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One of the central problems of contemporary politics lies in the difficulty of its legitimacy. The legitimacy of politics had been carried out according to the rules & rationality within the political arena. Politics today, however, faces a situation in which there is a large variety of spheres & logic that compete against it in order to arrive at a definition of the public. Without a doubt, one of these spheres & perhaps the most significant, is generated by the media. The media is inseparable from the political system, in so far as the rules of the first prevail on the latter. Starting from these premises, the article deals with four large aspects that express the fragmentary, if not entropic, character of contemporary politics. The first of these deals with the deinstitutionalization of politics, which stems either from the draining or the ownership of it by various lobbying groups. The second of this highlights the non political forces of legitimacy, focused on the use of "public opinion" by the mass media. The third explains the instability & inconsistency of political formulas, subjugated to the same ephemeral process as news production. As a result & in fourth place, one can talk about the emergence of a new political model, one which the author classifies as "news democracy.". Adapted from the source document.

Uno de los problemas centrales de la política actual radica en las dificultades que tiene para legitimarse. La legitimación de la política ha venido efectuándose dentro del propio campo político, conforme a las reglas y racionalidad emanadas dentro del mismo. Pero hoy la política tiene que habérselas con una situación en la que existe una multiplicidad de ámbitos y lógicas que compiten con ella por la definición de lo público. Sin duda alguna, uno de estos ámbitos, quizás el más significativo, es el que genera el sistema de la comunicación. Los medios de comunicación son inseparables del sistema político, hasta el punto de que las reglas de los primeros acaban por imponerse al segundo. A partir de estas premisas, el artículo aborda cuatro grandes aspectos que expresan el carácter fragmentario, cuando no entrópico, de la política contemporánea. En el primero se analiza la desinstitucionalización de la política, cifrada tanto en su vaciamiento cuanto en su patrimonialización por parte de diversos lobbies. En el segundo se ponen de relieve las fuentes no políticas de la legitimidad, centradas en la administración que los medios masivos hacen del concepto "opinión pública". En tercer lugar, se plantea la inestabilidad e inconsistencia de las fórmulas políticas, sometidas al mismo proceso efímero de la producción de noticias. Por todo ello, y en cuarto ligar, puede hablarse de la emergencia de un nuevo modelo de política, la que el autor denomina "democracia mediática".

The paper approaches the relevance of the public sphere in present political dynamics & of the use that make of it media & political class. In the first part, Felix Ortega explains the historical process of the public sphere as the field of dialectic interaction between necessities of society -- private necessities -- & policy. He emphasizes the deep sociopolitical transformations of the modern state, in which the public sphere abandons its paper as mediator between private & policy fields, & of democratic state in which also is generated a break between the public sphere & the policy, due to the role of the media as disarticulator agents of society & to the impossibility of management of the democratic policy, given the saturation of its obligations within the globalization process. In the second part of the paper, he makes emphasis in the way in how the public sphere is absorbed by the called "fourth power," serving, this second, like mediator not only between the policy & the social field, but even to the interior of these sectors. It emphasizes the pragmatic relations of mutual influence between the political class & journalists, like representatives of an interest group, thus establishing new forms of social relation. 26 References. Adapted from the source document.

Social modernization in advanced countries has been a gradual, almost linear, process. However, in countries such as Spain, with more contradictory attitudes toward modernity, the modernization process has been choppy. Spain was not able to step forward into modernity until Francisco Franco's dictatorship came to an end. Now Spain bounces between two myths -- that of a glorious past & that of the coming modernity. Gradual change would permit the consolidation of gains, but nothing is given time to stabilize, resulting in discontinuities. To reach minimum coherence, Spanish society should assume the past, not conflate Spanish problems with global problems, organize some autonomous intermediate groups between the state & the individual, revitalize political democracy, avoid exacerbation of social inequalities, & propagate a new rational culture. 10 References. M. Pflum