Page 40 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

POLITICS, DEMOCRACY AND THE MEDIA

societies during the twentieth century was paralleled by a
technological revolution in the means of mass communication as
print, then film, radio and television became available to mass
audiences.
Since the 1950s especially, and the expansion of television into
virtually every household in the developed capitalist world,
interpersonal political communication has been relegated to the
margins of the democratic process. Nowadays, as Colin Seymour-
Ure puts it, television has become an ‘integral part of the environment
within which political life takes place’ (1989, p.308). Surveys show
that for the vast majority of people the media represent the main
source of their information about politics. How, then, does the reality
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of contemporary political discourse as communicated through and
by the media correspond to the ideal described above? To what extent
do the media perform the role allotted to them in liberal democratic
theory?
Answering these questions requires a critical examination of both
democratic structures and the media environment around them. It
would, of course, be naive to expect that these two sets of institutions
should function perfectly. It is important, however, to acknowledge
the ways in which they fall short of the ideal, and the significance of
these shortcomings.

The failure of education

Firstly, it is argued by some observers that the normative assumption
of a ‘rational’ citizenry is not realistic. For Bobbio, one of the great
‘broken promises’ of liberal democracy is the failure of the education
system to produce rational voters, a failure which he sees reflected in
the growing political apathy characteristic of such democratic
exemplars as the United States. ‘The most well-established
democracies’, he argues, ‘are impotent before the phenomenon of
increasing political apathy, which has overtaken about half of those
with the right to vote’ (1987, p.36). When those who have the right
to vote decline to do so, democracy is clearly less than perfect.
However, voter apathy is far from being a universal phenomenon of
advanced capitalist societies. While the United States does bear out
Bobbio’s pessimism, the United Kingdom does not. Voter turnout in
the 1997 British general election was just over 1 per cent less than
that of 1945, at 71.3 per cent.
Looking at the phenomenon from another angle, it may be argued
that political apathy is an entirely rational, if slightly cynical response

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