Page 150 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

POLITICAL PUBLIC RELATIONS

are easily made, and not as easily recovered from. One of the decisive
events of the 1987 general election campaign occurred during
Labour leader Neil Kinnock’s interview with David Frost on the
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latter’s Sunday morning breakfast show. At that stage in the 1987
campaign Labour was doing reasonably well in the polls, and had
received some enthusiastic coverage for its advertising campaign
(see Chapter 6). In the course of the interview Kinnock implied,
during an attempt to explain Labour’s non-nuclear defence policy,
that the Soviets would not invade Britain, whether it had nuclear
or non-nuclear defence, because of the strategic difficulty of taking
the islands against determined opposition (including, he emphasised,
guerrilla warfare). This statement of an obvious military fact slipped
out almost unnoticed, until Conservative campaign managers
spotted it on recordings of the show and proceeded to develop a
powerful public relations and advertising campaign around the
theme of Labour’s incompetence on defence (see Figure 7.1).
Kinnock had inadvertently opened up the defence debate, on which
Labour was traditionally weak, and handed the Conservatives a
valuable opportunity to ‘score’.
Less prone to error, but equally useful in attracting and holding
media attention on a politician or organisation, are those types of
activity which fall into the category of ‘pseudo-event’ described in
Chapter 2. The pseudo-event, it was noted there, is a ‘happening’
which bears only a tenuous relationship to political reality. It has
meaning in and of itself, primarily as a media event. Some would
argue that the debate and interview-type events discussed above often
fall into this category, since there is clearly something rather artificial
and manufactured about the ways in which participants are set up,
questions framed, and answers carefully constructed. On the other
hand, they are often live, and the audience does have an opportunity
to make judgments about political actors based on their performances.
Closer, perhaps, to the ‘pure’ pseudo-event are occasions such as
party conferences which, in the latter part of the twentieth century,
have changed—particularly in the United States but increasingly too
in Britain and other advanced democracies— from being forums of
policy-resolution and decision-making into spectacles designed for
the maximisation of positive press coverage.
In the United States, where this change in the role and function of
the party gathering began, the Democratic and Republican
conventions have embraced, with unabashed enthusiasm, the
principles of show business. Meaningful political debate and
manoeuvring takes place behind the scenes, while in its public

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