Page 185 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

UK) were well-educated members of the middle class—liberal, rather
than radical, as were many of CND’s ordinary members. It was able
to draw on the resources of many supporters in the creative
professions—musicians, designers, writers, and actors. And it was
explicitly committed to a strategy of ‘non-violent’ opposition to
nuclear weapons.
To exploit these attributes the peace movement developed a
political communication strategy which saw it successfully gain access
to the mainstream news agenda in Europe and the United States.
Huge demonstrations were organised in London, New York, and
other cities in the early 1980s, providing television news organisations
in particular with highly attractive visual material. While some
broadcasters deliberately excluded such images from their output
(on the curious grounds that it did not contribute anything to the
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‘debate’ —a criterion of newsworthiness which, if applied
consistently, would leave our television news screens blank for most
of the time) the majority reported the demos, and the other spectacular
events organised by the peace movement in these years. Even symbolic
actions undertaken by relatively small groups of people, such as the
vigils carried out by women at the Greenham Common nuclear
airbase, or the ‘die-ins’ staged outside the London Stock Exchange,
were reported on main news programmes. In their innovative design
and effective execution of such events, peace movements in Britain,
the United States, Germany and elsewhere ‘manufactured’ news and
turned the media into transmission belts for a potent political
message—there is a growing risk of nuclear conflict between the
superpowers, and we are here to protest about it.
The perceived threat to political stability posed by the
demonstrators, and growing popular opposition to a central tenet of
the Western powers’ strategic military policy, was sufficient to
generate a sustained counter-offensive on the part of NATO
governments. In Britain, the Defence Minister Michael Heseltine was
frequently filmed at the Berlin Wall, warning citizens of the ‘threat’
against which NATO’s nuclear weapons were the only protection.
On one famous occasion he took part—suitably attired—in a military
expedition to ‘retake’ the Molesworth cruise missile base from
protesters who had camped outside its perimeter fence. This event,
indeed, was largely responsible for Mr Heseltine’s acquiring the
nickname of ‘Tarzan’, which haunted him for the rest of his time in
government.
These events, like those of the peace movement on the opposite
side of the political divide, were symbolic acts of political

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