Page 177 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

the opportunities for access which exist. Sources which cannot take
media access for granted must work to generate it, using skill,
innovation and knowledge to enhance their value for media
organisations. Such groups can, for example, increase their
newsworthiness by careful attention to interacting with the media,
cultivating contacts and responding to the organisational demands
of media production (for example, issuing news releases in time for
last editions and main evening news bulletins). As Edie Goldenberg
suggests, ‘a skilful source can build a relationship similar to that
which often exists between resource rich source and beat reporter, in
which the reporter depends on the source for news and, as a result,
the reporter is willing to listen to and act on behalf of the source’s
interests’ (1984, p.237).
In this sense, the group or source must cultivate dependence,
through generating newsworthiness, which requires an
understanding of what constitutes newsvalues. Goldenberg argues
that newsworthiness is partly a function of difference, and is
increased ‘the more a group’s political goals deviate from prevailing
social norms’ (Ibid., p.234). Collins’s discussion of counter-cultural
religious movements notes how they have frequently gained ‘access
to a public voice’ by cultivating and generating controversy (1992,
p. 116). A group’s newsworthiness, and thus access, is also increased
if its goals parallel a currently newsworthy issue, and if they are
specific and relatively easy to make sense of for the journalist and
can be associated with already-established ‘definers’ and sources
(such as the peace movement’s association with retired military
personnel in the 1980s).
King makes the obvious point that access to the media is strongly
influenced by ‘performance factors’ such as ‘situational credibility,
perceived sincerity, and rhetorical skill in conveying the message’
(1987, p. 10). For groups without the culturally validated authority
of elite sources, access can also be achieved by recourse to forms of
‘spectacular’ action—demonstrations of anger, determination, or
campaigning ingenuity which provide media organisations with
attractive and valuable news material and thus increase the likelihood
of coverage.
Media management of this type can and frequently does generate
substantial coverage for a political viewpoint or cause which might
otherwise be invisible to the mainstream media audience, a fact which
has led to the gradual adoption by pressure groups and other
subordinate sources of the whole battery of political communication
techniques (subject, of course, to resource limitations). However, just

160