Page 169 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 148

COMMUNICATING POLITICS
established in 1884 as a means of enabling parliamentary correspondents to
gain access to authoritative information about political events and govern-
mental business. So called because journalists originally assembled in the
lobby of the House of Commons, the system was institutionalised in 1921
and persists to the present day. Bernard Ingham describes the workings of
the Lobby thus:

Press officers speak as frankly as they feel able to members [of the
Lobby], either individually or collectively, on a background basis:
i.e. the journalist does not identify his source precisely in writing his
story. . . . This method of communication with journalists is
universally practised in government and other circles the world over
as a means of opening up the relationship [between government and
media].
(1991, p. 158)

Critics dispute both Ingham’s optimistic reading of the Lobby’s impact on
government–media relations, and his assertion of its ‘universality’. In Robert
Harris’s view:

by the late 1970s, most countries had a straightforward government
spokesman – a political appointee who would brief the press, appear
on radio and television, and promote the official line. But in Britain,
the spokesman was not only anonymous: he acted in accordance
with quasimasonic rules drawn up in Queen Victoria’s time. A
system which had been designed to preserve the quintessentially
English atmosphere of a gentleman’s club had been imported into
the television age.
(1991, p. 82)

The main criticism of this system of non-attributable media briefings was
that it permitted manipulation of journalists by politicians to a degree that
is unhealthy for and damaging to the democratic process. Cockerell et al.
argue that ‘its secretiveness mirrors the secrecy that surrounds so much of
government in Whitehall and allows the government of the day to present its
own unchallenged version of reality’ (1984, p. 42). This it can do simply
because journalists are forced to respect the rules, or face exclusion from the
system and the valuable information it supplies. In the extremely competitive
environment of the contemporary media industry this is not a realistic
option, although the Guardian and the Independent voluntarily withdrew
for a period in the 1980s, in the hope that change to the system would follow.
When, for example, Margaret Thatcher wished to leak damaging infor-
mation about ministerial colleagues who had fallen from favour, she frequently
employed Ingham, and the Lobby system, to do it, in the knowledge that

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