Page 35 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 14

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION
Recent decades have seen the political arena become more international,
as the media have extended their reach, geographically and temporally. In
the twenty-first century media audiences are the targets of political com-
munication not only from domestic sources, but foreign ones. Foreign
governments, business organisations, and terrorist groups such as al-Quaida,
all use the global information system to further their political objectives.
Traditional forms of interpersonal international diplomacy persist, but
modern wars, liberation struggles and territorial disputes are increasingly
fought out in the media, with global public opinion as the prize (since the
protagonists – governments and international bodies like the United
Nations – are presumed to be responsive to public opinion). As Walter
Lippmann recognised in the early 1920s, ‘governments today act upon the
principle that it is not sufficient to govern their own citizens well and to
assure the people that they are acting wholeheartedly on their behalf. They
understand that the public opinion of the entire world is important to their
welfare’ (quoted in Bernays, 1923, p. 44).
Efforts to influence international public opinion and policy are clearly
political communication as we have defined it in this introduction, and
Chapter 9 is devoted to analyses of some prominent examples of such efforts,
including the Falklands, Gulf and Yugoslavian wars, and the broader
propaganda campaigns which accompanied the seventy years of East–West
conflict, the Cold War. The discussion also considers the political com-
munication dimension of the events of 11 September 2001 and their after-
math in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

CONCLUSION

This book, then, is about political communication in the very broadest sense,
incorporating the communicative practices of all kinds of political organ-
isations (and some, such as British public service broadcasting, which are not
supposed to be ‘political’ at all), in both domestic and international arenas.
Throughout, I have referred to the form of polity with which the book is
chiefly concerned as ‘democratic’, although the discussion, particularly of
international political communication, will necessarily include societies, such
as the former Soviet Union and Iraq under Saddam Hussein, which could not
be so described. By ‘democracies’ I mean, simply, societies in which govern-
ments rule primarily through consent rather than coercion; where political
leaders have popular legitimacy, if not necessarily always popularity, and
where the views of the citizen as expressed through the ballot box and
elsewhere are declared to be meaningful. In the next chapter we examine
how such societies are supposed to work, and the role played in them by
political communication.

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