Page 158 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

POLITICAL PUBLIC RELATIONS

the people’ broadcasts of the 1990s, and Tony Blair’s live statements
and news conferences, such as his description of Princess Diana in
the hours following her death as ‘the people’s princess’, politicians
have become – thanks largely to the new profession of media
managers – more adept at exploiting media. As we shall see, many
journalists consider that the process has pushed the media–politician
relationship beyond that state of mutual interdependence to one
of media dependence on, and deference to, politicians, so that
journalists should now consciously adopt a more detached, critical
approach to the use of these techniques.
For many analysts of political communication, the modern era
of political public relations begins with the Nixon–Kennedy presi-
dential debates of September 1960 (Kraus and Davis, 1981).
Political scientists agree that this event had a key impact in the 1960
campaign. Here we note that the live presidential debate – now an
American institution, copied in many other democracies – is the
archetypal ‘free media’ event. In itself it guarantees the politicians
extensive live coverage, since the serious broadcasting organisations
must all report it fully, providing acres of follow-up coverage of the
issues raised and the respective performances of the participants.
The debate sets the agenda in a contemporary US presidential
campaign. It provides a platform for a candidate to appeal directly to
the mass audience and to demonstrate his or her superiority over the
opponent. And for the politician it is, in contrast to advertising, free.
As is characteristic of free media, however, the presidential debate
also carries the possibility of catastrophic failure. Live and
unedited, mistakes are more difficult to cover up and a candidate’s
detailed, intelligent articulation of policies can be fatally under-
mined by one slip. In his 1976 debate with Jimmy Carter, incumbent
Gerald Ford unintentionally reinforced a growing image of him as
stupid and lightweight by appearing to suggest that Poland was not
part of the Soviet bloc. Ford probably knew what he was trying to
say, as no doubt did most of the audience, but the verbal faux pas
haunted him for the rest of the campaign, contributing substantially
to his defeat by Carter. Carter himself, during one of the 1980
debates with Ronald Reagan, appealed to the audience’s anxiety
about the Republican’s hawkishness by introducing the image of his
daughter, Amy, losing sleep at night over the issue of nuclear
weapons. Coverage of the debate tended to take the view that this
was a cynical manipulation of a child, furthering the process by
which Carter lost to Reagan on polling day. The debates between
Al Gore and George W. Bush in the 2000 election transformed

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