Media Management: Labour’s Political Communications Strategy

Abstract

In an age when electors derive the majority of their political information from the news media, political parties are obliged to utilize television and the press to communicate with them. Parties have been using forms of mass communication to advance their partisan cause for the whole of the twentieth century. Political communications, the messages constructed through the mediated interaction of parties, mass media and electors are nothing new. Political campaigning is fought out in the news media because press and broadcast reportage are an integral part of elective politics. Parties attempt to turn this fact to their advantage by successfully projecting themselves through the media to the electorate-as-audience. This is now a significant feature of the political landscape, a widespread and increasingly sophisticated element not just of the modern professional election campaign but of daily political activity.