Page 179 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

(GUMG) in the 1970s, it was argued by trade unionists that the
media—press and broadcasting—reported such issues from an
inherently anti-labour, pro-capital perspective. Media accounts of
the causes of industrial disputes, for example, tended to be dominated
by management, while the viewpoints of the workforce were
simplified and distorted.
Perceiving this to be the case trade unions, like many other left-
of-centre organisations with political agendas to pursue, came to
view the media as ‘the enemy’ in an ongoing class struggle. To gain
fair media coverage, it was argued, the left would have to build and
sustain its own media channels, as was attempted unsuccessfully with
the Daily News experiment in Scotland in the early 1970s (McKay
and Barr, 1976), and the News on Sunday in 1986 (Chippindale and
Horrie, 1988).
Since the late 1970s, however, and especially since the election of
the Thatcher government in 1979, trade unions have been obliged to
reassess their relationship to the media, acknowledging that in
addition to anti-labour biases (of which there undoubtedly were and
remain many, particularly amongst the right-wing tabloids) there
are also spaces and opportunities for media coverage which they can
exploit.
Nicholas Jones’s valuable study of the role played by the media in
industrial disputes asserts that the coming of Thatcherism
fundamentally transformed the environment within which they were
pursued. In the period before Thatcher came to office—sometimes
referred to as the era of ‘social democratic consensus’—unemployment
was relatively low, Labour governments were a reality (as they became
again, eighteen years after Thatcher first came to power), and
organised labour enjoyed a certain degree of economic and hence
political power, exemplified by its role in the downfall of Edward
Heath in 1974, and the ‘winter of discontent’ in 1978–9 which
eventually destroyed the Labour government of James Callaghan.
Industrial relations legislation permitted effective solidarity action,
such as mass picketing, which allowed workers in dispute to believe
that they had some chance of success if confrontation with employers
became necessary. Employers, for their part, had incentives to seek
agreement with workers in dispute, since strikes and other forms of
action could be long and costly.
After 1979 all this changed. The Thatcher government pursued a
policy of driving up unemployment to levels not seen in Britain since
the 1930s. It introduced wave after wave of anti-labour legislation,
designed to make effective combined and solidarity action increasingly

162