setting; he emphasizes ‘that there is considerable leeway and autonomy on the side of journalism when deciding how to frame issues’ (p. 148). Strömbäck and Dimitrova (2011) relate journalistic interventionism to the extent to which news reporting is interpretive as opposed to descriptive, while others link it to growing media negativity (Lengauer et al., 2012) and a declining willingness to grant politicians authoritative voice or communication control in news (Esser, 2008). All this is to conceive mediatization as a process that expands the voice and values of news professionals and tries to push back efforts by politicians to limit journalists’ reporting options.

Dual perspective on mediatization

Both perspectives have been presented here for analytical purposes as monolithic contrasts but in reality, they are not. In fact, we wish to argue that they operate simultaneously in a dynamic interplay of ebb and flow moments, and that each perspective incorporates many elements of the other. This interplay was evident during the UK General Election of 2015. In order to understand the behaviours of political and media actors in that election, both mediatization as a pull process (parties make strategic use of communication services to achieve campaign goals) and as a push process (journalists interfere with the self-presentations of the parties) need to be considered. We contend that in order to advance mediatization theory, both processes need to be studied in interaction. In the following distillation of key features of the 2015 election campaign, both perspectives are incorporated. Furthermore, we will highlight two aspects of mediatization theory that so far have not yet drawn proper scientific attention.

First, regarding the push perspective, we propose that interventionism can derive from quality media, not just commercial media as suggested in some of the extant literature, and that the style of questions journalists use when interrogating politicians is a convenient and meaningful approach for capturing journalistic intervention. We are suggesting a set of five indicators designed to complement previous research on media actor-centric mediatization processes.

Second, regarding the pull perspective, we argue that self-mediatization is not a constant on the side of political actors. Even if exposed to similar push forces, campaign politicians may employ different pull strategies in their dealings with a media-saturated environment. For the exploration of political actor-centric mediatization processes in the context of elections, we are proposing a set of seven indicators developed from the professionalization literature.

Our approach

Methodically speaking, our study is a contribution to qualitatively oriented mediatization research. We follow the approach of Cushion et al. (2015) who used a British case study to examine television coverage of the European elections in 2014 and relied on close textual analysis. They found that the BBC applied a ‘combative and interpretative and form of journalism’ in their treatment of the UK Independent Party and argued that a purely quantitative approach would not have adequately captured the interventionist quality of news reporting (Cushion et al., 2015: 1538–1539).

Our study combines three qualitative methods. First, by means of textual analysis, we examine the question types used in BBC interview programmes aired during the last 3 weeks before the election day on 7 May 2015 (further details will follow) and construct a theory-guided typology of ‘push questions’ in British election news coverage. Second, by means of document analysis, we examine key campaign activities by the Labour and Conservative Party and construct a theory-guided typology of ‘pull’ strategies of party communication (more details will follow). Third, a group interview with senior political journalists (on 16 September 2015 in BBC Broadcasting House) served to obtain explanations for our findings on the interaction between media professionals and campaigning professionals. We had to grant anonymity but provide more details further below.

Election campaigns are crystallization points of political communication and particularly suitable for observing mediation processes as if under a magnifying glass. It is with these methodological and theoretical broodings in mind that we will now itemize relevant contextual features of mediation processes in the 2015 UK General Election campaign – after which we will discuss how ‘push’ and ‘pull’ forces manifested themselves, respectively, in it.

Contextual conditions: The UK political communication system

Like many other political communication systems in the Western democratic world, the UK one has been ever in transition, dynamically changing over time. Consistent with international trends, the United Kingdom’s main political parties have become increasingly professionalized. In the run-up to the 2015 election, the parties further refined their tactics for influencing media coverage. However, the efforts of the Conservative and Labour Party to shape the campaign agenda have not become any easier because the rise of new challenger parties (UK Independence Party, Scottish National Party (SNP), Green Party) have made the daily battle for whose interpretation of political issues prevails more competitive.

We also observe increasing professionalism in the media. Among other things, it is reflected in journalists’ growing desire to demonstrate their independence from the parties’ publicity efforts. British journalists’ desire for distance and scepticism is coupled with strong pride in their inquisitorial and reporting skills. The United Kingdom is further known for political parallelism of the newspaper industry, involving a press that has ‘always mirrored the divisions of party politics fairly closely’ (Hallin and Mancini, 2004: 208), tending to disadvantage the Labour Party – more so than ever before during the 2015 campaign (Deacon et al., 2017). In the 2015 election campaign, the press was quite successful at setting the agenda for the broadcasters (Cushion et al., 2018). Particularly, the narrative that a minority Labour government dependent on the SNP would plunge the country into chaos – a story constantly fed by the Tories and right-leaning newspapers – caused Labour so many difficulties in communicating their policy message that officials complained to the BBC about its journalists’ obsession with the ‘Scottish line’ (Cowley and Kavanagh, 2016).

At the BBC, scholars noticed an increased resort to interpretive journalism. The BBC employs a large cadre of subject specialist correspondents, regularly deploying their contextual commentary within story reports and in two ways with bulletin presenters (Cushion, 2015). In addition to its regular political programmes, the BBC also broadcast a series of special programmes during the 2015 election campaign, which were moderated by its most prominent journalists (such as John Humphrys, Andrew Marr, Andrew Neil, Evan Davis, Kirsty Wark, James Naughtie, Nick Robinson and Jeremy Paxman) and focused in particular on interviews with politicians.

Outcome: Lop-sided mediatization

It may be concluded from the sum of these factors that in 2015, the United Kingdom hosted a highly mediatized political communication system. The relations of political actors to this system and their roles within it may vary, however, including their dispositions and abilities to self-mediatize. For the purpose of the following analysis, we understand mediatization as a combination of push forces (where news media demonstrate autonomy from political considerations) and pull forces (where political behaviour is expanded in scope by integrating media logic-related activities in a calculated move). This twin-track perspective considers direct and indirect media effects. A direct media effect would be an interview style by a journalist that limits the response options of a politician; an indirect (or reciprocal) media effect would be a political decision to professionalize campaign communications in response to a media environment that is perceived as uncertain, dangerous or powerful.

A contention of our analysis is that both major British parties were exposed to similar push forces of mediatization but that the Conservative Party employed their available options of pull strategies much more effectively than the Labour Party during United Kingdom’s 2015 General Election. To what extent the British news media adjusted their own treatment of the parties to their unequal pull capabilities – eventually to the disadvantage of Labour in the final campaign days – has triggered some debate in the aftermath of the election. Our conclusion is that the 2015 general election campaign was an example of lop-sided mediatization. One party failed to use media-oriented campaigning strategies for its own purposes, while the other party was very successful at it.

Most observers of and commentators on the 2015 campaign concur with this verdict. For example, Scammell (2015), after characterizing the Conservative campaign as ‘consistent, comprehensible and apparently resonant’, goes on to contrast its combination of a ‘relentless attack on Labour’s weak points with strong core messages’ against Labour’s disregard of ‘the importance of news management and instant rebuttal’ (p. 39). The most comprehensive election study, based on interviews with 300 key players from all parties, contrasts the ‘clear direction and discipline’ of the Conservative campaign with the ‘brand failure’ of Labour’s effort, the often popular individual policies of which ‘were not connected into a persuasive or even coherent narrative’ (Cowley and Kavanagh, 2016: 61, 81). Labour’s own review of its 2015 campaign performance, the so-called Beckett (2016) report, also contrasts the Conservatives’ ability to stick to ‘their mantras’ with Labour’s lack of ‘early adoption of a consistent over-riding narrative or theme, which could be simply expressed and conveyed on the doorstep and in the studio’ (pp. 10–11).

Understanding push forces of mediatization: Examples of interventionist media strategies

The push perspective on mediatization draws on the ‘adversary model’ of the media. This model is an outgrowth of two trends outlined above – increased critical professionalism and growing interpretivism – that reflect an increasingly autonomous attitude towards politicians. Such an autonomous outlook connects with the professional norms of ‘watchdog journalism’, according to which journalists regard themselves as guardians of the public interest and ombudsmen for the audience (Eriksson and Östman, 2013; Hallin, 1992; Patterson, 1993; Strömbäck and Esser, 2014). An important conclusion from US-based research is that the ‘journalistic initiative’ has expanded greatly over the last 40 years, becoming more adversarial particularly towards US presidents (Clayman and Heritage, 2002; Clayman et al., 2010).

An instructive site for studying such adversarialism is question-and-answer sessions between journalists and politicians, for instance, in televised interview or debate programmes. As Voltmer and Brants (2011) have stated for the UK context, political interviews follow the principles of news media logic rather than political logic with journalists determining the choice of topic, the selection of interviewees, the dramaturgy of the encounter, and the conditions of studio production. The roles are clearly allocated: it is the journalist who asks the questions and therefore has considerable control over the course of the conversation. An important motivation for an aggressive interview style is, according to Voltmer and Brants (2011), not so much the journalists’ imagined expectations of the audience but the hoped-for recognition of professional peers. The point is that even if journalists have respectful and friendly relationships with politicians off-air, this changes on-air when journalists become aware of their public image and feel a need to safeguard their professional integrity and demonstrate their independence, which may lead them to more aggressive questioning.

To understand the extent to which British journalists used interview situations as an opportunity to exercise professional discretion during the 2015 UK General Election campaign, we analysed the choice of question styles by BBC journalists when quizzing Conservative and Labour politicians. The interviews we examined took place during the last 3 weeks before Polling Day on the Corporation’s current affairs programmes (such as Newsnight), extended news programmes (such as Today) and certain cross-party inquisitions closely controlled by BBC presenters (such as a series of eight debates on a selection of key policy areas among four or five party spokespersons on BBC 2). We picked these programmes because the BBC serves as a benchmark for standards in British news production. In line with case study theory, we consider the BBC’s approach towards election campaign coverage as an exemplary case (Hague and Harrop, 2010: 45). In this role, the BBC is an archetype of highly professional journalism that influences the understanding of professionalized journalism way beyond the United Kingdom and serves as a reference for quality journalists throughout Europe.

As a theoretical framework, we use five dimensions of interventionist question types: assertiveness, aggressiveness and accountability (developed by Clayman and Heritage, 2002); threat to public image (developed by Bull and Elliott, 1998); and challenging answers (developed by Voltmer and Brants, 2011). We found all of these styles represented in the corpus of question types used by BBC journalists, and without striking differences regarding Labour and Conservative party targets. While ‘adversarialism’ was the most widely used technique and ‘threats to public image’ the least common one, the boundaries between these two categories were sometimes particularly hard to draw, and we are inclined to conclude that these two categories should be considered together. Nevertheless, in the following, we present all five categories separately, together with selected examples to illustrate each question style.

Assertiveness

Assertiveness concerns the extent to which questions are prefaced in a manner that restricts the range of possible answers, thereby promoting an agenda controlled by the journalist rather than the politician. They are usually exhibited in the form of closed questions (yes/no) and often formulated negatively (don’t you think, isn’t it time). Examples that we recorded from BBC programmes include the following:

Don’t people have a right to know how Labour would relate to the SNP if it were to form a minority government?

By playing the Sturgeon card, aren’t you putting the Union at risk?

Your right-to-buy offer to social housing tenants won’t solve the housing crisis. Won’t it exacerbate it?

Since your inheritance tax proposal will benefit already advantaged middle-class kids and not disadvantaged working-class ones, won’t that limit social mobility?

Such negative interrogatives can be seen as an expression of the watchdog role, with the journalist setting out to dig out the hidden truth. However, they are also trying to push the response in a particular direction. As Clayman and Heritage (2002) state, this question type is ‘less information-seeking and more opinionated and assertive’ (p. 766).

Adversarialness

Adversarialness captures instances where the questioning implies a standpoint that is in opposition to the agenda advanced by the politician being questioned:

This form of journalistic aggressiveness is often performed in prefaces to questions, where journalists may describe problems with policy proposals, highlight discrepancies between politicians’ words and their actions, or refer to opinions that run counter to views presented by the politicians being questioned. (Eriksson and Östman, 2013: 310)

Examples recorded from BBC programmes include the following:

Isn’t your pledge not to raise value added tax (VAT), income tax and national insurance irresponsible? What if the economy was thrown off course by some unforeseen event? You will have closed off your policy options for dealing with it?

Although you say under Labour there will be no top-down reorganization of the National Health Service (NHS), the proposals in your manifesto sound like one!

You seem to be making all sorts of promises – on NHS expenditure, freezing rail fares and so on. Aren’t you living in a world of fantasy promises?

You are clear about the ‘give-aways’, the nice stuff, but not about the nasty stuff!

All these questions express a critical stance towards policy proposals and present them as extravagant, implausible or misguided. Oftentimes, they are not even questions in the strict sense but provocative invitations to respond to criticism. They come closer to accusations.

Threat to public image

Closely related is the idea that questions can also lead to, create or confirm a negative impression about a politician or party, for instance, by casting doubts on motivations or capabilities in policies, statements, actions, aims and principles. The boundaries to the previous category are fluid but the following examples seem good illustrations:

How would you deal with the huge deficit? Presumably not by spending cuts only. Your sums don’t add up!

Your past record of economic management doesn’t suggest that you can get your sums right!

By when would Labour clear the deficit? Given your past economic record, how much credence can we give to your pledge on that?

Why should the voters trust you?

Although these questions are closely linked to policy discussions, they seem to enter the territory of personal character and thereby carry a larger risk of questioning the reputation of a politician or party.

Challenging an answer

Depending on how the politician responds, a journalist can accept or reject an answer. Rejection can be indicated by expressing doubt as to the accuracy, honesty or validity of the information provided by the interviewee. While this happened frequently, we confine ourselves to just two examples:

Where will the money come from to pay for your promised injection of an extra sum of eight billion pounds into the NHS? Is it based on an assumption that economic growth between now and 2010 will suffice to support that? [A: I’m confident that can be achieved.] Q: ‘Confidence’ is not a ‘commitment’?

Your NHS spending pledge seems unfunded. Where will the money come from? [A: We won’t raise taxes.] Q: That’s not an answer!

Accountability

Accountability questions ask politicians to offer an explanation for taking a particular course of action or adopting a policy position. The first type (Why did you …?) asks for a rationale, whereas the second type (How could you …?) asks for a rationale with the implied expectation that it is not possible to offer a reasonable justification. Both forms usually imply that the politician is responsible for a state of affairs assumed in the framing of the question to be undesirable:

What does the inheritance tax ‘give away’ say about your values when you have nothing to offer to poor people worrying about how to make ends meet?

In your proposed welfare reforms, why won’t you tell us where the 12 billion pound benefit cuts will fall?

Why won’t you spell out where you would make cuts in welfare expenditure?

People on disability benefits need to know what is in store for them. Why won’t you tell them? You must know what you intend to cut?

The more hostile variant of How-Could-You questions were not recorded by us. Still, even the Why-questions in the present form are intended to put a politician in a position to defend himself or herself.

In our view, these five question styles (arguably four if adversarialism and threat to public image are collapsed) represent an important indicator of journalistic interventionism. Both Conservative and Labour politicians were in our estimation exposed to the same degree of journalistic scrutiny or aggression in the programme formats examined for this qualitative assessment. It is important to stress that we do not mean to condemn this form of journalism; it also has encouraging elements to it. BBC journalists seem to have become markedly less inclined to accept politicians’ pronouncements at face value, and more inclined to challenge politicians and hold them accountable for their actions – an important democratic media function in the ‘Age of Trumpism’.

We wondered whether this approach of scrutinizing politicians in the 2015 UK election more vigorously had derived from pre-election policy thinking in the Corporation or had just happened that way in response to campaign-period events. From an extensive discussion with sources at the BBC, in which an executive responsible for oversight of the Corporation’s current affairs provision joined his news colleague, the first interpretation indubitably emerged. It had been a considered and important part of the BBC’s prior thought about and planning for its 2015 election campaign coverage.

Campaign policy thinking within the BBC had begun about two and a half years before the election. Especially ‘tricky’ was the question of how to realize the BBC’s supreme political norm of ‘impartiality’ (also termed ‘fairness’ and ‘balance’ by our informants) with the emergence of more electorally significant parties on the scene and two coalition government parties. But to that norm had to be added ‘fairness’ to the now highly sceptical audience, whose members deserved, in present-day conditions of communication abundance and social media presence, greater consideration than they had been accorded in the past. In order to maintain audience trust in the BBC, it was essential not only to present campaign news accurately, clearly and accessibly, and to place it in some relevant explanatory context, but also to hold the campaigning politicians to account for what they had done in the past and intended to do in the future.

A Corporation-wide determination persistently to probe the veracity and credibility of the parties’ campaign promises and claims followed from this – to ‘go hammer and tong at their assertions’ (as one of our informants put it), to ‘press them hard’. It had been thought in retrospect that in 2010, ‘we may not have dug deep enough’ into leading politicians’ assertions. At the same time, our informants were troubled by what they called ‘the big problem of the political interview’. This had arisen because politicians were now so ‘trained in tactics of evasion’, in abilities to present only ‘the messages they wanted to roll out’. More tough questioning this time round was therefore called for.

In line with this was the advent of interpretive journalism, entailing a view of the journalist’s role as that of an ‘expert’ (Barnhurst and Mutz, 1997; Hallin, 1992; Patterson, 1993). So long as he or she got across the key facts about controversial issues and politicians’ positions on them, BBC journalists would not only be ‘allowed’ but also be ‘encouraged’, be ‘given free rein’, to mount lines of questioning geared ‘to get to the quick’. Helpful in this connection had been the rise to prominence by 2015 of several respected non-partisan think-tanks, such as the Institute of Fiscal Studies, whose occasional data-based analyses of economic and other trends could be reported in the news as objective backing for the doubts and reservations that BBC personnel would be voicing about the parties’ policy positions when interviewing their spokespersons.

Our informants did not depict this more interventionist outlook as entirely unique to the BBC, however. Much of it, they said, was ‘part of the ether’ of the UK journalism culture overall. These statements confirm earlier arguments by Esser (2013) according to which interventionist news media logic has grown to considerable degree out of critical professionalism and the self-perception of journalism as the (better) representative of the public will. This style of more assertive, sceptical reporting and interpretation turns at times adversarial when journalists feel threatened in their reporting options – often caused by a highly professionalized approach towards news management and campaign communication. This brings us to the pull forces of mediatization.

Understanding pull forces of mediatization: Examples of professionalized party strategies

Like in many countries, British parties have responded to growing journalistic interventionism by professionalizing their campaign strategies vis-à-vis the media. Tenscher et al. (2012, 2015) have tried to identify specific areas of activity where campaigns have responded with increased professionalism to increasing mediatization. To group them, the authors differentiated between a communicative (‘strategic’) component and an organizational (‘structural’) component, among which they specified 15 indicators of campaign professionalism. We shall first deal with communicative-strategic indicators where the media-oriented pull process can be clearly seen, before we delve into organizational-structural indicators of professionalized campaign management where the advantage over Labour can be clearly seen. Since we cannot address all 15 factors identified by Tenscher et al. (2012, 2015), we feel obliged to select the most important ones, and to recombine and reformulate others without losing sight of their original meanings.

News management

Although both major parties supplemented message fashioning for media consumption with efforts to reach individual voters over social media and on doorsteps, the Conservatives were undoubtedly committed, first and foremost, to the mounting of a highly considered, thoroughly worked-out and determinedly pursued campaign of news management, based partly on confidence in David Cameron’s ability smoothly and articulately to announce initiatives, respond to events, counter criticisms and answer challenging questions. Widely regarded as having been successful, two academically conducted content analyses of 2015 campaign news showed that Conservative-promoted issues were covered more frequently than Labour ones both in the press and on television (Cushion et al., 2016, 2018; Deacon et al., 2017).

In contrast, Labour seemed more doubtful of the pay-off value of mainstream news-based campaigning. This was expressed in Communication Director Tom Baldwin’s opinion that ‘quick wins and point-scoring over every policy will not convince the electorate’ and in Ed Miliband’s intention to turn his back on New Labour’s ‘celebrity politics’, his disdain for the Conservatives as a ‘virtual party’ and his often-stated wish to be known as the Prime Minister (if elected) who had ‘under-promised but over-achieved’. This was allied to a belief that by party activists conducting a large number of doorstep interviews with ordinary voters (five million such conversations were claimed), the Conservatives’ news-management advantages could be counteracted.

Event management

The Conservatives seemed more attuned than Labour to the imperatives of media logic, particularly in how they timed and paced their news publicity efforts and in their awareness of other events likely to be, favourably or unfavourably, in the news on a given day. Labour’s attempts to top the news sometimes seemed ham-fisted, as in the erection of its much-ridiculed (especially in social media) ‘Ed Stone’, a high concrete pillar of 12 slabs, each of which was intended to symbolize the rock solidity of each of the Party’s campaign pledges. Professionalization contrasts were particularly noticeable in the parties’ responses to television as a visual medium. Liz Sugg, the Conservative official responsible for coping with this, was widely praised for the attractive pictures she continually supplied to background the news appearances of David Cameron and other Party spokespeople. Places of presentation were often chosen for their visual symbolism (e.g. in school rooms, factories, and building sites) in contrast to Labour’s tendency to rely on scenes of leaders standing behind podiums in halls.

Strategic use of media appearances

Televised political debates are typical examples of ‘media events’ set up to suit the demands of the broadcasters. An incumbent should have little incentive to provide the main opponent with a platform to present himself on an equal footing and attack him – together with the moderator – on his previous record. In the 2015 election campaign, the Conservative Party rejected anything smacking of a head-to-head encounter between David Cameron and Ed Miliband. In the end, the BBC, on behalf of itself and the other broadcasters (ITV, Channel 4 and Sky News), acceded to the Conservatives’ demands. No head-to-head top leader debate was arranged. And although Mr Cameron did agree to appear in two of the three programmes that were eventually scheduled, in one, he was flanked by the leaders of five other parties, and in another, debating as such was set aside in favour of the presentation of questions from studio audience members to each of Cameron, Miliband and Nick Clegg (Liberal Democratic Party leader) separately. The Conservatives thus managed to avoid the risk that Mr Miliband would come across more positively than he had been painted in their campaign denigrations and in much media commentary. The debates’ potential to deflect attention away from the messages the Conservatives wanted to plant in news reports had also been ‘de-fanged’.

Unified campaign goal and strategy

The Conservative campaign was single-minded in purpose. Leader David Cameron issued a ‘very clear, simple, direct, unambiguous instruction’ to Lynton Crosby, his campaign supremo, that his job was to win the election (Myerscough, 2015). All else was subordinate to that single goal. In contrast, Labour’s campaign seemed to have been shaped by multiple purposes – to send leader Ed Miliband to 10 Downing Street of course but also to foster popular engagement in politics, especially among women and young people; to promote civic education through innovative and encompassing societal critiques; and to avoid doing anything that might worsen electoral mistrust of politics and politicians. Put differently, Labour seemed torn between impulses of idealism and realism, marketing its wares and movement-building (Gilbert, 2015), normative logic versus market logic (Landerer, 2013).

Centralized campaign management

Unified command was a hallmark of the Conservatives’ publicity apparatus (Cowley and Kavanagh, 2016: 74, 86): Lynton Crosby was in full charge of all its operations, and all would-be party communicators were accountable to him. In contrast, the direction of Labour’s campaign was more dispersed. A triumvirate of three chiefs was installed at its top (Tom Baldwin, Director of Communications; Greg Beale, Director of Strategy; Bob Roberts, Head of Press), who were said not always to have seen eye-to-eye about tactics or to be on mutually good personal terms. Their roles were overlaid by the hiring of US consultant David Axelrod as a part-time advisor, who every now and then made recommendations, sometimes from afar. Whereas message discipline was a sine qua non in the Conservative team, Labour was open to more plural approaches, with Ed Miliband sometimes encouraging the several heads of campaign publicity to put up alternative ideas for him personally to choose from. And whereas Conservative advisor Lynton Crosby enjoyed the reputation of a consummate professional, Tom Baldwin, though personally liked by many journalists, was described by one commentator as having been ‘unorganised’ in ‘style’ and as ‘anything but a polished PR man’ by another.

Opposition research and rapid response

Self-mediatization requires not only the tailoring of a party’s core messages to journalistic predilections but also rebuttals of rivals’ criticisms of its own positions. The Labour Party demonstrably failed to recognize and act upon this need by not confronting and refuting at an early stage the Conservatives’ repeated accusation that its profligate spending policies under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had been responsible for the financial crash of 2007–2008. Labour took account of this so late in the day – for example, in a last-minute inclusion on the front page of its election manifesto of a commitment to reduce the country’s deficit year-by-year – that when Ed Miliband rejected the charge during the campaign’s third televised debate, he was roundly jeered by the studio audience.

In contrast, the Conservatives were more alert to this need. To neutralize their perceived weakness over the NHS, they promised to invest £8bn over the next 5 years. To counter Labour’s claim that it would have to increase taxes in order to fulfil its spending promises and to meet its deficit reduction target, they promised to pass a law that would prohibit increases in income tax, VAT and national insurance contributions in normal conditions. And when Labour attacked the coalition government’s toleration of tax loopholes enjoyed by non-domiciled UK residents, they promised to abolish them if returned to power. For Lynton Crosby, the tactic to follow, when faced with an unfavourable report or accusation, would be to ‘deflect, dismiss and deny until the story ebbs away’ (Mason, 2016).

Negative campaigning

Although both major parties waged hard-hitting campaigns, over communication ethics they differed greatly. Conservative publicity strategy was arguably governed by the principle that, ‘So long as it works, anything goes!’ Believing that most voters only need to know and are able to process just a few essential points, the Conservatives relentlessly rubbished Ed Miliband’s perceived ideological and personal weaknesses (Delaney, 2016). A Conservative poster, reproduced many times in the media and described by Delaney (2016) as ‘simple, powerful funny and brutal’, showed Ed Miliband in the vest pocket of former SNP leader, Alex Salmond. But quintessentially, most characteristic of the Lynton Crosby touch was the sensational episode of the ‘dead cat on the table’. In order to brake Labour’s campaign momentum and to draw journalistic attention away from that Party’s intention on a certain news day to focus on the Conservatives’ failures to curb taxation abuses, Michael Fallon (Defense Secretary) declared in a Times article that, just as Ed Miliband had stabbed his brother in the back to become Labour leader, so too, if elected, would he stab the country in the back by giving up its nuclear deterrent. The reasoning behind this diversionary manoeuvre was to distract media attention from a potentially hurtful issue to a positive issue by staging a newsworthy pseudo-event. For lack of specific terminology, Boris Johnson called it ‘throwing a dead cat on the table’ (quoted in Delaney, 2016). The Labour Party’s approach to campaigning seemed somewhat more tempered by ethical scruples. It was as if it was dubious about some parts of the prevailing ‘game’, such as (1) indulgent promise-making, (2) perception is all, (3) electioneering as marketing to consumers and (4) the personalization of politics.

We conclude from this seven-point analysis that the Labour Party was less well prepared for the demands of mediatization in the 2015 campaign. This was reflected in their response to push forces and – even more clearly – their inept use of pull techniques to make better use of strategic political communication. Labour was less determined in their use of news management and negative campaigning, less effective in their use of event management and rapid rebuttals, less unified in their internal and external communication and less successful in communicating a compelling campaign agenda and hijacking the media agenda. This verdict was confirmed in our extensive post-election interview with BBC executives responsible for news programming. Although generalizations about the attitudes of UK journalists in general cannot be firmly drawn from a single group interview, the strategic positions of the news executives present that day suggest to us that their views were likely to be representative of the outlook of many BBC news people. The highest ranking executive present described the Conservative operation as ‘slick’, ‘sharp’ and ‘efficient’. The Conservatives’ control of their image had been ‘rigorous’, which he could not complain about since ‘they were just doing their job’. But that mattered, in his view, since that can ‘quietly seep into people’s perceptions of what a party stands for’. He confessed to ‘admiring’ the Conservative Party’s campaign professionalism, an example of which (mentioned more than once in the interview) being its ‘brilliant’ provision of pictures to accompany leaders’ appearances. In contrast, Labour had ‘not been staffed up with TV experience’, and its tactics had not been ‘as clear-sighted, brutal and ruthless’ as the Conservatives’ were.

Conclusion and outlook

Our study does not see itself as a contribution to the specific details of the UK General Election of 2015 (see Cowley and Kavanagh, 2016; Cushion et al., 2016, 2018; Deacon et al., 2017) but rather as a contribution to mediatization research. Its main purpose is to introduce a dual perspective to the study of mediatization of politics, a political actor-centric and a media actor-centric perspective. We offer a revised understanding of the mediatization of politics consisting of a combination of push forces (expressing an active role of the media in shaping the campaign discourse – by simultaneously adapting to news management) and pull forces (expressing an active role of the parties in shaping the campaign discourse – by simultaneously adapting to the media). We propose two sets of indicators that we deem particularly well suited to capture push and pull processes, and we hope that they will enrich the mediatization literature. We want to encourage future studies to consider both sides of the mediatization paradigm jointly.

Any normative assessment of media-initiated push factors (in our cases, questions to politicians that express assertiveness, aggressiveness or accountability) should be careful to consider that an interventionist attitude can also represent a welcome contribution to the media’s democratic critique and control function. Esser and Umbricht (2014) had already noted that we should distinguish between a ‘desirable’ form of interpretative journalism that scrutinizes policy positions and contributes to informed citizenry, and a ‘less desirable’ form that merely aims at game-related aspects and could be criticized as a distraction from the real issues. While the BBC offered more of the ‘desirable’ reporting type than, for instance, ITV or Sky during the 2015 campaign, some researchers defend a more interventionist style if it helps to de-spin party tactics (Cushion et al., 2015, 2016).

Any assessment of pull practices (in our case, strategies of campaign professionalism and news management) should take into account that political parties may use them with varying degrees of effectiveness. In highly mediatized political communication environments such as the United Kingdom during the 2015 general election, the news media seemed to have come to appreciate a certain degree of professionalism with regard to news management and to have responded critically to signs of clumsiness or indecisiveness (by Labour). Future mediatization research may want to pay more attention to the changed, increasingly hard-boiled, relationship between media actors and political actors, and particularly between push and pull factors.

Our case study examined a single event but political communication systems continue to undergo change, sometimes at a ‘glacial pace’, sometimes ‘in major cataclysmic bursts’ (Blumler and Gurevitch, 1995: 182). The UK Brexit referendum and the US presidential election of 2016 have evidently ushered in something like the latter. What questions arise from such game-changers for mediatization theory and research? Underlying our answer is Blumler and Gurevitch’s (1995) view that one source of change ‘may be traced to the drives of politicians and journalists to understand each other’s strategies and continually to adjust their mutual relations to the other side’s next steps and ploys’ (p. 205).

What about the pull forces by which politicians may be driven? In addition to the seven indicators spelt out above, future research may need to add new ones such as emotional appeals, appeals to fear and anger, propagation of a singular view of political reality strongly at odds with others, subordination of political ‘facts’ to that view, and increased resort to ‘disintermediation’ – bypassing press filters for direct access to voters. Or is lop-sidedness likely on these points, with some types of political actors purveying and others eschewing them?

What about the push forces by which journalists might be animated? Might some practices of journalistic interventionism be adopted more emphatically in the future – such as adversarialness and threats to public image? Might journalists try more often to hold politicians to account for the factual accuracy of their claims – and do so in news coverage, not just in interviews? Might quality media assume such a vocation more or less uniquely to themselves? Or, alternatively, will such interventions not be pursued all that determinedly in the end – moderated perhaps by adherence to conventional news values or the imperatives of intense competition for audience attention? Blumler and Gurevitch (1995) depicted politician-journalist relations of the 1990s as in a ‘chronic state of partial war’. Are they approaching something more like a total war nowadays – in some polities at least? If so, on what terms might it be waged – perhaps over the trustworthiness (or lack of it) and credibility of each side (p. 215)?

Questions also arise over the staying power of the hitherto quite firmly entrenched notion of ‘the campaign communication game’. Several campaigns that were based on the established model suffered spectacular defeats recently. This included Hillary Clinton’s ‘Stronger Together’ campaign in the 2016 US presidential election and the ‘Remain’ campaign in the same year’s Brexit referendum. Both lost to political movements observable in many Western countries (outside and within party structures) that disdain or otherwise decline to play the established game (initially at least), favouring new forms of mass mobilizing communication efforts instead. Will the standard model ultimately prevail? Will two rival approaches, deemed appropriate and useful for very different reasons, exist and evolve side-by-side? What part might mediatization impulses play in the mixes?

Finally, how might all that be perceived by ordinary people? The established approach might seem normatively restricted, barren, even repugnant at times – just a manipulative game. The upstart approach may seem more attractive but lacking in practical solutions to pressing current problems. How all that might play out in citizens’ perceptions of the kind of political communication process they inhabit could be a meaningful basis for new-found research.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Author biographies

Jay G Blumler is Emeritus Professor of Public Communication, University of Leeds, and Emeritus Professor of Journalism, University of Maryland.

Frank Esser is Professor of International and Comparative Media Research at the University of Zurich.

References

Barnhurst

Mutz

(1997) American journalism and the decline of event-centered reporting. Journal of Communication 47(4): 27–53.

Beckett

(2016) Learning the Lessons From Defeat: Taskforce Report. London: Labour Party.

Blumler

Gurevitch

(1995) The Crisis of Public Communication. London: Routledge.

Bull

Elliott

(1998) Level of threat: Means of assessing interviewer toughness and neutrality. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 17: 220–244.

Clayman

Heritage

(2002) Questioning presidents: Journalistic deference and adversarialness in the press conferences of U.S Presidents Eisenhower and Reagan. Journal of Communication 52(4): 749–775.

Clayman

Elliott

Heritage

et al . (2010) A watershed in White House journalism: Explaining the post-1968 rise of aggressive presidential news. Political Communication 27(3): 229–247.

Cowley

Kavanagh

(2016). The British General Election of 2015. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Cushion

(2012) The Democratic Value of News: Why Public Service Matters. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Cushion

(2015) News and Politics: The Rise of Live and Interpretive Journalism. London: Routledge.

10.

Cushion

Thomas

Kilby

et al . (2016) Interpreting the media logic behind editorial decisions: Television news coverage of the 2015 UK general election campaign. International Journal of Press/Politics 21(4): 472–489.

11.

Cushion

Thomas

Ellis

(2015) The mediatization of second-order elections and party launches: UK television news reporting of the 2014 European union campaign. International Journal of Communication 9: 1523–1543.

12.

Cushion

Kilby

Thomas

et al . (2018) Newspapers, impartiality and television news: Intermedia agenda-setting during the 2015 UK general election campaign. Journalism Studies 19(2): 162–181.

13.

De Vreese

(2014) Mediatization of news: The role of journalistic framing. In: Esser

Strömback

(eds) Mediatization of Politics: Understanding the Transformation of Western Democracies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 137–155.

14.

Deacon

Downey

Stanyer

et al . (2017) The media campaign: The issues and personalities who defined the election. In: Deacon

Mortimore

Atkinson

(eds) Political Communication in Britain: Polling, Campaigning and the Media in the 2015 Election. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 183–196.

15.

Delaney

(2016). Mad Men & Bad Men: When British Politics Met Advertising. London: Faber and Faber.

16.

Donges

Jarren

(2014) Mediatization of political organizations: Changing parties and interest groups? In: Esser

Strömbäck

(eds) Mediatization of Politics: Understanding the Transformation of Western Democracies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 181–199.

17.

Eriksson

Östman

(2013) Cooperative or adversarial? Journalists’ enactment of the watchdog function in political news production. International Journal of Press/Politics 18: 304–324.

18.

Esser

(2008) Dimensions of political news cultures: Sound bite and image bite news in France, Germany, Great Britain and the United States. International Journal of Press/Politics 13(4): 401–428.

19.

Esser

(2013) Mediatization as a challenge: Media logic versus political logic. In: Kriesi

Lavenex

Esser

et al . (eds) Democracy in the Age of Globalization and Mediatization. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 155–176.

20.

Esser

Umbricht

(2014). The evolution of objective and interpretative journalism in the western press. Comparing six news systems since the 1960s. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 91(2): 229–249.

21.

Gilbert

(2015) Corbyn – What’s a leader really for? Available at: www.opendemocracy.net

22.

Hague

Harrop

(2010) Comparative Government and Politics: An Introduction, 8th edn. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

23.

Hallin

Mancini

(2004) Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press.

24.

Landerer

(2013) Rethinking the logics: A conceptualization for the mediatization of politics. Communication Theory 23(3): 239–258.

25.

Lengauer

Esser

Berganza

(2012) Negativity in political news. Journalism 12(2): 179–202.

26.

Marcinkowski

Steiner

(2014) Mediatization and political autonomy: A systems approach. In: Esser

Strömbäck

(eds) Mediatization of Politics: Understanding the Transformation of Western Democracies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 74–89.

27.

Mason

(2016) David Cameron’s terrible week ends with calls for resignation over Panama Papers. The Guardian, 8 April. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/08/david-cameron-panama-papers-offshore-fund-resignation-calls

28.

Mazzoleni

(2014) Mediatization and political populism. In: Esser

Strömbäck

(eds) Mediatization of Politics: Understanding the Transformation of Western Democracies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 42–56.

29.

Myerscough

(2015) Corbyn in the media. London Review of Books 37(2): 8–9.

30.

Patterson

(1993) Out of Order. New York: Knopf.

31.

Scammell

(2015) Extraordinary election, political communication as usual. In: Jackson

Thorsen

(eds) UK Election Analysis 2015: Media, Voters and the Campaign. Poole: Bournemouth University, p. 39.

32.

Strömbäck

Dimitrova

(2011) Mediatization and media interventionism: A comparative analysis of Sweden and the United States. The International Journal of Press/Politics 16(1): 30–49.

33.

Strömbäck

Esser

(2014) Mediatization of politics: Towards a theoretical framework. In: Esser

Strömbäck

(eds) Mediatization of Politics: Understanding the Transformation of Western Democracies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 3–28.

34.

Tenscher

Koc-Michalska

Lilleker

et al . (2015) The professionals speak: Practitioners’ perspectives on professional election campaigning. European Journal of Communication 31(2): 95–119.

35.

Tenscher

Moring

Mykkänen

(2012) Modes of professional campaigning: A four-country comparison in the European parliamentary elections, 2009. International Journal of Press/Politics 17(2): 145–168.

36.

Van Aelst

Thesen

Walgrave

et al . (2014) Mediatization and political agenda-setting: Changing issue priorities. In: Esser

Strömbäck

(eds) Mediatization of Politics: Understanding the Transformation of Western Democracies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 200–222.

37.

Voltmer

Brants

(2011) A question of control: Journalists and politicians in political broadcast interviews. In: Brants

Voltmer

(eds) Political Communication in Postmodern Democracy: Challenging the Primacy of Politics. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 126–145.