Page 91 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 70

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION
they articulated ‘public outrage’ about this crime wave, and encouraged the
judiciary to come down hard on convicted ‘muggers’. In short, the press were
major contributors to the creation of a moral and political climate of
enhanced police repression, which had very real consequences for young
blacks in Britain. Following the massacre of schoolchildren and their teacher
by a gunman at Dunblane in 1996, the press actively campaigned for the
introduction of draconian restrictions on firearms – even those used by
competitors in Olympic shooting competitions. Like the case of ‘devil dogs’
in the early 1990s, when a wave of savaging incidents by pit-bull terriers and
Rottweilers resulted in ill-thought out and ineffective legislation to clamp
down on ‘dangerous dogs’, the anger and revulsion caused by the Dunblane
incident was seized on by the press to push politicians into what many
observers regarded as hasty, vote-catching legislation of little practical rele-
vance to the circumstances which caused the killings in Dunblane to occur.

THE PUBLIC VOICE OF THE PRESS

While news can be and frequently is used in the manner described here, there
are more ‘authored’ forms of political intervention available to the press. The
most important ‘voice’ of a newspaper is its editorial, which embodies its
political identity. It also, as Hall et al. noted in Policing the Crisis, seeks to
articulate what the newspaper’s editors believe to be the collective voice of its
readers. Hence, editorials in the Sun and the Sunday Times, although
expressing fundamentally similar political viewpoints, determined largely by
the opinions of parent company News Corp, will address the issues of the day
in completely different terms. The Sun claims to ‘speak’ for the working
classes, voicing their frequently racist, sexist and xenophobic prejudices,
while at the same time irreverential and critical of the establishment, whether
it be in the form of Royal ‘scroungers’, gay judges or two-timing Tory politi-
cians. The Sunday Times seeks to hold on to and expand its relatively young,
affluent readership with a right-of-centre iconoclasm which, like the Sun, is
by no means averse to putting the editorial boot into the establishment.
At the other end of the political spectrum, the Guardian’s editorials reflect
the kinder, gentler views of that paper’s liberal, left-of-centre readers. The
Financial Times speaks with the detached, business-like voice of hard-headed
British capital, and so on.
There is of course no necessary connection between the public voice of a
newspaper’s editorial and the actual beliefs of its readers. We have already
noted the distinction between the Daily Star’s pre-1997 editorial support for
the Conservative Party and the Labour-supporting views of most of its
readers. The Sun’s thundering endorsement of Tony Blair in the 1997 election
neglected the fact that a substantial proportion of its readers still supported
the Conservatives. But there is a clear commercial motive for a newspaper to

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