doxa.comunicación | nº 30, pp. 37-53 | 39

January-June of 2020

Marta Redondo García, Marta Ventura Meneu and Salomé Berrocal Gonzalo

ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978

To achieve this target, the politics has fallen into a “mediatization” process (Mazzoleni y Schutz, 1999; Kepplinger, 2002; Casero, 2009; Habler, Maurer y Oschatz, 2014; Strömbäck y Esser, 2015) which describes how the dominant values in the media scene are taken by certain sources adapting them to the media message in a procedural symbiosis (Redondo, 2011). Back in 1990, Krinppendorff noticed how the “properties of the media, regarding the register and dissemination of information produce an important effect among the nature of the institutions that can be supported due to this commu-nication process by using the media” (1990: 67). The mediatization of politics describes the process through which the political figure assumes the journalistic communication logic, getting adjusted to the media´s requirements. (Kepplinger, 2002). This goal becomes a must in the case of TV due to its power when it comes to make popular both persons and ideas.

This adaptation to media logic includes strategies such as: the personalization of the political action, the simplification of the message, the creation of catchwords and slogans that can be used as television testimonies or radio cuts, the creation of artificial news events or the search of photo opportunities.

Being an adaptive phenomenon, the mediatization is not a stable process and it has evolved in relation to the mediatic logistic which has suffered a change in its paradigm during the last years.

1.1. The mediatic logic of politainment

The mediatic logic and even more sharply the TV logistic, have experienced a considerable change since the 90´s of the last century choosing television shows as a way of increasing their audience in a very competitive environment: “ TV pro-grammers find in entertainment a crucial priority and are forced to adapt the features of the entertainment formats and the means of conversation in order to encourage a very casual communication style, emphasizing personalization, style, storytelling tools and shows” (Thusu, 2007: 3).

This changing process in the nature of information has also affected politics minting the term politainment to name the “superficial, spectacular and frivolous” treatment of political information (Berrocal, 2017).

In this context, we notice certain changes in the adjustment process of the political figures to the television logic, incorpo-rating new attributes and tactics to the prevailing ones in order to maintain and increase the media role. Table 1 collects in a visual way this attribute collection (old and new ones) in which the television and political logics converge.