Page 170 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

POLITICAL PUBLIC RELATIONS

Press officers speak as frankly as they feel able to members
[of the Lobby], either individually or collectively, on a
background basis: i.e., the journalist does not identify his
source precisely in writing his story… This method of
communication with journalists is universally practised
in government and other circles the world over as a means
of opening up the relationship [between government and
media].
(1991, p.158)

Critics dispute both Ingham’s optimistic reading of the Lobby’s
impact on government—media relations, and his assertion of its
‘universality’. In Robert Harris’s view:

by the late 1970s, most countries had a straightforward
government spokesman—a political appointee who would
brief the press, appear on radio and television, and
promote the official line. But in Britain, the spokesman
was not only anonymous: he acted in accordance with
quasimasonic rules drawn up in Queen Victoria’s time. A
system which had been designed to preserve the
quintessentially English atmosphere of a gentleman’s club
had been imported into the television age.
(1991, p.82)

The main criticism of this system of non-attributable media
briefings was that it permitted manipulation of journalists by
politicians to a degree that is unhealthy for and damaging to the
democratic process. Cockerell et al. argue that ‘its secretiveness
mirrors the secrecy that surrounds so much of government in
Whitehall and allows the government of the day to present its own
unchallenged version of reality’ (1984, p.42). This it can do simply
because journalists are forced to respect the rules, or face exclusion
from the system and the valuable information it supplies. In the
extremely competitive environment of the contemporary media
industry this is not a realistic option, although the Guardian and the
Independent voluntarily withdrew for a period in the 1980s, in the
hope (unfulfilled) that change to the system would follow.
When, for example, Margaret Thatcher wished to leak damaging
information about ministerial colleagues who had fallen from favour,
she frequently employed Ingham, and the Lobby system, to do it, in
the knowledge that nothing said in briefings could be attributed to

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