Page 48 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

THE EFFECTS OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

of the receiver, and, secondly, on the type of message transmitted.
A party election broadcast on British television, for example, is
clearly labelled as a motivated, partisan piece of political
communication: if not ‘propaganda’ in the most negative sense of
that term then undoubtedly a heavily skewed statement of a party’s
policies and values. The viewer knows this, and will interpret the
message accordingly.
Using Stuart Hall’s list of differential decoding positions (1980), 2
we might reasonably hypothesise that a Labour Party broadcast will
prompt in a Labour supporter a dominant decoding, in which the
receiver shares the world-view underlying the construction of the
broadcast, its interpretation of the ‘facts’ behind current political
and economic debates, and its preferred solutions. The ‘floating voter’,
lacking in strong commitment to any particular party, might well
adopt a negotiated decoding, agreeing with some aspects of the
message and rejecting others. Such a response would include one in
which the need for a more equitable distribution of income was
accepted, but specific proposals for tax increases rejected as being
too draconian. The Conservative supporter, on the other hand, will
adopt an oppositional decoding position, rejecting both the values
and the specific policy proposals contained in Labour’s PPB.
The broadcasts of the other parties will meet with similar diversity
of response. In short, one’s knowledge that a piece of communication
is partisan will to a large extent predetermine one’s ‘reading’ of it. If,
on the other hand, a political message is communicated through a
news report, a chat show interview, or a live debate in a US
presidential campaign (all contexts in which editorial control of the
message is seen to reside beyond the politician him or herself), the
audience may take the opportunity to judge abilities and policies
from a more detached perspective. There will be less interference in
the communication process, and the audience may be more open.
As a general rule, the effects of political communications of
whatever kind are determined not by the content of the message
alone, or even primarily, but by the historical context in which
they appear, and especially the political environment prevailing at
any given time. The ‘quality’ of a message, the skill and
sophistication of its construction, count for nothing if the audience
is not receptive. President Clinton’s media adviser in the 1996 re-
election campaign, Dick Morris, writes in his memoir that ‘if the
public won’t buy your basic premise, it doesn’t matter how much
you spend or how well your ads are produced; they won’t work’
(1997, p.152) (see Chapter 6).

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