Page 71 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Transnational Trends in Political Communication

political actors than ever before. As a result, politicians and officials have
become more sophisticated and effective at manipulating news coverage
by such means as staging events that are guaranteed to satisfy journalists’
commercial need for interesting video pictures, timing statements and
actions to meet news deadlines, staying “on message” to attract cover-
age to well-chosen campaign themes, and the omnipresent “spin” by
which political actors try to shape journalists’ reports to partisan advan-
tage. Not surprisingly, journalists in many countries have sought to resist
politicians’manipulationandasserttheirownindependence.Thisgrow-
ing adversarialism between journalists and politicians has been noted in
a number of studies (e.g., Blumler and Gurevitch 1995; Bennett 1996;
Fallows 1997; Blumler and Coleman 2001). One consequence of growing
adversarialism is an increasingly negative view of politics and politicians
offered in political news stories, which seek to expose political actors’
statements and actions as public relations ploys and which have become
less documentary and more heavily interpretive, emphasizing the jour-
nalists’ own views (e.g., Patterson 1993, 1996; Barnhurst and Steele 1997;
Blumler and Kavanagh 1999; Mancini 1999).
In a number of important studies, these attributes of political news
have been linked to citizens’ growing cynicism about politics and politi-
cians (e.g., Patterson 1993, 1996; Cappella and Jamieson 1996, 1997).
As Blumler and Coleman observe, “A seemingly unbreakable chain links
the centrality of the media in modern politics with politicians’ adapta-
tions to news imperatives, the emergence of ‘spin politics,’ journalists’
frequent and aggressive disclosure of such politics, politicians’ loss of
credibility, and finally public apathy” (4).

The Conventional View: An Assessment
As the modern model of campaigning became the model of politi-
cal communication – in governing as well as at election time – in more
countries, researchers became more convinced that it is corrosive to the
health of democracy. The forces that drove the emergence of the mod-
ern model – the rise of the postindustrial economy, the decline of the
influence of traditional institutions, the weakening of bonds to class and
region, the expansion of commercial mass media, growing public con-
cern about issues and topics that were not in the political parties’ tradi-
tional portfolios, the growing feeling that centers of economic power and
influence were becoming transnational and beyond the control of any
government, and so on – seemed to be inexorable. The consequences of
the modern political communication model seemed to be public apathy

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