The pseudo-eventLess prone to error

The pseudo-event
Less prone to error but equally useful in attracting and holding media
attention on a politician or organisation are those types of activity which fall
into the category of ‘pseudo-event’ described in Chapter 2. The pseudo-event,
it was noted there, is a ‘happening’ which bears only a tenuous relation to
political reality. It has meaning in and of itself, primarily as a mediaevent.
Some would argue that the debate and interview-type events discussed above
often fall into this category, since there is clearly something rather artificial
and manufactured about the ways in which participants are selected,
questions framed and answers constructed. On the other hand, they areoften
live, and the audience does have an opportunity to make judgments about
political actors based on their performances. Closer, perhaps, to the ‘pure’
pseudo-event are occasions such as party conferences which, in the latter part
of the twentieth century, changed – particularly in the US but increasingly
too in Britain and other advanced democracies – from being fora for policyresolution and decision-making into spectacles designed for the maximisation of positive media coverage.
In the US, where this change in the role and function of the party gathering began, the Democratic and Republican conventions have embraced, with
unabashed enthusiasm, the principles of show business. Meaningful political
debate and manoeuvring takes place behind the scenes, while in its public
manifestation the convention functions as a huge signifier of whatever it is
that the party that year is selling. In Ronald Reagan’s re-electioncampaign
of 1984 the Republican convention was dominated by emotional film of Ron
and Nancy, accompanied by the adulation of convention delegates and (by
extension) the American people. All this was communicated, through media
coverage, to the audience.
In Britain, the trend towards the conference-as-symbol was pioneered, as
were so many elements of modern political marketing, by Margaret
Thatcher’s Conservative Party (Scammell, 1995). In the 1980s, showbusiness enterpreneur Harvey Thomas was employed to design the annual
conferences, which he did according to the principle that ‘on a political
platform we only get a few seconds on BBC news [or ITN] . . . we’ve got to
make sure that those few seconds are absolutely pure as far as the message
is concerned’ (quoted in Cockerell, 1988, p. 325). In the search for ‘purity’
the stages on which conference speakers and party leaders sat were
constructed with the same attention to form and colour co-ordination as a
West End stage set. At the 1983 conference, the first following the Thatcher
government’s victory in the Falklands, the stage resembled nothing more
than a great, grey battleship, on which the Tory leadership sat like
conquering admirals.
As Thomas recognised, mass media coverage of that conference, and most
others, was limited to at most a few minutes. Although in Britain there is a
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tradition of live coverage of the conference debates on the minority audience
BBC 2 channel (now augmented by coverage on Sky News, BBC News and
BBC Parliament), the main news bulletins, whose audiences the politicians
are most concerned to reach, treat them merely as stories (albeit important
ones) in a packed news agenda. There is therefore a tendency for journalists
to look for the ‘essence’ of the event – a particular phrase in the leader’s
speech, for example – and to organise coverage around that feature. Hence,
the discourse emanating from conferences is constructed in the expectation
that only a small part of it will be repeated to the audience which matters.
Speeches are loaded with ‘soundbites’ – convenient, memorable words and
phrases which can become the hook around which journalists will hang a
story. Mrs Thatcher’s ‘This lady’s not for turning’ speech of 1981 is an
excellent example of the phenomenon. The speech and the circumstances of
its delivery are long forgotten, but the phrase lingers on in the public
imagination, evoking the ‘essence’ of Thatcherism. Similarly, the soundbite
‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’, came to symbolise New
Labour’s radical centrist approach of combining a stress on law and order
with concern for social justice.
Political speeches, then, delivered in the pseudo-event environment of a
televised party conference, attempt to satisfy the journalists’ need for easily
reportable ‘bits’ of political information, in such a way as to set the news
agenda in the politicians’ favour.
As the previous chapter noted, the Labour Party paid little attention to
political public relations in the early 1980s, and paid the electoral price for
that neglect in 1983. But as the decade progressed, the Labour Party under
Neil Kinnock successfully emulated the techniques pioneered by Thomas and
the Tories. More attention was paid to the ‘look’ of a conference, involving
everything from the choice of logo to the cut of the speaker’s suit. The
debates, which at Labour conferences had always been genuine exchanges of
view (evidenced by their frequently rancorous, anarchic quality), often
leading to media coverage of ‘splits’ and ‘disunity’, became like those of the
Tories, bland and artificial, with the real acrimony taking place behind closed
doors. The Labour Party, to be fair, has not (even in the era of Blair and
Mandelson) travelled as far down this road as the Conservatives, whose
conferences were by the 1990s organised as little more than expressions of
adulation for the leader, even when the leader was John Major, a man
manifestly unpopular with his party members. In 1993 Labour allowed its
conference to engage in a potentially damaging display of ideological
disagreement when it debated the party’s links with the unions. On this
occasion the leadership won the debate, and was thus able to present thenleader John Smith to the media audience as a commanding figure. After his
election as Labour leader in 1994, Tony Blair had to face some difficult
moments at party conferences, over such issues as the reform of Clause Four
of the constitution and other cherished ‘old Labour’ policies. Despite such
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moments of ‘reality intrusion’, nevertheless, Labour, like the Conservatives
and the Liberal Democrats, had by the 1990s been persuaded of the need to
apply the principles of pseudo-eventing to its public gatherings and become
increasingly adept at applying them. At the final Labour conferences of
Gordon Brown’s short-lived premiership (2007–10) his wife Sarah was
brought on stage to eulogise her husband, and help soften his image as ‘Iron
Broon’. The tactic was successful, if only in demonstrating that the workaholic, driven Brown did in fact have a family life, and the love of a strong,
independent woman. Not all attempts at stage managing party conferences
have been as successful, however.
During the 1992 election campaign, such was the manufactured quality of
the major Labour rally that its construction became a news story in itself,
backfiring on the party’s efforts to present itself as modern and media-literate.
The Sheffield rally of 4 April 1992 has passed into British political mythology
as an example of the point at which the construction of pseudo-events for
media consumption crosses the line from acceptable public relations activity
to cynical manipulation. Credited by some commentators as contributing
substantially to the ‘late swing’ which is said to have deprived Labour of
victory,
5
the event is a further example of the politicians’ difficulty in
controlling ‘free media’. Designed to portray an image of the party a few days
before the election as supremely confident in itself and its leader, Neil
Kinnock, the Sheffield rally was instead interpreted by the (mostly Tory)
media as demonstrating arrogance. Kinnock’s evangelistic style at the rally
seemed stilted and embarrassing, the media suggested, rather than, as had
been intended, relaxed and youthful. The exact role of the Sheffield rally in
Labour’s 1992 defeat cannot be known with precision, but there is certainly
force in the argument that it provoked in many members of the audience a
sense of unease. The presumption of victory which underpinned the event was
premature, and an indicator of complacency. The event gave off what were,
for Labour, unwelcome connotations.
Pseudo-events can also be organised on a much smaller scale than the full
conference or rally. An essential part of modern political campaigning is the
setting up of ‘photo-opportunities’ (with accompanying soundbites). In the
1979 election campaign Margaret Thatcher spent a considerable portion of
her time touring factories, donning white coats and, in the most famous
example, holding a calf at an agricultural enterprise. For the journalists
covering the campaign these events provided excellent news material, if not
information about the Conservatives’ political programme. Their need for
broadcastable material was satisfied, as was the aspiring Prime Minister’s
hunger for exposure and publicity.
Since Harold Macmillan’s official visit to Moscow in 1959, incumbent
politicians have used their status to create images of statesmanship and
global power (Foote, 1991). As we saw in the previous chapter, the coverage
generated by such photo-opportunities frequently resurfaces in political
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advertising campaigns, as did pictures of Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 state
visit to Moscow and shots of George Bush meeting foreign dignitaries in his
capacity as vice-president.
The prevalence of these techniques, which are now routinely used by all
parties, has generated debate within the journalistic profession about the
extent to which, by allowing the politicians to flood the campaign environment with pseudo-events of this kind, they are contributing to the degradation of political culture and t