Advocacy is an activity by an individual or group that aims to influence decisions within political, economic, and social institutions. Advocacy includes activities and publications to influence public policy, laws and budgets by using facts, their relationships, the media, and messaging to educate government officials and the public. Advocacy can include many activities that a person or organization undertakes, including media campaigns, public speaking, commissioning and publishing research. Lobbying is a form of advocacy where a direct approach is made to legislators on a specific issue or specific piece of legislation. Research has started to address how advocacy groups in the United States and Canada are using social media to facilitate civic engagement and collective action.
In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the Öffentlichkeit or public sphere. The concept of a public has also been defined in political science, psychology, marketing, and advertising. In public relations and communication science, it is one of the more ambiguous concepts in the field. Although it has definitions in the theory of the field that have been formulated from the early 20th century onwards, and suffered more recent years from being blurred, as a result of conflation of the idea of a public with the notions of audience, market segment, community, constituency, and stakeholder.
As an ethic that spans science, engineering, business, and the humanities, transparency is operating in such a way that it is easy for others to see what actions are performed. Transparency implies openness, communication, and accountability.
Agenda-setting theory suggests that the communications media, through their ability to identify and publicize issues, play a pivotal role in shaping the problems that attract attention from governments and international organizations, and direct public opinion towards specific issues. The theory suggests that the media can shape public opinion by determining what issues are given the most attention, and has been widely studied and applied to various forms of media. The way news stories and topics that impact public opinion are presented is influenced by the media. It is predicated on the idea that most individuals only have access to one source of information on most issues: the news media. Since they establish the agenda, they may affect how important some things are seen to be.
Sousveillance is the recording of an activity by a member of the public, rather than a person or organisation in authority, typically by way of small wearable or portable personal technologies. The term, coined by Steve Mann, stems from the contrasting French words sur, meaning "above", and sous, meaning "below", i.e. "surveillance" denotes the "eye-in-the-sky" watching from above, whereas "sousveillance" denotes bringing the means of observation down to human level, either physically or hierarchically.
Media democracy is a democratic approach to media studies that advocates for the reform of mass media to strengthen public service broadcasting and develop participation in alternative media and citizen journalism in order to create a mass media system that informs and empowers all members of society and enhances democratic values.
Media ethics is the subdivision dealing with the specific ethical principles and standards of media, including broadcast media, film, theatre, the arts, print media and the internet. The field covers many varied and highly controversial topics, ranging from war journalism to Benetton ad campaigns.
Equiveillance is a state of equilibrium, or a desire to attain a state of equilibrium, between surveillance and sousveillance. It is sometimes confused with transparency. The balance (equilibrium) provided by equiveillance allows individuals to construct their own cases from evidence they gather themselves, rather than merely having access to surveillance data that could possibly incriminate them.
Media transparency, also referred to as transparent media or media opacity, is a concept that explores how and why information subsidies are being produced, distributed and handled by media professionals, including journalists, editors, public relations practitioners, government officials, public affairs specialists, and spokespeople. In short, media transparency reflects the relationship between civilization and journalists, news sources and government. According to a textual analysis of “Information Subsidies and Agenda Building: A Study of Local Radio News”, an information subsidy is defined as “any item provided to the media in order to gain time or space”. In order to understand media transparency, one must gain an understanding of the different aspects in which media transparency is researched, understood, and explored. The following page will attempt to examine media transparency as it has grown and how it affects the modern world.
The CNN effect is a theory in political science and media studies which states that global television networks, in their modern ability to provide live, 24-hours news coverage from anywhere in the world, play a significant role in determining the actions policymakers take and the outcomes of events.
Civic journalism is the idea of integrating journalism into the democratic process. The media not only informs the public, but it also works towards engaging citizens and creating public debate. The civic journalism movement is an attempt to abandon the notion that journalists and their audiences are spectators in political and social processes. In its place, the civic journalism movement seeks to treat readers and community members as participants.
In politics, a political agenda is a list of subjects or problems (issues) to which government officials as well as individuals outside the government are paying serious attention to at any given time.
The politico-media complex is a name given to the network of relationships between a state's political and ruling classes and its media industry. It may also encompass other interest groups, such as law, corporations and multinationals. The term PMC is used as a pejorative, to refer to the collusion between governments, individual politicians, and the media industry.
Democratic media is a form of media organization that strives to have the principles of democracy underlying not only the production of content, but also the organization of the entire project. Civic media is another term with similar concept and therefore can be used interchangeably in many contexts. The mission of the defunct Center for Civic Media of MIT is to design, create, deploy, and assess tools and processes that support and foster civic participation and the flow of information between and within communities, working at the intersection of participatory media and civic engagement.
Open government is the governing doctrine which maintains that citizens have the right to access the documents and proceedings of the government to allow for effective public oversight. In its broadest construction, it opposes reason of state and other considerations which have tended to legitimize extensive state secrecy. The origins of open-government arguments can be dated to the time of the European Age of Enlightenment, when philosophers debated the proper construction of a then nascent democratic society. It is also increasingly being associated with the concept of democratic reform. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 16 for example advocates for public access to information as a criterion for ensuring accountable and inclusive institutions.
Political journalism is a broad branch of journalism that includes coverage of all aspects of politics and political science, although the term usually refers specifically to coverage of civil governments and political power.
Political communication is the 'production and impact of persuasive political messages, campaigns, and advertising, often concerning the mass media.' It is an interdisciplinary field that draws from communication, journalism and political science. Political communication is concerned with ideas such as: information flow, political influence, policy making, news, and the effect on citizens. Since the advent of the World Wide Web, the amount of data to analyze has increased and researchers are shifting to computational methods to study the dynamics of political communication. A key theorised system within political communication in advanced economies is the concept of the propaganda having the capacity to be organically spread, via self selection systems in democratic capitalist countries via the propaganda model. In recent years, machine learning, natural language processing, and network analysis have also become key tools in the field. The field also includes: the study of the media, the analysis of speeches by politicians, those that are trying to influence the political process, and conversations among members of the public. Today many universities offer courses in political communications.
Post-truth politics, amidst varying academic and dictionary definitions of the term, refer to a recent historical period where political culture is marked by public anxiety about what claims can be publicly accepted facts. It suggests that the public distinction between truth and falsity—as well as honesty and lying—have become a focal concern of public life, and are viewed by popular commentators and academic researchers alike as having a consequential role in how politics operates in the early 21st century. It is regarded as especially being influenced by the arrival of new communication and media technologies. Popularized as a term in news media and a dictionary definition, post-truth has developed from a short-hand label for the abundance and influence of misleading or false political claims into a concept empirically studied and theorized by academic research. Oxford Dictionaries declared that its international word of the year in 2016 was "post-truth", citing a 20-fold increase in usage compared to 2015, and noted that it was commonly associated with the noun "post-truth politics".
Agenda building describes the ongoing process by which various groups attempt to transfer their interests to be the interests of public policymakers. Conceptualized as a political science theory by Cobb and Elder in 1971, "the agenda-building perspective...alerts us to the importance of the environing social processes in determining what occurs at the decision-making stage and what types of policy outcomes will be produced.” It focuses on the relationship between society and policy maker.
Media independence is the absence of external control and influence on an institution or individual working in the media. It is a measure of its capacity to "make decisions and act according to its logic," and distinguishes independent media from state media.
