Perception definition communication1/6/2024 One would be hard-pressed to explain nonsensical policy goals like the Mexican border wall or the (de-facto) travel ban through any combination of American interests or values. In conjunction, these two developments lead to and enable the dynamics personified by Trump. Rather than a specific and universally perceived form of reality, on the basis of which particular interests or values might lead to policy preferences and negotiation processes, more selective modes of perception now give rise to self-reinforcing feedback loops between elites and particular segments of the public. Secondly, as these dynamics gain in importance and develop new communicative logics and political incentives, they alter the ways in which political leaders might engage with or react to particular events. Instead, a fragmented media landscape gives rise to various segmented and increasingly polarized publics, enabling political elites to selectively adjust their messages and cater exclusively to their preferred audiences. Two developments in particular seem striking about the current political environment: For one, in regard to political communication dynamics, the concept of a single dominant communication flow seems increasingly outdated. So what exactly are we dealing with now? And what are we to make of Trump? And yet, at the very least, these dynamics seemed a whole lot more assessable than whatever it is we are dealing with now. And the processes by which US interest and values dictated policy outcomes led to massive miscalculations and blunders. To be sure, the age in which policy elites were afforded disproportionate leeway in setting the media agenda was highly problematic in its own right. These in turn will give shape to agenda setting and framing processes which shape media narratives and lead to public perception and democratic deliberation processes which can come to feed back into elite perception and decision-making. When it comes to information flows concerning foreign events, a broadly applicable rule of thumb describing these dynamics could be expressed as follows: Powerful and informed policy elites hold beliefs and reach decisions based on specific sets of interests and values. But even so, it is mostly understood that policy-makers derive their views from specific sets of underlying norms, which lead to more or less consistent behavior over time. Constructivist schools of though have also stressed the importance of specific beliefs and questions of perception in these matters, which may come to dictate how interests are defined and which values matter. In the realm of US foreign policy, the dominant explanatory models have typically focused on a blend of interests and values in accounting for political decision-making. Nevertheless, Trump’s highly unusual campaign and his interaction with the press and pubic since the election has been an extraordinary reminder of just how badly our understanding of the new communication environment might lag behind.īut political communication flows are merely one of many focal points in dire need of readjustment. Within an increasingly abundant information environment, political leaders can sidestep the gatekeeping functions of the press, while selective exposure to ideological news sources proliferates. Sure enough, even without the wake up call of the 2016 election, the field was generally aware that many of our tried and tested assumptions of how political information reaches and impacts an audience no longer seem to hold up. Since the new administration has assumed office, many of the actions we have witnessed have fallen far outside the spectrum of how we usually expect these three players to interact with one another. For scholars of political communication, for example, it is generally understood that processes of political communication involve three main players: political elites, media, and the public. The surprising results of the 2016 presidential election therefore led to a fair amount of soul-searching within the various fields of our discipline. These give shape to our interpretation of data points and ongoing political dynamics. In predicting and accounting for political decision-making, political scientists tend to rely on specific sets of underlying assumptions.
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