AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

In his seminal study of Public Opinion Walter Lippmann observed that the
practice of democracy had ‘turned a corner’ (1954, p. 248). The democratic
process, it seemed to him four years after the end of the First World War had,
to an extent unprecedented in human history, come to incorporate selfconscious strategies of persuasion by political actors. The gradual extension
since the early nineteenth century of voting rights to wider and wider sections
of the population, combined with the emergence of media of mass
communication, had fundamentally transformed the nature of the political
process, for better or worse. No longer could it be assumed that political
action derived from the collectively arrived at will of rational, enlightened
men (for men they exclusively were, of course) of property and education.
Henceforth, the masses would decide, through their exercise of the vote and
the influence of public opinion on the political process.
But public opinion, Lippmann recognised even in 1922, was a constructed,
manufactured thing, which could be shaped and manipulated by those with
an interest in doing so. To that end, he noted the rise of a new professional
class of ‘publicists’, or ‘press agents’, standing between political organisations and media institutions, whose job it was to influence press coverage
of their clients, and thus, they hoped, public opinion.
In the twenty-first century these trends have accelerated and deepened,
until not only ‘the practice of democracy’ but politics in all its forms is played
out before a mass, sometimes global audience, through an expanded network
of print, broadcast and online media which have made McLuhan’s metaphor
of the planet as a shrinking ‘global village’ into a truism. As the role of the
media in mediating between politicians and public has increased, so has the
importance of those publicists, press agents and others in what we may refer
to as the political public relations industry. Brave (and probably doomed to
failure) is the organisation which ventures into the contemporary political
arena without a more or less sophisticated understanding of how the media
work and the professional public relations machinery capable of putting that
knowledge to good use. For all political actors, from presidents and prime
ministers to trade union leaders and terrorists, this is now recognised to be a
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major prerequisite of successful intervention in public debate and governmental decision-making.
If these trends are generally acknowledged to be real, they have not been
greeted with unanimous approval outside the offices of the political public
relations agencies themselves. For many, the growing centrality of the media
in the political process degrades the latter, undermining its democratic
characteristics and transforming it into meaningless, empty spectacle. Others
point with distaste to the use of the media by avowedly undemocratic
organisations, such as al-Quaida, to influence public opinion in directions
favourable to their political objectives. More optimistic voices welcome the
media’s heightened political role as signalling a long overdue extension of
democratic participation. Others still resign themselves and their organisations to the reality of an age when politics and the media are intimately
and forever bound together. Rather than complaining about the increasing
‘mediatisation’ of the political process, these groups strive to get in on the
act.
This book is intended as both an introduction and a modest contribution
to that debate, which has become so prominent an element of contemporary
political discourse throughout the advanced capitalist world. It will be of
value, I hope, to the growing numbers of students, researchers, teachers, and
concerned citizens with an interest, professional or otherwise, in the relationship between communication and politics.
My own interest in the subject derives from many years of research and
teaching in the field of media studies, in the course of which it has become
abundantly clear that what the media do is as much the product of external
factors – in the particular context of this book, the activities of the political
communications industry – as with such intra-media considerations as
journalistic bias, proprietorial interference, or the routine practices of newsgathering. In previous work I have examined the relationship between the
political public relations activities of, for example, the British Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament (CND), the British Labour Party, and the Soviet
Government (McNair, 1988, 1989, 1991) and the media coverage received
by them. These discussions were marginal, however, in the context of work
concerned chiefly with how journalists thought and behaved. This study of
political communication concentrates to a much greater extent on the nature
of the interface between politicians and the media, the extent of their
interaction, and the dialectic of their relationship. It probes the limits on the
actions of politicians on the one hand and journalists on the other, and the
influence of both on what citizens think and do.
Such an emphasis owes much to those who, over the last three decades,
have developed what has become known in communication studies as the
source-centred approach (Goldenberg, 1984; Tiffen, 1989; Schlesinger and
Tumber, 1994). The term focuses attention on the active role in shaping media
content played by those who provide the source material, rather than the
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producers of journalistic output themselves. The shift is one of emphasis, and
this book does not seek to replace the notion of an all-powerful media with
that of the all-powerful ‘spin doctor’ or media manipulator. It will, however,
add to a growing literature in communication and political studies concerned
with locating the media’s agency and effectivity in a wider social – in this case
political – environment, characterised by greater levels of uncertainty, risk
and arbitrariness than some perspectives within communication studies have
acknowledged.
Structurally, the book is organised into two parts. In Part I, I examine
what is meant by the term ‘political communication’, and who precisely are
the communicators. I describe the normative principles of liberal democracy
and consider how political communication relates, in theory, to the
democratic process. A complete chapter is devoted to outlining the contexts
in which modern mass media communicate politically, and another to the
‘effects’ of political communication on behaviour, attitudes and social
processes.
Part II places this introductory and theoretical material in the context of
the political communication practices of a variety of actors, including governments and party politicians, both domestically and in the international
arena; business and trade union leaders; and marginalised political actors
such as pressure groups and terrorist organisations.
A short conclusion makes a tentative effort to answer the question: is the
increasing role of mass communication in the political process a ‘good’ or a
‘bad’ thing for democracy?