Page 232 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

NOTES

their own opinions in the daily opinion polls. Nothing in all this engages
any responsibility. At no time are the masses politically and historically
engaged in a conscious manner. Nor is this a flight from politics, but
rather the effect of an implacable antagonism between the class which
bears the social, the political culture—master of time and history, and
the un(in)formed, residual, senseless mass’ (1983, p.38).
4 For an account of the 1997 general election campaign, by someone who
participated in it as a political reporter for the BBC, see Jones, 1997.
5 Duncan Campbell, the British investigative journalist who made his
reputation from the exposure of facts which government and the security
services would rather keep secret. Campbell’s notable successes include
his publication of the details of War Plan UK (1983), the British
government’s civil defence plans in the event of nuclear war. These facts
were revealed at a time when the rise of the anti-nuclear protest movement,
CND, gave them heightened political sensitivity.

3 THE EFFECTS OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATION
1 For an overview of the issues, see McQuail, 1987. For a more readable
summary of the problems, and the different approaches which they have
generated, see Morley, 1980.
2 Hall’s three decoding positions, which he argues to have been empirically
tested, are: (a) the dominant-hegemonic position, when a message is
decoded entirely within the encoder’s framework of reference; (b) the
negotiated position, which ‘acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic
definitions to make the ground significations, while, at a more restricted,
situational level, it makes its own ground rules’, and (c) the oppositional
decoding, ‘the point when events which are normally signified and
decoded in a negotiated way begin to be given an oppositional reading’
(1980, p.138).
3 In 1992 the final ‘poll of polls’ indicated a Labour lead of 0.9 per cent.
In fact, the Conservatives won the election by 7.6 per cent, giving a
polling error of 8.5 per cent, the largest ever in British polling history.
Butler and Kavanagh believe that ‘there is no simple explanation for this
massive failure in what had become a trusted instrument in election
analysis’ (1992, p.148), but propose the following explanations for the
size of the error: (a) the sample of those polled was disproportionately
working class (thus skewing the outcome in favour of Labour); (b) due
to such factors as poll tax evasion, many of those polled were not included
on the electoral register; (c) Tory voters were less likely to reveal their
voting intentions; (d) fewer Labour than Tory voters actually voted; (e)
there was a late swing to the Conservatives in the final few days of the
campaign.
4 Butler and Kavanagh suggest that polls taken on April 1 indicating Labour
leads of between 4 and 7 per cent were implicated in the party’s electoral
defeat, because they ‘encouraged the triumphalism of the Sheffield rally
and it helped to waken the public to the real possibility of a Labour
victory’ (1992, p.139).
5 So named because of its high production values, and artistic direction by
award-winning feature film-maker Hugh Hudson.

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