Mediatised Politics: Political Discourses and the Media in Contemporary Danish Democracy

look for the political in the wrong place, on the wrong floors and on the wrong pages of the newspapers. Those decision-making areas which had been protected by the political in industrial capitalism – the private sector, business, science, towns, everyday life and so on – are caught in the storms of political conflicts in reflexive modernity. (Beck 1994:18) We have been brought up with a clear picture of what to understand by 'the political' in the kind of liberal democracy that has characterised Danish society for most of this century. Not that the structural role of the political sphere has been a static one for all these decades, but for most researchers and commentators it has continued to be understood in terms of the Habermassian model of the role of the public sphere in bourgeois society (Habermas 1962; Mortensen 1977). In this notion the political sphere has been the only legitimate site of social power, as the private interests of individuals and organisations become synthesised through parliamentary negotiation and legislation into the 'common good', the 'public in-terest' of the whole of society. The role of the media in the political order has been an equally well-defined one within this Haber-massian framework, which sees the media (for a large part of this century almost synonymous with the printed press) as a crucial vehicle of information and debate, a vital link between the electorate and the elected representatives. It is the media which ensure that social power is exercised in the parliamentary assemblies in accordance with the collective reason of the citizens, and that those appointed to office do not abuse it their power. This conceptualisation of 'politics' and the media , suggest some sociological thinkers, is no longer adequate as we are moving into a new kind of social order variously labelled as " reflexive modernity " , " late modernity " , " post-traditional society " , etc. Under these new conditions the social practices that generate social change are no longer to be located strictly within the framework of parliamentary politics, but are increasingly shifting to the arena of subpolitics – a new domain of the political involving collective and individual agents outside the political or corporatist system – or to the field of tension between politics and subpolitics. And the media are no longer merely social institutions alongside, or subservient to, political institutions , but may themselves …