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Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 39

THE EFFECTS OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATION
commercials’ (1984, p. 117). Robins and Webster suggest that the appli-
cation of marketing and advertising techniques to the political process

signifies something about the conduct of political life [in the
advanced capitalist world]: Saatchi and Saatchi [the UK-based
marketing and PR firm responsible for some of the most innovative
political advertising of the 1980s] is an index of the way in which
politics has been changing to become a matter of ‘selling’ ideas and
‘delivering’ up voters; a sign that ‘scientific management’ has entered
into politics and market values have permeated deeper into social
relations.
(1985, p. 53)

From this perspective, the notion that democracy has anything to do with
rationality and ‘public interest’ is an illusion, since we choose our politics on
the same grounds, and as a result of the application of the same techniques
of persuasion, as we choose our toothpaste. As Nicholas Garnham puts it in
his discussion of the public sphere, the rise of political advertising and public
relations expresses ‘the direct control of private or state interests of the flow
of public information in the interest, not of rational discourse, but of
manipulation’ (1986, p. 41). The rational citizen of classical liberal theory
has become ‘a consumer of politics and policies . . . the competing political
parties [present] electors with different policy options in broadly the same
way as firms [offer] rival products to the consumers’ (Greenaway et al.,
1992, p. 51).

POLITICS AND THE POST-MODERN

To this argument about the trivialisation of politics and the expulsion of
rational discourse from the process may be added the ‘post-modernist’
variant, in which political communication is viewed as the one-way exchange
of empty signifiers and meaningless messages across a barren media
landscape. An early pioneer of this apocalyptic view was Daniel Boorstin
who, as we noted, coined the term ‘pseudo-event’ in response to what he saw
as the increasing tendency of the mass media to be preoccupied with unreal,
unauthentic, manufactured ‘happenings’, or ‘synthetic novelties’. His
definition of a pseudo-event contained the following elements:

(a) It is not spontaneous, but comes about because someone has
planned, planted or incited it; (b) It is planted primarily for the
immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced. Therefore, its
occurrence is arranged for the convenience of the media. Its success
is measured by how widely it is reported. Time relations in it are

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