Page 185 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

and thus to all the components of effective political communication
which money can provide: qualified professional and skilled
creative personnel, advertising and public relations material, etc.
Neither will they normally have access to the ‘cultural capital’ held
by established political actors – the credibility and authority which
tends to accrue to office holders and members of recognised elite
groups. They are, to use Edie Goldenberg’s phrase, ‘resource poor’
(1984). In Philip Schlesinger’s terms, they lack ‘definitional power’
(1989).
Schlesinger’s phrase refers us back to Stuart Hall et al.’s work on
‘primary definition’ (1978), which asserts a pattern of structured,
differential access to media (and the power to define issues which
such access potentially brings with it), favouring those in elite
or dominant positions and discriminating against marginal or
subordinate groups. For Hall et al. the former, by virtue of their
privileged access to channels of mass communication, acquire the
status of ‘primary definers’ in public debate about current issues.
Their interpretations of events, their explanatory frameworks
within which events are made sense of, become consensual, while
alternative explanations and accounts are excluded or relegated to
the margins, denied legitimacy.
Hall et al.’s work is informed by a Marxist problematic which
seeks to explain the relative invisibility of subordinate and oppo-
sitional accounts of social reality in the mass media, while avoiding
the crude, ‘vulgar’ materialism of some Marxist academics.
For Hall et al. primary definers become so not simply because
journalists and editors are ‘biased’ towards elite groups (although
straightforward ideological bias may be a sufficient explanation in
some cases) but as a result of the media’s structural relationships
of dependence on, and deference to, recognised authority. The
journalist’s need for reliable sources of information; editorial
pressures to meet deadlines; and elite groups’ typically more
developed systems for meeting these needs, gives them an inevitable
advantage over the ‘dissident’ or oppositional group.
This organisational factor is reinforced by cultural assumptions
on the part of news-gatherers (which are widely shared in the
society as a whole) about which sources are the most reliable and
authoritative on a given issue. Thus the Labour Home Office
Minister is automatically a primary definer on law and order
issues, while the views of the working-class resident of an inner-city
housing estate are not sought, unless on an occasional chat or
phone-in show with a ‘human interest’ angle.

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