Page 97 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION

THE PRESS

The press and broadcast media, by the nature of their func-
tioning and role, employ different modes of intervention in
politics. The former, as we have seen, have always been more
overtly partisan in their approach to political affairs, perceiving
their role as very much that of opinion-articulation. At election
time the views expressed are in terms of party preference.
Individual newspapers actively campaign on behalf of their pre-
ferred party and denigrate or criticise the others. The popular
tabloid press will do so in an openly propagandistic, ‘populist’
manner, accompanied by various levels of distortion, untruth and
sensationalism, while the broadsheet newspapers will outline their
views in more reasoned terms. Both will select news stories with
an eye to constructing a particular image (positive or negative) of
a party. James Curran’s analysis of 1980s press coverage of the
London Labour Party – the ‘loony Left’, as it became known –
shows clearly how some local and national newspapers attempted
to smear Labour councillors in the capital by associating them
with extreme or bizarre political crusades (1987). In many of the
cases examined, stories reported as ‘fact’ were manufactured,
or exaggerated until they had only a tenuous connection with
reality. 1
The so-called ‘quality’ newspapers are also capable of such
coverage. In 1991, not long before the 1992 general election,
Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times produced a long report on the
Labour leader Neil Kinnock’s ‘links’ with the Soviet Communist
2
Party. Although the connections were, on close examination of
the story, no more substantial than would be expected between a
potential British prime minister (as Mr Kinnock then was) and
the government of another major power, the construction of the
story and the headlines used implied an altogether more sinister
relationship.
‘Straight’ news can, then, be deployed as a form of political
intervention, intended to smear political organisations and influence
voters. In certain situations, such as the conflict in Northern Ireland
or the Gulf War, news often becomes a blatant form of propaganda,
intended to demonise and dehumanise ‘the enemy’. The Sun’s
reference to Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams (in the period before
the Good Friday peace agreement and the setting up of the Northern
Ireland assembly turned him into a statesman of sorts) as ‘the

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