The Media and Political Process

Eric Louw

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781446245736
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How have professional communicators transformed the business of politics? How do political bodies use the media to sell domestic and foreign policies to the public? This fully revised new edition of The Media and Political Process assesses the impact of spin doctoring and media activity in liberal democracies that are just as concerned with impression management and public relations as with policy.

Political processes never stand still, and this revised second edition explores the mediatisation of the political process in light of recent developments, from Vladimir Putin?s growth into a political celebrity, to the activities of spin doctors in the 2008 US Presidential Elections.

Providing a comprehensive overview of the evolution, operation and terminology of political communication, this text is an accessible, lively resource for students of political communication and media and politics, and will be important further reading for students of journalism, public relations and cultural studies.

ONE

Introduction

A core question for anyone interested in political studies, media studies or journalism studies is: ‘What is the relationship between the media and politics in contemporary Western democracies?’ Attempts to answer this question have given rise to the expanding field of Political Communication. This book aims to introduce students to some core themes and questions in Political Communication. Doing so will involve examining the following:

• The argument that there has been a substantial media-ization of Western politics;
• The growth of spin-doctors and public relations-ized politics;
• The relationship between media coverage and policy making;
• The evolution of political journalism;
• The way politicians have learned to use different media forms;
• How television has changed the nature of politics.

The Media and Political Process aims to introduce undergraduates to a range of themes associated with the notion that, since the arrival of mass communication, a particular kind of image making has grown into a central feature of the political processes of Western democracies. The book will argue that a core feature of mass democratic politics is ‘hype making’. Just as magicians use smoke-and-mirrors to distract their audiences and conjure up illusions, so too does the political machine and its media staffers. In today’s Western democracies, television is the primary (but not exclusive) vehicle for this smoke-and-mirrors show. This show involves four sets of players: politicians-as-performers; the spin industry; media workers (journalists, presenters/hosts and researchers); and their audiences. A fifth set of players are policy makers – but they tend to remain backstage; shielded from as much scrutiny as possible by the smoke-and-mirrors show. A core aim of this book is to unravel the symbiotic relationships between journalists, spin-doctors and politicians within contemporary televisualized politics.

The book will argue that demagoguery has become a core feature of twentieth-century Western politics, with politics now characterized by a range of demagogic arts geared to steering mass public opinion. These demagogic arts will be described and analyzed.

The book is also about describing how contemporary mass audiences increasingly experience ‘steered’ politics as a set of secondhand media images, projected into their lives by the media, especially television. Nimmo and Combs (1990: 18) liken this contemporary secondhand experience of media-ized politics to Plato’s prisoners in a cave (see Box 1.1).

Box 1.1 Plato’s prisoners in a cave

In his Republic, Plato relates the tale of prisoners in an underground den, bound so they cannot turn their heads. They can see nothing that goes on around them, only the shadows of those things that the fire throws on the cave wall. When they converse, they give names to and talk about the shadows of things, thinking they are naming the real things and not shadows. Suddenly one prisoner is released. The objects that produced the shadows are passed before his eyes. He is perplexed. He thinks the shadows he formerly saw are truer than the objects shown to him. Compelled to look at the piercing light of the fire, he turns away from the objects to the images on the wall. The shadows are clearer than the objects, again more real. Finally, hauled out to the sunlight, slowly the prisoner adjusts to seeing the objects for what they are. Yet pushed back into the cave, blinded by the sudden darkness, he sees even less than his fellow prisoners who were not released. The prisoners conclude it is better not to ascend to the light and vow to kill anyone forcing them to do so.

In this regard, the book is about exploring the following questions, namely – is the televisualization of politics transforming politics into a set of dancing ‘shadows’ which flicker through our lives, and which possibly hide more than they reveal? Have we perhaps become prisoners of an electronic cave? Are the secondhand televisualized images of politics we now receive:

• An accurate ‘reflection of reality’ (a mirror)?
• A blurred and skewed reflection (Plato’s shadows)?
• The result of demagoguery which carefully crafts the images we get to see?
• The result of a complex media-ized ‘construction process’ involving journalists, spin-doctors, politicians, public opinion pollsters and audiences.

THE MEDIA AS ‘A MIRROR’

In liberal democracies mainstream journalists are trained to be ‘objective’. Objective journalism is solidly grounded in an empiricist understanding of the world (see Box 1.2), i.e. journalists have been taught to believe that:

• News exists ‘out there’ in the ‘real world’;
• This news exists independently of media organizations and journalists;
• The journalist’s job is to find this news;
• Having found the news the journalist must record it objectively – i.e. ensure there is correspondence between what is described in the story and the world ‘out there’;
• Journalists are expected to eliminate their own subjectivity by applying routinized journalistic formulas (see Chapter 4).

Box 1.2 Empiricist understanding of the world

(This worldview also underpins ‘objective journalism’)

• A real objective world exists ‘out there’ independent of thinking subjects;
• Humans get access to this real world through their senses. Senses connect the ‘inner world’ (of thinking) to the ‘outer world’ of empirical reality;
• Knowledge of the world is achieved by carefully recording empirical regularities;
• Subjectivism must be eliminated from knowledge. This is achieved by building in ‘controls’;
• ‘Good’ empirical knowledge results from ensuring there is correspondence between what is described and the world ‘out there’. This correspondence must be verifiable.

This mainstream model of liberal journalism believes that its practices result in stories that are an accurate reflection of reality – i.e. journalists believe they simply hold a mirror up to society, and describe it ‘the way it is’. This notion of ‘journalism as a mirror’ has been disputed by constructivists (see Box 1.3) who have analyzed the media, e.g. Tuchman (1978). Tuchman argued that journalists actually construct the news, rather than reflect the news (see Chapter 4, Journalistic Practices). This constructivist view of journalism will strongly inform the arguments developed in this book (see p. 6).

Box 1.3 Constructivist understanding of the world

• Humans cannot passively receive inputs from the world ‘out there’ in the way cameras record images, because all incoming sense-data is processed by humans as thinking beings;
• All observation of the world is subjectively guided. Existing ideas (e.g. theory) knowledge, and experience (coded in our language-systems) structure the way we receive and interpret incoming data-inputs;
• Paradigms already in our head guide how we look at the world (e.g. the questions we ask and what we focus our senses upon) and how we process and interpret incoming sensory inputs. Hence people using different paradigms are effectively living in different worlds;
• Knowledge is the result of an internal (subjective) cognitive process –i.e. what we choose to think about; and how we choose to think about it (i.e. knowledge is guided by theories, ideas and experience already in our heads);
• So knowledge comes from where we choose to point the camera rather than a mechanical process of recording and it is our existing thoughts that guide what we choose to focus on. A significant determinant of our ‘existing thinking’ is how we have been socialized, and what we have already been exposed to via education and previously received media images.

However, the mainstream model of liberal journalism does acknowledge that an accurate portrayal of ‘reality’ (a mirror) is not always achieved. Although journalists strive to create an accurate correspondence between what is described in their story and the world ‘out there’, they do not always succeed. When it comes to political reporting this is blamed on the work of spin-doctors – i.e. demagogues who work to prevent journalists from finding all the ‘facts’. Spin-doctors have become a convenient scapegoat. They are viewed as practitioners of the dark arts who work to obstruct objective journalists doing their job. And there is some validity in this portrayal. However, this portrayal is only half the story. The other half of the story is the role journalists themselves play in constructing a view of the world more akin to the shadows in Plato’s cave than a mirror.

This book will argue that political reporting has indeed been PR-ized – i.e. spin-doctors have learned to ‘steer’ the portrayal of news. However, PR-ization involves a symbiotic relationship between a range of people, including spin-doctors, public opinion pollsters, politicians and journalists. The practices of objective journalism are implicated in the process of obscuration because spin-doctors have learned to use the practices of mainstream liberal journalism to help them construct the view of the world they are trying to portray. The shadows in Plato’s cave are constructed – and it is spin-doctors and journalists working symbiotically who construct them.

Journalists have every right to criticize the way spin-doctors try to alter the shadows projected onto the cave wall. Journalists are correct to be skeptical. The problem is that journalists are not skeptical enough – they only focus their skepticism on others, never on themselves. This book will suggest that skepticism needs to be focused on journalistic practices themselves, and journalists need to focus more on their own roles in constructing images that are so often obscurations.

BEING SKEPTICAL

This book will deliberately examine the processes of political communication with a skeptical and jaundiced eye. Its focus will be liberal democracies and the media practices associated with liberal democratic political systems. This focus should not be taken to mean that liberal democracy is viewed as a form of governance especially deserving of criticism. The critical approach of The Media and Political Process can just as easily be applied to other forms of governance. Liberal democracy has simply been focused on because it has arguably become the most important form of contemporary governance. (For anyone interested in reading a deconstruction of Soviet-communist governance from a critical and skeptical perspective paralleling in many ways this author’s approach, see Bahro, 1981.)

The Media and Political Process proposes that we increasingly inhabit a world of secondhand televisual images that increasingly naturalize ‘the way things are’. Skepticism demands that we pay serious attention to how televisual images are constructed so that we ‘de-naturalize’ them. In this regard, it is important to constantly ask ourselves what the cameras are pointed at; what they are not pointed at; and why? In essence, this book can be seen as an attempt to point the cameras in new directions. As Kuhn (1970) has noted, asking different questions produces different knowledge (see p. 6). In the same way, shifting the camera angle changes the view of the world we are presented with. This book is deliberately geared to provoking critical thinking about televisualized politics in liberal democracies. Consequently, the book will be deliberately provocative as a way of metaphorically shifting camera angles that we increasingly take for granted. In adopting a critical approach, this book is not attempting to construct ‘a truth’; rather, it is attempting to provoke discussion through a series of expositions grounded in critical theory and constructivist thinking. The book hopes to create skeptical readers of the media by revealing something of the symbiosis that has grown up between spin-doctors, journalists and politicians. In this regard, it was noted earlier that journalism is a skeptical profession. But it was suggested that journalists are not skeptical enough, because they focus their skepticism on others, but never on themselves. With this in mind, it is hoped that readers of this book not only will develop skepticism of media-ized politics, but also will be skeptical of this book itself. It too has been constructed.

TOWARDS A CRITICAL CONSTRUCTIVIST APPROACH TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

Plato’s shadows in a cave are helpful when thinking about political communication. However, in our contemporary era we need to revise the picture of the cave. Today it is not shadows that are the problem. Instead, there is a television screen attached to the back wall of the cave that receives highly constructed and mediated images of the world beamed in from outside. The pictures are not fuzzy and shadowy; indeed they are crisp and clear and colorful. But that does not necessarily make them accurate reflections of any ‘reality’ outside the cave. They are just as problematic as the shadowy images in Plato’s cave; perhaps more problematic because they now look so ‘real’.

This book will propose that we should be highly skeptical about televised pictures, and skeptical about the people and organizations that make them. We must ask critical questions like:

• Who constructs these televised images?
• What are the interests, biases, worldviews and agendas of those who make these images?
• Do the work practices of all those involved in making these images in any way skew the pictures we receive? If so, how?

In essence, we must not accept these televisual representations at face value. Rather we must be clear about how and why they were made, and how they almost certainly portray a partial and skewed view of the world. Instead of uncritically looking at the picture on the screen, we should be thinking about the camera, the cameraman, the cameraman’s boss, the journalist’s bias, the journalist’s boss, and the spin-doctors who seek to influence all of this. We must start to think critically about what the camera is pointed at. Why has it been pointed at this? What is behind the camera that we are not getting to see? What is being edited out? By whom? And how does the journalist’s or continuity announcer’s voice-over change how we see the pictures? To what extent, and under what circumstance, do spin-doctors successfully ‘steer’ people? Why do so many people fall for the ‘hype’ and scripted ‘faces’ of manufactured celebrity?

What is being proposed is the deployment of a particular methodological approach, namely constructivism. With this in mind, we’ll now take a brief digression to examine the constructivist approach.

THE CONSTRUCTIVIST APPROACH

Although constructivism is a theory of knowledge, it is especially well suited to understanding the processes of media-ized communication. Constructivism is a way of seeing and understanding the world based on the premise that as human beings we experience the world mentally – i.e. we relate to the world through our minds. Hence ‘knowing’ becomes an ‘internal’ (cognitive) process. For constructivists, it is our minds tha...