Page 69 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 48

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION
Chapter 2 noted that a key objective of political communication is to set
the public agenda in ways favourable to an organisation’s achievement of its
goals. Politicians thus direct considerable energies to having their preferred
agendas accepted and endorsed by the media. The media, however, are
agenda-setters in their own capacity as providers of information, high-
lighting some issues and neglecting others, for reasons which are often
beyond the capacity of politicians to influence significantly. When the British
media pursued Tory Cabinet Minister David Mellor to resignation in 1992
over his affair with an actress, we can be sure that this was not an issue
placed on the news agenda by Conservative media managers. Rather, the
story was driven by commercial and other criteria (the need to sell news-
papers and the British fascination with sex scandals). These same pressures,
reinforced by some proprietors’, editors’ and journalists’ determination to
expose what they perceived as a tired and corrupt ruling elite, drove the
‘sleaze agenda’ which dogged the Conservative government throughout most
of its 1992–97 term, and contributed substantially to the party’s defeat in the
May 1997 general election. The 1997 electoral agenda was, in this respect
at least, set by the media, rather than the politicians.
By contrast, the general election campaign of 1992 witnessed careful and
largely successful efforts by all the major parties to set the news agenda
from day to day, with Labour’s emphasis on the future of the National
Health Service countered by the Tories’ stress on taxation and the Liberal
Democrats’ focus on proportional representation. Often, it is difficult to
distinguish the agenda-setting activities of the media from those of the
politicians in this way, but the distinction is important analytically.
A variation on the agenda-setting theme, and one which views the media
institutions as working closely with political actors, is advanced by
Greenaway et al., in their analysis of the factors involved in governmental
policy-making and implementation (1992). In the case of the HIV/AIDS
epidemic, they note that the issue was largely absent from the political
agenda until 1986 or thereabouts, at which point it began to receive exten-
sive media coverage. As a result of this coverage, argue Miller et al., the
Thatcher government began for the first time to use the media as an anti-
HIV/AIDS educational tool (Miller et al., 1998). The media, in this sense,
put HIV/AIDS on the public agenda, and permitted a response to the
epidemic at the official level. Before 1986 moral considerations prevented
the Conservative government (with its espousal of ‘Victorian’ moral values)
from acknowledging the scale of the HIV/AIDS problem, addressing its
causes, or applying preventive public health measures with the requisite
degree of sexual explicitness. When the media took the issue on – albeit in a
sensationalistic and often inaccurate and homophobic manner – these
constraints were removed. Thereafter, the media became an important
channel through which anti-HIV public health messages and policies could
be transmitted to the population. ‘The media could be seen to legitimate

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