Complexifying media power: a study of the interplay between media and audience discourses on politics

The article reports from a research project about how the media function as a democratic resource for citizens in Denmark. It brings together discourse- and audienceanalysis perspectives into one research design, questioning the often simplified notions of media power found in media/politics research. Our three-tiered study explores the media/citizen nexus, in a social context where politics spans the continuum from traditional parliamentary politics, through grassroots organizations (‘subpolitics’) and everyday politics (‘life-politics’). First, we explore the citizens’ daily life with the media in the perspective of democratic citizenship, as people report this to us in group conversations. Second, we analyse the media’s discursive constructions of ‘politics’, focusing on the political issues around traffic and transport policy, but including all political coverage of a variety of media during one selected week. Third, we explore the citizens’ construction of ‘politics’ through focus group discussions. We see these studies as interrelated, but abstain from making causal generalizations about agenda setting and definitional power, preferring to map them as three interrelated discursive territories of contemporary politics, and to discuss possible linkages between media discourses and citizens’ discourses. We thus end up by ‘complexifying’ the media/citizen connection beyond simplistic notions of media power.