The Populism of Media-driven Public Opinion

Neo-populism is a phenomenon associated with the «democracies of the public». There exist two different forms of political representation in such democracies: the electoral one and that of the media-driven public opinion. This duality facilitates and stimulates populism. The dynamics is simple: the media offer as authentic social representation
the opinion generated by them, which reflects the «voice from the street» that expresses itself without intermediaries. The old concept of «people» is replaced by that of media-driven public opinion. The article analyzes three neo-populist meanings: the myth of public opinion, the way this is shaped by the communications system and the functions
it exerts in the political domain.

The World that Speaks Arabic. Television and Public Diplomacy between the West and the Islamic World

Thanks to the ability of reproducing and diffusing symbolic messages and categories of meaning, mass media are the main source of the cultural/ideological power; TV and radio are the most important arenas for the international debate, where a competition between dominant world’s views is taking place.
The starting point of this paper is that at the international level there is a rising attention towards the use of public diplomacy instruments towards the Middle East, especially TV. The methodology is a collection of data regarding international TV broadcasts in Arabic. Empirical evidence shows a broad and rich panorama but at the same time English abstracts several doubts have been raised about the effectiveness of such experiments. The main goal of this study is to understand whether a globalized political communication may guarantee a positive discussion between varieties of viewpoints or rather it is destined to be only a propaganda mouthpiece.

New Media, Election Strategies And Participation: The US Presidential Campaign 2008

This article analyzes the role of the new media in the United States’ 2008 Presidential election from three points of view: the political behavior of the internet audience, the supply of contents on candidates’ websites, and the strategies adopted by the consultants involved in the online campaign. Due to far-sighted investments, a strategy significantly centered on interpersonal communication, and the creation of a hybrid organizational model capable of balancing participation and control, Barack Obama effectively marshaled the new media to mobilize crucial resources and achieve a sizeable competitive advantage vis-a-vis his opponents in both the primaries and the general election. Analyzing the factors that contributed to Obama’s success helps generating hypotheses about the conditions that can enable or hinder the diffusion of an internet-centered model of political communication.

Media, Democracy and the Obama Administration: Hope without Change?

Social media (e-mail, blogs, social networking sites, text and instant messaging, mobile phone calls, and micro-blogs such as twitter, and digital media sharing formats including Flickr and YouTube) have been celebrated as changing fundamentally the nature of political discourse. Barack Obama’s successful 2008 presidential election bid and the practices of his newly installed administration have been offered as cases in point. Does this change mean putting the political process into the people’s hands? This paper considers briefly three cases (Citizen’s Briefing Book, Online Town Hall Meeting and Supreme Court Nomination) to evaluate if opportunities for decisive public input to government policy via social media have been realized.

Europe Is There. But What about the Campaign? 2009 EU Elections and the Cycle of News

The EU integration for a long time has been considered a supranational process that does not trigger substantial changes in national political contexts. Moreover, the enlargement process has stressed cultural differences between member states and has highlighted difficulties in the construction of a shared public space; so that the existence of a European public sphere is still questioned. European elections are usually a pretext to discuss domestic issues and this is a common feature in most of the member states. In Italy, 2009 elections represented a test which confirmed a tendency to «nationalize», or to ignore, the EU issues in terms of political strategies and journalistic practices. Once again European election campaigns have played a secondary role in the process of «Europeanization» of public opinion.
This article provides some suggestions about the place Europe and the European elections have within the political and media systems by studying the election campaign coverage in newspapers, newscasts and on the Web.

The «Humanitarian» Rock: When Music Turns into Politics. Live Aid and Live 8 as Tools of International Politics

This article develops an analysis of the Live 8 concerts, organized to anticipate the G8 Summit of 2005 in Gleneagles, Scotland. The aim was to persuade the leaders of the wealthiest countries to drop the debt of the poorest countries, to increase aids and to negotiate better trade conditions for the products of the developing countries.
The concerts took place on the 2nd of July 2005, almost at the same time, in London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Philadelphia, Toronto, Tokyo, Johannesburg and Moscow.
They can be considered an interesting example of «soft news event» and represent the most recent and most extraordinary case of «socially advantageous» use of a mega event: by means of the universal and «catchy» language of music, Live 8 turned out to be a pivotal element of a complex political and mediatic campaign.