The Handbook of Public Sector Communication

11Public Sector Communication and Mediatization

Magnus Fredriksson and Josef Pallas

Introduction

If we want to understand the circumstances within which public sector organizations operate, their governance, and the ways in which they are organized and managed, we have to take the media into account. To some extent, this is because the media functions as a fourth branch of government (the executive, legislature, and judiciary being the others). Through this role, the media is given extensive—and often constitutionally supported—liberties to scrutinize and critically examine the actions of public organizations and their representatives. This order of things was set up to uncover policy failures, corruption, inefficiency, and other forms of malfunctions. The media therefore assists citizens to exercise their legitimate right to control and evaluate public officials and hold them accountable for their actions. Such activities are supposed to have preventive as well corrective effects on organizations (Norris, 2008). This role, and the understandings it provides in relation to how we can conceptualize the media in a public sector context, is of great significance, but it is only part of the story, due to a large extent to the processes of mediatization.

Mediatization has become a way to understand how the media intervenes in organizations' activities in a wide variety of sectors and fields, and not just in public sectors. It is commonly understood as a process whereby ideas regarding ...