Page 149 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 128

COMMUNICATING POLITICS
The pseudo-event

Less prone to error but equally useful in attracting and holding media
attention on a politician or organisation are those types of activity which fall
into the category of ‘pseudo-event’ described in Chapter 2. The pseudo-event,
it was noted there, is a ‘happening’ which bears only a tenuous relation to
political reality. It has meaning in and of itself, primarily as a media event.
Some would argue that the debate and interview-type events discussed above
often fall into this category, since there is clearly something rather artificial
and manufactured about the ways in which participants are selected,
questions framed and answers constructed. On the other hand, they are often
live, and the audience does have an opportunity to make judgments about
political actors based on their performances. Closer, perhaps, to the ‘pure’
pseudo-event are occasions such as party conferences which, in the latter part
of the twentieth century, changed – particularly in the US but increasingly
too in Britain and other advanced democracies – from being fora for policy-
resolution and decision-making into spectacles designed for the maximisa-
tion of positive media coverage.
In the US, where this change in the role and function of the party gather-
ing began, the Democratic and Republican conventions have embraced, with
unabashed enthusiasm, the principles of show business. Meaningful political
debate and manoeuvring takes place behind the scenes, while in its public
manifestation the convention functions as a huge signifier of whatever it is
that the party that year is selling. In Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign
of 1984 the Republican convention was dominated by emotional film of Ron
and Nancy, accompanied by the adulation of convention delegates and (by
extension) the American people. All this was communicated, through media
coverage, to the audience.
In Britain, the trend towards the conference-as-symbol was pioneered, as
were so many elements of modern political marketing, by Margaret
Thatcher’s Conservative Party (Scammell, 1995). In the 1980s, show-
business enterpreneur Harvey Thomas was employed to design the annual
conferences, which he did according to the principle that ‘on a political
platform we only get a few seconds on BBC news [or ITN] . . . we’ve got to
make sure that those few seconds are absolutely pure as far as the message
is concerned’ (quoted in Cockerell, 1988, p. 325). In the search for ‘purity’
the stages on which conference speakers and party leaders sat were
constructed with the same attention to form and colour co-ordination as a
West End stage set. At the 1983 conference, the first following the Thatcher
government’s victory in the Falklands, the stage resembled nothing more
than a great, grey battleship, on which the Tory leadership sat like
conquering admirals.
As Thomas recognised, mass media coverage of that conference, and most
others, was limited to at most a few minutes. Although in Britain there is a

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