ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the relationship between politics and the media that has prevailed for many decades, and contemporary challenges to it arising in the context of internet-based political mobilization and the rise of social media. Developing alongside the radical critique of mainstream politics has been the critique of mainstream media. Consolidation of politics as electoral competition between large parties broadly of the left and the right was the underlying premise of much political science literature based upon theories of pluralism, and was the dominant form of political activity in Western liberal democracies after the Second World War. Even within the more narrowly defined parameters of political journalism and the public sphere, there is a crisis of the media insiders. The 2000s and 2010s have seen a rise in politics as social mobilization and challenges within mainstream political parties to the dominant model of politics as electoral competition and the development of strategies targeting the 'median voter'.
