Page 254 - Culture Society and the Media

244 POLITICAL EFFECTS
informed also constitute a new site for persuasion, since their defences against
persuasion are liable to be relatively frail.
A second consequence of the coming of television has been a reduction in
selectivity in voters’ exposure to party propaganda. A medium which is
constitutionally obliged to deal impartially with all recognized standpoints, and
which offers favourable time-slots for the screening of the parties’ broadcasts,
affords little scope for viewers selectively to tune in only to their side of the
argument. Moreover, innovations in the formats of election broadcasting, such as
face-to-face debates between party leaders, as between the Presidential
candidates in the US, further reduce the possibilities of selective exposure.
But perhaps the most potent consequence of television’s intervention into
politics stems from its seemingly most innocuous feature—its need to maintain
an above-the-battle stance in its relationship to party-political conflict. Since
broadcasting may not support individual parties, it is obliged to adhere to such
non-partisan—perhaps even anti-partisan—standards as fairness, impartiality,
neutrality and objectivity, at the expense of such alternative values as
commitment, consistent loyalty and readiness to take sides. Thus television may
tend to put staunch partisans on the defensive and help to legitimate attitudes of
wariness and scepticism towards the politicial parties. Perhaps that explains why
some writers have postulated a causal connection between the ascendancy of
television and increasing electoral volatility. Butler and Stokes (1974), writing
about Britain, for example, conclude: ‘It should occasion no surprise that the
years just after television had completed its conquest of the national audience
were the years in which the electoral tide began to run more freely.’ (p. 419, 2nd
edn)

Changes in conceptualizing media effects
The third major impulse feeding the renewed interest in the impact of the mass
media has been a shift in the conceptual underpinnings of political effects
inquiry. In the earlier post-war years, political communication research was
almost coterminous with persuasion research. More recently, however, greater
interest has been shown in the cognitive effects of political communication.
Instead of focusing on attitude change through exposure to persuasive messages,
researchers, pointing out that much political output of the mass media comes in
the form of information, have aimed to analyse the political impact of mass
communication in terms of its informationtransmittal function.
This observation accords with a certain feature of audience psychology.
Where overt persuasion is recognized, audience members may be on their guard.
But media contents may be received in a less sceptical spirit if people perceive
them as information, i.e. as if they have no specific axe to grind. Indeed, when
people are asked why they follow political events in the mass media, they tend to
give ‘surveillance’ reasons more often than any other, as illustrated in the