Page 68 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 47

THE POLITICAL MEDIA
the three parties should be given as nearly as possible equal attention (ibid.,
p. 26).
The fact that airtime has been a scarce resource (at least until the advent
of cable, satellite and digital television) determined that the impartiality
principle be retained by British broadcasters throughout the twentieth
century, with some exceptions (such as coverage of Northern Ireland).
Opportunities for the expression of political opinion by broadcasting
journalists were thus extremely limited. The press, by contrast, with its
particular role in the free exchange or ‘marketplace’ of ideas, were permitted,
and indeed expected, to take up political positions. They were ‘partial’, as
opposed to the studied impartiality of the broadcasters. This meant that even
after the British press abandoned direct organisational links with political
parties in the nineteenth century (Negrine, 1993), individual newspapers
continued to have political views and expressed them in their content. The
democratic principle was preserved in so far as newspapers and periodicals
expressed a plurality of opinions, corresponding to the variety of opinions
circulating in the public sphere. The diversity of the party system was
paralleled in the pluralism of the press.
In adhering to these principles, therefore – objectivity and impartiality for
broadcasting, partisanship and advocacy for the press – the media performed, in
their different ways, their democratic role. And indeed, as audience research
and public opinion surveys have consistently shown, the media in the course
of the twentieth century came to represent for most people, most of the time,
their primary source of political information. The press and broadcasting
became ‘the principal means of “mediating”, that is, standing between people
and the world and reporting to them what they could not see or experience
themselves’ (Nimmo and Combs, 1983, p. 12) [their emphasis]. As Jay Blumler
puts it, ‘at a time when the public’s confidence in many social and political
institutions has steeply declined . . . voters have become more dependent on
media resources . . . for impressions of what is at stake, as previous suppliers
of guiding frameworks have lost their credibility’ (1987, p. 170).
The media not only provide cognitive knowledge, informing us about
what is happening, but they also order and structure political reality,
allotting events greater or lesser significance according to their presence or
absence on the media agenda.
Indeed, the agenda-setting function of the media is argued by many
observers to be their main contribution to the political process (McCombs,
1981). As citizens, we are unable to grasp or assimilate anything like the
totality of events in the real world, and thus we rely on the media to search
and sift reality for the most important happenings. During election
campaigns, for example, David Weaver points to ‘considerable support for
the conclusion that the news media are crucial in determining the public
importance of issues . . . at least those issues generally outside the experience
of most of the public’ (1987, p. 186).

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