Unstability of mediatization

Currently, the academic debate on political communication turns around the mediatization of politics. On one hand, there are authors who believe that the media coverage of politics is evolving in stages. Nowadays, due to the historical development of societies, media systems have more capacity to influence the political systems in western democracies. This is one way of understanding mediatization of politics. It implies that the level of mediatization in each society is stable along the periods of history.

Trying to go a little further, authors like Jesper Strömbäck and Frank Esser preferred to define mediatization as a circumstantial phenomenon that can occur in different dimensions with greater or lesser intensity, at specific times. Media coverage of a simple event can be very politicized — a campaign event, with accessibility restrictions for journalists — , while other kind of events could be less politicized —a press conference where journalists could ask whatever— in the same community. So, they defend it is not just a historical evolution phenomenon, but a circumstancial one.

To sum up, mediatization of politics is unstable and fluctuant. It depends on many circumstances during a concret period of time that would allow the media system to mediatize politics at some relative degree.