Network news and political discourse in the age of megamedia: A study of two mass-mediated presidential impeachments (Richard M. Nixon, Bill Clinton)

This study investigates the changing nature of network news, the trade in public information, and democratic discourse in an era of media fragmentation and conglomeration. It offers a critical textual examination of network news coverage of Watergate and the Nixon impeachment of 1973–74 and compares it to similar coverage of the Clinton Affair and impeachment of 1998. Network news is understood here both as an industry which produces products and as a signifying system which articulates meanings and informs our understandings of the nature of the political process.; The analysis charts the transition in the political economy of media from a time of network dominance and the regulatory privileging of news to the contemporary age of megamedia and federal deregulation. It then reveals a shift in network newswork from a paradigm of information journalism to one of commodity journalism; from network news as an objective realist presentation which strove to disseminate vital information to active citizens, to news as a subjective construction of narratives designed for consumer appeal. Information journalism is primarily institutional, while commodity journalism focuses largely on the personal.; Although much contemporary thought bemoans the transition in substance and style of network news, this study suggests that information journalism reproduces hegemonic cultural boundaries of privilege and exclusion. Commodity journalism, however, crafts a discourse which is fundamentally more resonant, inclusive, and thus perhaps more democratic than its predecessor.