Page 73 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION

order and structure political reality, allotting events greater or lesser
significance according to their presence or absence on the media
agenda.
Indeed, the agenda-setting function of the media is argued by
many observers to be their main contribution to the political
process (McCombs, 1981). As citizens, we are unable to grasp or
assimilate anything like the totality of events in the real world, and
thus we rely on the media to search and sift reality for the most
important happenings. During election campaigns, for example,
David Weaver points to ‘considerable support for the conclusion
that the news media are crucial in determining the public importance
of issues . . . at least those issues generally outside the experience of
most of the public’ (1987, p. 186).
Chapter 2 noted that a key objective of political communication
is to set the public agenda in ways favourable to an organisation’s
achievement of its goals. Politicians, as we shall see in Chapters 6
and 7, thus direct considerable energies to having their preferred
agendas accepted and endorsed by the media. The media, however,
are agenda-setters in their own capacity as providers of information,
highlighting some issues and neglecting others, for reasons which
are often beyond the capacity of politicians to influence significantly.
When the British media pursued Tory Cabinet Minister David
Mellor to resignation in 1992 over his affair with an actress, we can
be sure that this was not an issue placed on the news agenda by
Conservative media managers. Rather, the story was driven by
commercial and other criteria (the need to sell newspapers and
the British fascination with sex scandals). These same pressures,
reinforced by some proprietors’, editors’ and journalists’ deter-
mination to expose what they perceived as a tired and corrupt
ruling elite, drove the ‘sleaze agenda’ which dogged the Conservative
government throughout most of its 1992–7 term, and contributed
substantially to the party’s defeat in the May 1997 general election.
The 1997 electoral agenda was, in this respect at least, set by the
media, rather than the politicians.
By contrast, the general election campaign of 1992 witnessed
careful and largely successful efforts by all the major parties to set
the news agenda from day to day, with Labour’s emphasis on the
future of the National Health Service countered by the Tories’ stress
on taxation and the Liberal Democrats’ focus on proportional
representation. Often, it is difficult to distinguish the agenda-setting
activities of the media from those of the politicians in this way, but
the distinction is important analytically.

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