Page 174 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

PRESSURE GROUP POLITICS

marginal political actors, and sometimes at the cost of real political
power. In other cases, a ‘dominant account’ or interpretation of
events has had to be revised to accommodate alternative or
oppositional views.
The Nixon administration’s withdrawal from the Vietnam War
was one such example. In this case radical change was forced on a
policy sponsored by the United States politico-military establishment
by a combination of pressure-group and journalistic activity (see
Chapter 9). The British Conservative government’s 1980s retreat on
the ‘poll tax’ (the refusal to retreat being an important factor in
Margaret Thatcher’s removal from office and replacement by John
Major) was occasioned not least by a groundswell of public opposition
to the policy, focussed on pressure groups of greater or lesser
extremism, and reported widely in the media (Deacon and Golding,
1994). The experience of the Major government after its election
victory of 1992 was one of constant challenge to its policy content
and style, in stark contrast to the 1980s, when ‘Thatcherism’ was
presumed to have become consensual. In Italy, as the tangentopoli
scandal emerged in 1993, an entire generation of politicians from all
parties was brought down by popular opinion.
The causes of these political shifts, and the contexts in which they
occurred, are of course very different. They all, however, highlight
the weaknesses of any theoretical framework which asserts the
existence of a deep structural bias on the part of the media towards
‘the powerful’, ‘the establishment’, or ‘the ruling class’ in modern
capitalist societies. Greek sociologist Nicos Poulantzas long ago
rejected, from a Marxist standpoint, the notion, of a ‘ruling class’ as
a meaningful political entity, preferring to think in terms of ‘class
fractions’, and alliances of class fractions, whose influence rose and
fell as economic and social circumstances changed. Thus, one could
1
identify the influence of ‘finance capital’ in 1980s Britain, and the
relative political impotence of ‘manufacturing capital’. Some
observers have argued that the sudden political demise of Margaret
Thatcher in 1990 can be viewed partly in terms of the reassertion of
British manufacturing capital in the context of a government whose
opposition to the concept of European union was endangering future
markets and prosperity. The same Conservative hostility to European
union has been cited as one explanation for the shift in business
support to Labour from 1994 onwards (in addition to the political
communication factors discussed already).
If economic classes (in the Marxist sense) can be divided, and
have contradictory political interests, so too the members of political

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