Page 183 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 162

COMMUNICATING POLITICS
position, compelling them to find ways of participating in and contributing
to public debate which do not require material or cultural ‘capital’. For such
groups, the use and manipulation of the media to communicate political
messages is potentially the most effective way of achieving this intervention,
though even if media access is realised, it imposes many limitations on the
form and content of that message.
Pressure groups, unlike trade unions, comprise more or less broad cross-
class coalitions of individuals, united in their readiness to act collectively in
pursuit of a limited political objective (Simmons and Mechling, 1981). They
emerge as reactions to particular historical conjunctures, and usually decline
or disappear when these conditions change. Where trade union action
focuses on various kinds of obstruction of the production process, with the
media used as a device for communicating to and negotiating with a variety
of constituencies (union membership, employers, the public, etc.), pressure
groups are more concerned with symbolic demonstrations of concern about,
or opposition to, what are viewed by its members as undesirable social and
political trends. Thus the international peace movement, which we cite as a
case study in this section, emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a
response to what were perceived by many citizens in the US and Western
Europe as a disturbing deterioration in the NATO–Warsaw Pact relation-
ship, and a corresponding increase in the likelihood of nuclear war.
The ‘nuclear issue’, having been high on the political agenda in the 1950s
and early 1960s, lay dormant for many years, reflecting the period of
relatively stable relations between the US and its allies and the Soviet Union,
which came to be known as détente (McNair, 1988). With the rise of the
radical Right in Britain and the US at the end of the 1970s, however, and the
expanded military budgets and heightened anti-Soviet rhetoric which
accompanied that rise, the anti-nuclear movement once again began to grow.
In Britain, in the four years from 1979 to 1983 membership of the British
wing of the peace movement, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
(CND), grew nearly thirtyfold, from 3,000 to 80,000. Like most pressure
groups, CND included in its membership a politically and socially diverse
mix of individuals. For some, the motivation to campaign with CND was
religious or moral (pacifism). Others objected ideologically to NATO’s
aggressive (under the leadership of Ronald Reagan) and moralising approach
to the rest of the world, and its apparent readiness to countenance nuclear
war-fighting in Europe. Others simply thought of themselves and their
children, and feared for the future.
Although ‘resource poor’ in Goldenberg’s terms, CND and the peace
movement internationally possessed certain characteristics which made them
more ‘media-friendly’ than some pressure groups. Being diverse and socially
heterogeneous, they were not easily stereotyped as ‘left-wing’ or ‘subversive’,
although many attempts were made by government to do so. The move-
ment’s chief spokespersons (such as Monsignor Bruce Kent and Joan

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