Page 61 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

airtime). The media’s demand for events to make into news was
matched by the politicians’ need to be reported, a mutual
interdependence which still exists and which will be considered in
greater detail in Chapter 4. Here we note that it created a new species
of event, ‘created’ by the politician, with the connivance of the
journalist, which provided the latter with material and the former
with coverage. The public, however, were not necessarily provided
with anything of significance or value in helping them to formulate
political choices (bearing in mind that this is one of the key functions
of the media in liberal democracies).
Typical pseudo-events, in Boorstin’s view, were interviews with
politicians (the first with a US public figure was conducted by a
newspaper in 1859); news releases (the first recorded example being
in 1907); party rallies; press conferences, and ‘leaks’—most of which,
if not all, were of little value as rational political discourse.
The increasing prevalence of pseudo-events which he detected in
the mass media of the 1960s was not, Boorstin believed, good for
democracy, although probably inevitable in the electronic age.
Although Boorstin does not use the term, this is clearly recognisable
as a ‘post-modernist’ view of the world, and the political process, in
which the rise of advertising and public relations in politics ‘express
[es] a world where the image, more interesting than the original, has
itself become the original. The shadow has become the substance’
(Ibid., p.204).
Chapter 2 noted Norberto Bobbio’s criticism that liberal
democracy has failed to encourage a sufficiently educated citizenry,
resulting in political apathy amongst the public. For Jean
Baudrillard, the proliferation of empty spectacle and image in
contemporary political discourse is itself a cause of the phenomenon
of ‘the silent majority’ (1983). Through increased exposure to
political marketing techniques, citizens have become consumers of
politics, but not active producers of it. The political pseudo-event
has become a ‘hyperreality’, leading to ‘the forced silence of the
masses’(1988, p.208).
The intrinsic pessimism of this perspective is rejected by others,
often those with interests in the political marketing industries, who
view it as elitist and patronising. Political communication consultants,
note Denton and Woodward,

believe that they are actually making the electoral process
more democratic. They claim that they cannot control
votes as the old political bosses did through the patronage

44