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Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 154

COMMUNICATING POLITICS
Party in government. At other times, such as the transfer of power from Bill
Clinton’s Democratic Party to George W. Bush’s Republicans in 2000, or from
Labour to a Conservative–Liberal coalition in 2010, the shift signals a more
fundamental change in the direction of a country’s government. At other
times still, such as the tangentopoli crisis in Italy, and the 2009 UK MPs’
expenses scandal, a wholesale cleansing of the political establishment takes
place, with commentators speaking of ‘revolution’.
In none of the above cases is the rotation of elites ‘revolutionary’ in the
true sense of signalling a transition from one type of social system (what
Marx called ‘mode of production’) to another, and the weakening of the
primary definition thesis (and similar Marxian-structuralist accounts of how
power is exercised at the cultural level) does not imply that the political arena
is completely open to unlimited dissent. But the reality of recent political
history has encouraged a movement away from sociological approaches
which view political, economic and cultural power as essentially static,
located in relatively fixed or rigid categories of class, sex, ethnicity, etc., to
one which focuses on the openness of the political communication process
and the opportunities available for subordinate groups to intervene meaning-
fully in the public sphere, having their alternative definitions of events
reported and taken seriously by the media, at which point they are much
more likely to be viewed as legitimate in public debate.
Such an approach asserts that there is no single ‘primary definition’ of an
event or an issue circulating in the public sphere at any given time. Rather,
there is a multiplicity of definitions, reflecting the interests of various collec-
tivities, within and outside the ‘establishment’. While one definition may be
dominant at a particular time, challenges will continually be mounted as
opposition groups seek to advance alternative definitions. Structures of
access to the media, through which the struggle for definitional primacy
principally takes place, are not rigid but flexible, and capable of accom-
modating, even under certain circumstances welcoming, challenges to the
establishment; such flexibility is, indeed, an integral legitimating feature of
the media in a liberal democracy.
As we noted in Chapter 4, the continuing credibility of the media’s fourth-
estate role requires, in conditions of liberal democracy, the maintenance of
journalists’ ‘relative autonomy’ from power elites. While we may readily
agree that the majority of the media in capitalist societies are, for economic,
organisational and ideological reasons, predisposed to certain sources and
viewpoints over others, we must acknowledge too that media organisations
have their own institutional interests to pursue, which include being seen to
be independent and objective and, in most cases, competitive and profitable.
These imperatives create opportunities for non-elite groups to gain access to
mainstream media.
The question thus arises: what are the conditions in which marginalised
political actors, aspiring to participate in public debate around an issue or to

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