Page 15 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

political public relations industry. Brave (and probably doomed to
failure) is the organisation which ventures into the contemporary
political arena without a more or less sophisticated understanding
of how the media work and the professional public relations
machinery capable of putting that knowledge to good use. For
all political actors, from presidents and prime ministers to trade
union leaders and terrorists, this is now recognised to be a major
prerequisite of successful intervention in public debate and govern-
mental decision-making.
If these trends are generally acknowledged to be real, they have
not been greeted with unanimous approval outside the offices of
the political public relations agencies themselves. For many, the
growing centrality of the media in the political process degrades the
latter, undermining its democratic characteristics and transforming
it into meaningless, empty spectacle. Others point with distaste to
the use of the media by avowedly undemocratic organisations, such
as the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland, to influence public
opinion in directions favourable to their political objectives. More
optimistic voices welcome the media’s heightened political role as
signalling a long overdue extension of democratic participation.
Others still resign themselves and their organisations to the reality
of an age when politics and the media are intimately and forever
bound together. Rather than complaining about the increasing
‘mediatisation’ of the political process, these groups strive to get in
on the act.
This book is intended as both an introduction and a modest
contribution to that debate, which has become so prominent an
element of contemporary political discourse throughout the
advanced capitalist world. It will be of value, I hope, to the growing
numbers of students, researchers, teachers, and concerned citizens
with an interest, professional or otherwise, in the relationship
between communication and politics.
My own interest in the subject derives from many years of
research and teaching in the field of journalism studies, in the course
of which it has become abundantly clear that what the media do is
as much the product of external factors – in the particular context
of this book, the activities of the political communications industry
– as with such intra-media considerations as journalistic bias,
proprietorial interference, or the routine practices of newsgathering.
In previous work I have examined the relationship between the
political public relations activities of, for example, the British
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), the British Labour

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