Page 43 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

The manufacture of consent
These processes begin with the politicians. The legitimacy of liberal
democratic government is founded, as we have noted, on the consent
of the governed. But consent, as Walter Lippmann observed in the
work cited above, can be ‘manufactured’. ‘The manufacture of
consent’ (1954, p.245), indeed, had as early as 1922 become a ‘self-
conscious art’ in which politicians combined the techniques of social
psychology with the immense reach of mass media. The detailed
analysis of these techniques will be the subject of most of this book,
but by acknowledging their existence at this point we recognise a
major flaw in democratic theory: if the information on which political
behaviour is based is, or can be, manufactured artifice rather than
objective truth, the integrity of the public sphere is inevitably
diminished. To the extent that citizens are subject to manipulation,
rather than exposed to information, democracy loses its authenticity
and becomes something rather more sinister.
The distinction between ‘persuasion’, which is a universally
recognised function of political actors in a democracy, and
manipulation, which carries with it the negative connotations of
propaganda and deceit, is not always an easy one to draw. But only
those with a touching and naive faith in the ethical purity of politicians
would deny that the latter plays an increasingly important part in
modern (or post-modern) democratic politics.
We shall return to the theme of manipulation later (see Chapter
7). Politicians, however, also seek to conceal information from
citizens, sometimes for reasons of what is called ‘national security’,
and sometimes to avoid political embarrassment. The public nature
of politics identified as a prerequisite of liberal democracy by Bobbio
often conflicts with the politicians’ desire for survival, and may be
sacrificed as a result. While secrecy, deception and cover-ups are
hardly new features of politics, their continued use and occasional
dramatic exposure (most notably in Italy’s tangentopoli scandal)
remind us that what the citizen receives as political information in
the public sphere is often an incomplete and partial picture of reality.
We may be conscious of that incompleteness when, for example,
secrecy legislation is deployed on national security grounds. More
commonly, the fact of concealment is itself concealed from the
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audience, unless a Bernstein, Woodward, or Campbell succeeds in
making it public.
Manipulation of opinion and concealment (or suppression) of
inconvenient information are strategies emanating from political

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