ABSTRACT
One of the most famous paintings by Magritte is that of a pipe painted over the artist's usual blue sky and clouds with a caption which says: ‘Ceci n'est pas une pipe’ [‘This is not a pipe’]. Dare we begin with a similar statement – ‘this is not just another book on political communication’? Of course, political journalism belongs to the realm of political communication, just as Magritte's flying pipe belongs to a smoker. Our statement does not express a love or abuse of paradoxes, but rather has the aim of challenging the effects of analytical routines on the approach to the study of political journalism by political communication researchers. These routines include the customary focus on the role of journalists during election campaigns as opposed to the periods between elections, the view of journalists as condemned to an endless and hopeless defensive struggle against spin-doctors, and the much greater attention paid to interactions between journalists and politicians rather than to those which develop inside the newsroom itself. The effect of such research routines is often to divert the attention of the researcher away from highly visible dimensions of the object of study. So in answer to our own question we can say, ‘this is not just one more book on political communication’. Instead, this book uses the subject of political journalism as a starting point to improve our knowledge of the visible and the unseen in the functioning of the public sphere and the political communication environment.
