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Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 49

THE POLITICAL MEDIA
government action, and then to provide the channels through which policy
was implemented. The net effect of press and TV attention was to establish
a climate of opinion which required governmental action, or gestures of
action’ (Greenaway et al., 1992, p. 87).
Greg Philo’s study of the ‘1984’ Ethiopian famine notes that although the
scale of the disaster was evident as early as 1982, it became an international
news story only in July 1984, when the BBC and ITN produced harrowing
filmed reports from the scene. Only then did the international community of
policy-makers formulate a response. The media played a key role in putting
the famine on to the international agenda. Philo concludes, ‘although it is
government and relief agencies which provide aid, the media are central in
galvanising an international response and in pressing governments to provide
more adequate levels of aid’ (1993a, p. 105). Journalist Martin Woolacott,
in an article pointing to the negative impact of the media’s agenda-setting
role in foreign news, observes wryly of the world’s disaster spots that ‘if you
are visible on television and in the papers, you are attended to. If you are
invisible you are dead, sometimes literally so’. 2
Molotch et al. describe the connection between media coverage and
political decision-making in terms of an ‘ecological’ model, based on ‘a need
for working models which include, not only ways of understanding how
public and policy actors form their agendas and perspectives, but how
journalistic agendas are shaped as well, and how these two sectors of reality-
making are interlinked’ (1987, p. 28) [their emphasis]. They add that ‘media
effects are embedded in the actions of the policy actor, just as the policy
actors’ own behaviour comes to be reflected in journalists’ formulations.
Media and policy are part of a single ecology in which cultural materials
cumulate and dissipate, often imperceptibly, throughout a media-policy web’
(ibid.).

SOME CRITICISMS OF THE MEDIA

To say that the media have important cognitive and agenda-setting effects in
modern democracies is perhaps, by this stage in our history, a statement of
the obvious. More contentious, however, is the benign view of the media’s
role described in the previous section. Many observers have challenged the
liberal democratic notion of the ‘public sphere’ and the media’s contribution
to it (Entman, 1989). For some, the very form of media output militates
against understanding on the part of the audience, while others perceive the
media as ideological institutions in societies where political power is not
distributed equitably or rationally but on the basis of class and economic
status.
The former criticism is voiced by Colin Sparks who notes the importance
for media culture, in Britain and in other capitalist societies, of ‘popular’,

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