Page 106 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

THE MEDIA AS POLITICAL ACTORS

intervenes on behalf of the audience more aggressively than was
traditionally the case, embarrassing the sometimes reluctant
panelists into going beyond political ‘waffle’ and answering a
question with some degree of clarity and directness. The BBC
and other broadcasters increasingly seek new ways of organising
public debate on television so that it is informative, educational and
entertaining. Although they have had varying degrees of success, all
such experiments are valuable attempts, as Livingstone and Lunt
put it, to establish ‘new forms of relationship between experts and
laity’ (1994, p. 131).

In the audience discussion programme, experts [politicians
in particular] and lay people are put together, setting an
agenda of social issues and offering both established elites
and ordinary people the opportunity at least to discuss
the lived experience of current affairs issues in relation to
expert solutions.
(Ibid.)

Broadcast punditry
Notwithstanding the requirements of impartiality imposed on the
broadcasters in these and other contexts, there are some formats
in which broadcasting journalists, like their press counterparts, can
go beyond the mere reporting of politics and move into the role
of active participants. At the most general level, broadcasting
works as part of the wider media system to define agendas and
‘political realities’ at any given time. Television and radio to a
large extent follow the news agenda set by the press, one set of
media feeding and reinforcing another’s perceptions of what is
important.
Straight news programmes do not, for the reasons already
mentioned, stray far beyond the narrow reportage function. Main-
stream bulletins on BBC1 and ITV, as one would expect, move
quickly through the day’s events, dealing only briefly with each.
Moments of definition are included, however, in the form, first, of
special correspondents. Like the political columnists of the press,
the correspondents are in a sense pundits although, unlike the
latter, their subjectivity and interpretative work must be confined to
analysing the situation, as opposed to instructing, and appealing to,
the audience. Channel 4 News’s Elinor Goodman, for example, will
frequently be asked by the programme’s presenters to assess or

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