De Bewakers Bewaakt: Journalistiek en leiderschap in een gemediatiseerde democratie

What challenge does the mediatization of politics present to the ideal of the journalist as a watchdog versus leadership? That is the question at the center of this study, a question that has not been considered in political philosophy yet seems particularly relevant for modern democracy with its omnipresence of mass media in the political domain.
To answer it, Remko van Broekhoven uses a multidisciplinary approach. First he explores the political philosophical significance of the basic concepts in the study: the role of journalism in a democracy, the mediatization thesis, the journalistic watchdog ideal, and the challenge that political mediatization poses to this ideal. Then he approaches the watchdog ideal from the perspective of Alasdair MacIntyre’s (1981) virtue ethics as a moral and social practice that is strongly connected with democracy. Subsequently he examines the threat to this practice’s virtuousness implied by Mazzoleni’s and Schulz’s (1999) thesis of the mediatization of politics.
After this theoretical approach of the subject matter, Van Broekhoven confronts his findings with an empirical study of Dutch TV election debates. He studies the watchdog behavior of journalistic moderators of ten such debates in the five national election campaigns that took place between 2002 and 2012. He compares the outcomes with a content analysis of the coverage of these debates by four major national newspapers and the most important news site in the Netherlands. And he concludes this empirical study with in-depth interviews of ten Dutch political journalists, among them the moderators of the election debates analyzed here.
In the third and final part of his PhD study Van Broekhoven comes to a synthesis of both the theoretical and the empirical approach, through a normative theory for journalistic watchdogs in modern, mediatized democracy. He tries to revitalize the watchdog ideal by developing ideas about coping with media logic, cynicism, commercialism and the increased importance of the Internet in political communication. All in all, these ideas amount to strengthening individual watchdog virtues, the collective and institutional encouragement of these virtues, and reformulating the role division of journalism, public, and political leadership.