Page 188 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

PRESSURE GROUP POLITICS

to invest cultural capital in many of these protests, and the
environment became a prominent issue in the news, as it was intended
to. Newspapers and broadcast news organisations recruited
environmental correspondents, and the proportion of routine news
coverage devoted to the subject increased.
A classic case of successful political communication by the
environmental movement was Greenpeace’s 1995 protest against
the planned disposal of the Brent Spar oil rig off the coast of
Scotland. The Shell company, whose rig it was, was eventually
compelled by the pressure of public opinion across Europe,
manifested in consumer boycotts of Shell products, and the
occasional torching of a Shell petrol station, to call off its Brent
Spar operation. This reversal had been achieved, despite vocal
support for the company from the British government (in whose
territorial waters the operation was taking place), entirely because
of the success with which Greenpeace commanded the news agenda.
Supported by a sophisticated media relations operation, Greenpeace
activitists boarded the deserted oil platform, moored in stormy
northern waters, in the process providing great pictures for television
news. The story was irresistible to journalists, and Greenpeace’s
propaganda (which later turned out to be false) about the
environmental dangers posed by Brent Spar set the agenda and
became the dominant reading. Greenpeace became, in this story at
least, the primary definers of reality.

Gay liberation
Another pressure group to achieve gains through media campaigning
in the 1990s was the gay rights movement. In Britain, a variety of
more or less polite demonstrations secured such long overdue
advances as the lowering of the homosexual age of consent to sixteen
in June 1998, and the repeal of the infamous Section 28 (introduced
by the Thatcher government in the 1980s, this legislation prohibited
local government from spending money on the ‘promotion’ of
homosexuality, including simple information and education for young
people about what homosexuality was, and why it was not an evil
force). Although the movement was divided between those, led by
such as Peter Tatchell, whose tactics included the staging of aggressive
demonstrations of ‘outing’ and pulpit-storming to secure media
coverage; and others, led by such as Sir Ian McKellen, who preferred
quiet lobbying of politicians and media, in the end a combination of
both approaches achieved a real shift in public perceptions of gayness

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