Page 248 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

NOTES

1 POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION
1 For a recent book-length discussion of how the environmental issue
became a news story in the late 1980s and 1990s, see Anderson, 1997.
2 Work undertaken by the Glasgow University Media Group in the 1970s
and 1980s claimed to show anti-labour, pro-business bias in broadcast
news coverage of key industrial disputes which took place in those years
(1976, 1980). ‘Bias’ was also argued by the Group to have accompanied
coverage of the left–right split which dominated the affairs of the Labour
Party in the 1980s (1982). On the subject of Northern Ireland, several
writers have presented accounts of how coverage of ‘the Troubles’
was slanted towards the interests of the British state (Schlesinger, 1987;
Curtis, 1984).
3 Hall et al.’s Policing the Crisis (1978) explored the role of the ‘public
voice’ of British newspapers in defining law and order issues during the
‘mugging’ panic of the early 1970s.
4 For a discussion of broadcast talk shows, including those which cover
non-party political themes, see Livingstone and Lunt, 1994.

2 POLITICS, DEMOCRACY AND THE MEDIA
1 See Mill’s essay ‘On Representative Government’, contained in his Three
Essays (1975).
2 Robert Worcester’s survey of attitudes after the 1992 general election
shows that this continues to be the case in Britain, although there is
evidence that, as Worcester puts it, ‘the boredom factor is increasing’
(1994, p. 12). Worcester finds that ‘a growing proportion of the [British]
public now feels that the media generally, and television specifically, have
provided too much or not the right coverage of election[s]’.
3 For Baudrillard, writing in the early 1980s, the masses experience
mediatised politics principally as an entertainment experience, like
television football. ‘For some time now’, he writes, ‘the electoral game
has been akin to TV game shows in the consciousness of the people. . . .
The people even enjoy day to day, like a home movie, the fluctuations of
their own opinions in the daily opinion polls. Nothing in all this engages
any responsibility. At no time are the masses politically and historically

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