Page 200 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

PRESSURE-GROUP POLITICS

1980s, the rise of the ‘greens’ was a response to growing perceptions
of a new kind of risk – away from the threat of nuclear war and
towards the threat of environmental disaster caused by human
intervention in, and distortion of, the natural order of things. This
was the product of science, as it generated worrying new knowledge
about such problems as the hole in the ozone layer, and then of
politicians who began to incorporate environmental issues into
their policy agendas in a unique and somewhat unexpected way
(exemplified by prime minister Thatcher’s pro-environment speech
of September 1988).
It was also the product of effective source strategies by the
environmental movement itself, which included new political
parties (the Greens) and pressure groups, most successfully
Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. Using the same non-violent,
direct action techniques as CND a decade before, these groups
organised visually spectacular, powerfully symbolic (and thus
media-friendly) demonstrations against such threats to the environ-
ment as nuclear power stations, the destruction of rain forests and
the dumping of industrial waste in the sea. Celebrities like U2 and
Sting were enlisted to invest cultural capital in many of these
protests, and the environment became a prominent issue in the
news, as it was intended to. Newspapers and broadcast news
organisations recruited environmental correspondents, and the
proportion of routine news coverage devoted to the subject
increased.
A classic case of successful political communication by the
environmental movement was Greenpeace’s 1995 protest against
the planned disposal of the Brent Spar oil rig off the coast of
Scotland. The Shell company, who owned the rig, was eventually
compelled by the pressure of public opinion across Europe,
manifested in consumer boycotts of Shell products and the
occasional torching of a Shell petrol station, to call off its Brent Spar
operation. This reversal had been achieved, despite vocal support
for the company from the British government (in whose territorial
waters the operation was taking place), entirely because of the
success with which Greenpeace commanded the news agenda.
Supported by a sophisticated media relations operation, Greenpeace
activists boarded the deserted oil platform, moored in stormy
northern waters, in the process providing great pictures for
television news. The story was irresistible to journalists and
Greenpeace’s propaganda (which later turned out to be false) about
the environmental dangers posed by Brent Spar set the agenda and

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