Page 191 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA); and, to begin, the trade
unions.

POLITICAL COMMUNICATION
AND INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS

The trade unions in Britain have traditionally been among the
most ardent critics of media ‘bias’ against their viewpoints on, and
definitions of, issues in which they have an interest, such as the
economy, employment rights and industrial relations legislation.
Fuelled by the work of the Glasgow University Media Group
(GUMG) in the 1970s, it was argued by trade unionists that the
media – press and broadcasting – reported such issues from an
inherently anti-labour, pro-capital perspective. Media accounts
of the causes of industrial disputes, for example, tended to be
dominated by management, while the viewpoints of the workforce
were simplified and distorted.
Perceiving this to be the case trade unions, like many other left-
of-centre organisations with political agendas to pursue, came to
view the media as ‘the enemy’ in an ongoing class struggle. To gain
fair media coverage, it was argued, the Left would have to build
and sustain its own media channels, as was attempted unsuccess-
fully with the Daily News experiment in Scotland in the early 1970s
(McKay and Barr, 1976), and the News on Sunday in 1986
(Chippindale and Horrie, 1988).
Since the late 1970s, however, and especially since the election of
the Thatcher government in 1979, trade unions have been obliged
to reassess their relationship to the media, acknowledging that in
addition to anti-labour biases (of which there undoubtedly were
and remain many, particularly amongst the right-wing tabloids)
there are also spaces and opportunities for media coverage which
they can exploit.
Nicholas Jones’s still valuable study of the role played by the
media in industrial disputes asserts that the coming of Thatcherism
fundamentally transformed the environment within which they
were pursued. In the period before Thatcher came to office –
sometimes referred to as the era of ‘social democratic consensus’
– unemployment was relatively low, Labour governments were a
reality (as they became again, eighteen years after Thatcher first
came to power), and organised labour enjoyed a certain degree of
economic and hence political power, exemplified by its role in the

170