Page 48 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

POLITICS, DEMOCRACY AND THE MEDIA

concealed from the audience, unless a journalist or campaigner
succeeds in making it public.
Manipulation of opinion and concealment (or suppression) of
inconvenient information are strategies emanating from political
actors themselves, pursued through media institutions. In some
cases, journalists will attempt to publicise and expose what is
hidden. As we shall see in Chapter 4, the media often have an
interest in playing the watchdog role over the politicians. On the
other hand, the media may be complicit in the politicians’ conceal-
ment of sensitive information (if, for example, a newspaper is
strongly committed to a government it may choose to ignore an
otherwise newsworthy story).
More generally, there are many aspects of the process of
media production which in themselves make media organisations
vulnerable to strategies of political manipulation.
In 1962 Daniel Boorstin coined the term ‘pseudo-event’ in
response to what he saw as the increasing tendency of news and
journalistic media to cover ‘unreal’, unauthentic ‘happenings’. This
tendency, he argued, was associated with the rise from the nine-
teenth century onwards of the popular press and a correspondingly
dramatic increase in the demand for news material. ‘As the costs
of printing and then broadcasting increased, it became financially
necessary to keep the presses always at work and the TV screen
always busy. Pressures towards the making of pseudo-events
became ever stronger. Newsgathering turned into news making’
(1962, p. 14).
An important source of pseudo-events for the media has of course
been the political process – interviews with government leaders,
news leaks and press conferences all provide reportable material
which is happily taken up by the media to fill newspaper column
inches and broadcast airtime (McNair, 2000). Thus, argues
Boorstin, the twentieth century has seen a relationship of mutual
convenience and interdependence evolve between the politician and
the media professional, as one strives to satisfy the other’s hunger
for news while at the same time maximising his or her favourable
public exposure. For Boorstin in 1962, the trend was not welcome.

In a democratic society . . . freedom of speech and of the
press and of broadcasting includes freedom to create
pseudo-events. Competing politicians, newsmen and news
media contest in this creation. They vie with each other in
offering attractive, ‘informative’ accounts and images of

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