Page 147 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

characteristics of both sets of actor for maximum advantage. For
the politicians, this requires giving the media organisation what it
wants, in terms of news or entertainment, while exerting some
influence over how that something is mediated and presented to the
audience.
As was the case with advertising, it would be a mistake to think
that media management in this sense is new in democratic politics.
Chapter 2 noted that the first newspaper interview with a public
figure was conducted in the United States in 1859 (Boorstin, 1962),
and that the first American news release was issued in 1907. The
interview form was imported to Britain in the 1880s, as subsequently
were all the techniques of influencing media coverage pioneered in
America (Silvester, ed., 1993).
We have traced the development of the political public relations
industry from the work of Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays at the turn
of the twentieth century. But, as with advertising, media management
has increased in political importance in parallel with the advance of
mass communication, and television in particular, which has provided
ever more opportunities (and dangers) for politicians to harness the
efforts and skills of professionals, and through them seek to influence
public opinion. Political parties, their leaders, and their public
relations advisers, have become steadily more sophisticated in their
appreciation of the implications for their media management efforts
of journalistic news values, technical constraints on newsgathering,
and commercial prerogatives. Since F.D.Roosevelt’s live radio
broadcasts in the 1930s, through Ronald Reagan’s reprisal of that
idea in the 1980s, to Bill Clinton’s ‘meet the people’ broadcasts of
the 1990s, and Tony Blair’s live statements and news conferences,
such as his description of Princess Diana in the hours following her
death as ‘the people’s princess’, politicians have become—thanks
largely to the new profession of media managers— more adept at
exploiting media. As we shall see, many journalists consider that the
process has pushed the media—politician relationship beyond that
state of mutual interdependence to one of media dependence on,
and deference to, politicians, and that journalists should now
consciously adopt a more detached, critical approach to the use of
these techniques.
For many analysts of political communication, the modern era of
political public relations begins with the Nixon—Kennedy presidential
debates of September 1960 (Kraus and Davis, 1981). Political
scientists agree that this event had a key impact in the 1960 campaign.
Here we note that the live presidential debate—now an American

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