Page 28 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 7

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION
A third commercially influenced category of political communication
activity is that of public relations – media and information management
tactics designed to ensure that a party receives maximum favourable
publicity, and the minimum of negative. Activities covered by the rubric of
‘public relations’ include proactive devices such as party conferences which,
as we shall see, are in contemporary politics designed principally to attract
positive media coverage of an organisation; news conferences, which permit
parties to (attempt to) set political agendas, particularly during election
campaigns; and the employment of image managers to design a party’s (and
its public leaders’) ‘look’.
Reactive political public relations techniques, in which parties strive for
damage-limitation, include the lobbying of journalists, the ‘spinning’ of
potentially damaging stories, and the suppressing of potentially damaging
information.
The design and execution of these forms of political communication is the
province of that new professional class referred to in the Preface – nowadays
known variously as media or political consultants, image-managers, ‘spin-
doctors’, and ‘gurus’ – which has emerged in the course of the twentieth
century and is now routinely employed by political parties all over the
democratic world.

Public organisations
If parties are at the constitutional heart of the democratic political process they
are not, of course, the only political actors. Surrounding the established institu-
tions of politics are a host of non-party organisations with political objectives.
Some, like the British trade unions, have clear organisational links with one or
more of the parties (the trade unions, indeed, gave birth to the Labour Party
as the organised political expression of workers’ interests).
Others, such as consumers’ associations, NGOs and corporate lobby
groups, will be more peripheral, dealing as they do with relatively narrow
constituencies and issues. Others will, by virtue of the tactics which they
adopt, be excluded from constitutional politics altogether, and may have the
status of criminal organisations.
We may divide these non-party actors into three categories. First, trade
unions, consumer groups, professional associations and others may be
defined as public organisations. They are united not by ideology but by some
common feature of their members’ situation which makes it advantageous
to combine, such as work problems (trade unions), or the weakness of the
individual citizen in the face of large corporations (consumer groups).
Corporations themselves engage regularly in political communication, or
lobbying, designed to influence governmental decision-makers.
In such organisations individuals come together not just to help each other
in the resolution of practical problems associated with their common

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