Page 71 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

based on ‘a need for working models which include, not only
ways of understanding how public and policy actors form their
agendas and perspectives, but how journalistic agendas are shaped
as well, and how these two sectors of reality-making are
interlinked’ (1987, p.28) [their emphasis]. They add that ‘media
effects are embedded in the actions of the policy actor, just as the
policy actors’ own behaviour comes to be reflected in journalists’
formulations. Media and policy are part of a single ecology in
which cultural materials cumulate and dissipate, often
imperceptibly, throughout a media-policy web’ (Ibid.).

SOME CRITICISMS OF THE MEDIA

To say that the media have important cognitive and agenda-setting
effects in modern democracies is perhaps, by this stage in our history,
a statement of the obvious. More contentious, however, is the benign
view of the media’s role described in the previous section. Many
observers have challenged the liberal democratic notion of the
‘public sphere’ and the media’s contribution to it (Entman, 1989).
For some, the very form of media output militates against
understanding on the part of the audience, while others perceive
the media as ideological institutions in societies where political
power is not distributed equitably or rationally but on the basis of
class and economic status.
The former criticism is voiced by Colin Sparks who notes the
importance for media culture, in Britain and in other capitalist
societies, of ‘popular’, ‘tabloid’ journalism, with its focus on issues
‘not normally associated with the public sphere, such as sex
scandals, human interest, and bizarre crime stories’ (1992, p.22).
‘Quality’ journalism, in the words of one observer, produces
information ‘required for the smooth operation of the public sphere
and of governmental party politics. It is a generalised knowledge
of policy—of broad social events and movements that is distanced
from the materiality of everyday life’ (Fiske, 1992, p.49). By
contrast, argues Sparks, the popular press ‘offers an immediate
explanatory framework [of social and political reality] in terms of
individual and personal causes and responses’ (1992, p.22). This
fragmentation and trivialisation of complex social reality is argued
to undermine the audience’s ability to make sense of events, and
hence to think and act rationally.

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