Mediation and Theme

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.