Page 197 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

the four years from 1979 to 1983 membership of the British wing
of the peace movement, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
(CND), grew nearly thirtyfold, from 3,000 to 80,000. Like most
pressure groups, CND included in its membership a politically and
socially diverse mix of individuals. For some, the motivation to
campaign with CND was religious. Others objected ideologically
to NATO’s aggressive (under the leadership of Ronald Reagan) and
moralising approach to the rest of the world, and its apparent
readiness to countenance nuclear war-fighting in Europe. Others
simply thought of themselves and their children, and feared for the
future.
Although ‘resource poor’ in Goldenberg’s terms, CND and the
peace movement internationally possessed certain characteristics
which made them more ‘media-friendly’ than some pressure groups.
Being diverse and socially heterogeneous, they were not easily
stereotyped as ‘left-wing’ or ‘subversive’, although many attempts
were made by government to do so. The movement’s chief spokes-
persons (such as Monsignor Bruce Kent and Joan Ruddock in the
UK) were well-educated members of the middle class – liberal,
rather than radical, as were many of CND’s ordinary members. It
was able to draw on the resources of many supporters in the
creative professions – musicians, designers, writers, and actors. And
it was explicitly committed to a strategy of ‘non-violent’ opposition
to nuclear weapons.
To exploit these attributes, the peace movement developed a
political communication strategy which saw it successfully gain
access to the mainstream news agenda in Europe and the US. Huge
demonstrations were organised in London, New York, and other
cities in the early 1980s, providing television news organisations in
particular with highly attractive visual material. While some broad-
casters deliberately excluded such images from their output (on the
curious grounds that it did not contribute anything to the ‘debate’ 3
– a criterion of newsworthiness which, if applied consistently,
would leave our television news screens blank for most of the time)
the majority reported the demonstrations and the other spectacular
events organised by the peace movement in these years. Even
symbolic actions undertaken by relatively small groups of people,
such as the vigils carried out by women at the Greenham Common
nuclear airbase or the ‘die-ins’ staged outside the London Stock
Exchange, were reported on main news programmes. In their
innovative design and effective execution of such events, peace
movements in Britain, the US, Germany, and elsewhere ‘manu-

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