Page 36 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION

increasingly fought out in the media, with global public opinion as
the prize (since the protagonists – governments and international
bodies like the United Nations – are presumed to be responsive to
public opinion). As Walter Lippmann recognised in the early 1920s,
‘governments today act upon the principle that it is not sufficient to
govern their own citizens well and to assure the people that they are
acting wholeheartedly on their behalf. They understand that the
public opinion of the entire world is important to their welfare’
(quoted in Bernays, 1923, p. 44).
Efforts to influence international public opinion and policy are
clearly political communication as we have defined it in this intro-
duction, and Chapter 9 is devoted to analyses of some prominent
examples of such efforts, including the Falklands, Gulf and
Yugoslavian wars, and the broader propaganda campaigns which
accompanied the seventy years of East–West conflict, the Cold
War. The discussion also considers the political communication
dimension of the events of 11 September 2001 and their aftermath.

CONCLUSION

This book, then, is about political communication in the very
broadest sense, incorporating the communicative practices of all
kinds of political organisations (and some, such as British public
service broadcasting, which are not supposed to be ‘political’ at all),
in both domestic and international arenas.
Throughout, I have referred to the form of polity with which the
book is chiefly concerned as ‘democratic’, although the discussion,
particularly of international political communication, will necess-
arily include societies, such as the former Soviet Union and Iraq,
which could not be so described. By ‘democracies’ I mean, simply,
societies in which governments rule primarily through consent
rather than coercion; where political leaders have popular legitimacy,
if not necessarily always popularity, and where the views of the
citizen as expressed through the ballot box and elsewhere are
declared to be meaningful. In the next chapter we examine how
such societies are supposed to work, and the role played in them by
political communication.

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