Politics and Media Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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In 1922 the American journalist and social commentator Walter Lippmann wrote that ”the significant revolution of modern times is the revolution taking place in the art of creating consent among the governed” (Lippmann 1954). From his vantage point in the early twentieth century, just four years after the end of World War I, Lippmann was drawing attention to the fact that politicians were entering a new era in which the role of the media was going to be central to effective government. Henceforth, they would have to know and understand how the media impacted on public opinion. Such knowledge, he predicted, would ”alter every political premise.” And so it has turned out. Politics in the twenty-first century is inconceivable without the part played by media institutions. As reporters, analysts, and interpreters of events to mass electorates the media are integral to the democratic process and no politician, party, or government can afford to ignore or dismiss them.

Since the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg in the late fifteenth century, media have driven politics. Early correspondents were employed by monarchs, bishops, aristocrats, and other elites in feudal societies as sources of information, be it from the far reaches of the kingdom, or from overseas. The first journalists provided a form of surveillance for political elites, making available information on the state of markets and commodity prices, or the progress of wars and court intrigues.

The rise of recognizably free media accompanied the rise of democracy from the ashes of feudalism in the seventeenth century, and was indeed an essential part of that process. The English Civil War saw the relaxation of feudal censorship and the emergence of the first independent newspapers, free to take sides in political disputes. Between them, the English, French, and American revolutions defined the modern role of the media in democracy as active, interventionist, and adversarial. The journalist was to be a constraint on the exercise of political power, one of the checks and balances without which democratic government could so easily slip back into authoritarian habits.

The growing importance of public opinion in the twentieth century propelled the growth of a new kind of communication, expressly intended to influence media output and through it public opinion. Lippmann and other pioneers of what we now know as public relations called it ”press counseling,” meaning the effort to influence what media organizations wrote and said about politics. Practicing this new form of communication were press counselors, skilled in the techniques of making media amenable to the wishes of politicians.

Public relations in the modern sense is a direct response to the growth of mass democracy on the one hand, and mass media on the other. Both make necessary an intermediate communicative class, a Fifth Estate operating in the space between politics and journalism, whose professional role is to manage, shape, and manipulate public opinion through managing, shaping, and manipulating the output of the media. Today, it is often called spin, a term which carries a negative connotation, but which quite accurately conveys the notion that this form of political communication aims to put a ”spin” on the meaning of events as they appear in the public sphere. Events happen, and they are reported. Spin, and spin doctors, strive to ensure that the reportage, as well as the analysis and commentary which make up so much of contemporary political journalism, are advantageous to their political clients.

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