In his foreword to Robert A. Brady's canonical text, Business as a System of Power (1943), Brady's colleague, Robert Lynd, questions-"will democratic political power absorb and use economic resources, bigness and all, to serve its ends, or will big economic power take over state power?" This far-fetched proposition guided Brady's projects and inspired a new class of critical political economics, many of whom applied their analyses to the field of communication. Bradys' expansive contributions to the field of communication are perhaps best understood through the context in which he conducted research and his web of influence in the academy. Bradys' musings reveal forgotten-or ostensibly omitted-revelations about how businesses wield power over social, technological, political, and cultural transformations. This investigation traces how Robert A. Brady's social and political history, fiercely democratic ideology, and scathing critique of business and state coordination prove significant to the history of political economy of communication.
There are many approaches and ideas to democratically transform social media. These perspectives range from better and more sophisticated regulation, reforming the design of social media platforms, better education of users and social ownership of social media platforms themselves. Following in this tradition, this article offers a novel point of democratic transformation of social media platforms: the subscription user. The introduction of subscription packages by Meta and Snapchat indicates a changing economic logic within social media platforms that situates subscription users with a newfound economic and political power to leverage against social media platforms. Through the works of Erik Olin Wright and Bonnie Honig, subscription users embody a point of democratic transformation as the fee (or the willingness to pay the fee) can be utilised as a collective form of social power, which enables public oversight of social media platforms.
Since the invasion of Ukraine, the "foreign agent" legislation is one example of the further tightening of restrictive discriminatory legislation of Putins' regime in attempts to restrain, silence and criminalise opposition and dissenting views from the public sphere and discourse. Starting from the multidisciplinary approach of critical discourse analysis (CDA), this study investigates the construction of media discourse on "foreign agents" by two state-affiliated outlets (Rossiyskaya Gazeta and Komsomolskaya Pravda) and one independent, alternative (Meduza) during three subsequent time frames from February 2022 to March 2024. The dominant discourse in state-owned and affiliated media signifies compliance and governmental alignment aimed at delegitimisation, stigmatisation and exclusion of "foreign agents". Meduza challenges the dominant discourse and aims to (re)define the prevailing narratives, expose injustice, and contest the current socio-political conjuncture, ultimately urging for civic engagement and change. The paper concludes by reflecting on the dual use of language in authoritarian contexts as both a mechanism of control and repression and an instrument of resistance and contestation at the same time.
Communication is fundamental to democracy, although this importance varies according to the different models of democracy. In deliberative and participatory democracy models, citizen participation and engagement and the discursive dimension exponentially increase the role of information and communication. Democratic innovations, emerging from these deliberative and participatory traditions, correspond to the type of initiative in which communication plays an essential role. However, communication processes in democratic innovations are still understudied. The scarce research in the field reveals difficulties in reaching the citizens and increasing public awareness. This study analyses communication in three different institution-led democratic innovations, namely the Conference on the Future of Europe, the Bologna Citizens' Assembly, and the Spanish Citizens' Climate Assembly. The case studies provide examples of local, national, and transnational initiatives at the European level. The qualitative approach to the three case studies was based on 30 interviews with participants and organisers of the initiatives, complemented by the consultation of documents. The findings are integrated into an analytical framework to approach the communication of democratic innovations, resulting from the triangulation of the results.
This article examines how platform infrastructures reshape the experiential and normative foundations of publicness as a principle of collective orientation. It argues that contemporary digital environments organise visibility, attention and affect through an algorithmic organisation of the sensible that aligns perception with data extraction, behavioural prediction and episodic intensification, thereby reconfiguring the conditions under which public experience acquires epistemic and democratic significance. To conceptualise this condition, the article develops the notion of aesthetic colonisation as the process through which platforms reorganise sensibility, temporal rhythm and the experienceability of publics. In dialogue with Dewey's account of aesthetic experience, Benjamin's analysis of shock and the dissolution of Erfahrung, Rosas' theory of social acceleration and Splichal's reconceptualisation of publicness, the article shows how contractual publics stabilise the procedural conditions of participation and how gig publics materialise collectivity through rhythmic peaks of circulation and performative visibility. The final sections outline an aesthetics of formation grounded in aesthetic literacy, democratic infrastructures and public-service communication models oriented to reflective publicity. The renewal of democratic publicness depends on environments capable of sustaining shared attention, temporal depth and the experiential resources required for collective understanding.
A decade and a half after "Political Communication in Freefall" (Blumler & Coleman), this article asks where the crisis of civic-democratic political communication nowstands. It argues that the problem is no longer an unanchored system in freefall but a more organised and consequential shift in the normative foundations of public discourse: political illiberalism has gained legitimacy, while core liberal-democratic norms of publicity-equal respect for voices, reason-giving, truth-testing, and openness to plural narratives-have weakened. Framed as a Weberian legitimation conflict, the article examines how antagonistic value-sets contend over what counts as acceptable public controversy, who must justify claims, and which voices can be excluded without scandal. The British case (2016-2026) is used as a critical illustration: Brexit-era turbulence, rapid turnover of governments, declining turnout, and the rise of Reform UK reveal a democracy characterised by volatility without durable public orientation. The article then analyses the media's role in this reconfiguration, arguing that elements of mainstream journalism-under structural-economic pressure and intensifying competition-have sometimes contributed to political chaos and illiberal normalisation, including through game framing, a narrow repertoire of expertise, and a degraded conception of impartiality under bad-faith conditions. Finally, the paper identifies four dimensions through which the new order is legitimated (ironic pragmatism, narrow expertise, hyper-fragmentation, and impunity for bad-faith actors) and concludes by calling for "democratic clarity": a renewed set of normative commitments capable of resisting illiberal drift and rebuilding communicative conditions for democratic agency.
Social media influencers-regular people who become famous through successful self-presentation on social media-intertwine entertainment with socio-political narratives in their communication. In this content, they display collective identities like sexual or religious identities. These collective identity portrayals (CIPs) could foster the visibility of marginalized groups and shared meaning-making but may also reinforce stigmatization. This quantitative content analysis investigates how YouTubers identified in a prior youth survey (N = 1829) portray collective identities in their political videos (N = 267). Our findings reveal that most (67.79%) of these videos contain at least one CIP. Furthermore, videos containing political and religious CIPs receive more comments, suggesting that collective identities may trigger collective action. Finally, while religious and gender CIPs are embedded in an emotional context, sexual CIPs co-occur with incivility. These findings align with the idea that collective identities in digital public spaces are expressed through personal experiences without formal gatekeeping. Notably, many sexual CIPs referred to minorities, underscoring the assumed visibility of underrepresented groups on social media. However, their presence alongside incivility contradicts the assumption that these spaces may approach such issues in a more positive way compared to the discourses dominant in legacy media.
The article addresses how radio played a double role in the Portuguese Empire. First, it functioned as a tool of cultural domination by promoting the superiority of European languages and cultural practices while presenting African cultures as unworthy of being audible on the airwaves. Second, radio became central to the creation of a black public opinion that was instrumental to the emergence of a sense of nation among the indigenous populations in the territories ruled by Portugal in Africa. This was made possible specially through the listening to programmes produced by the liberation movements that were fighting the colonial regime on the military front but also via the airwaves. Some of these movements broadcast to the Portuguese colonies from neighbouring countries where they were granted access to broadcasting infrastructures. By analysing this dual role played by broadcasting in the context of Portuguese Africa, the article argues that the audio medium was used to foster pro and anti-colonial public opinion. Finally, it discusses how the first broadcasts in African languages, started by white radio producers, aimed foremost to increase their own revenue, as they addressed the black listener as a consumer, not a citizen.
This article examines the conceptual evolution of a defining trope of the UK's Brexit era: "the left behind". Widely used today as discursive shorthand for marginalised post-industrial places and populations, the term "left behind" was popularised to describe older white working-class voters alienated from mainstream politics and susceptible to right-wing populism. It has since become a floating signifier for competing conceptions of social inequality. The Left has mobilised it as a counter-hegemonic signifier for socio-economic and socio-political marginalisation seen to affect areas scarred by deindustrialisation. The Right has weaponized it as a synonym for values cherished by such communities - arguing that these have been socio-culturally marginalised by latter-day mores promoted by metropolitan global elites. But prior to its conceptual capture by political scientists seeking to explain the resurgence of nativist politics, earlier iterations of the "left behind" concept had begun circulating in the language of press and Parliament. Drawing on critical discourse analysis of Hansard and newspaper from the years between the formation of Britain's post-crash Coalition government and the 2016 EU referendum, the article traces the early emergence of "left-behind" narratives in discursive practices spotlighting problematic social groupings: othered communities scarred by "worklessness", underachievement and "dependency" on social protection.
South Africa presents a unique case for the study of the link between historical and present-day inequalities, as it emerged relatively recently from colonialism and institutionalised segregation. While racial, socio-economic and gender discrimination takes centre stage in the media, disability has been relatively neglected. In the present article, we examine representations of people with disabilities in ten newspapers between 1978 and 2023. Using a qualitative approach, 48 articles were codified and analysed thematically. Articles were deductively allocated to categories emerging from the scholarly literature on historical forms of inequality. A decolonial theoretical lens reveals how past and recent stories employ colonial and patriarchal epistemological tools of oppression such as infantilisation, idealisation and/or demonisation. Representations of people with disabilities as children, angels or demons, understood not as outright and deliberate mystifications but rather as unconscious, often internalised and largely benevolent constructions of (dis)ability, concurrently feed the symbolic violence of able bodies as naturally superior, as reference points and as primary interlocutors and justify persisting inequalities.
In the nineteenth century, representatives of the socialist labour movement leveraged public communications to pursue their goal of overcoming class inequality. They expressed high expectations for media outlets and were consistently disappointed by the coverage of a hegemonic bourgeois press they regarded as biased. Demands for fair reporting tied in with the emerging self-image of the bourgeois press as news providers in the nineteenth century. Drawing on the concepts of hostile media perception and media bias, this paper examines whether the labour movement's perception of the dominant press corresponded to the reporting of the leading newspapers. The study is based on content analysis of 1,092 articles from The Times and K & ouml;lnische Zeitung covering the Paris Commune in 1871. The analysis reveals that representatives of the Commune had their say in principle, but to a relatively small extent, and that the newspapers mainly used neutral language. However, measuring coverage against the emerging norms of journalism resulted in a perceived inequality for the labour movement.
The article employs a comparative textual analysis of key legal texts within German (democratic-corporatist) and UK (liberal) media regulation models to examine the relationship between mass media regulation and social inequality. The research addresses three key questions: firstly, how each model approaches different markers of inequality (such as gender, age, race, ethnicity, or religion); secondly, how regulation has evolved alongside changing identity politics; and thirdly, what this reveals about underlying power structures - conceptualised as "symbolic violence" with Bourdieu - within each system. The analysis demonstrates a broadly similar acknowledgement of inequality markers in both countries, though the normative justifications for addressing them diverge. Notably, both regulatory frameworks pay limited attention to socio-economic inequality, reflecting a global trend of prioritising cultural identity over economic disparities. The study provides insights into how mass media regulation both reflects and reinforces existing power dynamics within media regulation systems, and offers avenues for further research at the intersection of mass media and social inequality.
Twentieth-century Portuguese history is marked by the longest autocratic regime of Western Europe, the Estado Novo. Throughout this period, the state instructed its Censorship Office to ensure that news outlets would not only portray a magnanimous regime but also project the image of a prosperous and secure country. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, the government chose to position the country as neutral in the conflict, instructing the censors to prevent information about the war or its impact from dominating the news at that time. In contrast, this article analyses the content of the newspaper O S & eacute;culo, aiming at understanding the social inequalities felt by the population and the real impact of the war on the country. It demonstrates that the censorship and propaganda apparatus was able to create an echo chamber and project the view of a country unaffected by the conflict - a prosperous nation without social problems or inequality. In reality, however, the effect on the population was hidden from view, demonstrating how the state was able to silence the truth.
This article examines East Berlin media criticism post-1990, focusing on the unequal distribution of symbolic resources between East and West Germans. Utilising Giddens's structuration and identity theories, we link the discursive side of inequality with media and define media criticism as one response of marginalised groups' to hegemonic discourses. We conducted 37 biographical interviews with East Berliners to examine their media criticism and experiences of exclusion in media discourse. We found that hegemonic media narratives about East Germany have influenced East Berlin media criticism. This criticism is directed at systemic media biases, particularly in public service broadcasting. The study identified a latent consciousness of structural factors shaping media realities among East Berliners, often linked to their experiences of social declassing and the socioeconomic challenges after reunification. A range of East Berliners criticised the portrayal of German Democratic Republic (GDR) life in the media, particularly the focus on the Stasi and negative stereotypes, which they feel misrepresent their lived experiences. The persistence of these stereotypes has, for some, reinforced an East German identity and fostered media criticism as a form of identity work.
This article critically examines how far-right influencers engage with historical fiction video games to articulate far-right cultural imaginaries. Through a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of "Let's Play" videos and video essays, it explores how far-right influencers negotiate temporal imaginaries, antagonisms, and subject positions within platformed gaming content. Moving beyond existing work on reactionary politics in gamer culture, I draw on insights from game studies to highlight the unique character of games: spaces that enable the performance of nostalgic fantasies, particularly of heroism and civilisational struggle, whilst also imposing structural constraints disrupting these narratives. These moments of friction give way to ideological manoeuvring, as far-right influencers strategically shift between roles - transhistorical heroes, guardians of historical accuracy, aggrieved defenders of gamer culture - deploying discursive flexibility to navigate and exploit the affordances and constraints of their technological, narrative and pop cultural environments to propagate far-right worldviews. These shifting performances illuminate ontological anxieties and subject positions far-right ideology seeks to stabilise, and provoke broader reflections regarding how discourse is shaped by and responsive to its structural environment. I conclude by considering how attention to these dynamics might inform antifascist cultural counter-strategies through attunement to affective, playful and imaginative sites of struggle.
While a podcast reviewing popular culture is nothing out of the ordinary, the German podcast "Von rechts gelesen" (VRG-Read from the right) might appear unusual: It is a culture and literature podcast produced by a group of German far-right activists. Yet, the podcast is emblematic of the way far-right thinkers and activists have set their sights on popular culture to win over the "hearts and minds' of the population at large. Focusing specifically on how the podcast both performs and reflects on metapolitics through discussing films, TV series and videos games, the article shows how audiovisual fiction serves as a canvas for the Neue Rechte to argue in favour of cultural homogeneity, warn of the dominance of an anti-nationalist liberal-capitalist ideology but also find (hidden) meanings that supposedly reveal an elite losing its grip. Indeed, in today's world, where politics has moved online, and is not reflected in but rather happens through the world of popular culture, there are arguably few things as metapolitically meaningful as discussing audiovisual fiction.
This article analyses Jordan Peterson's video lectures about Disney films, which he uses to expound a theory of myth based on his 2002 book Maps of Meaning. This semiotic analysis of his lectures and YouTube media commentary focuses on how he constructs myths using visual-verbal metaphors, then positions himself in the centre of myth through visual media as the wise guide and conquering intellectual hero. This analysis shows his vision of myth supports reactionary politics. His mythopoetic commentary reshapes male supremacy as deep personal, semiotic and social meaning.
The extreme-right practice of reviewing mainstream films is an overlooked, yet central part of their communicational activities. To more fully grasp the ideological function and effect of this practice, it is fruitful to revisit some fundamental questions about why extreme-right actors produce and/or engage with cultural forms and objects such as fictional narratives. Drawing especially on Fredric Jameson, it is suggested that the production/appropriation of fictional narratives can be analysed as a production of ideological affects. Affects which, in practices such as film reviewing, might then come to flow from the fictional to the political realm.
This commentary, first, looks both back at the contributions to the Special Issue Far-right Fictions: The Far Right and the Politics of Films, Series and Videogames and forward by pointing to future avenues for research on uses of audiovisual fiction by the far right. This is followed, second, by a conceptual suggestion regarding the notion of "atmosphere". The latter speaks to the contributions by further highlighting the relevance of thinking about audiences, with the commentary drawing on Lunt's media-/audience-oriented reading of B & ouml;hme's conceptualisation of "atmosphere".
With audiovisual fiction still largely overlooked in recent literature on the far right, this article turns its attention to research dedicated to the intersections between the far right and films, television series and video games. Based on a mapping review, we first identify main trends in existing literature, finding that it is mainly focused on (1) history and memory, (2) far-right regimes, and (3) film, and is (4) largely based in humanities approaches. Building on this and on recent developments in the literature, we then propose four ways forward to ensure that future research on the far right and audiovisual fiction is more attuned to (1) the contemporary far right, (2) the heterogeneity that characterises the far right today, (3) the significance of series and games as additionally important forms audiovisual fiction and, (4) the specificities and complexities of far-engagement with audiovisual fiction in a digital context.
