Page 64 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

THE EFFECTS OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

index of the way in which politics has been changing to
become a matter of ‘selling’ ideas and ‘delivering’ up
voters; a sign that ‘scientific management’ has entered into
politics and market values have permeated deeper into
social relations.
(1985, p. 53)

From this perspective, the notion that democracy has anything to
do with rationality and ‘public interest’ is an illusion, since we
choose our politics on the same grounds, and as a result of the
application of the same techniques of persuasion, as we choose our
toothpaste. As Nicholas Garnham puts it in his discussion of the
public sphere, the rise of political advertising and public relations
expresses ‘the direct control of private or state interests of the flow
of public information in the interest, not of rational discourse, but
of manipulation’ (1986, p. 41). The rational citizen of classical
liberal theory has become ‘a consumer of politics and policies . . .
the competing political parties [present] electors with different
policy options in broadly the same way as firms [offer] rival
products to the consumers’ (Greenaway et al., 1992, p. 51).

POLITICS AND THE POST-MODERN

To this argument about the trivialisation of politics and the
expulsion of rational discourse from the process may be added the
‘post-modernist’ variant, in which political communication is
viewed as the one-way exchange of empty signifiers and meaningless
messages across a barren media landscape. An early pioneer of this
apocalyptic view was Daniel Boorstin who, as noted in Chapter 2,
coined the term ‘pseudo-event’ in response to what he saw as
the increasing tendency of the mass media to be preoccupied with
unreal, unauthentic, manufactured ‘happenings’, or ‘synthetic
novelties’. His definition of a pseudo-event contained the following
elements:

(a) It is not spontaneous, but comes about because some-
one has planned, planted or incited it; (b) It is planted
primarily for the immediate purpose of being reported or
reproduced. Therefore, its occurrence is arranged for
the convenience of the media. Its success is measured by
how widely it is reported. Time relations in it are more

43