Page 96 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

THE MEDIA AS POLITICAL ACTORS

‘really’ matters in political affairs at any given time. Journalists
communicate to us the ‘meaning’ of politics (Gerstle et al., 1991).
They insert the events of political life into narrative frameworks
which allow them to be told as news stories. These frameworks do
not spring fully formed from the journalistic pen, of course, but
develop over time in the interaction and competition between
different news media, and between the various actors in, or sources
of, a story. Over time, competing frameworks are narrowed down
and eliminated until one dominant framework remains. Although
always subject to challenge and revision, the dominant framework,
once established, provides the structure within which subsequent
events are allocated news value, reported and made sense of.
For example, the dominant narrative framework for making
sense of events within the British Conservative Party following the
1992 election can be expressed in terms of a ‘leadership crisis’.
Political journalists – encouraged by Thatcherite elements in the
Conservative Party resentful of their leader’s abrupt dismissal from
office – told a continuing story of John Major’s buffeting by the
harsh winds of political misfortune. The ‘story’ of the Labour Party
over the same period, on the other hand, was the relatively positive
one of modernisation and renewal. When Labour leader John Smith
died suddenly on 12 May 1994, media coverage of his success in
transforming the party’s image and improving its ‘electability’ was
uniformly positive. Tony Blair’s election as Labour leader on 26 July
that year took place in an atmosphere of euphoric endorsement of
his abilities, shared even by such formerly right-wing organs as
the London Evening Standard. Journalists also appreciated New
Labour’s skill in public relations and news management, and the
invincibility of Labour’s ‘spin doctors’ (see Chapter 7) became a
powerful narrative framework in the media’s making sense of
Labour’s transition to an electable government. The Conservatives,
meanwhile, were dogged from 1994 onwards not only by having
all they said and did interpreted as part of the ongoing leader-
ship crisis, but also by the developing narrative of sleaze, which
added corruption and moral hypocrisy to the party’s perceived
problems. From ‘leadership crisis’ the dominant framework for
making sense of the Conservatives developed into one of decay,
decline and imminent defeat. So powerful did this framework
become as a journalistic structuring device that nothing the party
leadership could do to highlight the strengths of the economy (and
when the Tories left office in 1997 the economy was performing
exceptionally well by British standards) could undermine it.

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