Page 141 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

Opposition to this viewpoint is based not only on financial
grounds, but also on resistance to the ‘trivialisation’ of the political
process and the degradation of the public sphere discussed in Chapter
3. This returns us once again to a debate that continues to defy neat
resolution. As this edition went to press, there were no government
plans to permit paid political advertising on British television or radio,
and it seems unlikely that such a form of political communication
will ever be permitted on the main ‘terrestrial’ channels. A
consultation paper released by the main British broadcasters (BBC,
ITV, Channels 4 and 5, Independent Radio) after the 1997 election,
with a view to reforming the system of party political broadcasting
in the UK, stressed that ‘there is little enthusiasm amongst either
broadcasters or the political parties to move to a system of paid
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political advertising’. But some change is inevitable, probably in the
direction of concentrating the transmission of party political
broadcasts around election campaigns, and reducing the number of
broadcasts which take place outside campaign periods. For example,
the broadcasters would like to discontinue the tradition of
transmitting a ten-minute ‘talking head’ piece to camera by the
Chancellor, after the annual Budget speech in parliament (which is
by convention ‘answered’ by the main opposition spokespersons).
This is argued to be a reasonable reform in the context of expanding
live coverage of parliament, and the extended media coverage of it
which now takes place. On the other hand, should not the public be
permitted to hear the Chancellor explain, in his or her own words,
without the mediation of journalists, what the Budget that year is
about?
Here and in other features of the British PPB system, new
technologies which allow more and better coverage of parliament
(and the political process in general), and the force of commercial
pressures on access to broadcast airtime, make some degree of change
inevitable in the years to come. How much, and how quickly it will
be implemented, remain to be decided. Before long, however, there
will be hundreds of channels transmitting into people’s homes by
cable and satellite. The uses to which such channels might be put are
difficult to foresee, but paid political advertising on the American
model, on some of them at least, is clearly a possibility.

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