Page 188 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

PRESSURE-GROUP POLITICS

Such an approach asserts that there is no single ‘primary definition’
of an event or an issue circulating in the public sphere at any given
time. Rather, there is a multiplicity of definitions, reflecting the
interests of various collectivities, within and outside the ‘establish-
ment’. While one definition may be dominant at a particular time,
challenges will continually be mounted as opposition groups seek
to advance the alternative definitions. Structures of access to
the media, through which the struggle for definitional primacy
principally takes place, are not rigid but flexible, and capable of
accommodating, even under certain circumstances welcoming,
challenges to the establishment; such flexibility is, indeed, an
integral legitimating feature of the media in a liberal democracy.
As we noted in Chapter 4, the continuing credibility of the
media’s fourth-estate role requires, in conditions of liberal democ-
racy, the maintenance of journalists’ ‘relative autonomy’ from
power elites. While we may readily agree that the majority of the
media in capitalist societies are, for economic, organisational and
ideological reasons, predisposed to certain sources and viewpoints
over others, we must acknowledge too that media organisations
have their own institutional interests to pursue, which include
being seen to be independent and objective and, in most cases,
competitive and profitable. These imperatives create opportunities
for non-elite groups to gain access to mainstream media.
The question thus arises: what are the conditions in which
marginalised political actors, aspiring to participate in public
debate around an issue or to put an issue on the media’s and the
public’s agenda, can maximise their ‘definitional power’ and pursue
their political objectives? We must acknowledge at the outset that
access to the media for a particular source is never completely open,
but rather is dependent on such factors as the degree of institution-
alisation accruing to that source, its financial resources, its ‘cultural
capital’ or status, and the extent of its entrepreneurship and
innovation in media management. In 1978, Hall et al. argued that

if the tendency towards ideological closure [in news
media] is maintained by the way the different apparatuses
are structurally linked so as to promote the dominant
definitions of events, then the counter-tendency must also
depend on the existence of organised and articulate sources
which generate counter-definitions of the situation. This
depends to some degree on whether the collectivity
which generates counter-ideologies and explanations is a

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