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New Media and American Politics. By Richard Davis and Diana Owen. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 304p. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.
Richard Davis and Diana Owen draw from news accounts, interviews, content analyses, and surveys to assess countervailing arguments about the political role of new media. The authors develop two dimensions on which to define types of media. The first distinguishes between old information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as radio and television broadcasting, versus new ICTs, such as the Internet. The second dimension focuses on the use of old media "formats" (e.g., the network news anchor) versus new media formats (e.g., live interaction with the audience), which blur distinctions between the producers and users of content.
The authors concentrate on new media within two of the four categories: (1) old ICTs, new formats, including talk radio and television, electronic town meetings, television news magazines, Music Television (MTV), and print and electronic tabloids, which "came of age during the 1992 campaign" (p. 255); and (2) new ICTs, new formats, including computer networks, electronic mail, and interactive Web sites, which became a factor in the 1996 presidential election. They view these new ICTs and media formats as similar in that they enable more opportunities for discussion and interactivity. These technical features create the potential to inform and facilitate debate about candidates and public policy issues in ways that traditional broadcasting could not.
Are politicians and journalists using these media in ways that give the general public a greater voice in public affairs, or have demagogues and entertainers hijacked the new media to serve commercial ends? Overall, Davis and Owen conclude that the new media fail to fulfill their promise, since content is devoted to entertainment over substance. At the extreme, the drive...