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Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 209

NOTES

1 POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION
1 For a recent book-length discussion of how the environmental issue became a
news story in the late 1980s and 1990s, see Anderson, 1997.
2 Work undertaken by the Glasgow University Media Group in the 1970s and
1980s claimed to show anti-labour, pro-business bias in broadcast news coverage
of key industrial disputes which took place in those years (1976, 1980). ‘Bias’ was
also argued by the Group to have accompanied coverage of the left–right split
which dominated the affairs of the Labour Party in the 1980s (1982). On the
subject of Northern Ireland, several writers have presented accounts of how
coverage of ‘the Troubles’ was slanted towards the interests of the British state
(Schlesinger, 1987; Curtis, 1984).
3 O. Burkeman, ‘The new commentariat’, Guardian, 17 November 2005.
4 For a discussion of broadcast talk shows, including those which cover non-party
political themes, see Livingstone and Lunt, 1994.

2 POLITICS, DEMOCRACY AND THE MEDIA
1 See Mill’s essay ‘On Representative Government’, contained in his Three Essays
(1975).
2 Robert Worcester’s survey of attitudes after the 1992 general election shows that
this continues to be the case in Britain, although there is evidence that, as
Worcester puts it, ‘the boredom factor is increasing’ (1994, p. 12). Worcester finds
that ‘a growing proportion of the [British] public now feels that the media
generally, and television specifically, have provided too much or not the right
coverage of election[s]’.
3 For Baudrillard, writing in the early 1980s, the masses experience mediatised
politics principally as an entertainment experience, like television football. ‘For
some time now’, he writes, ‘the electoral game has been akin to TV game shows
in the consciousness of the people. . . . The people even enjoy day to day, like a
home movie, the fluctuations of their own opinions in the daily opinion polls.
Nothing in all this engages any responsibility. At no time are the masses politically
and historically engaged in a conscious manner. Nor is this a flight from politics,
but rather the effect of an implacable antagonism between the class which bears
the social, the political culture – master of time and history, and the un(in)formed
residual, senseless mass’ (1983, p. 38).
4 For an account of the 1997 general election campaign, by someone who
participated in it as a political reporter for the BBC, see Jones, 1997.

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