Page 148 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

ADVERTISING

In Britain, with its distinctive traditions and conventions, the
issues are rather different. The controversy which Conservative
government advertising for its 1980s privatisation campaigns
provoked, fuelled by legislation (quoted on p. 122) prohibiting local
governments from using public revenues for political advertising
purposes, has long called into question the logic of a system
which prevents political advertising on television and radio, while
allowing the government to spend hundreds of millions of pounds
promoting ideologically based policies. New Labour has also been
charged with using public money to promote policy, as in the funds
earmarked for education about the euro. Advocates of reform have
argued, reasonably enough, that since such campaigns are clearly
‘political’ and paid for by the tax-payer, other organisations with
political objectives, such as environmental groups, trade unions and
even political parties, should be permitted to purchase broadcast
advertising time at commercial rates, as is the case in the US.
There, pressure groups and political organisations of all kinds can
buy up television time to protest, nationally or locally, about the
environment, or factory closures, or any of the issues around
which political campaigns regularly develop. Why not in Britain,
therefore?
The future of political advertising has taken on greater urgency as
the British broadcasting system becomes more commercialised and
the financial pressures on broadcasters increase. Can the political
parties take it for granted that they will always have access to free
airtime in the form of PPBs and PEBs? When ratings are everything
in a broadcasting system increasingly run as a profit-making
industry, will media managers be content to provide prime-time
slots free of charge to pontificating politicians? Quite possibly not,
argued a confidential internal Labour Party document in the late
1980s, warning that ‘parties may be forced to find ways of entering
this hostile broadcasting environment directly, either through paid
political advertising . . . or by the production of programmes or by
sponsorship of programmes. Naturally such developments would
be costly and the richest party – or the party with the richest friends
– would be best able to take any advantages there might be’.
And here, precisely, is the great danger, as opponents of paid
political advertising on British broadcasting perceive it. As was noted
in Chapter 3, the growing importance in political campaigning
of paid-for media inevitably favours those who can pay, and
discriminates against those who cannot. In an unequal society, in
which political and economic resources are already closely linked,

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