Page 57 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 36

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION
public opinion, regardless of their intellectual qualities. The image of the
leader, it is argued, counts for more than his or her abilities; the smoothness
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of delivery of a political message for more than its content. The integrity of
politics, in short, is undermined.
Undoubtedly, image is perceived to be more important than it once was.
Ronald Reagan, it is universally accepted, was not a great American presi-
dent because of his powerful intellect, but because of how, with the assis-
tance of his actor’s training, he articulated his simple, homely messages. He
was ‘the great communicator’ rather than the great thinker. Conversely,
Michael Foot, the Labour Party’s leader from 1980 until 1983, was acknow-
ledged by supporters and opponents alike to have been a formidable intel-
lectual and a skilful party manager. In the age of television, unfortunately, he
did not look and sound ‘right’. After Labour’s 1983 defeat he was quickly
shunted off into back-bench retirement, to be replaced by the more ‘media-
friendly’ Neil Kinnock. In more recent times, all observers agree that Tony
Blair, leader of the British Labour Party from 1994 to 2007, was an excellent
communicator, leading his party to three consecutive general election
victories. His successor Gordon Brown, by contrast, was deemed a failure in
this respect, his unease with modern media techniques regarded as a
contributing factor in Labour’s election defeat of 2010. Brown’s alleged
insincerity and apparent awkwardness in working with YouTube and other
new media channels became a serious liability for him, despite his universally
acknowledged strengths as a politician of seriousness and depth.
These examples are regularly cited by those who bemoan the ascendancy
of the image as a deciding factor in voting behaviour. The trend is alleged to
represent a move away from the rationality of the democratic ideal to a more
irrational, fickle political process in which the ‘real’ issues are marginalised
by trivial considerations of appearance and personality.
An opposing argument asserts that the importance of image is overstated.
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How, such voices ask, did George Bush – Doonesbury’s ‘invisible man’ –
win the 1988 presidential election? How did John Major, whose Spitting
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Image puppet portrayed him with a deep grey pallor, defeat the more
charismatic Kinnock in 1992? The suggestion here is that voters are in fact
less vulnerable to manipulation by glossy images than has become the
received wisdom, and that, in any case, one voter’s attractive, homely leader
is another’s synthetic conman. John Major’s success in the 1992 general
election has been attributed by some to the fact that he was not packaged in
the manner of a Reagan, Thatcher or Kinnock, but stood for himself, warts
and all. Some observers detected a backlash in the 1990s to the parties’ focus
on image (Bruce, 1992), and a return to ‘authentic’ campaigning tactics,
although this predated the election of Tony Blair as the Labour leader in
1994 and his party’s landslide victories in the subsequent elections of 1997
and 2001. Both events have been perceived, correctly, as triumphs of political
marketing and image management (the re-branding of Labour as ‘New’ and

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