Page 20 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

CNN and Al-Jazeera the protagonists mounted their appeals to
their respective constituencies. As in previous media wars, truth was
often the first casualty, though it seems only fair to acknowledge
that confusion and error, rather than the politicians’ tendency to
deceive, were often to blame. That said, the war on terror, following
closely on the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia and Kosovo which
led eventually to the removal from power of Slobodan Milosevic,
further refined and developed the techniques of international
political communication which earlier editions of this book have
examined in the context of the Vietnam, Falklands and Gulf
wars.
But as one war on terror was hotting up, others were cooling
down. In Northern Ireland, the political wing of the republican
movement, Sinn Fein, moved into government alongside unionists.
With the relative success of the Good Friday agreement, politics in
Northern Ireland moved further away from the use of terroristic
acts towards the more conventional, constitutional forms of
opinion management, though not without relapses and continuing
sectarian violence. The suspension of Stormont on October 2002
showed that peace in Northern Ireland was still a fragile beast. In
Spain, meanwhile, the Basque nationalist movement ETA continued
to use terror as a political tool, even after the September 11 events,
leading to the banning of ETA’s political wing, the Batasuna party
in August 2002.
Of greater global significance, and intimately bound up with the
outcome of the war on terror, in Israel and Palestine a second
Intifada erupted in 2000, leading to more than 2,000 deaths in
Israel and the occupied territories by the time this edition went to
print. Each atrocity in this conflict brought forth propaganda
designed to convince international opinion that the other side was
at fault, though neither could claim the moral high ground in a
conflict where civilians were the main casualties.
At both the domestic and international levels, then, the years
since 1999 have been eventful ones for politics, at times traumatic,
and as this book goes to press it is clear that, in contrast to the
dangerous but stable balance which characterised the Cold War, the
global political environment will continue to be unpredictable and
explosive for some time to come. As we observe these events unfold,
it is clear that the media, and the management of public opinion
through political communication, have never been more important
to the conduct of domestic and international affairs than they are
today.

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