Page 173 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 152

COMMUNICATING POLITICS
holders and members of recognised elite groups. They are, to use Edie
Goldenberg’s phrase, ‘resource poor’ (1984). In Philip Schlesinger’s terms,
they lack ‘definitional power’ (1989).
Schlesinger’s phrase refers us back to Stuart Hall et al.’s work on ‘primary
definition’ (1978), which asserts a pattern of structured, differential access
to media (and the power to define issues which such access potentially brings
with it), favouring those in elite or dominant positions and discriminating
against marginal or subordinate groups. For Hall et al. the former, by virtue
of their privileged access to channels of mass communication, acquire the
status of ‘primary definers’ in public debate about current issues. Their
interpretations of events, their explanatory frameworks within which events
are made sense of, become consensual, while alternative explanations and
accounts are excluded or relegated to the margins, denied legitimacy.
Hall et al.’s work is informed by a Marxist problematic which seeks to
explain the relative invisibility of subordinate and oppositional accounts of
social reality in the mass media, while avoiding the crude, ‘vulgar’ materialism
of some Marxist academics. For Hall et al. primary definers become so not
simply because journalists and editors are ‘biased’ towards elite groups
(although straightforward ideological bias may be a sufficient explanation in
some cases) but as a result of the media’s structural relationships of depen-
dence on, and deference to, recognised authority. The journalist’s need for
reliable sources of information; editorial pressures to meet deadlines; and elite
groups’ typically more developed systems for meeting these needs, gives them
an inevitable advantage over the ‘dissident’ or oppositional group.
This organisational factor is reinforced by cultural assumptions on the
part of news-gatherers (which are widely shared in the society as a whole)
about which sources are the most reliable and authoritative on a given issue.
Thus the Labour Home Office Minister is automatically a primary definer
on law and order issues, while the views of the working-class resident of an
inner-city housing estate are not sought, unless on an occasional chat or
phone-in show with a ‘human interest’ angle.
The primary definition thesis is a compelling one, which has proved useful
in predicting and analysing patterns of access in media debate about a wide
range of political issues. Schlesinger and others have pointed out, however,
that it fails to account adequately for the complexity of mediated political
debate and the many cases where ‘primary definers’ have failed to impose
their primary definitions on the public debate as a whole. Recent political
history provides many examples of dominant or elite groups being, in effect,
defeated in public debate, often by the activities of relatively marginal
political actors and sometimes at the cost of real political power. In other
cases, a ‘dominant account’ or interpretation of events has had to be revised
to accommodate alternative or oppositional views.
The Nixon administration’s withdrawal from the Vietnam War was one
such example. In this case radical change was forced on a policy sponsored

152