Page 59 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

democracies, the powerless poor and less affluent will ever succeed
in securing the kinds of electoral reforms which would remedy them.
That being so, the poorer parties and organisations have had to accept
the financial realities of modern politics and compete on those terms
as best they can. As we shall see in Chapter 7, debates about how
this should be done have driven the development of these
organisations’ communication strategies since the advent of mass
television in the 1950s.

THE COMMERCIALISATION OF POLITICS

The third level at which we can examine the impact of modern
political communication is on the social system itself: the capitalist
social formation, within which democracy usually comprises the
defining political element. An important tradition within sociology
has argued that the growing role of mass communication in politics
represents the extension of capitalist social relations—in particular,
the relations of consumption—to the political sphere. In the process,
politics has become artificial and degenerate. Jurgen Habermas has
argued that ‘late capitalism brings with it the manipulation of public
opinion through the mass media, the forced articulation of social
needs through large organisations, and in short, the management of
politics by the “system”’ (quoted in Pusey, 1978, p.90). Using different
language, but saying essentially the same thing, Herbert Schiller
observes that in contemporary capitalism politicians ‘are “sold” to
the public, much like soap and automobiles… Issues of public policy,
when considered at all, increasingly receive their expression and
discussion in thirty second commercials’ (1984, p. 117). Robins and
Webster suggest that the application of marketing and advertising
techniques to the political process

signifies something about the conduct of political life [in
the advanced capitalist world]: Saatchi and Saatchi [the
UK-based marketing and PR firm responsible for some
of the most innovative political advertising of the 1980s]
is an index of the way in which politics has been changing
to become a matter of ‘selling’ ideas and ‘delivering’ up
voters; a sign that ‘scientific management’ has entered
into politics and market values have permeated deeper
into social relations.
(1985, p.53)

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