Page 16 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

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

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
major prerequisite of successful intervention in public debate and govern-
mental 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 organ-
isations 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 rela-
tionship 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 news-
gathering. 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

xv