Page 32 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION

The audience
The purpose of all this communication is, as has been noted, to
persuade. And the target of this persuasion – the audience – is the
second key element in the political communication process, without
which no political message can have any relevance.
The audience for a particular political communication may be
broad, as in a British party political broadcast (PPB) or a US election
‘spot’, where the objective is to persuade an entire nation of voters.
It may be narrow, as when the editorial of a leading newspaper ‘of
record’, such as the Sunday Times, calls on the Conservative party
to change its leadership (or to retain it, as the case may be). The
audience may be both broad and narrow, as in the case of the IRA
bombing of a Manchester shopping mall in 1995. Such a ‘communi-
cation’ has at least two levels of meaning, and is intended for at least
two audiences. One, the British people as a whole, are being told
that they should not view the Northern Irish conflict as something
of irrelevance to them. A second, more selective audience, the
government, is being warned that the IRA has the ability and the
will to carry out such acts, and that appropriate changes to policy
should be forthcoming (as, with the election of a Labour govern-
ment in 1997, they were).
Whatever the size and nature of the audience, however, all
political communication is intended to achieve an effect on the
receivers of the message. From US presidential campaigns to the
lobbying of individual MPs and senators, the communicator hopes
that there will be some positive (from his or her point of view)
impact on the political behaviour of the recipient.
As every student of the media knows, the effects issue is one of
great complexity and unending controversy. In political communi-
cation, as in Hollywood cinema or pornography, the audience’s
relationship to the message is ambiguous and extremely difficult to
investigate empirically. Attempts have been made to do so none
the less, and Chapter 3 will examine the evidence for and against
the efficacy of political communication (as measured against the
intentions of the communicators), including such issues as the
importance of a politician’s visual image in shaping voters’
perceptions; the impact of ‘biased’ media coverage on election out-
comes; and the relationship between ‘public opinion’ and attempts
(by both politicians and media organisations) to set agendas. We
also examine the broader effects issue: what ‘effect’ has the rise of
political communication had on the democratic process?

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