The Crisis of Public Communication

Jay Blumler, Michael Gurevitch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134839544
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The role of the mass media in the world of politcs has become increasingly influential and controversial. This book traces the origins and development of this phenomena, basing discussion on critiques of BBC election coverage since 1966.

Part I
Structure

Chapter 2
Linkages between the mass media and politics¹

INTRODUCTION

Assumptions about the political impact of the mass media have played a formative part in guiding the direction of mass communication research ever since its inception. In so far as the pioneer investigators accepted popular impressions of the media as omnipotent and capable of being employed for manipulative purposes, it was natural that much research attention should have been paid to communication influences on people’s political opinions and attitudes. It is equally obvious why such a preoccupation with persuasive effects should have resulted in an imbalance of activity favouring studies of the audience at the expense of other elements in the communication process. Dramatic examples of seemingly successful uses of the mass media to propagate political beliefs and ideologies in World War I and the 1930s, plus the growth of political science interest in empirical analysis of voting behaviour, gave rise to and reinforced the conviction that the prime target for research should be processes of opinion and attitude change among individual receivers of mass-communicated messages.

The subsequent erosion of the myth of the media’s irresistible powers of persuasion through the publication of contrary evidence had two related repercussions for the study of political communication. First, there was a marked broadening and diversification of the problems regarded as open to enquiry. Consequently, political communication provides a fertile field of study nowadays for researchers steeped in a wide range of disciplines and methodologies (see Swanson and Nimmo, 1990, for an overview). Second, in some cases those shifts of focus resulted in a virtual rejection of the audience as an object of research interest. This stemmed mainly from the assumption that the original seekers after persuasion effects had not only exhausted that particular seam of enquiry but had returned from their endeavours with precious little gold to show for their trouble.

The position taken in this essay is that the study of political communication could be enriched by adoption of a systems outlook. As conceived here, this is regarded not as competitive with other research approaches but as capable of incorporating them. Three benefits could ensue from attempts to place political communication phenomena in a systems framework. First, it links diverse bodies of evidence in broader analytical perspectives. Second, there would be an antidote against the tendency to under- or over-emphasize any single element of the political communication system (e.g. the audience). Third, by drawing attention to system factors which might have macro-level consequences that could be measured and compared, cross-national investigation would be facilitated.

THE ELEMENTS OF A POLITICAL COMMUNICATION SYSTEM

An underlying assumption of such an approach is that the main features of the political communication process may be regarded as if they formed a system, such that variation in one of its components would be associated with variation in the behaviour of its other components. In very broad terms, the main components of a political communication system may be located in:

1. Political institutions in their communication aspects.²
2. Media institutions in their political aspects.
3. Audience orientations to political communication.
4. Communication-relevant aspects of political culture.

Expressed somewhat differently, if we look at a political communication system, what we see is two sets of institutions – political and media organizations – which are involved in the course of message preparation in much ‘horizontal’ interaction with each other, while, on a ‘vertical’ axis, they are separately and jointly engaged in disseminating and processing information and ideas to and from the mass citizenry.

The interactions of the two kinds of institutions are to some extent conditioned by mutual power relationships. This presupposes that both have an independent power base in society, one source of which arises from their respective relations with the audience. The power of political institutions is inherent in their functions as articulators of interest and mobilizers of social power for purposes of political action. The independent power base of media institutions is perhaps less obvious and may even be denied by those who perceive them as essentially secondary bodies, entirely dependent on others for the news and opinions they pass on, and highly constrained in their operation by a number of political, economic, cultural and technological factors. Nevertheless, at least three sources of media power can be identified. These are structural, psychological and normative in origin.

The structural root of the power of the mass media springs from their unique capacity to deliver to the politician an audience which, in size and composition, is unavailable to him by any other means. Indeed, the historical significance of the growing role of mass communication in politics lies, among other things, in the resulting enlargement of the receiver base to such an extent that previous barriers to audience involvement (e.g. low level of education and weak political interest) have been largely overcome and the audience for political communication has become virtually coterminous with membership of society itself.

The psychological root of media power stems from the relations of credibility and trust that different media organizations have succeeded in developing (albeit to different degrees) with members of their audiences. This bond is based on the fulfilment of audience expectations and the validation of past trust relationships, which in turn are dependent on legitimized and institutionalized routines of information presentation evolved over time by the media.

It is the combined influence of these structural and psychological sources of strength that enable the media to interpose themselves between politicians and the audience and to ‘intervene’ in other political processes as well. This is expressed in the way in which they are capable of restructuring the timing and character of political events (conventions, demonstrations, leader appearances, etc.), defining crisis situations to which politicians are obliged to react, requiring comment on issues that media personnel have emphasized as important, injecting new personalities into the political dialogue (such as television interviewers) and stimulating the growth of new communication agencies (such as public relations firms, opinion-poll agencies, and political advertising and campaign management specialists).

Since such forms of intervention may be unwelcome to many politicians, the normative root of media power can be crucial at times of conflict. This springs from the respect that is accorded in competitive democracies to such tenets of liberal philosophy as freedom of expression and the need for specialized organs to safeguard citizens against possible abuses of political authority. This tends to legitimate the independent role of media organizations in the political field and to shelter them from overt attempts blatantly to bring them under political control.

It is not the argument here that political communication flows are merely the product of a naked power struggle waged between two sets of would-be communicators. On the contrary, the notion that such powerholders are bound together in a political communication system alerts us to the influence of other forces as well. One such influence arises from audience expectations, which it is the concern of both sorts of communicators to addresseffectively. In addition, a systems outlook implies that the interactions of the various actors occur within an overarching framework of organizing principles that are designed to regularize the relationships of media institutions to political institutions. The implications of those considerations are discussed more fully below.

ENTRY POINTS INTO THE SYSTEM

Any analysis of a system comprising a number of components linked by a network of mutual dependencies is faced with the need to identify a set of relevant conceptual perspectives and to select optimal entry points into the system. The following discussion proposes to proceed by selecting as points of departure those elements in each of the components of the political communication system which are most conducive to generating propositions offering a basis for both theoretical advance and empirical research. We look first at the audience, then at certain organizational characteristics of political and media institutions and finally at the political culture, as it is reflected in the principles which organize normative relationships between political and media institutions, which in turn have some consequences for relationships between these institutions and the audience.

Audience roles

The concept of audience roles has arisen from attempts to apply the ‘uses and gratifications’ approach to the study of voters’ orientations to the political contents of the mass media. Evidence collected from this standpoint supports the implication that different receivers of political information are motivated by different expectations of it, develop different orientations towards it and may therefore be perceived as playing different roles in the political communication system. Investigating such orientations to political communications in Britain, Blumler (1973) has provisionally identified four such audience roles that might be applicable to the political communication systems of other competitive democracies. They include: the partisan, seeking a reinforcement of existing beliefs; the liberal citizen, seeking guidance in deciding how to vote; the monitor, seeking information about features of the political environment (such as party policies, current issues and the qualities of political leaders); and the spectator, seeking excitement and other affective satisfactions.

The notion of audience roles offers a point of departure for analysis of political communication systems in two respects. One use of the concept would enquire into the processes that lead people in different societies to take up one or more of the roles available to them. Supposing that the validity of a common repertoire of alternative role possibilities could be established for audience members in a designated set of competitive democracies, it would then be possible to identify some of the sociological and psychological correlates associated with the particular political communication roles that different people adopt and to compare their influence cross-nationally. Sociologically, such an analysis might focus, for example, on educational background (expected to differentiate monitors from spectators) or on early patterns of socialization to politics in the family and elsewhere. Psychologically, it might examine such variables as strength of partisan identity (expected to pinpoint the partisans at one pole and spectators at the other) and political cynicism (as a possible discriminant of spectators from the rest). The results might help to show how in the countries studied political culture impinges on political communication expectations at the audience level.

A second line of analysis would pursue the possibility that audience roles are matched by similar orientations among political and professional communicators. The underlying assumption here is that audience members and communicators are linked in a network of mutually shared expectancies (Tan, 1973). It does not follow that such a correspondence of roles will always be perfect. On the contrary, imperfections of feedback, differences of purpose, and especially constraints arising from the disparities of political stratification may all be productive of discrepancies between the orientations of the different participants in the political communication process. Nevertheless, the concept of a ‘communication role’ is at least as applicable to political communicators and to media personnel as it is to audience members. Moreover, the very notion of communication presupposes some degree of compatibility between the orientations of the originators and the receivers of messages. Table 1 presents a set of parallels that may be drawn between them.

Table 1 The complementarity of roles in a political communication system

The utility of such a paradigm depends on its ability to stimulate speculation about the structure of a political communication system and to suggest hypotheses about linkages between the components of such a system. Attention to the role relationships indicated in Table 1 would open up at least three areas of exploration:

1. System integration. The degree of integration of a political communication system might be conceived in terms of the degree of correspondence between its constituent parts. Thus, a highly integrated system would be one with high inter-correlations between role orientations across levels, i.e. where all the participants in the communication process share equivalent orientations and consequently speak on, or are tuned in to, similar wavelengths. Conversely, a system with a low level of integration would be one with low inter-correlations between parallel roles, reflecting a situation where the leading elements are at cross-purposes with each other, and in which a high degree of communication conflict across levels prevails.
2. Inter-level distancing. The relative distance between the audience and the media system, on the one hand, and between the electorate and the political system, on the other, might be measured by the degree to which audience roles correspond more closely with media personnel roles or with political leader roles. Closeness of correspondence might indicate the relative credibility of the media, and the trustworthiness of politicians, for the audience, while lack of correspondence might reflect a failure of one or the other set of communicators to address themselves relevantly to the needs of the audience.
3. Cross-level influences. The principles that normatively relate media organizations to political institutions in a particular society may help to shape the roledefinitionsregarded as appropriate bythose occupyingdifferent positionsin the communication system. Various specific hypotheses may be derived from this possibility:

(a) Media systems with a high degree of political autonomy are likely to give professional communicators considerable freedom to adopt a variety of role orientations. This will leave audience role options wide open as well and tend to oblige political spokespersons to perform in multifunctional fashion. This might not be equally palatable to all politicians (some of whom might have a distaste for the actor/performer role, for example). In such systems, then, we might find more evidence of ‘role distancing’ among politicians and ‘typecasting’ forms of division of labour among journalists in the media.

(b) Where public-service-type goals prevail in media organizations, watchdog functions will be favoured by media professionals and audience members will be encouraged to assume the monitor role; this will exert pressure on politicians to give primacy to the information-provider role. On the other hand, more commercially oriented media might give greater prominence to entertainer roles because of assumptions about audience preferences for the spectator role. Conformity on the part of politicians would lead them to adopt actor/performer roles.

(c) Where political parties control the media, the gladiatorial role will be adopted more often by politicians while the role of editorial guide will be adopted by media personnel; this will exert pressure on audience members to assume the partisan role.

(d) Systems governed by more authoritative and paternalistic goals might have either of two consequences for audience members: audience roles could tend to follow those assumed by party and media communicators, involving a greater emphasis, then, on partisan and monitor roles; or audience expectations would be in conflict with the equivalent orientations of message senders, with resulting tendencies to avoid political information, distrust the media and feel alienated from politics.

Political institutions vs. media institutions: norms and structures

A second point of entry to the analysis of political communication systems springs initially from the necessary involvement of two kinds of actors – political spokespersons and media personnel – in recurrent patterns of interaction with each other. These can be seen as operating on two planes: of boundary maintenance between organizations, and of message production. In the first case, members of the top echelons of both organizations might maintain contacts aimed at regulating the relationships between the two, resolving conflicts where they arise and generally defining the boundaries between them and maintaining the smooth functioning of the system. But of course, second, the bulk of interaction between professional communicators and politicians is concerned (commonly at somewhat lower levels) more directly with political output as such. This takes place in both formal contexts – such as press conferences, briefings, interviews and so on – and informal ones – such as a confidential exchange of views over a drink. The products of these interactions include not only streams of specific messages – on problems of the day, policies evolved to deal with them, arguments for and against alternative positions, the personalities involved in controversy, etc. – but also (and more importantly) those more abiding ground rules that prescribe the standardized formats through which information is regularly presented to the public (Dearlove, 1974). The interacting parties on both planes are perpetually caught up in a tension between needs of mutual accommodation and various sources of conflict. Without minimal accommodation, little or no communication would take place, and nobody’s purposes would be realized. Yet the conflicting functions, and independent power bases, of the two sides ensure that the terms of accommodation will continually be open to renewal and revision.

The conduct of the main participants in this relationship is often assessed from essentially one-sided standpoints: for example, that of the political activist who treats media output as a trivialized version of his own more lofty concerns (Crossman, 1968); or that of the journalist who regards politicians as inveterate corrupters of the independence of the press. A more analytical approach might aim instead to identify the sources of certain more or less constant influences on the behaviour of both interacting parties in so far as they subscribe to different codes of conduct and belong to different kinds of organization. Such constant factors may be found in two critical structural dimensions that influence the relationship between the parties concerned: the degree of professionalization characteristic of the personnel of media and political institutions; and the degree of bureaucratization characteristic of the two organizations.

Studies of mass media institutions have paid much attention to issues centring on the professionalization of staff communicators (Elliott, 1972; Kumar, 1975; Nayman, 1973; Tunstall, 1971). Although the degree to which media personnel exhibit all the characteristics usually ascribed to established professions might be debated, the influence of professional norms on their outlook is greater than in the case of politicians (Lattimore and Nayman, 1974). Some dimensions of this distinction may include the following:

1. Bases of legitimacy. These differ for the two sets of actors. Thus, whereas politicians derive their legitimacy from the authority of the causes they espouse, the degree of consensus among the interests they articulate and public acceptance of the procedures by which they have been chosen to represent such interests, media personnel are legitimated chiefly through their fidelity to professional codes.
2. The service function. The centrality of the service function in the behaviour of media professionals is reflected in the claim commonly made by them to be concerned primarily to serve the audience members’ ‘right to know’, as distinct from the primary concern of the politician to persuade them in the cause of political and partisan goals.
3. Autonomy. The rewards that media personnel enjoy also derive partly from their professional autonomy. Such an emphasis might clash with the politician’s often-held view of them as essentially middlemen in the political communication process. This potential conflict becomes yet more acute when politicians, who commonly are disposed towards more ideological criteria of political truth, are confronted with the tendency of media professionals to adhere to more empirical, sceptical (perhaps cynical) and many-sided descriptions of political reality. All this suggests an essential discrepancy between the codes of conduct accepted by partisan communicators and those that regulate the behaviour of profession...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• The Crisis of Public Communication
• Communication and Society General Editor: James Curran
• Introduction
• Part I: Structure
• Part II: Development
• Conclusion
• References