Page 165 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 144

COMMUNICATING POLITICS
Labour had been weak and vulnerable to an effective challenge, which it was
not), and which by the election of 2001 was far from complete. Following
defeat in that year’s general election the Tories elected Iain Duncan Smith as
leader. Following an ineffective and brief period in the post, he was succeeded
by Michael Howard, the former Home Secretary. Howard presided over
another defeat in 2005, despite the contribution to the party’s campaign of
Australian political PR guru Lynton Crosby. In September 2005 the party
elected the youthful David Cameron to lead it. As noted above, David
Cameron was presented to the British electorate as a Tory version of Tony
Blair, prepared to reform his party’s policies and image. He embraced a range
of issues not hitherto associated with the Conservatives, such as the environ-
ment, and campaigned for more women and ethnic minority parliamentary
candidates. He was, in short, to the old Tory party what Blair had been to
Labour when elected leader in 1994. In an echo of the Blair-Campbell
relationship, Cameron in 2007 appointed former News Of The World editor
Andy Coulson as his director of communication. His aim, like Blair’s with
Campbell, was to have access to the communication expertise of a senior
popular journalist. David Cameron’s qualified victory in the 2010 election,
where his party emerged with the largest number of parliamentary seats (but
no overall majority) was seen by some as the outcome of a flawed com-
munications strategy, and as this edition went to press Coulson had yet to
prove himself as a spin doctor of the calibre of Alistair Campbell.

Information management

Finally in this discussion of party political public relations, we turn to the
techniques and practices involved in information management by govern-
ment. By this is meant activities designed to control or manipulate the flow
of information from institutions of government to the public sphere beyond.
Steinberg defines governmental communication as ‘those techniques
which government officials and agencies employ to keep the public informed
and to disseminate information about the activities of various departments’
(1958, p. 327). The dissemination of information is not, however, the only
purpose of governmental communication. Information is a power resource,
the astute deployment of which can play a major role in the management of
public opinion. As Denton and Woodward note, ‘information is power, and
the control of information is the first step in propaganda’ (1990, p. 42).
Information can be freely given out in the pursuit of democratic government,
but it can also be suppressed, censored, leaked, and manufactured in
accordance with the more particular interests of a government and the
organs of state power. As former civil servant Clive Ponting puts it, writing
of the British government, public opinion may be regarded as ‘something to
be manipulated rather than a voice that might alter government policy’
(1989, p. 189). In Britain, he noted then, ‘the tradition is that government is

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