Page 199 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

in detail elsewhere how governmental news management ensured
that coverage of a major CND demonstration held at Easter,
1983 was ‘framed’ by stories about the Soviet threat (McNair,
1988), a rhetorical device which throughout the ‘new Cold War’
was routinely presented by journalists as objective fact rather than
contestable assertion. The presentation of an anti-nuclear viewpoint
was consistently contextualised by a wider ‘reality’, that of the
threat nuclear weapons were supposed to protect us against.
Second, the content of ‘peace movement news’ was typically
lacking in explanation and analysis of the anti-nuclear argument.
While journalists undoubtedly gave extensive and often sympathetic
coverage to the people involved in demonstrations, there was
rarely any attempt to examine the detail of their case, or indeed its
validity. As was noted earlier, the very nature of news militates
against considered analysis of events in preference to coverage of
the epiphenomenal, easily graspable aspects. In this respect the
peace movement, like other pressure groups (and political actors in
general) found it difficult to have its arguments, as opposed to its
existence, reported. One should qualify this observation by noting
that spaces were occasionally found in current affairs and in-depth
news programmes of the type provided by BBC’s Newsnight
and Channel 4 News, for detailed articulation of the anti-nuclear
perspective.
As the East–West confrontation eased in the late 1980s, culmi-
nating in the ‘end’ of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet
Union, the peace movement withered away. In terms of govern-
mental decision-making, historians will probably judge that the
movement had negligible impact. In the end, cruise missiles were
installed in Europe, Britain commissioned the Trident submarine
system and the US government pursued its desired nuclear weapons
programmes. There was, however, a public debate about these
crucial issues in the 1980s, where there had been practically none
in the 1960s and 1970s. The communication strategies and
campaigning activities of the international peace movement can
reasonably take the credit for forcing that debate, and requiring
NATO governments to consider public opinion, where they had not
been used to doing so before.

Pressure groups in the 1990s

As the anti-nuclear weapons movement declined in the 1990s, so
the environmental movement came to prominence. Like CND in the

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