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This article examines public debates about disruption to the media regime of Western democracies precipitated by the Trump and Brexit elections. Delli Carpini and Williams introduce the media regime concept to explain how media and politics in a given era hold together structurally and are superseded. This article highlights what conditions for public reflexivity emerge during such a disruption and transition, while renewal of media and political institutions continues in parallel to disruption. I explore the conjuncture of formats, contexts, and content in 2016–2019 elite public debates. I find that these broadly map onto the macro-, meso-, and micro-level changes Delli Carpini and Williams identify. I use this to demonstrate the form and content of reflexivity claims generated as elite actors attempt to give meaning to these changes. Despite uncertainty in these debates, there is normative value to the attention generated on fundamental questions about the nature of connectivity and the nature of the social. This disruption presents opportunities for scholars to build new research trajectories and inform public debate as we transition to a new media regime.

AbstractBelief that images have become the critical 'weapon' in contemporary warfare has enjoyed great currency in the past decade. This belief rests upon certain understandings about the impact visual footage of terrorist attacks or still images of the abuse of prisoners have had on public opinion in different parts of the world. These understandings, in turn, reflect simplistic models of representation and mediation in which citizens are assumed to know little of the 'true' situation of war but are easily and primarily shocked by unexpected graphic images. To explore these relationships, this article presents analysis of original research from a three-year study of military practitioners, media coverage of security events, and collaborative audience ethnography across towns and cities in the UK. While military practitioners feel frustration that communicating with publics is 'like talking to a brick wall', analysis of audience interpretations of Abu Ghraib and other events suggests varied and negotiated understandings in which audiences account for processes of mediation as well as reflect on the event being represented. Images cannot necessarily be considered primary to explaining how an individual interprets a news story, and, to the extent and manner in which images do matter, this often depends on what longer historical narratives such images are situated within – by media or audiences themselves. No image is intrinsically shocking. For policymakers concerned with public diplomacy, for journalists and for audiences themselves there is a need for further research into the role images – Weber's 'visual language' – play amid today's conditions of diffused war.