Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of democratic elitism supposes that political leaders, once they are elected to govern, have sufficient autonomy and decisional latitude to govern in largely unfettered ways between elections. But in Norway today, government office-holders and all other top political leaders are subjected to close and constant surveillance by the mass media, whose operatives seem to see themselves as charged with the task of ”keeping the bastards honest”.
It is not surprising that many Norwegian political leaders, like their counterparts in other western democracies, regard the media warily, and media leaders and practitioners reciprocate this wariness. In this article I examine this tense relationship and its implications for democratic elitism, utilizing some rich data from a major study of Norwegian elites.

A majority of the parliamentarians are skeptical about the media. At the same time they engage actively with the media. Not surprisingly, media elite members assess the media much less negatively than they assess other institutions.

It is notable that there are far more politicians who hold sceptical attitudes towards the mass media than there are politicians who themselves have had negative experiences with the media, a disjunction between attitudes and actual experiences that is even more pronounced among the other elites studied. This may mean that a negative image of the mass media has been generalized among elites in ways that are unrelated or only loosely related to their own concrete media experiences.
The study we conducted reveals a further puzzle. Although a majority of Norway’s political leaders hold negative views of the mass media, a sizable minority has trust in the media and is not noticeably sceptical about how the media function. What explains variations in politicians’ reactions to mass media?

In the analysis it was found, firstly, that parliamentarians who regard leaks to the media as a considerable problem in their fields of work hold more negative views of the mass media than those who see leaks as not especially bothersome. Second, male parliamentarians are less concerned about negative aspects of the media than female parliamentarians. The relative power and seniority, length of time in politics, and left or right party affiliation, however, do not effect how political leaders evaluate the mass media.

It is obvious that leaks distract attention from political leaders’ planned undertakings. Moreover, leaks to the media are instruments in political power competitions.
The mass media thus affect the workings of democratic elitism in contrary ways. Certainly the media check tendencies toward excessively secret elitism. But at the same time they make political competitions much more continuous than the periodic electoral contests that Schumpeter placed at the centre of his ‘democratic method’. Worse, the insatiable appetite of mass media for scandal and leaked revelations about political leaders’ personal misadventures, greatly enflames democratic politics, making them a good deal more costly and risky than Schumpeter recognized.