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Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 157

PRESSURE-GROUP POLITICS
the website operated by Australian Julian Assange, has frequently succeeded
in exposing material to the world which governments in the US and
elsewhere would much prefer had remained hidden. In one case, Wikileaks
put online a disturbing video depicting the killing of a group of Iraqis in
Baghdad by a US helicopter crew. For this leak, Assange was actively pursued
by the US and went underground. The material was available nonetheless,
presenting the US government of Barack Obama with an unwelcome agenda
of alleged war crimes, Pakistani state unreliability, and mounting military
losses. In this case, and in many others, new digital technologies with global
reach and widespread availability have altered the dynamics of pressure
group political communication.
In the remainder of this chapter we consider these issues in the context of
the experience of three different types of organisation: pressure groups
proper, such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth; illegal or ‘terrorist’
organisations, such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and al-Quaida; and,
to begin, the trade unions.

POLITICAL COMMUNICATION AND INDUSTRIAL
RELATIONS

The trade unions in Britain and other countries have traditionally been
among the most ardent critics of media ‘bias’ against their viewpoints on,
and definitions of, issues in which they have an interest, such as the economy,
employment rights and industrial relations legislation. Fuelled by the work
of the Glasgow University Media Group (GUMG) in the 1970s, it was
argued by trade unionists that the media reported such issues from an
inherently anti-labour, pro-capital perspective. Media accounts of the causes
of industrial disputes, for example, tended to be dominated by management,
while the viewpoints of the workforce were simplified and distorted.
Perceiving this to be the case trade unions, like many other left-of-centre
organisations with political agendas to pursue, came to view the media as
‘the enemy’ in an ongoing class struggle. To gain fair media coverage, it was
argued, the Left would have to build and sustain its own media channels, as
was attempted unsuccessfully with the Daily News experiment in Scotland
in the early 1970s (McKay and Barr, 1976), and the News on Sunday in 1986
(Chippindale and Horrie, 1988).
Since the late 1970s, however, trade unions have reassessed their rela-
tionship to the media, acknowledging that in addition to anti-labour biases
(of which there undoubtedly were and remain many, particularly amongst the
right-wing outlets) there are also spaces and opportunities for media coverage
which they can exploit.
Nicholas Jones’s still valuable study of the role played by the media in
industrial disputes asserts that the coming of Thatcherism fundamentally

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