Making sense of political ideology in mediatized political
communication
A discourse analytic perspective
Angelos Kissas | London School of Economics and Political Science
Political discourse becomes more and more ‘mediatized’ nowadays but, as I argue
in this article, mediatization should be considered neither as a testament to
‘de-ideologization’ nor as a restyling of the ‘inherently ideological’
contemporary political communication. Ideology, I claim, is a potentiality of
mediatized political discourse and as such, it rests with the generic capacity
of the latter to recontextualize symbolisms from the institutional past serving
the ordering of the institutional present. How is the recontextualization of
symbolic meanings facilitated by the aesthetic and affective qualities of
different media genres? In what ways does recontextualized discourse serve the
neoliberal order of the present? Lying at the heart of the ideological analysis
of political communication, these are questions which can be insightfully
addressed through a discourse analytics of mediatization as the one I apply here
on two political advertisements from the Greek general election of January
2015.
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