Page 162 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

POLITICAL PUBLIC RELATIONS

are selected, questions framed and answers constructed. On the
other hand, they are often live, and the audience does have an
opportunity to make judgments about political actors based on
their performances. Closer, perhaps, to the ‘pure’ pseudo-event are
occasions such as party conferences which, in the latter part of
the twentieth century, have changed – particularly in the US but
increasingly too in Britain and other advanced democracies – from
being forums of policy-resolution and decision-making into
spectacles designed for the maximisation of positive press coverage.
In the US, where this change in the role and function of the party
gathering began, the Democratic and Republican conventions
have embraced, with unabashed enthusiasm, the principles of show
business. Meaningful political debate and manoeuvring takes place
behind the scenes, while in its public manifestation the convention
functions as a huge signifier of whatever it is that the party that year
is selling. In Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign of 1984 the
Republican convention was dominated by emotional film of Ron
and Nancy, accompanied by the adulation of convention delegates
and (by extension) the American people. All this was communi-
cated, through media coverage, to the audience.
In Britain, the trend towards the conference-as-symbol was
pioneered, as were so many elements of modern political marketing,
by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party (Scammell, 1995). In
the 1980s, show-business enterpreneur Harvey Thomas was
employed to design the annual conferences, which he did according
to the principle that ‘on a political platform we only get a few
seconds on BBC news [or ITN] . . . we’ve got to make sure that
those few seconds are absolutely pure as far as the message is
concerned’ (quoted in Cockerell, 1988, p. 325). In the search for
‘purity’ the stages on which conference speakers and party leaders
sat were constructed with the same attention to form and colour
co-ordination as a West End stage set. At the 1983 conference, the
first following the Thatcher government’s victory in the Falklands,
the stage resembled nothing more than a great, grey battleship, on
which the Tory leadership sat like conquering admirals.
As Thomas recognised, mass media coverage of that conference,
and most others, was limited to at most a few minutes. Although in
Britain there is a tradition of live coverage of the conference debates
on the minority audience BBC Two channel (now augmented by
coverage on Sky News, BBC24 and BBC Parliament), the main news
bulletins, whose audiences the politicians are most concerned to
reach, treat them merely as stories (albeit important ones) in a

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