LEADER AS A MEDIA FIGURE: THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE IMAGE OF POWER IN THE AGE OF UNCERTAIN MULTIPLICITY
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32782/NPU-VOU.2025.3(98).06Keywords:
leadership, media leadership, mediatization of politics, leader’s image, political communication, society of the spectacle, symbolic powerAbstract
The article analyzes the phenomenon of media leadership as one of the key transformations of political and social leadership in the 21st century. The focus is on the role of mass media and new communication technologies in shaping the image of leaders, whose prominence is increasingly determined not by personal traits or the substance of political programs, but by their ability to operate effectively within the media space. The central examples are Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose political success was largely conditioned by media logic and symbolic practices. To broaden the context, the article also considers the cases of Junichiro Koizumi and Silvio Berlusconi, which illustrate other models of interaction between politics and the media. The theoretical framework draws upon the concepts of the mediatization of politics, Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle,” and Daniel J. Boorstin’s theory of pseudoevents. The study highlights the irony of the contemporary political process: in the age of informational fragmentation, leadership often belongs not to those who present profound programs, but to those whose images are most effectively mediated.
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