Page 186 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 165

PRESSURE-GROUP POLITICS
Pressure groups in the 1990s

As the anti-nuclear weapons movement declined in the 1990s, so the
environmental movement came to prominence. Like CND in the 1980s, the
rise of the ‘greens’ was a response to growing perceptions of a new kind of
risk – away from the threat of nuclear war and towards the threat of
environmental disaster caused by human intervention in, and distortion of,
the natural order of things. This was the product of science, as it generated
worrying new knowledge about such problems as the hole in the ozone layer,
and then of politicians who began to incorporate environmental issues into
their policy agendas in a unique and somewhat unexpected way (exemplified
by prime minister Thatcher’s pro-environment speech of September 1988).
It was also the product of effective source strategies by the environmental
movement itself, which included new political parties (the Greens) and
pressure groups, most successfully Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.
Using the same non-violent, direct action techniques as CND a decade
before, these groups organised visually spectacular, powerfully symbolic (and
thus media-friendly) demonstrations against such threats to the environment
as nuclear power stations, the destruction of rain forests and the dumping of
industrial waste in the sea. Celebrities like the members of U2 and Sting were
enlisted to invest cultural capital in many of these protests, and the
environment became a prominent issue in the news, as it was intended to.
Newspapers and broadcast news organisations recruited environmental
correspondents, and the proportion of routine news coverage devoted to the
subject increased.
A classic case of successful political communication by the environmental
movement was Greenpeace’s 1995 protest against the planned disposal of
the Brent Spar oil rig off the coast of Scotland. The Shell company, who
owned the rig, was eventually compelled by the pressure of public opinion
across Europe, manifested in consumer boycotts of Shell products and the
occasional torching of a Shell petrol station, to call off its Brent Spar
operation. This reversal had been achieved, despite vocal support for the
company from the British government (in whose territorial waters the
operation was taking place), entirely because of the success with which
Greenpeace commanded the news agenda. Supported by a sophisticated
media relations operation, Greenpeace activists boarded the deserted oil
platform, moored in stormy northern waters, in the process providing great
pictures for television news. The story was irresistible to journalists and
Greenpeace’s propaganda (which later turned out to be false) about the
environmental dangers posed by Brent Spar set the agenda and became the
dominant reading. Greenpeace became, in this story at least, the primary
definers of reality. Since the 1990s the environment has moved to the top of
the global political agenda, as the reality of climate change has been
acknowledged and governments have been forced to begin to think seriously
about policy options. The increasing frequency of extreme weather events

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