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CONCLUSION

Performance politics and the
democratic process

This book has described the growing involvement of mass communication
in a variety of political arenas, and the pursuit of what we might call
performance politics at all stages in the process by which issues emerge in the
public sphere to be debated, negotiated around and, on occasion, resolved.
We have examined the use of public relations, marketing and advertising
techniques by political parties, in campaigning and governmental mode
(sometimes, of course, the two are indistinguishable). We have noted the
enhanced role of opinion and media management in disputes between states,
between workers and their employers, and between governments and insurgent
organisations. We have considered the role of journalists and their media as
political reporters, interpreters, commentators, and agenda-setters, observing
how their relationship of inter-dependence with politicians has shaped the
behaviours and professional practices of both groups. We have considered
the emergence of online media channels, of citizen jounalists and content-
generating users of Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. And we have reviewed
the debate about the impact of these phenomena on citizens, on behalf of
whom, finally, politics, the media and the democratic process as a whole are
supposed to function.
While many of the processes described in the preceding chapters are
matters of fact, debate about the effects of political communication con-
tinues to occupy all those involved in the processes of public debate, election
and government, whether as protagonists, mediators or voters. I would like
to end, therefore, with some remarks on the current state of that debate,
before identifying some of the key outstanding issues.
I began with an epigraph from the pen of Walter Lippmann, identifying a
‘revolution’ in the ‘art of creating consent among the governed’, which
would ‘alter every political premise’. More than eighty years after those
words were written, their truth is self-evident. They apply, moreover, not
simply to those ‘in control of affairs’, but to those groups of greater or lesser
marginality whose political objectives are to challenge, subvert or capture
that control.

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