Page 145 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 124

COMMUNICATING POLITICS
As was the case with advertising, it would be a mistake to think that
media management in this sense is new in democratic politics. Chapter 2
noted that the first newspaper interview with a public figure was conducted
in the US in 1859 (Boorstin, 1962), and that the first American news release
was issued in 1907. The interview form was imported to Britain in the
1880s, as subsequently were all the techniques of influencing media coverage
pioneered in America (Silvester, 1993).
We have traced the development of the political public relations industry
from the work of Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays at the turn of the twentieth
century. But, as with advertising, media management has increased in
political importance in parallel with the advance of mass communication,
television in particular, which has provided ever more opportunities (and
dangers) for politicians to harness the efforts and skills of professionals, and
through them seek to influence public opinion. Political parties, their leaders
and their public relations advisers have become steadily more sophisticated
in their appreciation of the implications for their media management efforts
of journalistic news values, technical constraints on news gathering and
commercial prerogatives. Since F. D. Roosevelt’s live radio broadcasts in the
1930s, through Ronald Reagan’s reprisal of that idea in the 1980s, to Bill
Clinton’s ‘meet the people’ broadcasts of the 1990s, and Tony Blair’s live
statements and news conferences, such as his description of Princess Diana
in the hours following her death as ‘the people’s princess’, politicians have
become – thanks largely to the new profession of media managers – more
adept at exploiting media. As we shall see, many journalists consider that the
process has pushed the media–politician relationship beyond that state of
mutual interdependence to one of media dependence on, and deference to,
politicians, so that journalists should now consciously adopt a more
detached, critical approach to the use of these techniques.
For many analysts of political communication, the modern era of
political public relations begins with the Nixon–Kennedy presidential
debates of September 1960 (Kraus and Davis, 1981). Political scientists
agree that this event had a key impact in the 1960 campaign. Here we note
that the live presidential debate – now an American institution, copied in
many other democracies – is the archetypal ‘free media’ event. In itself it
guarantees the politicians extensive live coverage, since the serious broad-
casting organisations must all report it fully, providing acres of follow-up
coverage of the issues raised and the respective performances of the
participants. The debate sets the agenda in a contemporary US presidential
campaign. It provides a platform for a candidate to appeal directly to the
mass audience and to demonstrate his or her superiority over the opponent.
And for the politician it is, in contrast to advertising, free.
As is characteristic of free media, however, the presidential debate also
carries the possibility of catastrophic failure. Live and unedited, mistakes are
more difficult to cover up and a candidate’s detailed, intelligent articulation

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