Studies in communication and politics – serie

New technologies and new media have significantly influenced the process of political communication. They have created new opportunities such as the great interactivity of communication, the personalization of a message or an uncountable number of possibilities for campaigning. This publication is a collection of socio-political studies which analyze the phenomenon of political communication in the 21st century. The main focus is on new media, especially on the Internet as well as on social media or social networks. However, there are also papers which examine traditional channels of political communication in the era of new technologies. Moreover, to the advantage of this book, the chapters explore the phenomenon of political communication not only in the USA and Western Europe, but also in Central Europe, Latin America and Africa.

Media developments change journalism all over the world. But are the changes the same in different media systems? How is professionalization influenced by the constant growth of a network society and social media? How are commercialization and political influences in the media relating to each other? These are some of the issues discussed in this study. It is based on the research project Journalism in Change – professional journalistic cultures in Poland, Russia and Sweden. From 2011 to 2014 researchers from Sweden, Poland and Russia at Södertörn University in Stockholm have been cooperating closely in order to survey a sample of 1500 journalists and 60 in depth interviews with journalists. The results are presented in a comparative design covering different areas.It is an unusually tightly focused volume that sheds much light on the values, roles and working conditions of these journalists in a revealing comparative perspective. It is a model of well-conceptualized and carefully conducted comparative cross-national journalism research.David H. Weaver, Bloomington, Indiana University, USA

This book is a collective effort of scholars who elaborate on democracy, civil society and media-political relations in Central and Eastern Europe. The authors look at both theories and practices of media systems and democracy. They indicate problems, risks, challenges related to political transformations, the public sphere, journalism culture and media freedom. All of this while bearing in mind the growing role of new media, civic engagement in the online space as well as societal changes that Central and Eastern European democracies are going through in the second decade of the 21st Century. This book is a helpful companion to media and communication scholars as well as students of journalism and political science, media practitioners and policy makers in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond.«A well-documented book on the mass media in a little explored area: Central Eastern Europe. Four models of media and politics are presented opening the floor for a wider scholarly debate.» (Paolo Mancini, Università di Perugia, Italy)«This volume meets the continuing need to make sense of the changing worlds of journalism, journalists, and media. Each of the ten contributions is a well conceptualized, researched and thought out assessment of the pertinent issues and a springboard for further evaluations and model building. A great addition to the classroom and scholarship.» (Peter Gross, The University of Tennessee, USA)

This collective effort of Central and Eastern European (CEE) scholars investigates and compares journalism cultures in a selection of CEE countries. Simultaneously with dramatic societal and political changes, CEE journalisms undergo a technological revolution and the global repercussions of the economic crisis. According to the authors of this volume, the national cultural factors and traditions play an important role in professionalization and democratization of journalism cultures. The book critically examines some of the identified developments, such as shifting roles and functions of the media and journalists or interpretations of occupational self-regulation as genuine phenomena of CEE journalisms rather than deviations from the Western professional ideology of journalism.

This book analyzes when and how Poland implemented public diplomacy. The author explains it as a form of external political communication of governments conducted in cooperation with non-state actors to position the country internationally. The Polish case illustrates how a mid-size country in Europe attempts to impact the public opinion formation abroad while implementing soft power tools. Since 2004, when Poland joined the EU, the country has used public diplomacy to inform the world about its achievements. Poland’s public diplomacy has been strongly oriented on Europe and shaped by geopolitics. It integrated transmission and network models of communication. The Polish model reflects the relevance of public diplomacy domestic dimension and the focus on foreign politics on memory.«The book (…) is the first monograph analyzing contemporary Polish public diplomacy written in English, being at the same time a methodologically sound piece of research, based on extensive primary source research.»Professor Andrzej Mania, Chair of American Studies and the History of Diplomacy and International Politics, Jagiellonian University«An excellent case study of public diplomacy. Ociepka systematically analyzed the Polish utilization of key public diplomacy instruments including cultural diplomacy, branding and Twiplomacy, and properly placed them within historical and theoretical contexts.»Professor Eytan Gilboa, Director, Center for International Communication, Bar-Ilan University

This book analyses the adaptivity of public service media (PSM) to the digital network age. The authors use specific case studies and research initiatives, involving a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches, to argue that current changes in media and society offer a wide range of possibilities for PSM renewal. Changes in PSM are analysed through the lenses of shifts in users’ behavior and the growing importance of big data, machine mediation and developing partnership systems alongside other agents in the overall media ecology. The authors map the potential mental, regulatory, institutional and financial indicators which might restrict the ways in which PSM adapts. They argue that PSM renewal is possible as long as PSM policy-makers and managers both recognize and understand the drivers for, and obstacles to, change.«What is the role of Public Service Media in the digital era? While pundits either call for its abolishment or fend off any criticism, the present volume avoids simplistic answers and offers valuable inputs for academic and policy debates.»Manuel Puppis, University of Fribourg, Switzerland. «This volume presents a multi-layered analytical prism through the lenses of which conditions for public service media future may be viewed. An excellent source for media studies with country cases and general evaluation.»Andrei Richter, Office of the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, Vienna, Austria.

The book provides an empirically based analysis of changes on how various political and denominational actors seek to influence the Church and state relationship, as well as how we understand the idea of the secular state. A set of case studies shows how and why changes in the coverage of the secular state and Church-state relations have followed the dynamics of media logic. By establishing a grounded theory based on media content, legal regulations and political party programs in the years 1989–2015 as well as a current survey, the author throws new light on the theory of mediatization. The book demonstrates that the disseminated idea of the secular state is largely a result of the adaptation of both political and religious representatives to a dynamically changing media logic."The book is the first study of this kind showing the Polish perspective. It is an interesting and important source of information for those who want to trace the media picture of relations between the Polish state and the institution of the Roman Catholic Church, representing the largest religious community in Poland."Professor Dorota Piontek, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań

A media system does not exist in a vacuum. It develops and grows within social, political and economic systems. They interact with and influence one another, as well as stimulate each other’s development. The main subject of this work is the dynamically evolving Polish media system, which is under the influence of institutions and external stakeholders. Thanks to this, it is easier to understand that the "crossroads" is not only a problem of the Polish media system, but a global one. For this reason, a comparative perspective is employed. Three chapters help to provide an answer to research questions dedicated to political parallelism and journalistic professionalization. The analysis would be limited and unrepresentative if the book enclosed it with one country's border, omitting the broad global, European and Centro-European context.

In this book, the author examines the media coverage of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict by six Polish media outlets in 2014 and 2015. Using content analysis and in-depth interviews, the author explores how cultural and historical factors, as well as the national security threat to Poland, affected the media image of the conflict. Despite differences in editorial line, level of political parallelism and type of medium, the Polish media largely spoke with one voice. Interviews with journalists uncover how they view their role in reporting on the conflict, and how national prejudices had an impact on their work. The military and economic threat to Poland, resulting from Russia’s actions, was the dominant tool of domestication used by the media to bring the dispute closer to the public.

The book deals with the most challenging issues which the Slovak Mass Media are currently facing, including matters of public criticism. The first chapter describes the media influence on power control in Slovakia. It does not avoid the controversial question of corruption in the Slovak media field. The following chapter examines the stereotypes about the social minorities that are still widely spread by the media (especially the Internet and the social media). In this context, the chapter related to the public media explains why the existence of the media of public service is so important and why it is necessary to finance such media by public sources and not by the state. In the final chapter, the author aims to identify the reasons why alternative sources of information usually fail to inform truthfully, impartially and objectively.

The book deals with the problems of media communication and its formation in the Slovak Republic in and after 1993. It focuses on the social function of the media in the sense of journalistic communication. The authors also address the problems of gender stereotypes presented through social networks and advertising in all kinds of media in Slovakia and abroad. This book also explores the question of forming a theoretical basis for the creation of mass media communication (print media, film, photography, literature, works in marketing communication, books). This book does not elaborate on all problems of the mass media in the Slovak Republic, but it attempts to examine the key issues.

This book is the fruit of scientific research conducted using quantitative and qualitative methods regarding the mutual relations between the media elites and the political elites in Poland. The authors of this work focus on several virtuous aspects of this issue: on the characteristic model of opinion-forming journalism, also on the differences presented by female and male journalists in the assessment of the relations between politicians and journalists, as well as on the differences between local and national level of mass media in terms of external and internal autonomy of journalists, next on the importance of opinion-forming media in the process of creating a sense of political subjectivity in their recipients, and finally on the phenomenon of politicization of cultural issues in opinion-forming weeklies in Poland.

This book reveals the value and significance of pirate radio, with a special focus on local radio stations that broadcast illegally in Poland in the early 90s. It shows that many of them, like in other countries from the region, began as non-commercial, community-oriented initiatives. Several sources of information were used to maximize the potential of the study, especially documents gathered from public institutions, press articles, interviews with radio representatives, and decision-makers who influenced the shape of the broadcasting system. The analysis of these sources supports the conclusion that, although the pirates left a lasting legacy, they lost out in the licensed regime driven by market logic.

While most of the scholarship on populism and populist political communication is focused on Western European countries with a long tradition of populist parties’ appearance on the political scene (such as Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, or Sweden), this volume offers an insight into populist political communication in countries less frequently covered in the English-language literature, namely Bosnia and Hercegovina, Bulgaria, France, Israel, Poland, and Romania. With the main focus on Eastern and Southern Europe, this book contributes to answering key questions regarding the relations between populist actors, media, and citizens. The publication represents an interdisciplinary approach to the populist political communication. The co-existence of different research methods and tools in that book allows us to capture the multi-dimensional nature of populism.

The monograph is focused on three essential research problems identified by the key terms used in its title. The analysis covers concepts that previously were not subject to in-depth research projects: the MediaPolis, a MediaEgo and evolution of the political communication paradigm, observed and analysed on the political scene in Poland. Evolution of the public sphere and the media requires consideration of the causes of ongoing changes and of forecast transformations initiated by those changes. Hence, the research project focused on the sphere that emerged in an intersection of known discourse areas – public, political, meta-political and media discourses. The monograph summarizes years of research into the proposed concepts of a MediaEgo politician and the MediaPolis public sphere.

The issue of increasing migration is still relevant even after years of international efforts to address and stabilize the socio-economic increase in migration in the European context. The media are still the main source of information on distant topics, including the migration crisis, and are a mediator of people's access to social reality. Media discourses about migrants are essential for the public to form implicit attitudes towards them and can thus negatively influence the process of integration of refugees in the EU and contribute to strengthening prejudices among citizens. The publication presents a transdisciplinary view of the issue in the Trans-European context, i.e. in an area that has historically served as a buffer zone of migratory pressures.

The main purpose of the book is to create a model of the presidential election campaign in South Korea. The research questions included both those regarding the content of the campaign itself and, more broadly, its organization. The collected materials, posted on Facebook and Twitter accounts by the three most important candidates in the campaign, were analyzed using mixed (qualitative and quantitative) research methods. In addition to describing the results of empirical research, the book provides a broader context regarding political communication in the Republic of Korea. Because of that, the work can be useful for students of political science, international relations, communication studies, as well as Korean studies.

We selected ten post-communist countries for this research. Eight of them are located on the Balkan Peninsula, from a geographical point of view. We added Romania and Slovenia for historical reasons. The main aim of research is to provide a model of the media system in each of them. We are interested in the political, societal, economic and technological situation, journalistic standards and media accountability. The important thing is to know how media systems evolve in each country, under the influence of political institutions and external stakeholders. We examined how political, media, economic and social systems co-work or influence each other and how they affect each other.