ABSTRACT
Concerns over the relationship between media and politics have echoed over much of the last century. Various forms of language and discourse analysis have looked at the public discourse of contemporary politics. Public space is constituted and populated through the technologies of media, leaving political figures to live by their success in fabricating a self-image of appeal. Mediatisation provides a useful way of conceptualising the relationship between politics and media. Its basis is that media logic exercises growing authority over the organising principles of people's everyday lives. The explanatory purchase of mediatisation rests upon a clear idea of those qualities that characterise media logic. The assumption of an institutionally-authored line is characteristic of much political talk, where party policies are enunciated and defended. The activities of both language and politics draw upon a similar cultural lexicon, and are committed to related imperatives of care over expression and comprehensibility, including developments in emotionality outside media and politics.
