Page 12 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

PREFACE AND
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

More than seventy years ago Walter Lippmann observed that the
practice of democracy had ‘turned a corner’ (1954, p.248). The
democratic process, it seemed to him four years after the end of the
First World War had, to an extent unprecedented in human history,
come to incorporate self-conscious strategies of persuasion by political
actors. The gradual extension since the early nineteenth century of
voting rights to wider and wider sections of the population, combined
with the emergence of media of mass communication, had
fundamentally transformed the nature of the political process, for
better or worse. No longer could it be assumed that political action
derived from the collectively arrived at will of rational, enlightened
men (for men they exclusively were, of course) of property and
education. Henceforth, the masses would decide, through their
exercise of the vote, and the influence of public opinion on the political
process.
But public opinion, Lippmann recognised even in 1922, was a
constructed, manufactured thing, which could be shaped and
manipulated by those with an interest in doing so. To that end, he
noted the rise of a new professional class of ‘publicists’, or ‘press
agents’, standing between political organisations and media
institutions, whose job it was to influence press coverage of their
clients, and thus, they hoped, public opinion.
Now, as we approach the end of the twentieth century, these trends
have accelerated and deepened, until not only ‘the practice of
democracy’ but politics in all its forms is played out before a mass,
sometimes global audience, through electronic and print media which
have made McLuhan’s metaphor of the planet as a shrinking ‘global
village’ into a truism. As the role of the media in mediating between
politicians and public has increased, so has the importance of those
publicists, press agents and others in what we may refer to as the

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