Page 147 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

voters who had kept the Conservatives in power for eighteen years,
as well as their traditional supporters.
That brand was still marketable in 2001, when Labour again
won a landslide majority over the opposition parties. On this
occasion, as already noted, Labour’s campaign advertisements
sought to play up its domestic and foreign policy achievements in
office, while scaring voters with the prospect of a Tory return to
power. The strategy was successful, in so far as New Labour’s vote
held up, aided by the absence of a credible Conservative opposition.

POLITICAL ADVERTISING: THE FUTURE

The role and place of advertising in political communication
continues to generate debate, with each new election campaign
presenting material for further controversy, though rarely providing
resolution of the issues which have occupied political and
communication scientists ever since the first ‘I like Ike’ spots. In the
US, criticism of the sheer cost of political advertising remains at
the forefront of debate, though the allegedly negative effects of
‘attack’ ads also worry many (Jamieson, 1992). The third edition of
Diamond and Bates’ classic study of American political advertising
takes a pragmatic tone, pointing out, as was noted above, that
political campaigns have always been negative and ‘dirty’ (1992).
Kathleen Jamieson, while complaining of a general deterioration
in the quality of mediated political discourse, to which political
advertising has contributed, accepts that ‘simplistic dualities’ have
always been at the centre of campaigning (1992, p. 44). There is, in
the US as well as other countries, growing acceptance that there is
nothing intrinsically wrong with negative campaigning, if the claims
made are fair and reasonable. Lies and deception are not accept-
able, of course, but they are hardly unique to our political culture.
Modern media give attack ads more reach and visibility, but did not
invent them or the principles of political competition underpinning
them. Attack is as much part of the political process as defence, and
if modern advertisers do it with ever-increasing slickness and
sophistication, it seems pointless, indeed futile, to spend too much
intellectual energy on condemning them. As Diamond and Bates
put it, in the history of political advertising, as in so many other
forms of political communication, ‘the political golden age of the
past, upon close inspection, turns out to be made of brass’ (1992,
p. 384).

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