Page 91 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

always subject to challenge and revision, the dominant framework,
once established, provides the structure within which subsequent
events are allocated news value, reported, and made sense of.
For example, the dominant narrative framework for making sense
of events within the British Conservative Party, following the 1992
election, can be expressed in terms of a ‘leadership crisis’. Political
journalists—encouraged by Thatcherite elements in the Conservative
Party, resentful of their leader’s abrupt dismissal from office—told a
continuing story of John Major’s buffeting by the harsh winds of
political misfortune. The ‘story’ of the Labour Party over the same
period, on the other hand, was the relatively positive one of
modernisation and renewal. When Labour leader John Smith died
suddenly on May 12, 1994, media coverage of his success in
transforming the party’s image and improving its ‘electability’ was
uniformly positive. Tony Blair’s election as Labour leader on July 21
that year took place in an atmosphere of euphoric endorsement of
his abilities, shared even by such formerly right-wing organs as the
London Evening Standard. Journalists also appreciated New Labour’s
skill in public relations and news management, and the invincibility
of Labour’s ‘spin doctors’ (see Chapter 7) became a powerful narrative
framework in the media’s making sense of Labour’s transition to an
electable government. The Conservatives, meanwhile, were dogged
from 1994 onwards not only by having all that they said and did
interpreted as part of the ongoing leadership crisis, but by the
developing narrative of sleaze, which added corruption and moral
hypocrisy to the party’s perceived problems. From ‘leadership crisis’
the dominant framework for making sense of the Conservatives
developed into one of decay, decline and imminent defeat. So powerful
did this framework become as a journalistic structuring device that
nothing the party leadership could do to highlight the strengths of
the economy (and when the Tories left office in 1997 the economy
was performing exceptionally well by British standards) could
undermine it.

THE PRESS

The press and broadcast media, by the nature of their functioning
and role, employ different modes of intervention in politics. The
former, as we have seen, have always been more overtly partisan in
their approach to political affairs, perceiving their role as very much
that of opinion-articulation. At election time the views expressed

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