Press and Government Relations

Daniel C. Hallin

The development of news media is closely tied to the emergence of modern government. Indeed, news media organizations have always been intimately tied to government and political institutions more generally; they are often considered a political institution, a kind of “fourth branch of government.” Early newspapers served to shape public opinion in the course of battles between and within states, to integrate citizens into developing administrative structures of the modern state and provide them with the information necessary to manage their interactions with those institutions. They were central to the production of the “imagined communities” described by researcher Benedict Anderson, which were the cultural manifestation of the rise of the modern state. The news media expanded in importance as popular participation in political life expanded, often through the extension of institutions of mass democratic politics, but also through authoritarian institutions for the mobilization of mass opinion. News media are tied ...

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