Page 202 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 181

POLITICAL COMMUNICATION IN A GLOBALISED WORLD
Afghanistan were never effectively communicated on the international stage.
If the 1980s were years of sustained propaganda warfare between NATO
and the Warsaw Pact, in which international public opinion was the prize to
be won, the USSR fought with two hands tied behind its back. Only when
Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, armed with an appreciation of news
management and public relations techniques, did the Soviet position on
events and issues begin to emerge with some accuracy in the Western media.
At the Reykjavik summit of 1988, for example, the Soviet side supplied a
news-hungry media with a rich diet of briefings (on and off the record) and
photo-opportunities. Raisa Gorbachev made herself available for the
cameras, while at the end of the summit her husband mounted a two-hour
tour de force news conference for the assembled media. Reagan, by contrast,
appeared hesitant and ill-briefed (McNair, 1991).
The years between 1985 and 1991, when Gorbachev led the Soviet Union,
illustrate the fact that source strategies are of profound importance in
international political communication. As the previous chapter argued, the
Western media, by virtue of their dependence on sources and attraction to
certain types of news material, will provide spaces for views not those of the
‘ruling elite’ to be reported. While the ideological biases of the media as a
whole during this period are amply documented, Gorbachev’s successful
advocacy of the Soviet perspective in the years of perestroika provide further
evidence of the potential of skilful public relations in challenging these
biases. It hardly seems an exaggeration to state that the end of the ‘new Cold
War’, and decades of East–West tension, were greatly facilitated by the
source strategies of Gorbachev and his media advisers and spokespersons.
The changes in presentation were accompanied, of course, by major devel-
opments in Soviet foreign and domestic policy, which might have rendered
the ‘Soviet threat’ concept untenable in any case. Of major importance,
however, is the fact that Gorbachev, as the public face of the Soviet Union
during these years, effectively communicated to the world a vision of Soviet
society, and an account of Soviet government policy, which undermined the
Cold War propaganda of the NATO allies and eventually made it appear
anachronistic. In this sense, one might even say, skilful political com-
munication brought an end to the Cold War.
The experience of the Cold War is an example of the fact that con-
temporary international relations are, like domestic election campaigns and
political debates, focused on and conducted through the channels of the mass
media, television in particular. Inter-state relations are negotiated by appeal
to domestic and global public opinion, from which governments and inter-
national organisations such as the United Nations seek to draw legitimacy.
As was noted in the introduction to this chapter, much diplomacy continues
in secret, but the immediacy and scale of modern reportage of diplomatic
affairs requires political actors always to consider the impact of their actions,
and communications, on public opinion.

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