Page 74 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

THE POLITICAL MEDIA

A variation on the agenda-setting theme, and one which views the
media institutions as working closely with political actors, is
advanced by Greenaway et al., in their analysis of the factors
involved in governmental policy-making and implementation
(1992). In the case of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, they note that
the issue was largely absent from the political agenda until 1986
or thereabouts, at which point it began to receive extensive media
coverage. As a result of this coverage, argue Miller et al., the
Thatcher government began for the first time to use the media as
an anti-HIV/AIDS educational tool (Miller et al., 1998). The media,
in this sense, put HIV/AIDS on the public agenda, and permitted a
response to the epidemic at the official level. Before 1986 moral
considerations prevented the Conservative government (with its
espousal of ‘Victorian’ moral values) from acknowledging the
scale of the HIV/AIDS problem, addressing its causes, or applying
preventive public health measures with the requisite degree of
sexual explicitness. When the media took the issue on – albeit in
a sensationalistic and often inaccurate and homophobic manner –
these constraints were removed. Thereafter, the media became an
important channel through which anti-HIV public health messages
and policies could be transmitted to the population. ‘The media
could be seen to legitimate government action, and then to provide
the channels through which policy was implemented. The net
effect of press and TV attention was to establish a climate of
opinion which required governmental action, or gestures of action’
(Greenaway et al., 1992, p. 87).
Greg Philo’s study of the ‘1984’ Ethiopian famine notes that
although the scale of the disaster was evident as early as 1982, it
became an international news story only in July 1984, when the
BBC and ITN produced harrowing filmed reports from the scene.
Only then did the international community of policy-makers
formulate a response. The media played a key role in putting the
famine on to the international agenda. Philo concludes, ‘although it
is government and relief agencies which provide aid, the media
are central in galvanising an international response and in pressing
governments to provide more adequate levels of aid’ (1993a,
p. 105). Journalist Martin Woolacott, in an article pointing to the
negative impact of the media’s agenda-setting role in foreign news,
observes wryly of the world’s disaster spots that ‘if you are visible
on television and in the papers, you are attended to. If you are
invisible you are dead, sometimes literally so’. 2
Molotch et al. describe the connection between media coverage

53