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Patricia Moy, Pamela Pietrucci, Gianpietro, M. & Sfardini, A. (2009). Politica Pop:da “Porta a Porta” a “L’Isola dei famosi” [Pop Politics: From “door to door” to “island of the famous”]., International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Volume 23, Issue 1, Spring 2011, Pages 114–116, https://doi.org/10.1093/ijpor/edr003
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Since the advent of television and the (in)famous Kennedy–Nixon presidential debate, scholars have questioned the political impact of televised messages. This overarching question has spawned numerous studies and the spate of studies has grown increasingly complex as the media landscape has balkanized. No longer are scholars studying only television versus newspapers versus radio (and now the Internet), nor are they studying news versus non-news.
In fact, sea changes in content production and dissemination, along with new ways of thinking about how citizens interact with politics, have revolutionized the field of political communication with researchers turning to the study of “pop politics.” The book of this same title, by Italian scholars Gianpietro Mazzoleni and Anna Sfardini, illustrates the prevalence of this phenomenon. It brings to the attention of scholars and lay readers alike the popularity of such content and its political and social implications. The authors describe the phenomenon as a television-based transformation in which “facts and people, stories and words that belong to the realm of politics and are traditionally synonymous with the seriousness, complexity and distance from people’s everyday life” become “a familiar reality, a subject of interest and curiosity, a topic for discussion, and a source of entertainment like any other story that belongs to the world of spectacle” (p. 14). Exemplified by the CNN program Larry King Live, the American fake news program The Daily Show, and the UK-based Celebrity Big Brother and its counterparts in other countries, it is no wonder that this new type of content provides fertile soil for communication scholars of all stripes. For those familiar with or interested in Italian media content, Politica Pop offers an appendix that includes the history, general content, program schedule, and key moments of 25 shows in Italy.
