Page 178 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

POLITICAL PUBLIC RELATIONS

Information management
Finally in this discussion of party political public relations, we
turn to the techniques and practices involved in information
management by government. By this is meant activities designed to
control or manipulate the flow of information from institutions of
government to the public sphere beyond.
Steinberg defines governmental communication as ‘those
techniques which government officials and agencies employ to keep
the public informed and to disseminate information about the
activities of various departments’ (1958, p. 327). The dissemination
of information is not, however, the only purpose of governmental
communication. Information is a power resource, the astute
deployment of which can play a major role in the management of
public opinion. As Denton and Woodward note, ‘information is
power, and the control of information is the first step in propa-
ganda’ (1990, p. 42). Information can be freely given out in the
pursuit of democratic government, but it can also be suppressed,
censored, leaked, and manufactured in accordance with the more
particular interests of a government and the organs of state power.
As former civil servant Clive Ponting puts it, writing of the British
government, public opinion may be regarded as ‘something to be
manipulated rather than a voice that might alter government policy’
(1989, p. 189). In Britain, he notes, the tradition is that government
is a matter for insiders and not something that need concern the
general public. Decisions are taken in secret by a small group of
ministers and senior civil servants and then the effort is made to sell
those policies to the public through the government propaganda
machine’ (ibid., p. 177). Governmental communication for this
observer, himself a former Whitehall ‘insider’, is about the control
and management of information for the purpose of protecting and
insulating power from the critical gaze of the public, rather than
empowering the latter and drawing them into the governmental
process. Cockerell et al. concur that ‘what government chooses
to tell us through its public relations machine is one thing; the
information in use by participants in the country’s real government
is another’ (1984, p. 9).
The British government first established an apparatus of media
management during the First World War. Known as the Official
Press Bureau, the principles of secrecy to which it adhered have been
retained in the governmental information apparatus ever since. In
this respect British political culture may be seen as ‘closed’ and

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