Page 89 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 68

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION
but develop over time in the interaction and competition between different
news media, and between the various actors in, or sources of, a story. Over
time, competing frameworks are narrowed down and eliminated until one
dominant framework remains. Although always subject to challenge and
revision, the dominant framework, once established, provides the structure
within which subsequent events are allocated news value, reported and made
sense of.
For example, the dominant narrative framework for making sense of
events within the British Conservative Party following the 1992 election can
be expressed in terms of a ‘leadership crisis’. Political journalists – encour-
aged by Thatcherite elements in the Conservative Party resentful of their
leader’s abrupt dismissal from office – told a continuing story of John
Major’s buffeting by the harsh winds of political misfortune. The ‘story’ of
the Labour Party over the same period, on the other hand, was the relatively
positive one of modernisation and renewal. When Labour leader John Smith
died suddenly on 12 May 1994, media coverage of his success in trans-
forming the party’s image and improving its ‘electability’ was uniformly
positive. Tony Blair’s election as Labour leader on 26 July that year took
place in an atmosphere of euphoric endorsement of his abilities, shared even
by such formerly right-wing organs as the London Evening Standard.
Journalists also appreciated New Labour’s skill in public relations and news
management, and the invincibility of Labour’s ‘spin doctors’ (see Chapter 7)
became a powerful narrative framework in the media’s making sense of
Labour’s transition to an electable government. The Conservatives, mean-
while, were dogged from 1994 onwards not only by having all they said and
did interpreted as part of the ongoing leadership crisis, but also by the
developing narrative of sleaze, which added corruption and moral hypocrisy
to the party’s perceived problems. From ‘leadership crisis’ the dominant
framework for making sense of the Conservatives developed into one of
decay, decline and imminent defeat. So powerful did this framework become
as a journalistic structuring device that nothing the party leadership could
do to highlight the strengths of the economy (and when the Tories left office
in 1997 the economy was performing exceptionally well by British
standards) could undermine it. In the period between Tony Blair’s resignation
as prime minister in June 2007 and the Labour Party’s general election defeat
in May 2010 the narrative framework for reporting British politics was
centred on the communicative failures of Gordon Brown, and the economic
mistakes of his government.

THE PRESS

The press and broadcast media, by the nature of their functioning and role,
employ different modes of intervention in politics. The former, as we have

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