"In this superb account of how the British and American news mediarepresent everyday citizens and public opinion, the authors show howcoverage of politics and policy debates subtly - even inadvertently - urgepeople to see themselves as and thus to be politically passive,disengaged and cynical. The book's analysis of how journalistsmisrepresent, even invent, public opinion is alone worth the price ofadmission. Written with great verve, passion and unswerving clarity,Citizens or Consumers? promises to become an instant classic in the studyof the failings--and the still untapped promise--of the news media tofurther democracy." Susan J. Douglas, Catherine Neafie Kellogg Professor and Chair,Department of Communication Studies, The University of Michigan "Based on an exhaustive cross-Atlantic empirical study, Citizens or Consumers? is an engaging and incisive contribution to a subject usually restricted to clichés and vague generalizations. Looking not only at how media impact upon their audiences, but the manner in which that influence is mediated by the way in which citizenship itself is represented in news stories, Lewis et. al. offer us unusual and keen insight into a familiar world. Written in an engaging and lively style, first year students and experienced faculty members (as well as general readers) will benefit from its many perceptive insights. Especially useful are the last few pages which suggest how journalists might alter their representation practices to invoke citizenship rather than passive consumerism." Sut JhallyProfessor of Communication, University of Massachusetts at AmherstFounder & Executive Director, Media Education Foundation "The two great duelists for our attention - citizens and consumers - are locked in a struggle for the future of democracy. Citizens or Consumers? offers its readers a sharp lesson in how the media highlight and distort that struggle. It's the kind of lesson we all need." Toby Miller, author of Cultural Citizenship. In recent years there has been much concern about the general decline in civic participation in both Britain and the United States - especially among young people. At the same time we have seen declining budgets for serious domestic and international news and current affairs amidst widespread accusations of a “dumbing down” in the coverage of public affairs. This book enters the debate by asking whether the news media have played a role in producing a passive citizenry. And, if so, what might be done about it? Based on the largest study of the media coverage of public opinion and citizenship in Britain and the United States, this book argues that while most of us learn about politics and public affairs from the news media, we rarely see or read about examples of an active, engaged citizenry. Key reading for students in media and cultural studies, politics and journalism studies.

"Americans spend far more time thinking about what to buy, and what not to buy, than they do about politics. Political leaders often make political claims while using consumer terminology. And political decisions resemble consumer decisions in surprising ways. Together, these forces help give rise to the consumer-citizen: A person who depends on tools and techniques familiar from consumer life to make sense of politics. Understanding citizens as consumer-citizens has implications for a broad array of topics related to public opinion and political behaviour. More than a dozen new experiments make clear that appealing to the consumer-citizen as consumer-citizen can increase trust in government, improve attitudes toward taxes, and enhance political knowledge. Indeed, such appeals can even cause people to sign up for government-sponsored health insurance. However, the consumer-citizen may also prefer candidates whose policies would explicitly undercut their own self-interest. Two concepts from consumer psychology, consumer fairness and operational transparency, are especially useful for understanding the consumer citizen. Although the rise of the consumer-citizen may trouble democratic theorists, the lessons of the consumer-citizen can be applied to a new approach to civic education, with the aim of enriching democracy and public life"--

Technological, cultural and economic forces are transforming political communication, posing challenges and opportunities for politicians and media organisations, while at the same time many governments and civil society express concerns about the extent and nature of political empowerment and civic engagement. This book offers an international perspective on current thinking and practice about civic and audience empowerment, focusing on the ways and means through which media can empower or dis-empower citizens as audiences. It features theoretical and empirical chapters that draw specific attention to a reappraisal of the theories, methods and issues that inform our understanding of citizens and audiences in contemporary politics. The authors address the following questions: How much and what sorts of civic and audience empowerment are most desirable, and how does this differ cross-nationally? How do citizens relate to private and public spaces? How do citizens function in online, networked, liminal and alternative spaces? How do audiences of ‘non-political’ media spaces relate their experiences to politics? How are political parties and movements utilising audiences as co-creators of political communication and what are the consequences for democracy? With examples from the UK, USA, Holland, France, Germany, The Middle East, South Africa and Mexico, this innovative volume will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, marketing, journalism, cultural studies, public relations, media and international relations.

Particularly among segments of the left that have identified neoliberal market logics and consumer capitalist structures as a major focus of political struggle -- .

The decline of citizen involvement affects two key elements of democratic government: elections and political parties. Activating the Citizen examines the reasons underlying citizen withdrawal and explores and assesses innovative approaches on both sides of the Atlantic to try to counter these phenomena.

This edited collection makes a unique contribution to analyses of the changing nature and challenges of mediated political communication, through a distinctive comparative discourse analytical approach. The book explores how politics is performed and discursively constructed in television news and current affairs in five countries (France, Greece, Italy, Sweden and the UK) and focuses on a moment in time in European politics characterized by challenging tensions; increased Euroscepticism, questioning of mainstream politics; accentuated gaps between the elite and the citizens, and polarizations between member states. Emphasising the performative and discursive dimensions of political communication, the chapters provide a detailed comparative analysis that is centred around three themes: how symbolic representations of politics are shaped by journalistic practices, genres and styles of news reporting; the language and performances of mainstream and populist political leaders; and the participation and representation of citizens’ voices.

This book is the first comprehensive textbook on political marketing. Drawing on the latest theoretical work and applying it to a wide variety of international case studies, it provides an essential resource for all students of political marketing.

Petros Iosifidis addresses an increasingly prominent subject area in the field of media and communications, and one that has attracted increased attention in areas such as sociology, economics, political science and law: global media policy and regulation. Specifically, he considers the wider social, political, economic and technological changes arising from the globalization of the communications industries and assesses their impact on matters of regulation and policy. By focusing on the convergence of the communication and media industries, he makes reference to the paradigmatic shift from a system based on the traditions of public service in broadcast and telecommunications delivery to one that is demarcated by commercialization, privatization and competition. In doing so, Iosifidis tackles a key question in the field: to what extent do new media developments require changes in regulatory philosophy and objectives. It considers the various possible meanings of the public interest concept in exploring the different regulatory modes and the interplay between the local and the global in policy-making.

Citizen Journalism as Conceptual Practice provides a conceptualization of citizen journalism as a political practice developed through analyses of an historical and postcolonial case. Arguing that citizen journalism is first and foremost situated, embodied and political rather than networked and technology-based, the book offers a grounded analysis of the colonial newspaper, The Herald, published in St. Croix (Virgin Islands) 1915-25 by a descendant of enslaved people and independently of the colonial ruler, Denmark. The analysis is informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s approach to knowledge production and formulates a critical reading of citizens’ and subjects’ mediated political engagements then as well as now. The book discusses current approaches to citizen journalism before turning to The Herald, which is then read against the grain in an attempt to show the embodied politics of colonial history and cultural forms of citizen engagement as these politics evolve in this particular case of journalism

Through a focus on media and political discourses both before and after the UK 2016 EU Referendum, this volume provides a set of comprehensive, empirically based analyses of Brexit as a social and political crisis. The book explores a variety of context-dependent, ideologically driven, social, political, and economic imaginaries that have been attached to the idea/concept of Brexit in the UK and internationally. The volume’s wider contribution has three dimensions. First, it provides evidence of how the Brexit referendum debate and its immediate reactions were discursively framed and made sense of by a variety of social and political actors and through different media. Second, the contributors show how such discourses were reflexive of the wider path-dependent historical and political processes which have been instrumental in pre-defining the key pathways along which Brexit has been articulated. Third, the book identifies key patterns of national and international framing in order to discover the key, recurrent discursive trajectories in the ongoing process of Brexit – including after UK’s formal departure from the EU in January 2020 – while putting forward an agenda for its further, in depth and systematic analysis in, in particular, politics and the media. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Critical Discourse Studies.