Page 29 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

Firstly, and most obviously, political actors must use the media in
order to have their messages communicated to the desired audience.
Political programmes, policy statements, electoral appeals, pressure
group campaigns, acts of terrorism, have a political existence—and
potential for communicative effectiveness—only to the extent that
they are reported and received as messages by the media audience.
Consequently, all political communicators must gain access to the
media by some means, whether legislative, as in the rules of political
balance and impartiality which govern British public service
broadcasting, or by an appreciation of the workings of the media
sufficient to ensure that a message is reported.
In Chapter 4 we examine the regulations and conventions which
typically govern access to the media for political actors. We also
describe the organisational features of media production which may
work for or against political communicators in their efforts to obtain
coverage. This will lead us into a discussion of the constraints and
pressures within which news is selected and produced, and the
implications of these for the choices routinely made by media
workers.
The media, of course, do not simply report, in a neutral and
impartial way, what is going on in the political arena around them.
Despite protestations to the contrary by some journalists, there are
more than enough analyses of the media in the communication studies
literature to show that their accounts of political events (as of any
other category of ‘reality’) are laden with value judgments,
subjectivities and biases. Kaid et al. suggest that we may view political
‘reality’ as comprising three categories (1991):

• Firstly, we may speak of an objective political reality, comprising
political events as they actually occur.
• There is then a subjective reality—the ‘reality’ of political events
as they are perceived by actors and citizens.
• Thirdly, and crucial to the shaping of the second category of
subjective perceptions, is constructed reality, meaning events as
covered by the media.

While arguments about the precise efficacy of the media’s political
output continue, there is no disagreement about their central role in
the political process, relaying and interpreting objective happenings
in the political sphere, and facilitating subjective perceptions of them
in the wider public sphere. For this reason, media ‘biases’ are of key
political importance.

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