Page 14 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

PREFACE AND

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

More than eighty years ago Walter Lippmann observed that the
practice of democracy had ‘turned a corner’ (1954, p. 248). The
democratic process, it seemed to him four years after the end of the
First World War had, to an extent unprecedented in human history,
come to incorporate self-conscious strategies of persuasion by
political actors. The gradual extension since the early nineteenth
century of voting rights to wider and wider sections of the
population, combined with the emergence of media of mass
communication, had fundamentally transformed the nature of the
political process, for better or worse. No longer could it be assumed
that political action derived from the collectively arrived at will
of rational, enlightened men (for men they exclusively were, of
course) of property and education. Henceforth, the masses would
decide, through their exercise of the vote and the influence of
public opinion on the political process.
But public opinion, Lippmann recognised even in 1922, was a
constructed, manufactured thing, which could be shaped and
manipulated by those with an interest in doing so. To that end,
he noted the rise of a new professional class of ‘publicists’, or
‘press agents’, standing between political organisations and media
institutions, whose job it was to influence press coverage of their
clients, and thus, they hoped, public opinion.
Now, in the early twenty-first century, these trends have acceler-
ated and deepened, until not only ‘the practice of democracy’ but
politics in all its forms is played out before a mass, sometimes global
audience, through electronic and print media which have made
McLuhan’s metaphor of the planet as a shrinking ‘global village’
into a truism. As the role of the media in mediating between
politicians and public has increased, so has the importance of those
publicists, press agents and others in what we may refer to as the

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