Page 45 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

and are allowed to judge among them. When we speak
of ‘informing’ the people this is what we really mean.
(Ibid., p.35)

For Boorstin there is something illusory and artificial about the
rationalist notion of public information and its contribution to
democracy. The political reportage received by the citizen has become
dominated by empty spectacle.

The limitations of objectivity
A further criticism of the media’s democratic role focusses on the
professional journalistic ethic of objectivity. This ethic developed with
the mass media in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
and has been assailed ever since as fundamentally unattainable
(McNair, 1999). For a variety of reasons, it is argued, the media’s
political reportage is biased and flawed—subjective, as opposed to
objective; partisan, rather than impartial. As Lippmann put it in 1922,
‘every newspaper when it reaches the reader is the result of a whole
series of selections as to what items shall be printed, in what position
they shall be printed, how much space each shall occupy, what
emphasis each should have. There are no objective standards here.
There are conventions’ (1954, p.354).
The nature of these conventions, and their implications for the
objectivity of the media, will be examined in Chapter 4.

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