Page 15 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

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

PREFACE AND

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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 self-
conscious 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 organ-
isations 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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