Page 185 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 164

COMMUNICATING POLITICS
example of this effect, Mr Heseltine’s announcement in 1983 that his
government would be spending some £1 million of public money on anti-
CND propaganda generated numerous headlines for the peace movement
and significantly raised its profile as a legitimate participant in the nuclear
debate. While an innovative approach to communication and media man-
agement permitted the peace movement to gain access to news media, official
responses to that access reinforced its visibility and authority. The Defence
Secretary’s ‘cultural capital’ was transferred, in part, to a competitor.
It would be misleading to suggest, however, that the peace movement came
anywhere near to dominating the debate as mediated by broadcasting and the
press. First, the defence establishment used its privileged access to intervene
at key moments in the peace movement’s campaigning. I have described in
detail elsewhere how governmental news management ensured that coverage
of a major CND demonstration held at Easter, 1983 was ‘framed’ by stories
about the Soviet threat (McNair, 1988), a rhetorical device which throughout
the ‘new Cold War’ was routinely presented by journalists as objective fact
rather than contestable assertion. The presentation of an anti-nuclear view-
point was consistently contextualised by a wider ‘reality’, that of the threat
nuclear weapons were supposed to protect us against.
Second, the content of ‘peace movement news’ was typically lacking in
explanation and analysis of the anti-nuclear argument. While journalists
undoubtedly gave extensive and often sympathetic coverage to the people
involved in demonstrations, there was rarely any attempt to examine the
detail of their case, or indeed its validity. As was noted earlier, the very nature
of news militates against considered analysis of events in preference to
coverage of the epiphenomenal, easily graspable aspects. In this respect the
peace movement, like other pressure groups (and political actors in general)
found it difficult to have its arguments, as opposed to its existence, reported.
One should qualify this observation by noting that spaces were occasionally
found in current affairs and in-depth news programmes of the type provided
by BBC’s Newsnight and Channel 4 News, for detailed articulation of the
anti-nuclear perspective.
As the East–West confrontation eased in the late 1980s, culminating in
the ‘end’ of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the peace
movement withered away. In terms of governmental decision-making,
historians will probably judge that the movement had negligible impact. In
the end, cruise missiles were installed in Europe, Britain commissioned the
Trident submarine system and the US government pursued its desired nuclear
weapons programmes. There was, however, a public debate about these
crucial issues in the 1980s, where there had been practically none in the
1960s and 1970s. The communication strategies and campaigning activities
of the international peace movement can reasonably take the credit for
forcing that debate, and requiring NATO governments to consider public
opinion, where they had not been used to doing so before.

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