Page 70 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

THE POLITICAL MEDIA

A variation on the agenda-setting theme, and one which views
the media institutions as working closely with political actors, is
advanced by Greenaway et al., in their analysis of the factors involved
in governmental policy-making and implementation (1992). In the
case of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, they note that the issue was largely
absent from the political agenda until 1986 or thereabouts, at which
point it began to receive extensive media coverage. As a result of this
coverage, argue Miller et al., the Thatcher government began for the
first time to use the media as an anti-HIV/ AIDS educational tool
(Miller et al., 1998). The media, in this sense, put HIV/AIDS on the
public agenda, and permitted a response to the epidemic at the official
level. Before 1986 moral considerations prevented the Conservative
government (with its espousal of ‘Victorian’ moral values) from
acknowledging the scale of the HIV/AIDS problem, addressing its
causes, or applying preventive public health measures with the
requisite degree of sexual explicitness. When the media took the issue
on—albeit in a sensationalistic and often inaccurate and homophobic
manner—these constraints were removed. Thereafter, the media
became an important channel through which anti-HIV public health
messages and policies could be transmitted to the population. ‘The
media could be seen to legitimate government action, and then to
provide the channels through which policy was implemented. The
net effect of press and TV attention was to establish a climate of
opinion which required governmental action, or gestures of action’
(Greenaway et al., 1992, p.87).
Greg Philo’s study of the ‘1984’ Ethiopian famine notes that
although the scale of the disaster was evident as early as 1982, it
became an international news story only in July 1984, when the
BBC and ITN produced harrowing filmed reports from the scene.
Only then did the international community of policy-makers
formulate a response. The media played a key role in putting the
famine on to the international agenda. Philo concludes, ‘although it
is government and relief agencies which provide aid, the media are
central in galvanising an international response and in pressing
governments to provide more adequate levels of aid’ (1993a, p.105).
Journalist Martin Woolacott, in an article pointing to the negative
impact of the media’s agenda-setting role in foreign news, observes
wryly of the world’s disaster spots that ‘if you are visible on television
and in the papers, you are attended to. If you are invisible you are
dead, sometimes literally so’. 2
Molotch et al. describe the connection between media coverage
and political decision-making in terms of an ‘ecological’ model,

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