The tabloidization of political discourse: The Polish case

Mass media discourse about politics consists of three overlapping fields: public discourse, discourse of politics and political discourse. Political discourse is defined as a discourse of symbolic elites present in the media, including journalists. In news programs there is a combination of political discourse and a discourse of politics: politicians appear in their political roles, while comments made by experts and reporters can be viewed as a part of the political discourse. The main topic of the article is the tabloidization of the political discourse in Polish television news programs. According to Frank Esser’s concept of tabloidization it takes place on two levels: micro and macro, and this paper focuses on the second one. The main goal of the paper is to present how the phenomenon of tabloidization of the media discourse on politics has appeared in Poland since the beginning of the 21st century. Some empirical data from different periods of time are presented to provide content analysis of news programs on commercial and public TV. Differences between the way politics is discussed in public and commercial TV are visible, but the tendency described as tabloidization is observed in both.