Political Culture and Media Genre Beyond the News

This book explores the forms and meanings of mediated politics beyond the news cycle. It encompasses genres drawn from television, radio, the press and the internet, assessing their individual and collective contribution to contemporary political culture through textual analysis and thematic review, including attention to audience responses and reflections. The academic study of political communication usually focuses on political journalism - the challenges it faces, the economic, political and social conditions under which it operates, and the implications for a healthy public sphere. But mediated politics goes well beyond the news coverage. Politicians and their activities are evaluated by columnists and bloggers, lampooned in cartoons, narrativised in dramas, satirised in broadcasting panel shows, and discussed, in different ways, by citizens themselves. Through these genres and others, the world of politics is kept at the forefront of mediated culture. 'Beyond the news'is where judgments are publicly made, the imagination gets to work and emotion as well as information is mobilised, variously addressed to different parts of the national audience, and variously relevant to citizens' understandings of, and feelings towards, politics itself.

KAY RICHARDSON is based at the University of Liverpool, UK, where she teaches courses on language and communication. Her research is located at the intersection of media studies, sociolinguistics and politics. She has authored or co-authored papers in these areas for Media Culture and Society, Multilingua, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Journal of Language and Politics, Language and Literature, British Journal of Press and International Relations, Interactions and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. Her book Television Dramatic Dialogue: A Sociolinguistic Study (2010) brought approaches from sociolinguistics to the study of performed, crafted speech in TV drama. KATY PARRY is Lecturer in Communications Studies at the University of Leeds, UK, where she teaches on visual communication, political communication, and media and war. She is a co-author of Pockets of Resistance: British News Media, War and Theory in the 2003 Invasion of Iraq (2010), with Piers Robinson, Peter Goddard, Craig Murray and Philip Taylor. She has authored and co-authored journal articles in Journal of Communication, Media Culture & Society, Sociology Compass, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Media, War and Conflict, and Television and New Media. She was research associate for the 'Media Genre and Political Culture' project, on which this book is based, and continues to publish on media visualisation of war. JOHN CORNER is Visiting Professor in Communications at the University of Leeds and Emeritus Professor of the University of Liverpool, UK. He has written widely on media history, theory and forms in books and journals, including Television Form and Public Address (1995), The Art of Record (1996) and Critical Ideas in Television Studies (1989). With Dick Pels, he co-edited the collection Media and the Restyling of Politics (2003). His most recent book is Theorising Media: Power, Form and Subjectivity (2011).