Page 47 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION

citizen experiences as political information is the product of several
mediating processes which are more or less invisible to him or
her.

The manufacture of consent
These processes begin with the politicians. The legitimacy of liberal
democratic government is founded, as we have noted, on the
consent of the governed. But consent, as Walter Lippmann observed
in the work cited above, can be ‘manufactured’. ‘The manufacture
of consent’ (1954, p. 245), indeed, had as early as 1922 become a
‘self-conscious art’ in which politicians combined the techniques of
social psychology with the immense reach of mass media. The
detailed analysis of these techniques will be the subject of most of
this book, but by acknowledging their existence at this point we
recognise a major flaw in democratic theory: if the information
on which political behaviour is based is, or can be, manufactured
artifice rather than objective truth, the integrity of the public sphere
is inevitably diminished. To the extent that citizens are subject to
manipulation, rather than exposed to information, democracy loses
its authenticity and becomes something rather more sinister.
The distinction between ‘persuasion’, which is a universally
recognised function of political actors in a democracy, and manipu-
lation, which carries with it the negative connotations of propaganda
and deceit, is not always an easy one to draw. But only those with a
touching and naive faith in the ethical purity of politicians would
deny that the latter plays an increasingly important part in modern
(or post-modern) democratic politics.
We shall return to the theme of manipulation later (see Chapter 7).
Politicians, however, also seek to conceal information from citizens,
sometimes for reasons of what is called ‘national security’, and
sometimes to avoid political embarrassment. The public nature of
politics identified as a prerequisite of liberal democracy by Bobbio
often conflicts with the politicians’ desire for survival, and may be
sacrificed as a result. While secrecy, deception and cover-ups are
hardly new features of politics, their continued use and occasional
dramatic exposure (for example in Italy’s tangentopoli scandal of
the mid-1990s) remind us that what the citizen receives as political
information in the public sphere is often an incomplete and partial
picture of reality. We may be conscious of that incompleteness
when, for example, secrecy legislation is deployed on national
security grounds. More commonly, the face of concealment is itself

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