Who Criticizes the Government in the Media? The Symbolic Power Model.

The existing literature on the media's role in criticizing the government is somewhat slim. While it pays ample attention to the process where the media mediate information to the public (Davis 2002, Thompson 2000), it is unclear who they mediate it from. This article is focused on media claims making critical remarks about the government. Public criticism is an important topic of research because it sets the range of disputable issues. It may affect the shaping of the government agenda. It warns the government of potential social tensions. In the best case scenario, public criticism enhances democracy as it gives voice to those disgruntled parts of the population, who cannot voice their dissatisfaction with the government through official channels of accountability. Public criticism should eventual increase electoral responsibility. It can swing public opinion and affect the chances of reelection of the government. Finally, media criticism of the government enhances transparency and enables the flow of information. This in turn allows citizens to make more informed choices. Given the importance of public criticism of the government, it is surprising how little attention the topic has received. The broad contents of media coverage have been widely analyzed, but specific criticisms of the establishment have not. In this paper, I analyze five models attributing various degrees of journalistic involvement in initiating criticism at the government- indexing theory, the Fourth Estate ideal, the social responsibility theory, the propaganda model and political parallelism. The paper advances a symbolic power model, which emphasizes the importance of the media as an arena for gaining political capital and public support. It tests the model on an original database containing about 6000 articles of accusations in Bulgaria, Germany and Russia in the period between 1995 and 2005. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]