Page 249 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

NOTES

engaged in a conscious manner. Nor is this a flight from politics, but
rather the effect of an implacable antagonism between the class which
bears the social, the political culture – master of time and history, and the
un(in)formed residual, senseless mass’ (1983, p. 38).
4 For an account of the 1997 general election campaign, by someone who
participated in it as a political reporter for the BBC, see Jones, 1997.

3 THE EFFECTS OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATION
1 For an overview of the issues, see McQuail, 1987. For a more readable
summary of the problems, and the different approaches which they have
generated, see Morley, 1980.
2 Hall’s three decoding positions, which he argues to have been empirically
tested, are: (a) the dominant–hegemonic position, when a message
is decoded entirely within the encoder’s framework of reference;
(b) the negotiated position, which ‘acknowledges the legitimacy of the
hegemonic definitions to make the ground significations, while, at a
more restricted, situational level, it makes its own ground rules’ and
(c) the oppositional decoding, ‘the point when events which are
normally signified and decoded in a negotiated way begin to be given an
oppositional reading’ (1980, p. 138).
3 In 1992 the final ‘poll of polls’ indicated a Labour lead of 0.9 per cent.
In fact, the Conservatives won the election by 7.6 per cent, giving a
polling error of 8.5 per cent, the largest ever in British polling history.
Butler and Kavanagh believe that ‘there is no simple explanation for this
massive failure in what had become a trusted instrument in election
analysis’ (1992, p. 148), but propose the following explanations for the
size of the error: (a) the sample of those polled was disproportionately
working class (thus skewing the outcome in favour of Labour); (b) due
to such factors as poll tax evasion, many of those polled were not
included on the electoral register; (c) Tory voters were less likely to reveal
their voting intentions; (d) fewer Labour than Tory voters actually voted;
(e) there was a late swing to the Conservatives in the final few days of the
campaign.
4 Butler and Kavanagh suggest that polls taken on 1 April indicating
Labour leads of between 4 and 7 per cent were implicated in the party’s
electoral defeat, because they ‘encouraged the triumphalism of the
Sheffield rally and it helped to waken the public to the real possibility of
a Labour victory’ (1992, p. 139).
5 So named because of its high production values, and artistic direction by
award-winning feature film-maker Hugh Hudson.
6 For a recent discussion of the implications of these trends for the
democratic process see McNair, 1998a.
7 The American political scientist Roderick Hart, for example, in his
discussion of contemporary US presidential speech-making, argues that
‘the mass media have caused presidents to seek security in discourse, not
challenge, and have made the perception of assent, not assent itself,
the valued commodity. What used to be a broad, bold line between
argument and entertainment, between speech-making and theatre, now
has no substance at all’ (1987, p. 152).

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