Political Communication Systems All Change

Political Communication Systems All Change
Almost everything to do with political communication seems to be in flux these days: social formations and lifestyles; strategies of persuasion; politician–journalist relations; and media technology, organization and finance. Critical in the last sphere has been the shift from a situation where limited-channel, nationwide television was the dominant medium of political communication, to a more abundant and fragmented system, providing not only more outlets for political messages but also more opportunities for audiences to ignore (or only cursorily scan) those messages in favour of more sheerly enjoyable fare. Some observers even suspect that the turbulent currents of change are ushering in a quite new political communication order in place of the older one (Blumler and Kavanagh, 1998; Wyatt, 1998).
Wherefrom the crisis of public communication?
First, why have some of us discerned in certain current trends the seeds of a crisis of public communication (Blumler and Gurevitch, 1995; Blumler, 1997)? Here Brants misses the point. The nub of our concern is not the march of infotainment, as he seems to suppose. I certainly have no quarrel with the argument that there may be more than one way or one television genre to inform citizens about politics, ranging from mainstream news and current affairs through call-in programmes, talk shows, other hybrid infotainment formats, as well as soap operas and dramas in realistic settings that highlight current issues. Inasmuch as (1) television is the primary medium of political communication, (2) television offers a cornucopia of diverse genres and programme types and (3) uses and gratifications research has often spotted ‘surveillance’ and ‘reality-seeking’ motives for viewing such programmes, the notion that only programmes formally labelled as ‘informational’ should be regarded as legitimate outlets for civic communication is unsustainable. Of course, whether all such programmes actually do stimulate and inform their audience members, or whether some are perniciously seductive (deflecting people from the ‘hard stuff’ as Brants puts it), are still largely unexplored empirical questions. A need to be open-minded about infotainment also arises from the strong currents of populism that are suffusing the worlds of politics and the media these days. They emanate from the expansion of media outlets, which ‘has created new opportunities and pitfalls for the public to enter the political world’ (Delli Carpini and Williams, 1998). But they also stem from the decline of ideology, leaving a sort of legitimacy gap that populism helps to fill; from the growth of political marketing as an adjunct to campaign strategy; and from the diminished standing of political, media and other elites in popular eyes. In such conditions, paternalistic discourse is no longer an option. Communicators who wish to inform and empower their auditors must therefore adapt more closely than in the past to what ordinary people find interesting, engaging, relevant and accessible. It is also important, however, whether such communicators actually do wish to inform and empower or just want to grab eyeballs and sop up ratings. And that is why it is worth holding on to our distinction, scorned by Brants, between ‘simplistic’ and ‘deliberative’ approaches to populist political communication (Blumler and Gurevitch, 1995: 221).