Page 44 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 23

POLITICS, DEMOCRACY AND THE MEDIA
Capitalism and power

Socialist and Marxist critiques of liberal democracy are more fundamental,
arguing that the real loci of power in capitalist societies are hidden behind
formal political procedures: in the boardrooms of big business; in the
higher reaches of the civil service and security apparatus; in a host of
secretive, non-elected institutions. The people may elect a Labour govern-
ment, the argument goes, but any attempt to implement a genuinely socialist
programme (even if the government wanted to do so) inevitably meets with
resistance in the form of bureaucratic obstruction, flights of capital abroad,
the use of the Royal prerogative, and dirty tricks of the type described by
Peter Wright in Spycatcher (1989). From this perspective, the democratic
process as pursued in Britain and most other developed capitalist societies
is merely a facade, behind which the real levers of political and economic
power are wielded by those for whom the citizenry never has an opportunity
to vote.
Some of these criticisms are accepted even by the most ardent defenders
of liberal democracy. Let us assume, however, that the procedures of
democratic politics are fundamentally sound; that election results are
meaningful and effective in shaping governments and their behaviour; and
that voters will respond rationally to the political information they receive
from the media and elsewhere. Were all these assumptions justified, we may
still identify a fundamental weakness of democratic theory as it relates to the
media. According to the theory, the citizen is a rational subject who absorbs
the information available and makes appropriate choices. He or she is, as it
were, the repository of knowledge existing out there in the world, which is
converted unproblematically into political behaviour. In reality, however,
what the citizen experiences as political information is the product of several
mediating processes which are more or less invisible to him or her.

The manufacture of consent

These processes begin with the politicians. The legitimacy of liberal
democratic government is founded, as we have noted, on the consent of the
governed. But consent, as Walter Lippmann observed in the work cited
above, can be ‘manufactured’. ‘The manufacture of consent’ (1954, p. 245),
indeed, had as early as 1922 become a ‘self-conscious art’ in which politi-
cians combined the techniques of social psychology with the immense reach
of mass media. The detailed analysis of these techniques and their evolution
over time will be the subject of most of this book, but by acknowledging
their existence at this point we recognise a major flaw in democratic theory:
if the information on which political behaviour is based is, or can be, manu-
factured artifice rather than objective truth, the integrity of the public sphere

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