Page 34 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 13

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION
of the opinion industry, challenging the primacy of newspaper commentators’. 3
This trend has accelerated with the emergence of Twitter, Facebook, and social
networking, as we shall see below. Chapter 5 will consider how these online
channels of communication interact with the political process as a whole.
The media are important in the political process, finally, as transmitters of
messages from citizens to their political leaders. In their coverage of opinion
polls, for example, the media may claim to represent ‘public opinion’, which
takes on the status of a real thing by which to understand or evaluate the
political situation, often in terms critical of or admonitory to individual
politicians. In this way, the views of the citizen are communicated upwards,
often with observable effects on parties’ behaviour. Newspapers also publish
readers’ letters, providing a forum for public discussion of political issues. In
some newspapers, notably The Times, the letters page is likely to be read by
politicians as indicative of public opinion (or some significant portion of it),
and may be a significant consideration in policy-making. Broadcasting is now
awash with political debate and public access programmes, in which members
of the public are brought together to discuss the burning issues of the day, and
to express their opinions on these issues (McNair, 2000; McNair et al., 2003).
In January 1997, for example, Britain’s ITV broadcast Monarchy: The Nation
Decides. Advertised as the biggest live debate ever broadcast on British TV,
the programme allowed 3,000 citizens, egged on by a panel of pro- and anti-
monarchy experts, to express their views on the past and present performance
of the British monarchy, and its future role, in unprecedentedly critical terms,
which both the British royal family, and any government responsible for
stewarding the country’s constitutional development, would have been foolish
to ignore. There have been many such debates since. 4
The emergence of the internet has provided new opportunities for public
participation in political debate, such as blogging and ‘citizen journalism’.
Websites such as YouTube permit marginal political groups to make
statements with global reach. During the pro-reform demonstrations which
took place in Iran following the flawed election of June 2009, protesters used
Twitter and YouTube to post to the world video footage of regime violence,
including the death by gunshot of a young woman. Campaigners aboard the
flotilla of ships which sought to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza in May
2010 used Twitter to distribute real-time information about and video
footage of the incident.
For all these reasons, then, an understanding of the contemporary
political process is inconceivable without an analysis of the media, and a
substantial part of this book is devoted to that task.

The international stage
We turn, finally, to a category of political actor of growing importance in the
study of communication.

13