Page 69 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

allotting events greater or lesser significance according to their
presence or absence on the media agenda.
Indeed, the agenda-setting function of the media is argued by many
observers to be their main contribution to the political process
(McCombs, 1981). As citizens, we are unable to grasp or assimilate
anything like the totality of events in the real world, and thus we
rely on the media to search and sift reality for the most important
happenings. During election campaigns, for example, David Weaver
points to ‘considerable support for the conclusion that the news media
are crucial in determining the public importance of issues…at least
those issues generally outside the experience of most of the public’
(1987, p.186).
Chapter 2 noted that a key objective of political communication
is to set the public agenda in ways favourable to an organisation’s
achievement of its goals. Politicians, as we shall see in Chapters 6
and 7, thus direct considerable energies to having their preferred
agendas accepted and endorsed by the media. The media, however,
are agenda-setters in their own capacity as providers of information,
highlighting some issues and neglecting others, for reasons which
are often beyond the capacity of politicians to influence significantly.
When the British media pursued Tory Cabinet Minister David
Mellor to resignation in 1992 over his affair with an actress, we
can be sure that this was not an issue placed on the news agenda by
Conservative media managers. Rather, the story was driven by
commercial and other criteria (the need to sell newspapers, and the
British fascination with sex scandals). These same pressures,
reinforced by some proprietors’, editors’ and journalists’
determination to expose what they perceived as a tired and corrupt
ruling elite, drove the ‘sleaze agenda’ which dogged the Conservative
government throughout most of its 1992–7 term, and contributed
substantially to the party’s defeat in the May 1997 general election.
The 1997 electoral agenda was, in this respect at least, set by the
media, rather than the politicians.
By contrast, the general election campaign of 1992 witnessed
careful and largely successful efforts by all the major parties to set
the news agenda from day to day, with Labour’s emphasis on the
future of the National Health Service countered by the Tories’ stress
on taxation and the Liberal Democrats’ focus on proportional
representation. Often, it is difficult to distinguish the agenda-setting
activities of the media from those of the politicians in this way, but
the distinction is important analytically.

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