Page 13 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

political public relations industry. Brave (and probably doomed to
failure) is the organisation which ventures into the contemporary
political arena without a more or less sophisticated understanding
of how the media work and the professional public relations
machinery capable of putting that knowledge to good use. For all
political actors, from presidents and prime ministers to trade union
leaders and terrorists, this is now recognised to be a major prerequisite
of successful intervention in public debate and governmental decision-
making.
If these trends are generally acknowledged to be real, they have
not been greeted with unanimous approval outside the offices of
the political public relations agencies themselves. For many, the
growing centrality of the media in the political process degrades
the latter, undermining its democratic characteristics and
transforming it into meaningless, empty spectacle. Others point
with distaste to the use of the media by avowedly undemocratic
organisations, such as the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland, to
influence public opinion in directions favourable to their political
objectives. More optimistic voices welcome the media’s heightened
political role as signalling a long overdue extension of democratic
participation. Others still resign themselves and their organisations
to the reality of an age when politics and the media are intimately
and forever bound together. Rather than complaining about the
increasing ‘mediatisation’ of the political process, these groups strive
to get in on the act.
This book is intended as both an introduction and a modest
contribution to that debate, which has become so prominent an
element of contemporary political discourse throughout the advanced
capitalist world. It will be of value, I hope, to the growing numbers
of students, researchers, teachers and concerned citizens with an
interest, professional or otherwise, in the relationship between
communication and politics.
My own interest in the subject derives from many years of research
and teaching in the field of journalism studies, in the course of which
it has become abundantly clear that what the media do is as much
the product of external factors—in the particular context of this book,
the activities of the political communications industry —as with such
intra-media considerations as journalistic bias, proprietorial
interference, or the routine practices of newsgathering. In previous
work I have examined the relationship between the political public
relations activities of, for example, the British Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament (CND), the British Labour Party, and the Soviet

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