Mediatization as a combination of push and pull forces: Examples during the 2015 UK general election campaign

Abstract

This article introduces a dual perspective to the study of mediatization of politics, a political actor-centric and a media actor-centric perspective. It applies both perspectives to a case study of the 2015 UK General Election campaign. The media actor-centric perspective focuses on push forces of mediatization, manifested in proactive, interventionist reporting methods. The political actor-centric perspective focuses on pull forces of mediatization, referring to how candidates and parties purposefully draw media logic into the political world in order to achieve better their campaign goals. We argue that the Conservative Party and Labour Party, when exposed to equal push forces, employed different pull strategies in the 2015 UK General Election Campaign. The article uses a set of five indicators to recognize push forces that focus on the style of questions used by journalists when interrogating politicians on TV election programmes (reflecting media actor-centric mediatization). It finds clear indications of assertiveness, adversarialism and accountability in the news approach of the BBC. To recognize pull forces, the article uses a set of seven indicators developed from the literature on campaign professionalism (reflecting political actor-centric mediatization) and finds a considerable imbalance in the effective use of pull strategies between the Conservative and Labour Parties. This latter point leads to what we call lop-sided mediatization. The concluding section discusses inplications for mediatization research in times of Brexit and Trumpism.

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Mediatization as a
combination of push and pull
forces: Examples during the
2015 UK general election
campaign
Jay G Blumler
University of Leeds, UK
Frank Esser
University of Zurich, Switzerland
Abstract
This article introduces a dual perspective to the study of mediatization of politics, a
political actor-centric and a media actor-centric perspective. It applies both perspectives
to a case study of the 2015 UK General Election campaign. The media actor-
centric perspective focuses on push forces of mediatization, manifested in proactive,
interventionist reporting methods. The political actor-centric perspective focuses on
pull forces of mediatization, referring to how candidates and parties purposefully draw
media logic into the political world in order to achieve better their campaign goals.
We argue that the Conservative Party and Labour Party, when exposed to equal push
forces, employed different pull strategies in the 2015 UK General Election Campaign.
The article uses a set of five indicators to recognize push forces that focus on the style of
questions used by journalists when interrogating politicians on TV election programmes
(reflecting media actor-centric mediatization). It finds clear indications of assertiveness,
adversarialism and accountability in the news approach of the BBC. To recognize
pull forces, the article uses a set of seven indicators developed from the literature on
campaign professionalism (reflecting political actor-centric mediatization) and finds a
considerable imbalance in the effective use of pull strategies between the Conservative
and Labour Parties. This latter point leads to what we call lop-sided mediatization. The
Corresponding author:
Frank Esser, Department of Communication and Media Research, University of Zurich, Andreasstrasse 15,
8050 Zurich, Switzerland.
Email: frank.esser@uzh.ch
754850JOU0010.1177/1464884918754850JournalismBlumler and Esser
research-article2018
Original Article

2 Journalism 00(0)
concluding section discusses inplications for mediatization research in times of Brexit
and Trumpism.
Keywords
Elections, journalism (profession), mediatization, politics/political communication/
political journalism, research methods: qualitative, television news
Introduction
The interactional relationship between news media and political actors can be examined
from several perspectives. The currently most popular perspective discusses this rela-
tionship within the framework of the mediatization of politics. Strömbäck and Esser
(2014: 6) define the mediatization of politics as a process through which the importance
of the media and their spill-over effects on political actors and their behaviours has
increased. Applied to campaign communication, it asks to what extent election discourse
is shaped by political actors compared to how far it is framed by the news media (Cushion,
2015). In an attempt to develop the mediatization literature further, we would like to
propose that it is useful to distinguish between a political actor-centric perspective and a
media actor-centric perspective.
A political actor-centric mediatization perspective places parties, governments and
campaign teams at the centre of the analysis. Consequently, Donges and Jarren (2014)
define mediatization as ‘a reaction’ of political actors to ‘their perceptions’ that news
media have become an influential factor in their environment (p. 188). These ‘reactions’
become evident empirically in, for instance, the expansion of public relations units and
the prioritization of publicity experts and techniques of news management and message
control. According to this understanding, it is not the news media which cause changes
in political organizations, but it is the organizations themselves that decide, on the basis
of their own perceptions, to make changes. Put differently, in this view, the mediatization
of politics is not forced upon politics from the outside but is self-effected or internally
initiated through the strategic utilization of media services (Donges and Jarren, 2014;
Marcinkowski and Steiner, 2014). The political actor mediatization perspective pre-
sumes a reflexive understanding of media impact that has been theorized in previous
work as ‘self-mediatization’ or the ‘anticipatory behaviour of political actors’ (Strömbäck
and Esser, 2014: 21). It views the mediatization of politics as a pull process whereby
political actors deliberately draw news media logic into their own considerations and
action rationales. In short, although mediatization may pressurize political actors to carry
out strategic adaptations, this does not lead them automatically to lose power to the
media (Marcinkowski and Steiner, 2014; Van Aelst et al., 2014).
The opposite position, a media actor-centric mediatization perspective, is based on
concepts of journalistic interventionism or media intrusion. These concepts symbolize
the push qualities of the news media – and an understanding of news media as proactive
actors (i.e. organizations pursuing their own interests) and independent institutions (i.e.
a trans-organizational field following its own news logic). As an adherent of this view,

Blumler and Esser 3
Mazzoleni (2014) defines mediatization as ‘the result of media-driven influences in the
political domain’ (p. 43). He argues that in the current multichannel news environment,
political actors are losing ‘their central position’ and growing ‘more dependent than ever’
on the media (Mazzoleni, 2014: 44). What fuels the hegemony of the news media, in this
view, is the fact that no other institution can compete with the news media’s reality con-
structions in terms of social reach, relevance, binding character, diversity and timeliness.
A key source of media power is the fact that all other systems in society depend on the
scarce resource of public attention and are therefore motivated to adapt to news logic and
to incorporate some of its elements into their own action programmes (Donges and
Jarren, 2014; Marcinkowski and Steiner, 2014). Several indicators of journalistic inter-
ventionism have been suggested by previous research. De Vreese (2014) links news
media logic to the process of journalistic frame-building and frame-setting; he empha-
sizes ‘that there is considerable leeway and autonomy on the side of journalism when
deciding how to frame issues’ (p. 148). Strömbäck and Dimitrova (2011) relate journal-
istic interventionism to the extent to which news reporting is interpretive as opposed to
descriptive, while others link it to growing media negativity (Lengauer et al., 2012) and
a declining willingness to grant politicians authoritative voice or communication control
in news (Esser, 2008). All this is to conceive mediatization as a process that expands the
voice and values of news professionals and tries to push back efforts by politicians to
limit journalists’ reporting options.
Dual perspective on mediatization
Both perspectives have been presented here for analytical purposes as monolithic con-
trasts but in reality, they are not. In fact, we wish to argue that they operate simultane-
ously in a dynamic interplay of ebb and flow moments, and that each perspective
incorporates many elements of the other. This interplay was evident during the UK
General Election of 2015. In order to understand the behaviours of political and media
actors in that election, both mediatization as a pull process (parties make strategic use of
communication services to achieve campaign goals) and as a push process (journalists
interfere with the self-presentations of the parties) need to be considered. We contend
that in order to advance mediatization theory, both processes need to be studied in inter-
action. In the following distillation of key features of the 2015 election campaign, both
perspectives are incorporated. Furthermore, we will highlight two aspects of mediatiza-
tion theory that so far have not yet drawn proper scientific attention.
First, regarding the push perspective, we propose that interventionism can derive
from quality media, not just commercial media as suggested in some of the extant litera-
ture, and that the style of questions journalists use when interrogating politicians is a
convenient and meaningful approach for capturing journalistic intervention. We are sug-
gesting a set of five indicators designed to complement previous research on media
actor-centric mediatization processes.
Second, regarding the pull perspective, we argue that self-mediatization is not a con-
stant on the side of political actors. Even if exposed to similar push forces, campaign
politicians may employ different pull strategies in their dealings with a media-saturated
environment. For the exploration of political actor-centric mediatization processes in the

4 Journalism 00(0)
context of elections, we are proposing a set of seven indicators developed from the pro-
fessionalization literature.
Our approach
Methodically speaking, our study is a contribution to qualitatively oriented mediatization
research. We follow the approach of Cushion et al. (2015) who used a British case study
to examine television coverage of the European elections in 2014 and relied on close
textual analysis. They found that the BBC applied a ‘combative and interpretative and
form of journalism’ in their treatment of the UK Independent Party and argued that a
purely quantitative approach would not have adequately captured the interventionist
quality of news reporting (Cushion et al., 2015: 1538–1539).
Our study combines three qualitative methods. First, by means of textual analysis, we
examine the question types used in BBC interview programmes aired during the last
3 weeks before the election day on 7 May 2015 (further details will follow) and construct
a theory-guided typology of ‘push questions’ in British election news coverage. Second,
by means of document analysis, we examine key campaign activities by the Labour and
Conservative Party and construct a theory-guided typology of ‘pull’ strategies of party
communication (more details will follow). Third, a group interview with senior political
journalists (on 16 September 2015 in BBC Broadcasting House) served to obtain expla-
nations for our findings on the interaction between media professionals and campaigning
professionals. We had to grant anonymity but provide more details further below.
Election campaigns are crystallization points of political communication and particu-
larly suitable for observing mediation processes as if under a magnifying glass. It is with
these methodological and theoretical broodings in mind that we will now itemize rele-
vant contextual features of mediation processes in the 2015 UK General Election cam-
paign – after which we will discuss how ‘push’ and ‘pull’ forces manifested themselves,
respectively, in it.
Contextual conditions: The UK political communication
system
Like many other political communication systems in the Western democratic world, the
UK one has been ever in transition, dynamically changing over time. Consistent with
international trends, the United Kingdom’s main political parties have become increas-
ingly professionalized. In the run-up to the 2015 election, the parties further refined their
tactics for influencing media coverage. However, the efforts of the Conservative and
Labour Party to shape the campaign agenda have not become any easier because the rise
of new challenger parties (UK Independence Party, Scottish National Party (SNP), Green
Party) have made the daily battle for whose interpretation of political issues prevails
more competitive.
We also observe increasing professionalism in the media. Among other things, it is
reflected in journalists’ growing desire to demonstrate their independence from the par-
ties’ publicity efforts. British journalists’ desire for distance and scepticism is coupled
with strong pride in their inquisitorial and reporting skills. The United Kingdom is

Blumler and Esser 5
further known for political parallelism of the newspaper industry, involving a press that
has ‘always mirrored the divisions of party politics fairly closely’ (Hallin and Mancini,
2004: 208), tending to disadvantage the Labour Party – more so than ever before during
the 2015 campaign (Deacon et al., 2017). In the 2015 election campaign, the press was
quite successful at setting the agenda for the broadcasters (Cushion et al., 2016a).
Particularly, the narrative that a minority Labour government dependent on the SNP
would plunge the country into chaos – a story constantly fed by the Tories and right-
leaning newspapers – caused Labour so many difficulties in communicating their policy
message that officials complained to the BBC about its journalists’ obsession with the
‘Scottish line’ (Cowley and Kavanagh, 2016).
At the BBC, scholars noticed an increased resort to interpretive journalism. The BBC
employs a large cadre of subject specialist correspondents, regularly deploying their con-
textual commentary within story reports and in two ways with bulletin presenters
(Cushion, 2015). In addition to its regular political programmes, the BBC also broadcast
a series of special programmes during the 2015 election campaign, which were moder-
ated by its most prominent journalists (such as John Humphrys, Andrew Marr, Andrew
Neil, Evan Davis, Kirsty Wark, James Naughtie, Nick Robinson and Jeremy Paxman)
and focused in particular on interviews with politicians.
Outcome: Lop-sided mediatization
It may be concluded from the sum of these factors that in 2015, the United Kingdom
hosted a highly mediatized political communication system. The relations of political
actors to this system and their roles within it may vary, however, including their disposi-
tions and abilities to self-mediatize. For the purpose of the following analysis, we under-
stand mediatization as a combination of push forces (where news media demonstrate
autonomy from political considerations) and pull forces (where political behaviour is
expanded in scope by integrating media logic-related activities in a calculated move).
This twin-track perspective considers direct and indirect media effects. A direct media
effect would be an interview style by a journalist that limits the response options of a
politician; an indirect (or reciprocal) media effect would be a political decision to profes-
sionalize campaign communications in response to a media environment that is per-
ceived as uncertain, dangerous or powerful.
A contention of our analysis is that both major British parties were exposed to similar
push forces of mediatization but that the Conservative Party employed their available
options of pull strategies much more effectively than the Labour Party during United
Kingdom’s 2015 General Election. To what extent the British news media adjusted their
own treatment of the parties to their unequal pull capabilities – eventually to the disad-
vantage of Labour in the final campaign days – has triggered some debate in the after-
math of the election. Our conclusion is that the 2015 general election campaign was an
example of lop-sided mediatization. One party failed to use media-oriented campaigning
strategies for its own purposes, while the other party was very successful at it.
Most observers of and commentators on the 2015 campaign concur with this verdict.
For example, Scammell (2015), after characterizing the Conservative campaign as ‘con-
sistent, comprehensible and apparently resonant’, goes on to contrast its combination of a

6 Journalism 00(0)
‘relentless attack on Labour’s weak points with strong core messages’ against Labour’s
disregard of ‘the importance of news management and instant rebuttal’ (p. 39). The most
comprehensive election study, based on interviews with 300 key players from all parties,
contrasts the ‘clear direction and discipline’ of the Conservative campaign with the ‘brand
failure’ of Labour’s effort, the often popular individual policies of which ‘were not con-
nected into a persuasive or even coherent narrative’ (Cowley and Kavanagh, 2016: 61,
81). Labour’s own review of its 2015 campaign performance, the so-called Beckett (2016)
report, also contrasts the Conservatives’ ability to stick to ‘their mantras’ with Labour’s
lack of ‘early adoption of a consistent over-riding narrative or theme, which could be
simply expressed and conveyed on the doorstep and in the studio’ (pp. 10–11).
Understanding push forces of mediatization: Examples of
interventionist media strategies
The push perspective on mediatization draws on the ‘adversary model’ of the media. This
model is an outgrowth of two trends outlined above – increased critical professionalism
and growing interpretivism – that reflect an increasingly autonomous attitude towards
politicians. Such an autonomous outlook connects with the professional norms of ‘watch-
dog journalism’, according to which journalists regard themselves as guardians of the
public interest and ombudsmen for the audience (Eriksson and Östman, 2013; Hallin,
1992; Patterson, 1993; Strömbäck and Esser, 2014). An important conclusion from
US-based research is that the ‘journalistic initiative’ has expanded greatly over the last
40 years, becoming more adversarial particularly towards US presidents (Clayman and
Heritage, 2002; Clayman et al., 2010).
An instructive site for studying such adversarialism is question-and-answer sessions
between journalists and politicians, for instance, in televised interview or debate pro-
grammes. As Voltmer and Brants (2011) have stated for the UK context, political inter-
views follow the principles of news media logic rather than political logic with journalists
determining the choice of topic, the selection of interviewees, the dramaturgy of the
encounter, and the conditions of studio production. The roles are clearly allocated: it is
the journalist who asks the questions and therefore has considerable control over the
course of the conversation. An important motivation for an aggressive interview style is,
according to Voltmer and Brants (2011), not so much the journalists’ imagined expecta-
tions of the audience but the hoped-for recognition of professional peers. The point is
that even if journalists have respectful and friendly relationships with politicians off-air,
this changes on-air when journalists become aware of their public image and feel a need
to safeguard their professional integrity and demonstrate their independence, which may
lead them to more aggressive questioning.
To understand the extent to which British journalists used interview situations as an
opportunity to exercise professional discretion during the 2015 UK General Election
campaign, we analysed the choice of question styles by BBC journalists when quizzing
Conservative and Labour politicians. The interviews we examined took place during the
last 3 weeks before Polling Day on the Corporation’s current affairs programmes (such
as Newsnight), extended news programmes (such as Today) and certain cross-party

Blumler and Esser 7
inquisitions closely controlled by BBC presenters (such as a series of eight debates on a
selection of key policy areas among four or five party spokespersons on BBC 2). We
picked these programmes because the BBC serves as a benchmark for standards in
British news production. In line with case study theory, we consider the BBC’s approach
towards election campaign coverage as an exemplary case (Hague and Harrop, 2010:
45). In this role, the BBC is an archetype of highly professional journalism that influ-
ences the understanding of professionalized journalism way beyond the United Kingdom
and serves as a reference for quality journalists throughout Europe.
As a theoretical framework, we use five dimensions of interventionist question types:
assertiveness, aggressiveness and accountability (developed by Clayman and Heritage,
2002); threat to public image (developed by Bull and Elliott, 1998); and challenging
answers (developed by Voltmer and Brants, 2011). We found all of these styles repre-
sented in the corpus of question types used by BBC journalists, and without striking
differences regarding Labour and Conservative party targets. While ‘adversarialism’ was
the most widely used technique and ‘threats to public image’ the least common one, the
boundaries between these two categories were sometimes particularly hard to draw, and
we are inclined to conclude that these two categories should be considered together.
Nevertheless, in the following, we present all five categories separately, together with
selected examples to illustrate each question style.
Assertiveness
Assertiveness concerns the extent to which questions are prefaced in a manner that
restricts the range of possible answers, thereby promoting an agenda controlled by the
journalist rather than the politician. They are usually exhibited in the form of closed
questions (yes/no) and often formulated negatively (don’t you think, isn’t it time).
Examples that we recorded from BBC programmes include the following:
 Don’t people have a right to know how Labour would relate to the SNP if it were
to form a minority government?
 By playing the Sturgeon card, aren’t you putting the Union at risk?
 Your right-to-buy offer to social housing tenants won’t solve the housing crisis.
Won’t it exacerbate it?
 Since your inheritance tax proposal will benefit already advantaged middle-class
kids and not disadvantaged working-class ones, won’t that limit social mobility?
Such negative interrogatives can be seen as an expression of the watchdog role, with
the journalist setting out to dig out the hidden truth. However, they are also trying to push
the response in a particular direction. As Clayman and Heritage (2002) state, this ques-
tion type is ‘less information-seeking and more opinionated and assertive’ (p. 766).
Adversarialness
Adversarialness captures instances where the questioning implies a standpoint that is in
opposition to the agenda advanced by the politician being questioned:

8 Journalism 00(0)
This form of journalistic aggressiveness is often performed in prefaces to questions, where
journalists may describe problems with policy proposals, highlight discrepancies between
politicians’ words and their actions, or refer to opinions that run counter to views presented by
the politicians being questioned. (Eriksson and Östman, 2013: 310)
Examples recorded from BBC programmes include the following:
 Isn’t your pledge not to raise value added tax (VAT), income tax and national
insurance irresponsible? What if the economy was thrown off course by some
unforeseen event? You will have closed off your policy options for dealing with
it?
 Although you say under Labour there will be no top-down reorganization of the
National Health Service (NHS), the proposals in your manifesto sound like one!
 You seem to be making all sorts of promises – on NHS expenditure, freezing rail
fares and so on. Aren’t you living in a world of fantasy promises?
 You are clear about the ‘give-aways’, the nice stuff, but not about the nasty stuff!
All these questions express a critical stance towards policy proposals and present
them as extravagant, implausible or misguided. Oftentimes, they are not even questions
in the strict sense but provocative invitations to respond to criticism. They come closer
to accusations.
Threat to public image
Closely related is the idea that questions can also lead to, create or confirm a negative
impression about a politician or party, for instance, by casting doubts on motivations or
capabilities in policies, statements, actions, aims and principles. The boundaries to the
previous category are fluid but the following examples seem good illustrations:
 How would you deal with the huge deficit? Presumably not by spending cuts only.
Your sums don’t add up!
 Your past record of economic management doesn’t suggest that you can get your
sums right!
 By when would Labour clear the deficit? Given your past economic record, how
much credence can we give to your pledge on that?
 Why should the voters trust you?
Although these questions are closely linked to policy discussions, they seem to enter
the territory of personal character and thereby carry a larger risk of questioning the repu-
tation of a politician or party.
Challenging an answer
Depending on how the politician responds, a journalist can accept or reject an answer.
Rejection can be indicated by expressing doubt as to the accuracy, honesty or validity of

Blumler and Esser 9
the information provided by the interviewee. While this happened frequently, we confine
ourselves to just two examples:
 Where will the money come from to pay for your promised injection of an extra
sum of eight billion pounds into the NHS? Is it based on an assumption that eco-
nomic growth between now and 2010 will suffice to support that? [A: I’m confi-
dent that can be achieved.] Q: ‘Confidence’ is not a ‘commitment’?
 Your NHS spending pledge seems unfunded. Where will the money come from?
[A: We won’t raise taxes.] Q: That’s not an answer!
Accountability
Accountability questions ask politicians to offer an explanation for taking a particular
course of action or adopting a policy position. The first type (Why did you …?) asks for
a rationale, whereas the second type (How could you …?) asks for a rationale with the
implied expectation that it is not possible to offer a reasonable justification. Both forms
usually imply that the politician is responsible for a state of affairs assumed in the fram-
ing of the question to be undesirable:
 What does the inheritance tax ‘give away’ say about your values when you have
nothing to offer to poor people worrying about how to make ends meet?
 In your proposed welfare reforms, why won’t you tell us where the 12 billion
pound benefit cuts will fall?
 Why won’t you spell out where you would make cuts in welfare expenditure?
 People on disability benefits need to know what is in store for them. Why won’t
you tell them? You must know what you intend to cut?
The more hostile variant of How-Could-You questions were not recorded by us. Still,
even the Why-questions in the present form are intended to put a politician in a position
to defend himself or herself.
In our view, these five question styles (arguably four if adversarialism and threat to
public image are collapsed) represent an important indicator of journalistic interven-
tionism. Both Conservative and Labour politicians were in our estimation exposed to
the same degree of journalistic scrutiny or aggression in the programme formats exam-
ined for this qualitative assessment. It is important to stress that we do not mean to
condemn this form of journalism; it also has encouraging elements to it. BBC journal-
ists seem to have become markedly less inclined to accept politicians’ pronouncements
at face value, and more inclined to challenge politicians and hold them accountable for
their actions – an important democratic media function in the ‘Age of Trumpism’.
We wondered whether this approach of scrutinizing politicians in the 2015 UK elec-
tion more vigorously had derived from pre-election policy thinking in the Corporation or
had just happened that way in response to campaign-period events. From an extensive
discussion with sources at the BBC, in which an executive responsible for oversight of
the Corporation’s current affairs provision joined his news colleague, the first interpreta-
tion indubitably emerged. It had been a considered and important part of the BBC’s prior
thought about and planning for its 2015 election campaign coverage.

10 Journalism 00(0)
Campaign policy thinking within the BBC had begun about two and a half years
before the election. Especially ‘tricky’ was the question of how to realize the BBC’s
supreme political norm of ‘impartiality’ (also termed ‘fairness’ and ‘balance’ by our
informants) with the emergence of more electorally significant parties on the scene and
two coalition government parties. But to that norm had to be added ‘fairness’ to the now
highly sceptical audience, whose members deserved, in present-day conditions of com-
munication abundance and social media presence, greater consideration than they had
been accorded in the past. In order to maintain audience trust in the BBC, it was essential
not only to present campaign news accurately, clearly and accessibly, and to place it in
some relevant explanatory context, but also to hold the campaigning politicians to
account for what they had done in the past and intended to do in the future.
A Corporation-wide determination persistently to probe the veracity and credibility of
the parties’ campaign promises and claims followed from this – to ‘go hammer and tong
at their assertions’ (as one of our informants put it), to ‘press them hard’. It had been
thought in retrospect that in 2010, ‘we may not have dug deep enough’ into leading poli-
ticians’ assertions. At the same time, our informants were troubled by what they called
‘the big problem of the political interview’. This had arisen because politicians were now
so ‘trained in tactics of evasion’, in abilities to present only ‘the messages they wanted to
roll out’. More tough questioning this time round was therefore called for.
In line with this was the advent of interpretive journalism, entailing a view of the
journalist’s role as that of an ‘expert’ (Barnhurst and Mutz, 1997; Hallin, 1992; Patterson,
1993). So long as he or she got across the key facts about controversial issues and politi-
cians’ positions on them, BBC journalists would not only be ‘allowed’ but also be
‘encouraged’, be ‘given free rein’, to mount lines of questioning geared ‘to get to the
quick’. Helpful in this connection had been the rise to prominence by 2015 of several
respected non-partisan think-tanks, such as the Institute of Fiscal Studies, whose occa-
sional data-based analyses of economic and other trends could be reported in the news as
objective backing for the doubts and reservations that BBC personnel would be voicing
about the parties’ policy positions when interviewing their spokespersons.
Our informants did not depict this more interventionist outlook as entirely unique to
the BBC, however. Much of it, they said, was ‘part of the ether’ of the UK journalism
culture overall. These statements confirm earlier arguments by Esser (2013) according to
which interventionist news media logic has grown to considerable degree out of critical
professionalism and the self-perception of journalism as the (better) representative of the
public will. This style of more assertive, sceptical reporting and interpretation turns at
times adversarial when journalists feel threatened in their reporting options – often
caused by a highly professionalized approach towards news management and campaign
communication. This brings us to the pull forces of mediatization.
Understanding pull forces of mediatization: Examples of
professionalized party strategies
Like in many countries, British parties have responded to growing journalistic interven-
tionism by professionalizing their campaign strategies vis-à-vis the media. Tenscher et al.
(2012, 2015) have tried to identify specific areas of activity where campaigns have

Blumler and Esser 11
responded with increased professionalism to increasing mediatization. To group them, the
authors differentiated between a communicative (‘strategic’) component and an organiza-
tional (‘structural’) component, among which they specified 15 indicators of campaign
professionalism. We shall first deal with communicative-strategic indicators where the
media-oriented pull process can be clearly seen, before we delve into organizational-
structural indicators of professionalized campaign management where the advantage over
Labour can be clearly seen. Since we cannot address all 15 factors identified by Tenscher
et al. (2012, 2015), we feel obliged to select the most important ones, and to recombine
and reformulate others without losing sight of their original meanings.
News management
Although both major parties supplemented message fashioning for media consumption
with efforts to reach individual voters over social media and on doorsteps, the
Conservatives were undoubtedly committed, first and foremost, to the mounting of a
highly considered, thoroughly worked-out and determinedly pursued campaign of news
management, based partly on confidence in David Cameron’s ability smoothly and artic-
ulately to announce initiatives, respond to events, counter criticisms and answer chal-
lenging questions. Widely regarded as having been successful, two academically
conducted content analyses of 2015 campaign news showed that Conservative-promoted
issues were covered more frequently than Labour ones both in the press and on television
(Cushion et al., 2016a, 2016b; Deacon et al., 2017).
In contrast, Labour seemed more doubtful of the pay-off value of mainstream news-
based campaigning. This was expressed in Communication Director Tom Baldwin’s
opinion that ‘quick wins and point-scoring over every policy will not convince the elec-
torate’ and in Ed Miliband’s intention to turn his back on New Labour’s ‘celebrity poli-
tics’, his disdain for the Conservatives as a ‘virtual party’ and his often-stated wish to be
known as the Prime Minister (if elected) who had ‘under-promised but over-achieved’.
This was allied to a belief that by party activists conducting a large number of doorstep
interviews with ordinary voters (five million such conversations were claimed), the
Conservatives’ news-management advantages could be counteracted.
Event management
The Conservatives seemed more attuned than Labour to the imperatives of media logic,
particularly in how they timed and paced their news publicity efforts and in their aware-
ness of other events likely to be, favourably or unfavourably, in the news on a given day.
Labour’s attempts to top the news sometimes seemed ham-fisted, as in the erection of its
much-ridiculed (especially in social media) ‘Ed Stone’, a high concrete pillar of 12 slabs,
each of which was intended to symbolize the rock solidity of each of the Party’s cam-
paign pledges. Professionalization contrasts were particularly noticeable in the parties’
responses to television as a visual medium. Liz Sugg, the Conservative official responsi-
ble for coping with this, was widely praised for the attractive pictures she continually
supplied to background the news appearances of David Cameron and other Party spokes-
people. Places of presentation were often chosen for their visual symbolism (e.g. in

12 Journalism 00(0)
school rooms, factories, and building sites) in contrast to Labour’s tendency to rely on
scenes of leaders standing behind podiums in halls.
Strategic use of media appearances
Televised political debates are typical examples of ‘media events’ set up to suit the
demands of the broadcasters. An incumbent should have little incentive to provide the
main opponent with a platform to present himself on an equal footing and attack him –
together with the moderator – on his previous record. In the 2015 election campaign, the
Conservative Party rejected anything smacking of a head-to-head encounter between
David Cameron and Ed Miliband. In the end, the BBC, on behalf of itself and the other
broadcasters (ITV, Channel 4 and Sky News), acceded to the Conservatives’ demands.
No head-to-head top leader debate was arranged. And although Mr Cameron did agree to
appear in two of the three programmes that were eventually scheduled, in one, he was
flanked by the leaders of five other parties, and in another, debating as such was set aside
in favour of the presentation of questions from studio audience members to each of
Cameron, Miliband and Nick Clegg (Liberal Democratic Party leader) separately. The
Conservatives thus managed to avoid the risk that Mr Miliband would come across more
positively than he had been painted in their campaign denigrations and in much media
commentary. The debates’ potential to deflect attention away from the messages the
Conservatives wanted to plant in news reports had also been ‘de-fanged’.
Unified campaign goal and strategy
The Conservative campaign was single-minded in purpose. Leader David Cameron
issued a ‘very clear, simple, direct, unambiguous instruction’ to Lynton Crosby, his cam-
paign supremo, that his job was to win the election (Myerscough, 2015). All else was
subordinate to that single goal. In contrast, Labour’s campaign seemed to have been
shaped by multiple purposes – to send leader Ed Miliband to 10 Downing Street of
course but also to foster popular engagement in politics, especially among women and
young people; to promote civic education through innovative and encompassing societal
critiques; and to avoid doing anything that might worsen electoral mistrust of politics
and politicians. Put differently, Labour seemed torn between impulses of idealism and
realism, marketing its wares and movement-building (Gilbert, 2015), normative logic
versus market logic (Landerer, 2013).
Centralized campaign management
Unified command was a hallmark of the Conservatives’ publicity apparatus (Cowley and
Kavanagh, 2016: 74, 86): Lynton Crosby was in full charge of all its operations, and all
would-be party communicators were accountable to him. In contrast, the direction of
Labour’s campaign was more dispersed. A triumvirate of three chiefs was installed at its
top (Tom Baldwin, Director of Communications; Greg Beale, Director of Strategy; Bob
Roberts, Head of Press), who were said not always to have seen eye-to-eye about tactics
or to be on mutually good personal terms. Their roles were overlaid by the hiring of US

Blumler and Esser 13
consultant David Axelrod as a part-time advisor, who every now and then made recom-
mendations, sometimes from afar. Whereas message discipline was a sine qua non in the
Conservative team, Labour was open to more plural approaches, with Ed Miliband
sometimes encouraging the several heads of campaign publicity to put up alternative
ideas for him personally to choose from. And whereas Conservative advisor Lynton
Crosby enjoyed the reputation of a consummate professional, Tom Baldwin, though per-
sonally liked by many journalists, was described by one commentator as having been
‘unorganised’ in ‘style’ and as ‘anything but a polished PR man’ by another.
Opposition research and rapid response
Self-mediatization requires not only the tailoring of a party’s core messages to journal-
istic predilections but also rebuttals of rivals’ criticisms of its own positions. The Labour
Party demonstrably failed to recognize and act upon this need by not confronting and
refuting at an early stage the Conservatives’ repeated accusation that its profligate
spending policies under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had been responsible for the
financial crash of 2007–2008. Labour took account of this so late in the day – for exam-
ple, in a last-minute inclusion on the front page of its election manifesto of a commit-
ment to reduce the country’s deficit year-by-year – that when Ed Miliband rejected the
charge during the campaign’s third televised debate, he was roundly jeered by the studio
audience.
In contrast, the Conservatives were more alert to this need. To neutralize their per-
ceived weakness over the NHS, they promised to invest £8bn over the next 5 years. To
counter Labour’s claim that it would have to increase taxes in order to fulfil its spending
promises and to meet its deficit reduction target, they promised to pass a law that would
prohibit increases in income tax, VAT and national insurance contributions in normal
conditions. And when Labour attacked the coalition government’s toleration of tax loop-
holes enjoyed by non-domiciled UK residents, they promised to abolish them if returned
to power. For Lynton Crosby, the tactic to follow, when faced with an unfavourable
report or accusation, would be to ‘deflect, dismiss and deny until the story ebbs away’
(Mason, 2016).
Negative campaigning
Although both major parties waged hard-hitting campaigns, over communication ethics
they differed greatly. Conservative publicity strategy was arguably governed by the prin-
ciple that, ‘So long as it works, anything goes!’ Believing that most voters only need to
know and are able to process just a few essential points, the Conservatives relentlessly
rubbished Ed Miliband’s perceived ideological and personal weaknesses (Delaney,
2016). A Conservative poster, reproduced many times in the media and described by
Delaney (2016) as ‘simple, powerful funny and brutal’, showed Ed Miliband in the vest
pocket of former SNP leader, Alex Salmond. But quintessentially, most characteristic of
the Lynton Crosby touch was the sensational episode of the ‘dead cat on the table’. In
order to brake Labour’s campaign momentum and to draw journalistic attention away
from that Party’s intention on a certain news day to focus on the Conservatives’ failures

14 Journalism 00(0)
to curb taxation abuses, Michael Fallon (Defense Secretary) declared in a Times article
that, just as Ed Miliband had stabbed his brother in the back to become Labour leader, so
too, if elected, would he stab the country in the back by giving up its nuclear deterrent.
The reasoning behind this diversionary manoeuvre was to distract media attention from
a potentially hurtful issue to a positive issue by staging a newsworthy pseudo-event. For
lack of specific terminology, Boris Johnson called it ‘throwing a dead cat on the table’
(quoted in Delaney, 2016). The Labour Party’s approach to campaigning seemed some-
what more tempered by ethical scruples. It was as if it was dubious about some parts of
the prevailing ‘game’, such as (1) indulgent promise-making, (2) perception is all, (3)
electioneering as marketing to consumers and (4) the personalization of politics.
We conclude from this seven-point analysis that the Labour Party was less well pre-
pared for the demands of mediatization in the 2015 campaign. This was reflected in their
response to push forces and – even more clearly – their inept use of pull techniques to
make better use of strategic political communication. Labour was less determined in
their use of news management and negative campaigning, less effective in their use of
event management and rapid rebuttals, less unified in their internal and external com-
munication and less successful in communicating a compelling campaign agenda and
hijacking the media agenda. This verdict was confirmed in our extensive post-election
interview with BBC executives responsible for news programming. Although generali-
zations about the attitudes of UK journalists in general cannot be firmly drawn from a
single group interview, the strategic positions of the news executives present that day
suggest to us that their views were likely to be representative of the outlook of many
BBC news people. The highest ranking executive present described the Conservative
operation as ‘slick’, ‘sharp’ and ‘efficient’. The Conservatives’ control of their image had
been ‘rigorous’, which he could not complain about since ‘they were just doing their
job’. But that mattered, in his view, since that can ‘quietly seep into people’s perceptions
of what a party stands for’. He confessed to ‘admiring’ the Conservative Party’s cam-
paign professionalism, an example of which (mentioned more than once in the interview)
being its ‘brilliant’ provision of pictures to accompany leaders’ appearances. In contrast,
Labour had ‘not been staffed up with TV experience’, and its tactics had not been ‘as
clear-sighted, brutal and ruthless’ as the Conservatives’ were.
Conclusion and outlook
Our study does not see itself as a contribution to the specific details of the UK General
Election of 2015 (see Cowley and Kavanagh, 2016; Cushion et al., 2016a, 2016b; Deacon
et al., 2017) but rather as a contribution to mediatization research. Its main purpose is to
introduce a dual perspective to the study of mediatization of politics, a political actor-
centric and a media actor-centric perspective. We offer a revised understanding of the
mediatization of politics consisting of a combination of push forces (expressing an active
role of the media in shaping the campaign discourse – by simultaneously adapting to
news management) and pull forces (expressing an active role of the parties in shaping the
campaign discourse – by simultaneously adapting to the media). We propose two sets of
indicators that we deem particularly well suited to capture push and pull processes, and

Blumler and Esser 15
we hope that they will enrich the mediatization literature. We want to encourage future
studies to consider both sides of the mediatization paradigm jointly.
Any normative assessment of media-initiated push factors (in our cases, questions to
politicians that express assertiveness, aggressiveness or accountability) should be careful
to consider that an interventionist attitude can also represent a welcome contribution to
the media’s democratic critique and control function. Esser and Umbricht (2014) had
already noted that we should distinguish between a ‘desirable’ form of interpretative
journalism that scrutinizes policy positions and contributes to informed citizenry, and a
‘less desirable’ form that merely aims at game-related aspects and could be criticized as
a distraction from the real issues. While the BBC offered more of the ‘desirable’ report-
ing type than, for instance, ITV or Sky during the 2015 campaign, some researchers
defend a more interventionist style if it helps to de-spin party tactics (Cushion et al.,
2015, 2016b).
Any assessment of pull practices (in our case, strategies of campaign professionalism
and news management) should take into account that political parties may use them with
varying degrees of effectiveness. In highly mediatized political communication environ-
ments such as the United Kingdom during the 2015 general election, the news media
seemed to have come to appreciate a certain degree of professionalism with regard to
news management and to have responded critically to signs of clumsiness or indecisive-
ness (by Labour). Future mediatization research may want to pay more attention to the
changed, increasingly hard-boiled, relationship between media actors and political
actors, and particularly between push and pull factors.
Our case study examined a single event but political communication systems continue
to undergo change, sometimes at a ‘glacial pace’, sometimes ‘in major cataclysmic bursts’
(Blumler and Gurevitch, 1995: 182). The UK Brexit referendum and the US presidential
election of 2016 have evidently ushered in something like the latter. What questions arise
from such game-changers for mediatization theory and research? Underlying our answer
is Blumler and Gurevitch’s (1995) view that one source of change ‘may be traced to the
drives of politicians and journalists to understand each other’s strategies and continually
to adjust their mutual relations to the other side’s next steps and ploys’ (p. 205).
What about the pull forces by which politicians may be driven? In addition to the
seven indicators spelt out above, future research may need to add new ones such as emo-
tional appeals, appeals to fear and anger, propagation of a singular view of political real-
ity strongly at odds with others, subordination of political ‘facts’ to that view, and
increased resort to ‘disintermediation’ – bypassing press filters for direct access to vot-
ers. Or is lop-sidedness likely on these points, with some types of political actors purvey-
ing and others eschewing them?
What about the push forces by which journalists might be animated? Might some
practices of journalistic interventionism be adopted more emphatically in the future –
such as adversarialness and threats to public image? Might journalists try more often to
hold politicians to account for the factual accuracy of their claims – and do so in news
coverage, not just in interviews? Might quality media assume such a vocation more or
less uniquely to themselves? Or, alternatively, will such interventions not be pursued all
that determinedly in the end – moderated perhaps by adherence to conventional news
values or the imperatives of intense competition for audience attention? Blumler and

16 Journalism 00(0)
Gurevitch (1995) depicted politician-journalist relations of the 1990s as in a ‘chronic
state of partial war’. Are they approaching something more like a total war nowadays –
in some polities at least? If so, on what terms might it be waged – perhaps over the trust-
worthiness (or lack of it) and credibility of each side (p. 215)?
Questions also arise over the staying power of the hitherto quite firmly entrenched
notion of ‘the campaign communication game’. Several campaigns that were based on
the established model suffered spectacular defeats recently. This included Hillary
Clinton’s ‘Stronger Together’ campaign in the 2016 US presidential election and the
‘Remain’ campaign in the same year’s Brexit referendum. Both lost to political move-
ments observable in many Western countries (outside and within party structures) that
disdain or otherwise decline to play the established game (initially at least), favouring
new forms of mass mobilizing communication efforts instead. Will the standard model
ultimately prevail? Will two rival approaches, deemed appropriate and useful for very
different reasons, exist and evolve side-by-side? What part might mediatization impulses
play in the mixes?
Finally, how might all that be perceived by ordinary people? The established approach
might seem normatively restricted, barren, even repugnant at times – just a manipulative
game. The upstart approach may seem more attractive but lacking in practical solutions
to pressing current problems. How all that might play out in citizens’ perceptions of the
kind of political communication process they inhabit could be a meaningful basis for
new-found research.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this
article.
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Author biographies
Jay G Blumler is Emeritus Professor of Public Communication, University of Leeds, and Emeritus
Professor of Journalism, University of Maryland.
Frank Esser is Professor of International and Comparative Media Research at the University of
Zurich.