Page 209 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

foreign policies of states are pursued in the full glare of publicity.
Indeed, governments and other political actors use the media to
influence public opinion on foreign policy in their favour. In inter-
national politics, as in domestic, image has come to rival substance
in the calculations of politicians and their advisers. The principles
of news and information management described in previous chapters
now apply equally to the sphere of international relations. For all
governments, domestic and global public opinion has become a key
factor in the formulation and execution of foreign policy and never
more so than in the era of ‘the war against terrorism’.
In this chapter we consider how governments, principally those
of Britain and the US in the post Second World War period, have
sought to manage journalistic discourse about their foreign policies
and international relations. The focus is on military conflict
situations, from the Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s to the
former Yugoslavia and the Middle East. As we shall see, the
perceived importance of public opinion in shaping the outcome of
such conflicts has led their protagonists to develop sophisticated
strategies of public relations and media management, often
involving the same commercial companies and advisers employed
to handle politicians’ domestic campaigns.
In one key sense, of course, international relations are a domestic
matter, since a government’s conduct in this area can sharply affect
its popularity with the voters and hence its re-election chances. In
the pursuit of a state’s international relations, a government has the
opportunity to perform on the world stage, before a global audience
of billions. The quality of that performance inevitably has
resonance for the domestic audience. Hence, the success of govern-
mental efforts to control media image can make an important
contribution to wider political success.
There is one further sense in which communication about the
international political environment has consequences for the
domestic debate. Throughout the twentieth century, governments
and ruling elites in the business, military and media spheres have
manipulated symbols and images of ‘the enemy’ for domestic
political purposes. The nature of ‘the enemy’ has changed over
time, but the basic principle underlying this communication has
been retained: that it is possible to mobilise public opinion behind
campaigns which, though ostensibly targeted on an ‘alien’ force,
have domestic political objectives. We shall begin this chapter with
a discussion of the century’s most sustained example of such a use
of the media: the ‘Cold War’.

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