This post was originally posted on Charlie Beckett’s blog on April 6th.
Charlie Beckett is the Director of POLIS.
I cannot remember a more staged start to a General Election campaign than today. And the mainstream media are playing their part in one of the most orchestrated opening political Acts in modern history.
As the long-prepared campaigns clear their throats and belt out their lines, so the news-editors’ plans spring into action sending correspondents scurrying into their alloted roles. It’s a delightful dance of the politically damned.
I remember back in the early ’90s when there were serious discussions in newsrooms about whether to even cover the newly-created construct of political photo-opportunities. Newspapers like The Independent actually considered ignoring this pantomime of imagery and soundbite. Now we happily watch the leaders on parade and the media simply puts it on air and the front page.
Of course, the still-vast political press corps then indulges in endless dissection of what these stunts symbolise in a desperate attempt to show some sort of critical faculty. Hence, the endless exegesis of patently unfelt and meaningless slogans such as ‘A future fair for all’ or ‘the great ignored’.
The public ends up with a blizzard of post-modernist deconstruction of semiotic meanings that blankets any real politics with a deep covering of drifts of non-relevance and unreality.
And so from Day One, process triumphs over policy.
This isn’t to say that there isn’t some wonderfully detailed attempts to serve up facts. We’ve had a range of delightful swing-ometers already. And go online and most media organisations are delivering very good psephological and policy information. The FT has a good guide to election maps, for example, here.
But as I have said elsewhere, it is the telly and to a degree the papers that will continue to produce the most impactful and agenda-setting election coverage. We await to see if the Internet, the blogosphere and social media can be any more than a wonderful back-up and secondary source. Please can someone break through the play-acting to create some real drama?
Hi Patrick, thanks for the comment. Indeed, I very much enjoy the more academic articles on issues to do with voting and the way the election is run, and find the “race” articles worth the read.. I was in fact looking at the tag cloud to the right to determine what the blog focused on. It seemed to me from that that the race was the main focus — the “issues” words (I see crime, higher education, fiscal policy gap, policing, pensions, trasnport policy as issues words) are much smaller than the “race” words (see Polls in huge letters, for example) and there are many fewer of them.
So, I’ll have a look, but I did just think that Charlie’s post was a bit of the pot calling the kettle black. Thanks again for the comment back.
Thanks for this comment EJVC. Our “State of the Race” feature is indeed about how the campaign is going. And because it tries to keep up to date, the State updates quite frequently, so it has quite a few entries.
But the State feature is not the whole blog. Even in our coverage of voting, we hope that our Blog also has a good sprinking of articles on academic issues – such as how disproportional the the UK system is, the importance of Other parties and the role of young people in political disengagement.
And if you look in the other parts of the Blog in the right-hand margin, you will find that there is a great deal of content about public policy choices – try our “Hard Choices” feature, the entries on “Public Services and the Welfare State” and “Economic Policy”.
Finally, I should add that until recently the parties have been in a bit of a phoney war where they held back policy details to save for their manifestos. We will be racking up our coverage of policies as the campaign gets under way in earnest.
The structure of a Blog is that you need to click around to find stuff more than you would on an ordinary web site, and click downwards in each stream to find more materials. You can also use our Search box to find stuff that you are interested in.
Well, but this blog is about the “race,” right, and not the issues? Or did I miss the actual issues somewhere? In that way, it can also be considered a very shallow commentary on the election, although the horse-race coverage is very good. Process over policy.