Political Source
Relations
JN 513/815 Political Reporting
Lecture Outline
• 1. Primary Definition
• 2. News Source Influence Models
• 3. Journalist/Source Dance
Primary Definition
• ‘Primary definition’ – asserts
a pattern of structured,
differential access to media
(and the power to define
issues…), favouring those in
elite or dominant positions
and discriminating against
marginal or subordinate
groups
• Primary definers are political
and economic elites who
are authoritative figures and
institutions that work to
reproduce existing
hierarchies and forms of
knowledge.
Primary Definition
• News media are secondary definers.
• Journalists not ‘biased’ towards elite groups but rely
on them because of organisational factors, as a
result of the media’s structural relationships of
dependence on recognised authority.
Primary Definition
• Primary definition thesis has
been criticised:
• dominant perspectives are
sometimes undermined;
• historical shifts in status and
access occur; and
• political elites are not
represented in single
perspective but are
factionalised.
• http://www.theguardian.co
m/politics/2014/jan/27/vinc
e-cable-attacksideological-cuts-uk-recovery
News Source Influence Models
• Radical Approach
• Corporate and state sources have massive
institutional and economic resource advantages
that cannot be matched – restricting/enabling
access to information, assisting their status as
primary definers, and facilitating ‘bureaucratic
affinity’. Public relations one means for the state
and large corporations to control the media.
News Source Influence Models
• Public relations is linked directly to needs of
capitalist democracies – universal suffrage, the rise
of the mass media and the consumer society, the
ongoing need for legitimation of the state and
capitalist accumulation are all factors requiring
increased management of public opinion.
News Source Influence Models
•
•
•
•
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• Radical Pluralist Approach
Radical pluralists argue that public communication
more of a dynamic process of contestation and
that the radical approach is:
overly economic determinist;
subordinates activities of journalists;
assumes primary definers act in unison; and
does not account for historical shifts in status and
access.
News Source Influence Models
• Pluralist Optimism Approach
• Pluralist optimism position
argues that PR less capitaldependent than other forms
of public communication.
News coverage is free.
Strategies can be successful
if they mobilize ‘public
interest’. Use of social
media, volunteer labour,
non-professional PR labour
versed in media process,
use of third parties
(celebrities, public figures)
to generate coverage.
Journalist/Source Dance
• The metaphor of some
kind of dance is
invoked to describe
both the
interdependence of
politicians and
journalists and the
struggle to lead in the
relationship.
Journalist/Source Dance
• The symbiotic relationship between politicians,
political staffers and journalists is a significant
feature of everyday political communication.
• While politicians can employ forms of social media
to communicate more directly with the public,
politicians still need journalists, and the oxygen of
publicity that they provide, in order to disseminate
their policies and promote themselves.
Journalist/Source Dance
• Journalists need access to politicians to fulfill their
‘fourth estate’ functions in monitoring the exercise
of power and also because the drama of party
politics is newsworthy and a prominent and
substantial feature of the daily news agenda
(McNair 2000, 42-43).
• This ‘exchange relationship’‘can be characterized
as a voluntary contractual one because it mimics a
market relationship in which information supplied by
government is freely swapped for publicity by
journalists at the price where both sides gain equal
satisfaction’ (Moloney 2001, 130).
Journalist/Source Dance
• Alternatively, politics is an
inherently combative and
agonistic phenomenon
and the diversity of
interests of politicians,
spin doctors and
journalists will result in
something of a contest.
• http://www.theguardian.
com/world/2014/jan/29/u
s-congressman-michaelgrimm-threatens-reporter
•
Journalist/Source Dance
• Power is manifested in the possession of knowledge
and information and the means to control where
and when that knowledge and information is
distributed, and this fact informs practices
associated with the contest model of political
communication:
o politicians may limit media conferences during crises; or
o engage in the anonymous leaking of information to embarrass a political
opponent; and
o the press gallery will hound and interrogate politicians who they feel are
covering up embarrassing information.
Journalist/Source Dance
• We can distinguish between structural factors over
access and cultural factors regarding the meanings
of the news. There are individual struggles over
which events and issues are reported and then how
those events and issues are reported.
• It may well be that authoritative political sources
are able to exert their influence over journalists in
the setting of the news agenda and the process of
news making, while journalists have the greater
power in the framing of news and its interpretative
content.
Journalist/Source Dance
• Journalists are highly dependent upon the initiatives
of elite sources and if conflict does not exist
between political elites then a particular issue is not
likely to be raised by journalists.
• Bennett’s theory of indexing refers to ‘the journalistic
practice of opening or closing the news gates to
citizen-activists … according to levels of conflict
among public officials and established interests
involved in making decisions about an issue’ (2005,
4).
References
• Bennett, W. L. 2005, News: The Politics of Illusion, 6th edn.,
New York, Pearson.
• McNair, B. 2000, Journalism and Democracy: An
evaluation of the political public sphere, London,
Routledge.
• Moloney, K. 2001, ‘The rise and fall of spin: Changes of
fashion in the presentation of UK politics’, Journal of
Public Affairs, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 124-135.
• Stromback, J. and Nord, L. W. 2006, ‘Do Politicians Lead
the Tango? A Study of the Relationship between Swedish
Journalists and their Political Sources in the Context of
Election Campaigns’, European Journal of
Communication, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 147-164.