Experts in political communication: The construal of communication expertise in prime time television news

A central journalistic counterstrategy to the communicative ‘professionalization’ of politics consists in a use of political communication experts who comment on political moves and analyse the strategies behind them. This study investigates how the media uses political communication experts in prime time news programmes from the 2005 parliamentary election campaign in Denmark. To this aim, the knowledge positions ascribed to the experts as well as the articulation of the expert voice with the news genre is analysed. Furthermore, the qualitative analysis is combined with quantitative data on the amount of political communication experts and their professional background. The study situates the analysis within a public sphere perspective on the power relations between politics and media, and discusses implications of the findings for a well functioning public sphere.