‘simplistic dualities’ have always

‘simplistic dualities’ have always been at the centre of campaigning (1992,
p. 44). There is, in the US as well as other countries, growing acceptance that
there is nothing intrinsically wrong with negative campaigning, if the claims
made are fair and reasonable. Lies and deception are not acceptable, of
course, but they are hardly unique to our political culture. Modern media give
attack ads more reach and visibility, but did not invent them or the principles
of political competition underpinning them. Attack is as much part of the
political process as defence, and if modern advertisers do it with everincreasing slickness and sophistication, it seems pointless, indeed futile, to
spend too much intellectual energy on condemning them. As Diamond and
Bates put it, in the history of political advertising, as in so many other forms
of political communication, ‘the political golden age of the past, upon close
inspection, turns out to be made of brass’ (1992, p. 384).
In Britain, with its distinctive traditions and conventions, the issues are
rather different. The controversy which Conservative government advertising for its 1980s privatisation campaigns provoked, fuelled by legislation
(quoted on p. 109) prohibiting local governments from using public revenues
for political advertising purposes, has long called into question the logic of
a system which prevents political advertising on television and radio, while
allowing the government to spend hundreds of millions of pounds promoting
ideologically based policies. New Labour has also been charged with using
public money to promote policy, as in the funds earmarked for education
about the euro. Advocates of reform have argued, reasonably enough, that
since such campaigns are clearly ‘political’ and paid for by the tax-payer,
other organisations with political objectives, such as environmental groups,
trade unions and even political parties, should be permitted to purchase
broadcast advertising time at commercial rates, as is the case in the US.
There, pressure groups and political organisations of all kinds can buy up
television time to protest, nationally or locally, about the environment, or
factory closures, or any of the issues around which political campaigns
regularly develop. Why not in Britain, therefore?
The future of political advertising has taken on greater urgency as the
British broadcasting system becomes more commercialised and the financial
pressures on broadcasters increase. Can the political parties take it for granted
that they will always have access to free airtime in the form of PPBs and PEBs?
When ratings are everything in a broadcasting system increasingly run as a
profit-making industry, will media managers be content to provide prime-time
slots free of charge to pontificating politicians? Quite possibly not, argued a
confidential internal Labour Party document in the late 1980s, warning that
‘parties may be forced to find ways of entering this hostile broadcasting
environment directly, either through paid political advertising . . . or by the
production of programmes or by sponsorship of programmes. Naturally such
developments would be costly and the richest party – or the party with the
richest friends – would be best able to take any advantages there might be’.
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And here, precisely, is the great danger, as opponents of paid political
advertising on British broadcasting perceive it. As was noted in Chapter 3,
the growing importance in political campaigning of paid-for media
inevitably favours those who canpay, and discriminates against those who
cannot. In an unequal society, in which political and economic resources are
already closely linked, the concentration of power and the disenfranchisement of the economically deprived would be even greater than it currently
is. In Britain, to put it simply, the political party with the richest friends and
supporters would have much greater access to paid-for broadcast advertising
than their opponents.
To some extent the debate about political advertising parallels that on the
future of broadcast news and current affairs (McNair, 2009c). In a media
environment where wavelength scarcity is no longer a determining factor and
in which there is a multitude of channels beaming to increasingly fragmented, ‘targeted’ groups, why not allow some overt political advertising, as
is permitted in the US and other countries? We have it in our print media, so
why not on television and radio?
Opposition to this viewpoint is based not only on financial grounds, but
also on resistance to the ‘trivialisation’ of the political process and the
degradation of the public sphere discussed in Chapter 3. This returns us
once again to a debate that continues to defy neat resolution. As this book
went to press, there were no government plans to permit paid political
advertising on British television or radio, and it seems unlikely that such a
form of political communication will ever be permitted on the main
‘terrestrial’ channels. A consultation paper released by the main British
broadcasters (BBC, ITV, Channels 4 and 5, Independent Radio) after the
1997 election, with a view to reforming the system of party political
broadcasting in the UK, stressed that ‘there is little enthusiasm amongst
either broadcasters or the political parties to move to a system of paid
political advertising’.
12
But some change is inevitable, probably in the
direction of concentrating the transmission of party political broadcasts
around election campaigns and reducing the number of broadcasts which
take place outside campaign periods. For example, the broadcasters would
like to discontinue the tradition of transmitting a ten-minute ‘talking head’
piece to camera by the Chancellor, after the annual Budget Speech in
parliament (which is by convention ‘answered’ by the main opposition
spokespersons). This is argued to be a reasonable reform in the context of
expanding live coverage of parliament and the extended media coverage of
it which now takes place. On the other hand, should not the public be
permitted to hear the Chancellor explain, in his or her own words, without
the mediation of journalists, what the budget that year is about?
Here and in other features of the British PPB system, new technologies
which allow more and better coverage of parliament (and the political
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process in general), and the force of commercial pressures on access to
broadcast airtime, make some degree of change inevitable in the years to
come.
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Further reading
Diamond and Bates’ The Spotremains the best source of further
reading on American political advertising. Margaret Scammell’s
Designer Politics: How Elections are Won(1995) includes political
advertising in its examination of British political communication
before the era of New Labour. Martin Rosenbaum’s From Soapbox to
Soundbites examines party-political campaigning in the UK since
1945. Andrew Wernick’s Promotional Culture(1991) presents critical
perspectives on the allegedly damaging effects which the steadily more
sophisticated use of commercial advertising techniques by politicians
has had on the quality of modern democracy. For a recent study of
politicians’ use of public-access broadcasting see McNair et al.(2003).
Peter Mandelson’s autobiographical account of his work for the
Labour Party between 1986 and 2010 (The Third Man, 2010) includes
fascinating material on the background to iconic examples of British
political advertising such as the Hugh Hudson-directed ‘Kinnock’. The
Sage Handbook of Political Advertising(Kaid and Holtz-Bacha, 2006)
provides a comprehensive overview of the role of political advertising
in democracies around the world. Sally Young’s edited collection on
Government Communication in Australia(2007) discusses advertising
and other forms of political communication in that country.