Page 60 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

THE EFFECTS OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

From this perspective, the notion that democracy has anything to
do with rationality and ‘public interest’ is an illusion, since we choose
our politics on the same grounds, and as a result of the application
of the same techniques of persuasion as we choose our toothpaste.
As Nicholas Garnham puts it in his discussion of the public sphere,
the rise of political advertising and public relations expresses ‘the
direct control of private or state interests of the flow of public
information in the interest, not of rational discourse, but of
manipulation’ (1986, p.41). The rational citizen of classic liberal
theory has become ‘a consumer of politics and policies…the
competing political parties [present] electors with different policy
options in broadly the same way as firms [offer] rival products to
the consumers’ (Greenaway et al., 1992, p.51).

POLITICS AND THE POST-MODERN

To this argument about the trivialisation of politics and the expulsion
of rational discourse from the process may be added the ‘post-
modernist’ variant, in which political communication is viewed as
the one-way exchange of empty signifiers and meaningless messages
across a barren media landscape. An early pioneer of this apocalyptic
view was Daniel Boorstin who, as noted in Chapter 2, coined the
term ‘pseudo-event’ in response to what he saw as the increasing
tendency of the mass media to be preoccupied with unreal,
unauthentic, manufactured ‘happenings’, or ‘synthetic novelties’. His
definition of a pseudo-event contained the following elements:

a) It is not spontaneous, but comes about because someone
has planned, planted or incited it; b) It is planted primarily
for the immediate purpose of being reported or
reproduced. Therefore, its occurrence is arranged for the
convenience of the media. Its success is measured by how
widely it is reported. Time relations in it are more
commonly fictitious than factitious; c) Its relation to the
underlying reality of the situation is ambiguous; d) Usually
it is intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
(1962, p.11)

The phenomenon of the pseudo-event was, as already noted,
directly associated with the rise of the mass media in the nineteenth
century and their growing need to fill space (and later, broadcasting

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