close_and_distant_political_executive-media_relations_in_four_countries.pdf
Karl Magnus Johansson sh.academia.edu
This book explores the interplay between government and media drawing on unique evidence from, and in-depth analysis of, four national cases: Finland, Lithuania, Poland and Sweden. Based on the chapters dedicated to each country, five additional
On Friday 25 August 2017, the leader of the conservative party in Sweden, Anna Kinberg Batra, called a press conference. She was under pressure and declared that she would be leaving her post due to increased internal criticism. The press conference ended four days of intense coverage from all leading media on the decreasing popular support for the party. The internal wave of criticism had grown stronger every day, and journalists reported the story as a power struggle between different groups within the party. Was the media the organiser behind the resignation? The coverage showed that the media and the political sphere are intertwined in a mutual dependency: Media provided an arena for the internal party struggle, but it also amplified the internal criticism. In media logic, the demands for a new leader became a good story, and the opposition in the party used this logic to oust a party leader democratically elected just eight months earlier (Eriksson, 2017).

The focus of this anthology has been the relationship between political journalists and their sources in government. The results from this three-year project show the many dimensions, contradictions, and uncertainties of the relationship. Both sides need each other in their daily work, but there are also conflicting interests in the struggle for control of information flows. Both sides need close and personal relationships, but also distance and a division of roles. Journalists and sources perform a daily trade of information in exchange for publicity – a daily negotiation based on power and personal contacts. The rules governing this trade are written by media logics, and both parts know these rules and use them for their own purposes. The negotiations are mostly hidden, but their results are visible in the public image of government politics and the control of information flows in politics. This anthology lists many examples of this daily exchange between political journalists and...

Abstract. While sitting at a place designated for guests in a representative hall of the Lithuanian parliament, the Italian President was smiling at the Speaker of Seimas who was sitting right in front of him and quietly waited until the three minutes dedicated to photojournalists and television cameramen under the protocol were over. When the journalists left, his wide smile vanished, and the President confided to the Speaker of the Seimas that he ‘also ’ did not like and even hated journalists but had no other choice than get used to them and be nice because they also ‘were an authority’. He agreed for his words to be translated into Lithuanian and pointed out: “A very powerful authority, unfortunately”. This situation from the end of the 20th century is in no way an exception in terms of the relationship between the media and government even if used in this article as a case example, because the author will present some more of such examples illustrating the issues of public rela...

While sitting at a place designated for guests in a representative hall of the Lithuanian parliament, the Italian President was smiling at the Speaker of Seimas who was sitting right in front of him and quietly waited until the three minutes dedicated to photojournalists and television cameramen under the protocol were over. When the journalists left, his wide smile vanished, and the President confided to the Speaker of the Seimas that he ‘also’ did not like and even hated journalists but had no other choice than get used to them and be nice because they also ‘were an authority’. He agreed for his words to be translated into Lithuanian and pointed out: “A very powerful authority, unfortunately”. This situation from the end of the 20th century is in no way an exception in terms of the relationship between the media and government even if used in this article as a case example, because the author will present some more of such examples illustrating the issues of public relations (PR) ...

The exercise of political power in a democracy is primarily made through communication with institutions, civil society and individuals. What happens if governments have to deal with an enormous increase of mass, personal and interactive communication like the latest "explosion of communication"? The new media landscape arises issues in the relation of democratic governments with society, specially when it comes to the exercise of its power. In the past, media influenced not only the way government spoke with citizens but the political process and the media-politics relationship. Now it seems governments all over the world are successfully changing the media and the news. New attacks on the freedom of the press and journalists happen all over the world in either liberal or conservative regimes. This article with look for examples from several countries, as France, Italy, Portugal, Venezuela, Argentina, the United States and Russia, and will try to draw a picture and not just to gather a sum of anecdotical evidence. Can these strains and limitations result from the "excess" of nongovernment communications, leading governments to overtake the media, by legal procedures, exerting economic pressure, interfering in the media or upgrading their own marketing, propaganda and misinformation? The present day governmental hyperpropaganda and the constraints on journalists activity hint at the emergence of a new paradigma in the governments-media relation: severe constraints within a formal democracy. It is widely accepted that "attempts by governments to control and manipulate the media are universal because public officials everywhere believe that media are important political forces" and that, in consequence, nowhere are the media totally free from formal and informal government and social controls, even in times of peace. On the whole, authoritarian governments control more extensively and more rigidly than nonauthoritarian ones, but all control systems represent a point of continuum. There are also gradations of control within nations, depending on the current regime and political setting, regional and local variations, and then nature of news. The specifics of control systems vary from country to country, but the overall patterns are similar (Graber, 2010: 16). Hallin and Mancini (2004) theorised media systems with a mutual dependency between political and media institutions and practices, avoiding the paradigma of media always being the dependent variable on relation to the system of social control which it reflects: "media institutions have an impact of their own on other social structures" (Hallin and Mancini, 2004: 8). Considering that mutual dependency, they proposed three models of media systems: the Mediterranean or Polarized Pluralist (including Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain), the North and Central European or 1 Please do not quote without consulting the author.