Page 31 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

some significant portion of it), and may be a significant consideration
in policy-making. Broadcasting is now awash with political debate
and public access programmes, in which members of the public are
brought together to discuss the burning issues of the day, and to
express their opinions on those issues. In January 1997, for example,
Britain’s ITV broadcast Monarchy: the nation decides. Advertised as
the biggest live debate ever broadcast on British TV, the programme
allowed 3,000 citizens, egged on by a panel of proand anti-monarchy
experts, to express their views on the past and present performance
of the British monarchy, and its future role, in unprecedentedly critical
terms, which both the British royal family, and any government
responsible for stewarding the country’s constitutional development,
would have been foolish to ignore. 4
For all these reasons, then, an understanding of the contemporary
political process is inconceivable without an analysis of the media,
and a substantial part of this book will be devoted to that task.

The international stage
We turn, finally, to a category of political actor of growing importance
in the study of communication.
The progress of the twentieth century has seen the political arena
become more international, as the media have extended their reach,
geographically and temporally. In the modern world media
audiences are the targets of political communication not only from
domestic sources, but foreign ones. Foreign governments, business
organisations, and terrorist groups, all use the global information
system to further their political objectives. Traditional forms of
interpersonal international diplomacy persist, but modern wars,
liberation struggles, and territorial disputes are increasingly fought
out in the media, with global public opinion as the prize (since the
protagonists—governments and international bodies like the United
Nations—are presumed to be responsive to public opinion). As
Walter Lippmann recognised in the early 1920s, ‘governments today
act upon the principle that it is not sufficient to govern their own
citizens well and to assure the people that they are acting
wholeheartedly on their behalf. They understand that the public
opinion of the entire world is important to their welfare’ (quoted
in Bernays, 1923, p.44).
Efforts to influence international public opinion and policy are
clearly political communication as we have defined it in this
introduction, and Chapter 9 is devoted to analyses of some prominent

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