Page 186 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

PRESSURE-GROUP POLITICS

The primary definition thesis is a compelling one, which has
proved useful in predicting and analysing patterns of access in
media debate about a wide range of political issues. Schlesinger and
others have pointed out, however, that it fails to account adequately
for the complexity of mediated political debate and the many
cases where ‘primary definers’ have failed to impose their primary
definitions on the public debate as a whole. Recent political history
provides many examples of dominant or elite groups being, in
effect, defeated in public debate, often by the activities of relatively
marginal political actors and sometimes at the cost of real political
power. In other cases, a ‘dominant account’ or interpretation
of events has had to be revised to accommodate alternative or
oppositional views.
The Nixon administration’s withdrawal from the Vietnam War
was one such example. In this case radical change was forced on
a policy sponsored by the US politico-military establishment by a
combination of pressure-group and journalistic activity (see
Chapter 9). The British Conservative government’s 1980s retreat on
the ‘poll tax’ (the refusal to retreat being an important factor in
Margaret Thatcher’s removal from office and replacement by
John Major) was occasioned not least by a groundswell of public
opposition to the policy, focused on pressure groups of greater or
lesser extremism and reported widely in the media (Deacon and
Golding, 1994). The experience of the Major government after its
election victory of 1992 was one of constant challenge to its policy
content and style, in stark contrast to the 1980s when ‘Thatcherism’
was presumed to have become consensual. In Italy, as the
tangentopoli scandal emerged in 1993, an entire generation of
politicians from all parties was brought down by popular opinion.
The causes of these political shifts, and the contexts in which they
occurred, are of course very different. They all, however, highlight
the weaknesses of any theoretical framework which asserts the
existence of a deep structural bias on the part of the media towards
‘the powerful’, ‘the establishment’, or ‘the ruling class’ in modern
capitalist societies. Greek sociologist Nicos Poulantzas long ago
rejected, from a Marxist standpoint, the notion of a ‘ruling class’ as
a meaningful political entity, preferring to think in terms of ‘class
fractions’ and alliances of class fractions, whose influence rose and
fell as economic and social circumstances changed. Thus, one
1
could identify the influence of ‘finance capital’ in 1980s Britain and
the relative political impotence of ‘manufacturing capital’. Some
observers have argued that the sudden political demise of Margaret

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