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Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 206

COMMUNICATING POLITICS
the presentational skills of a Tony Blair or a Peter Mandelson prevent a
socialist message from getting through to it, if that indeed is what the Labour
Party wishes to promulgate?
I would submit that the ‘romantic pessimists’, as I shall call them, make
the mistake of confusing form and content in political communication, and
of contrasting – unfairly – the current reality of mass, albeit mediatised,
political participation with a mythical golden age when rational, educated
citizens knew what they were voting for and why. However imperfect
modern mediatised democracy may be, it is surely preferable to that state of
public affairs which existed not so long ago when political power was
withheld from all but a tiny minority of aristocrats and the bourgeoisie.
The ‘pragmatic optimists’, by contrast, embrace a new age of digitised,
inter-active, ‘town-hall’ democracy, peopled by a media-wise, culturally-
knowing electorate immune to such blunt instruments as propaganda and
brainwashing. Subscribers to this view, some of whom have a vested interest
in the industry which manages and directs it, argue not only that per-
formance politics are here to stay, but that we are stronger as democracies
for it. This perspective challenges the view that what one says is more
important than how one says it, asserting instead that the voter can learn as
much from a politician’s more or less spontaneous performance than from
his or her rational debate of the issues. The enhanced use of mass communi-
cation has made the political process more open, rather than less.
Elsewhere I have articulated qualified support for this position (McNair,
2000, 2006). While politics has indeed become, for the first time in human
history, a mass spectator sport, it is nevertheless one in which citizens have
real power to decide outcomes. Politicians employ a wide array of manipu-
lative communication-management techniques but, as we have seen, these
are subject to mediation, comment and interpretation by the meta-discourse
of political journalism, to which voters are relentlessly exposed. Politics in
the age of mediation may have the character of a complex game, but it is one
which media commentators and citizens alike have become increasingly
adept at playing.
There are, however, important qualifications which must be made to the
optimists’ arguments. Most obviously, access to the resources required for
effective political communication is neither universal nor equitable. The
design, production and transmission of political messages costs money. In a
capitalist system, this simple fact inevitably favours the parties and organ-
isations of big business. Who could state with confidence that the dramatic
electoral success of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia movement owed nothing to his
control of so much of the Italian media system? Or that the financial support
of Lord Ashcroft for the Conservative Party’s campaign in marginal seats did
not influence the 2010 electoral outcome? Chapter 8 argued strongly that
innovation and skill in the techniques of media management can partially
offset this resource imbalance for marginal political organisations but, to the

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