The mediatization of politics in the new Hybrid media environment

Mediatization is still one of the most debated framework within media studies. It has been astonishingly increasing and it involves interactions between media from one side and different fields from the other (politics, war, religion, education) (Hepp et al. 2015; Esser and Stromback, 2014). Nonetheless, an amount of critics is surrounding the use of the concept. 1) The new media environment is a challenge to the most traditional understandings of the concept (Schultz, 2004; Klinger and Svensoon, 2014); 2) mediatization appears to be a media-centric causal process where interrelations among diverse actors are ignored (Deacon and Stanyer, 2014); 3) mediatization as meta-process is not empirically verifiable (Deacon and Stanyer, 2014; Hepp, 2013). Politics has been one of the field where the concept has been successfully applied (Mazzoleni and Schultz, 1999; Strömbäck, 2008; Strömbäck and Esser, 2014), even though it appears to be mainly (not only) conceived in its institutional approach: how political agents try to make use of media’s resources for their purposes. Following a social-constructivist approach (Hepp et al., 2015; Hepp, 2013; Hepp and Couldry, 2013), this paper tries to tackle those three critics also in the field of mediatization of politics. It investigates how the hybrid ecosystem (Bentivegna 2014; Chadwick 2013; Mancini and Mazzoni 2014) influences the everyday communication (production) practices, and how the change of these practices is related to a changing of the construction of news.