After Broadcast News
Media Regimes, Democracy, and the New Information Environment

After Broadcast News challenges the role of professional journalists as the primary source of politically relevant information.

Bruce A. Williams (Author), Michael X. Delli Carpini (Author)

9781107010314, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 September 2011

376 pages, 7 b/w illus. 6 tables
23.7 x 16 x 2.6 cm, 0.62 kg

“Political communication took place for most of the late twentieth century in a media environment dominated by professional journalistic gatekeepers, dedicated to norms of social responsibility, largely insulated from commercial pressures, and at the same time closely tied to established political elites. Over the past couple of decades, this ‘media regime,’ as Williams and Delli Carpini put it, has broken down, and a multitude of hybrid genres and competing gatekeepers with divergent motivations and ideologies have replaced the bounded, unified system of the previous era. We are still sorting out how to understand political communication in this new era, and Williams and Delli Carpini make a sophisticated, lively contribution to accomplishing this. It makes a big difference that they bring to this task a good sense of history, and put the most recent transformation of American political communication in the context of along and complex history of contention over the rules of the game for determining who gets to speak about politics and how.”
– Daniel Hallin, University of California, San Diego

The new media environment has challenged the role of professional journalists as the primary source of politically relevant information. After Broadcast News puts this challenge into historical context, arguing that it is the latest of several critical moments, driven by economic, political, cultural and technological changes, in which the relationship among citizens, political elites and the media has been contested. Out of these past moments, distinct 'media regimes' eventually emerged, each with its own seemingly natural rules and norms, and each the result of political struggle with clear winners and losers. The media regime in place for the latter half of the twentieth century has been dismantled, but a new regime has yet to emerge. Assuring this regime is a democratic one requires serious consideration of what was most beneficial and most problematic about past regimes and what is potentially most beneficial and most problematic about today's new information environment.

1. Is there a difference between Tina Fey and Katie Couric?: policing the boundaries between news and entertainment
2. Media regimes and American democracy
3. And that's the way it (was): the rise and fall of the age of broadcast news
4. Political reality, political power and political relevance in the changing media environment
5. Politics in the emerging new media age: hyperreality, multiaxiality, and 'the Clinton scandals'
6. When the media really matter: coverage of the environment in a changing media environment
7. 9/11 and its aftermath: constructing a political spectacle in the new media environment
8. Shaping a new media regime.

Subject Areas: Press & journalism [KNTJ], Media, information & communication industries [KNT], Constitution: government & the state [JPHC], Politics & government [JP]