Page 63 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 42

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION
that there are effects sufficient to justify substantial expenditure on time and
resources. As Doris Graber has noted, ‘one cannot deny that people
throughout the world of politics consider the media important and behave
accordingly. This importance . . . is reflected in efforts by governments
everywhere, in authoritarian as well as democratic regimes, to control the
flow of information produced by the media lest it subvert the prevailing
political system’ (1984a, p. 19). Arterton suggests of the US that ‘those who
manage presidential campaigns uniformly believe that interpretations placed
upon campaign events are frequently more important than the events
themselves. In other words, the political content is shaped primarily by the
perceptual environment within which campaigns operate’ (1984, p. 155).
Molotch et al. agree that, without regard to the empirical measurability of
effects, ‘elected politicians, other political activists and agency policy-makers
usually “perceive” that media are critical to both public attitude formation
and to the policy process’ (1987, p. 27) [their emphasis]. Baudrillard, with
typical mischievousness, put it well when he observed that ‘we will never
know if an advertisement or opinion poll has had a real influence on
individual or collective will, but we will never know either what would have
happened if there had been no opinion poll or advertisement’ (1988, p. 210).

Further reading
Habermas’ analysis of the media’s negative impact on the democratic
process is set out at length in The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere (1989). A more recent and readable critique of political
media, as seen from the French perspective, is set out in the late Pierre
Bourdieu’s On Television and Journalism (Pluto, 1999). ‘Optimistic’ and
‘pessimistic’ perspectives on the evolution of the political public sphere
are compared in my own Journalism and Democracy (Routledge, 2000).
Chadwick and Howard’s Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics
(2009) contains a number of essays exploring the impact of digital
communication on voter behaviour and electoral outcomes. Nic
Newman’s Reuters’ Institute study of the role of the internet in the
2010 British general election considers the impact of social networking
and other emerging channels on levels of political engagement,
electoral turnout and party campaigning techniques (2010). In the
same series, Nik Gowing revisits his earlier work on the impact of
globalised media and political communication on government decision
making (2009).

42