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Considering that the beginning of the 21st century saw the emergence of a third meaning of the word “to communicate” – to negotiate, the author sets out to explore the challenges it supposes in today’s dangerous, multipolar world, where the respect for alterity and the construction of cohabitation have become the keys of peace and war. The author concludes that the political challenge of communication in the 21st century will be to enable the peaceful cohabitation of the same and the different in open societies, where economy will no longer be the only horizon of human beings.

Political communication introduces in the sphere of politics a change that is equal in scope to those introduced by the mass media in the field of information and by polls in that of public opinion. It essentially constitutes a locus for the exchange of conflicting discourses between three main actors, all endowed with legitimacy: political leaders; journalists; public opinion as expressed by polls. This restricted definition has the advantage of showing that the originality of political communication consists in dealing with contradictory and complementary elements of mass democracy: Politics, Information and Communication. Stressing the importance of communication in politics does not imply an erasure of conflict, which would be absurd, given the consubstantiality of conflict and political life. It merely serves to underline the fact that in democratic systems conflict can also be expressed through communication. Thus communication is both a fact of everyday life, and a necessary concept to the understanding of pluralistic mass democracies.

O espírito crítico de Dominique Wolton é voraz quando o assunto diz respeito ao discurso oficial dos meios de comunicação de massa. Nesta entrevista à Revista Famecos, o pensa dor francês analisa questões relevantes, como comunicação e política no episódio 11 de setembro e, também, apresenta seus pontos de vista sobre o poder da mídia.