Political Culture and Media Genre

This book is a contribution to the growing international and interdisciplinary research on media, communication and politics. Its particular interest is in the ways that politics is dramatized, joked about and expressed within the world of entertainment, understanding that these make an important contribution to the way that political ideas, feelings and values are circulated in society. Forms of storytelling, fantasy, farce and satire provide powerful and rich indicators of the relationship between a national political system and a national political culture, acting both as expressions of, and as resources for, the wider play of imagination. Our own focus is primarily on Britain, though the scholarly context for research of this kind is an international one. The recent increase in the range and scale of media output, extending to the culture of the internet, has added to the significance of media use as an everyday practice of people acting as consumers and also as national citizens, and has deepened and broadened transnational aspects of mediated politics as well.

In democratic political systems, broadcasting has from its origins been attributed with key roles in mediating between government and citizens. Its nature as a way of recording and transmitting speech and then (with TV) images, including through ‘live’ programming, have given it a special and powerful place in the history of media–political relations (for a recent historical account see Hilmes (2011)). Although the extent and character of broadcasting’s public service responsibilities vary from country to country, and are subject to change over time, all governments impose some level of duty towards the polity, a duty which broadcasters interpret through considerations of their own, convergent or divergent, agendas of public communication (Freedman (2008) reviews the different policy frameworks in their economic settings). These agendas are more or less commercial according to national context, and more or less influenced, if not by bottom-up demands direct from viewers and listeners, then at least by a professionalized orientation to viewing figures and other proxy indicators of what makes political content in various generic formats relevant and interesting to them.

This chapter looks at a selection of printed, non-news mediations of British politics collected during our research period.¹ We give particular emphasis to a category that we have called ‘colour writing’, of which parliamentary sketches are a core example, and to that long-standing vehicle of critical political expression — the editorial cartoon. We also give briefer attention to other forms, including newspaper ‘leaders’, a genre of writing in which it is opinion rather than information as such which is given priority and where the newspaper’s own identity, as well as its views, are given strong visibility. We conclude with some examples of parody from the satirical magazine Private Eye, examples which take a more elaborate and sustained approach to comic design than most of the other work we examine.

In this chapter we turn our attention to ‘media audiences’, and develop an account of how audiences both make sense of and evaluate sources of the political portrayed in non-news media genres, working within the terms of our enquiry into the intersections and overlaps of ‘political’, ‘civic’ and ‘popular’ culture.¹ When it comes to posing questions about their varying relationships with mediated politics, we can construe audiences as citizens, conscious of their political rights and responsibilities and with expectations of the media based on that consciousness; we can construe them as primarily consumers, seeking pleasure, knowledge and information in a media marketplace. In their interactions with mediated politics, audiences also choose (with varying degrees of self-consciousness and in response to a range of textual and contextual cues) the manner of their engagement. They do this by identifying with or contesting political ideas and values (as individual viewers or through shared experiences); by adjusting their levels of attentiveness or interest; by making cognitive and emotional connections via a range of dispositions (empathetic, ironic, rational); and by choosing whether or not to participate directly in related activities, which may be productive (e.g. commenting on a blog post) or merely cathartic in dialogic potential (e.g. shouting at the TV).

In this chapter, we shift the emphasis from matters of form to matters of theme. So far in this book we have looked in detail at how mediations of politics outside of ‘news’ worked within very different generic models, articulating their material within a diversity of discursive, aesthetic and comic frameworks, often to distinctive audiences and readerships. What kind of thematic profile emerges from this heterogeneous activity? Across the kinds of generic space we have explored, what of politics and the political gets picked up and worked upon and what does not? Of course, some themes were articulated across many different generic formats, others were just identified by, for instance, a particular cartoonist, blogger or columnist. In nearly all cases, what we are terming ‘theme’ had a particular event or statement at its core, a piece of political specificity around which more general values and ideas were generated. As we have noted earlier, deciding what is and what is not ‘political’ can be an issue for research of the kind that we conducted given the interconnections between the political, economic, the legal and the broadly social that are always active. However, by focusing on accounts largely concerning Westminster and the major institutions of state, whatever else they also include, we hope to have reduced, if not eliminated, the vulnerability of our analyses to category confusion and category drift.

Here, standing back from the detailed empirical work offered in the preceding chapters, we attempt to summarize what we have found out, reflect on its implications and develop points of connection with the existing research literatures to which we referred in the book’s Introduction.