Page 165 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

Since Harold Macmillan’s official visit to Moscow in 1959,
incumbent politicians have used their status to create images of
statesmanship and global power (Foote, 1991). As we saw in
the previous chapter, the coverage generated by such photo-
opportunities frequently resurfaces in political advertising
campaigns, as did pictures of Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 state visit
to Moscow and shots of George Bush meeting foreign dignitaries in
his capacity as vice-president.
The prevalence of these techniques, which are now routinely
used by all parties, has generated debate within the journalistic
profession about the extent to which, by allowing the politicians to
flood the campaign environment with pseudo-events of this kind,
they are contributing to the degradation of political culture and
5
the manipulation of the audience. As a result, recent election
campaigns have witnessed journalists adopting a considerably
more sceptical approach to the pseudo-event. Political coverage
now frequently includes, not merely an account of the event, but a
critique – meta-coverage – of its status as an event and how it has
been covered. In the case of Labour’s Sheffield rally, as already
noted, this meta-discourse became seriously critical. In future, it
seems, politicians will have to construct their pseudo-events in ways
which acknowledge their ‘constructedness’.
All political news management, indeed, now operates in a context
of ongoing journalistic commentary about the ‘game’ of politics.
Journalists are aware of the efforts made to influence their coverage,
and include analysis of these efforts as part of their reportage.
Political journalism, as a result, is increasingly focused on matters
of process rather than policy, on the hidden meanings behind the
surface appearance of political events. Some observers are critical of
this ‘relentless emphasis on the cynical game of politics’ (Fallows,
1996, p. 31), warning that it diverts the citizens’ attention from
the ‘real issues’. The then Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw, for
example, criticised ‘the quality of political journalism’ in Britain at
the height of the ‘cash-for-contracts’ scandal in 1998. In this case,
the Observer newspaper reported that lobbyists associated with the
Labour government (and at least one, Roger Liddle, in its employ at
the time) were selling their (claimed) privileged access to business
clients. This kind of ‘process’ journalism, argued Straw, was
squeezing substantive coverage of policy out of the media, to be
replaced by trivia. On the other hand – and the frantic efforts of the
Labour leadership to discredit the Observer story when it broke in
July 1998 might be thought to reinforce this point – journalistic

144