Page 155 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

Political journalism, as a result, is increasingly focussed on matters
of process rather than policy; on the hidden meanings behind the
surface appearance of political events. Some observers are critical
of this ‘relentless emphasis on the cynical game of politics’ (Fallows,
1996, p.31), warning that it diverts the citizens’ attention from the
‘real issues’. Labour home secretary Jack Straw, for example,
criticised ‘the quality of political journalism’ in Britain at the height
of the ‘cash-for-contacts’ scandal in 1998. In this case, the Observer
newspaper reported that lobbyists associated with the Labour
government (and at least one, Roger Liddle, in its employ at the
time) were selling their (claimed) privileged access to business clients.
This kind of ‘process’ journalism, argued Straw, was squeezing
substantive coverage of policy out of the media, at the expense of
trivia. On the other hand—and the frantic efforts of the Labour
leadership to discredit the Observer story when it broke in July
1998 might be thought to reinforce this point—journalistic
monitoring and deconstruction of the political process—including
the behind-the-scenes efforts of the lobbyists (see below)—are
arguably the citizens’ best defence against the increasingly
sophisticated efforts of the politicians and their media advisers to
create favourable media images of their clients.
Finally, under the category of media management, we turn to the
news conference, in which political actors make public statements
before audiences of journalists, which are then transmitted by print
and broadcast media to the wider citizenry. News conferences present
politicians with opportunities to set media agendas and thus influence
public debate during election campaigns, as in the routine pursuit of
politics between elections. Since Pierre Salinger first persuaded John
Kennedy to give live television news conferences in the early 1960s
they have become a presidential institution in the United States.
Trading, once again, on the inherent newsworthiness of presidential
utterances, and of reportable soundbites and pictures, presidents seek
to impose their reading of events on the political environment by
having it reported at the top of the main news bulletins. Hart’s book-
length study of presidential rhetoric notes that

the presidency has been transferred from a formal,
printoriented world into an electronic environment
specialising in the spoken word and rewarding casual,
interpersonally adept politicians… Presidents and their
staff [have] become expert in [the sociology of persuasion],
and much of their time is devoted to discovering the best

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