Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Discussing mediatization of politics based on the portuguese case 135 It is from 2007 that we started to find politicians in the commentary of the newscasts of RTP and SIC Notícias . In the public channel, politicians comment until 2008, and, despite the extension of public service in the fulfillment of political plural - ism, in none of these years, we have found commentators of the Communist Party (CDU) in the prime-time newscasts of the pub- lic channel. If in 2007 we found only commentators from the PSD and the right-wing party (CDS) on SIC Notícias, when politicians return to the channel’s news, in 2011, we found, in that year and the following, only one commentator from the PS. In 2013, the comment space was composed of members of the government arc parties, that is, PS, CDS, and PSD, with the latter party stand- ing out. From the following year, Francisco Louçã, former leader of the Left Bloc Party, integrates this area of the ideological spec- trum in the commentary of the main channel news. TVI24 has had the collaboration of politicians in its prime- time newscast since the start of its broadcasts in 2009. This is the channel with the most commentators coming from politics , and it is the channel with a portfolio of commentators with a greater party diversity. Only in 2010 and 2011, since these were years in which we found commentators exclusively from the PS and PSD, the remaining parties with parliamentary seats did not comment on this channel’s news. If we subdivide the results according to the time frame of each legislature, during the period of the PS government, led by José Sócrates, there is a configuration of the comment that may resemble a counterpower, manifested in a higher presence of elements of the PSD and the CDS on all cable channels. The prevalence of members of these parties continued to be seen when both of them were in coalition in the government, but the data indicated a new distribution of forces on the left, as the 2015 elections approached. In general terms, we highlight a composition that de- notes a relationship between parliamentary representation and political party distribution in the commentary. The presence of commentators with party connections gets made along the lines of what we may call a representation of a conventional na- ture, that is, of party origin (FREIRE et al., 2004). None of the