Page 17 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

here. Mediated politics, I continue to argue in this edition, is neither
the threat to normative standards of democracy suggested by
cultural pessimists, nor the panacea to the traditional limitations
of democratic representation identified by some of the more
optimistic commentators. Its benefits are huge, and its weaknesses
many. On balance, however, the time elapsed between the first and
second editions strengthens my belief—and my feeling, as a
reasonably well-informed citizen and an enthusiastic consumer of
mediated politics—that the vast quantity of political communication
now in circulation and accessible to anyone who wants it, and the
increasingly irreverent, often subversive, unpredictably chaotic
character of much of that communication towards politicians and
other elite members amounts on balance to an improvement in the
quality of the public sphere; an increase in its value as a democratic
resource, the full significance which we are still striving to
understand and assess. To that extent I take issue with the more
apocalyptic hypotheses of ‘dumbing down’, ‘tabloidisation’ and
‘infotainment’ which have driven recent debates in the
communication studies field, and which I critique more fully
elsewhere in my work on journalism (McNair 1998b, 1999). The
resignation as trade and industry secretary of Peter Mandelson in
December 1998, amid accusations of ‘cronyism’, reinforces the
argument of the first edition that spin doctors are not all-powerful
in the face of a competitive and unpredictable media. Mandelson’s
resignation was only the most spectacular of a series of
presentational failures experienced by New Labour in government,
and regardless of the detail of each case, the fact that such misfortune
could befall the most communicatively adept political party in
Europe must cast doubt on the more pessimistic assessments of the
spin doctors’ power to dictate to and manipulate the political media.
The researching and writing of this edition have benefited greatly
from my involvement in the ESRC-funded Political Communication
and Democracy project (reference number: L126251022), carried
out at Stirling University between 1996 and 1998. Although this
volume is not the place for the presentation of detailed empirical
findings, my work on that project—still in progress as this edition
goes to press—and the period of sabbatical leave which it funded,
has greatly assisted and informed my updating and revision of this
book, and I am grateful to research assistants Will Dinan and Deirdre
Kevin for their help in assembling some of the new data contained
here.
Brian McNair, April 1999

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