Page 190 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

PRESSURE-GROUP POLITICS

of ‘spectacular’ action – demonstrations of anger, determination
or campaigning ingenuity which provide media organisations
with attractive and valuable news material and thus increase the
likelihood of coverage.
Media management of this type can and frequently does generate
substantial coverage for a political viewpoint or cause which might
otherwise be invisible to the mainstream media audience, a fact
which has led to the gradual adoption by pressure groups and other
subordinate sources of the whole battery of political communi-
cation techniques (subject, of course, to resource limitations).
However, just as the British Labour Party for many years resisted
this trend in its campaigning work on the grounds that it signalled
a fundamental degradation of the political process, so many
pressure groups, particularly those on the left of the political
spectrum, remain suspicious of what they view as inauthentic,
corrupting campaign methods (though, as the power of such
methods becomes clear, resistance lessens). Todd Gitlin’s discussion
of the interaction between the US-based Students for a Democratic
Society movement and the media in the 1960s acknowledges
that techniques of the sort listed above allowed the SDS to be
present in media coverage, but argues that by adopting them
the organisation was ‘incorporated’ into the political process in
such a way that its original objectives were lost. ‘As movement
and media discovered and acted on each other, they worked out
the terms with which they would recognise and work on the other;
they developed a grammar of interaction. This grammar then
shaped the way the movement–media history developed’ (1984,
p. 240). This development, Gitlin suggests, was one in which the
SDS members came under pressure to ‘legitimise’ themselves and
their objectives, in the interests of gaining access to the mainstream
media agenda.
In any case, Gitlin adds, to receive coverage in the media is not by
any means the same thing as gaining access to it for the effective
articulation of one’s definition of events. News journalism tends to
trivialise and simplify the activities of subordinate groups, to focus
on the spectacular demonstrations at the expense of explanation
and argument. Such ‘access’ may have more negative than positive
consequences for an organisation.
In the remainder of this chapter we consider these issues in the
context of the experience of three different types of organisation:
pressure groups proper, such as the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament and Greenpeace; illegal or ‘terrorist’ organisations,

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