Page 72 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 51

THE POLITICAL MEDIA
engulfed the Conservative Party at the beginning of 1994; the revelations of
the Matrix-Churchill and cash-for-questions affairs and the intense, ongoing
media speculation around John Major’s qualities (or lack of them) as
Conservative prime minister which preceded his electoral defeat. In the US,
the major news story of the Clinton administration’s second term was a sex
scandal; the President’s affair with a White House staff member, Monica
Lewinsky.
For Fiske, such journalism is to be welcomed in so far as it produces a
‘disbelieving’ citizen, exposing suppressed official information and
discrediting establishment shibboleths. ‘The tabloid press [and increasingly,
as noted above, tabloid television] constantly attempts to incorporate
popular tones of voice and popular stances towards official knowledge . . .
this informed popular scepticism can be, if all too rarely, turned towards
events in the public, political sphere’ (1992, p. 61).
Fiske goes further, asserting that popular journalism is more honest, less
reactionary and more relevant to the world in which most citizens live than
the ‘quality’ journalism regarded as superior by the majority of liberal
commentators. For Fiske, the collision between commercial necessity and
popular rhetoric creates a space where significant political criticism and
dissent can surface. The existence of this space is independent of the ‘official’
political complexion of a media organisation. A good example of this phe-
nomenon was the monarchy debate referred to in Chapter 1. Presented by
Trevor McDonald, one of ITN’s most conservative and reverential broad-
casters, and broadcast at peak-time on the main commercial channel, the
programme was at times fiercely anti-royal, as the following angry statement
by one member of the participating audience shows:

The Queen is . . . the richest woman in the world. She is the head of
a rotten, class-ridden, corrupt political and social establishment
which is directly responsible for this nation’s terrible decline.

Carlton TV, which produced the debate, was no hotbed of political sub-
version, but in giving space to popular feelings about the monarchy (and
there were pro-monarchy statements too), in what was undoubtedly a
commercially-driven search for high audience ratings, a kind of subversion
was the result.
For other observers, however, the fact that the popular media, and
newspapers in particular, do have political allegiances, is more important to
an understanding of their democratic function than any acknowledgement,
no matter how generous, of their anti-establishment content. We have
already seen that in a capitalist society such as Britain, the press are per-
mitted to have opinions and are expected to express them. In a pluralist
democracy, ideally, those opinions should reflect the structure of partisanship
in the society as a whole, serving diversity and promoting rational debate, in

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