NAME = KHUSHI

ROLL NO = 23/0418

POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

WHAT IS POLITICAL COMMUNICATION?

DEFINATION

Political communication is the process by which language

and symbols , employed by leaders, media, or citizens, exert
intended or unintended effects on the political cognitions,
attitudes, or behaviours of individuals or on outcomes that
bear on the public on the public policy of a nation, state, or
community.

The definition emphasize that political communication is a

process. It does not occur with the flick of a wrist, or flipping
of a leave. A president can propose a particular initiative, but
to turn an idea into a credible bill and a bill into law, the chief
executive must persuade congress, which involves multiple
influence attempts on legislators, mediated by countless
communiques with the public. A journalistic expose of
corporate malfeasance that produces a policy change does
not magically exert an impact. Instead, it unleashed a variety
of forces, including changes in public opinion, which, through
poll results, influence policymakers, who, themselves, must
consider the most effective and politically advantageous way
of altering policy.
Political communication calls centrally on words and symbols.
Political communication can be viewed “the practice of using
language to move people to think and act in way that they
might not otherwise think or act”. Leaders harness the power
of language – colourful phrases, apt metaphors, syntax, and
rhythm to mold attitudes and move citizens.

The language of political communication is laden with

symbols. A symbol is a form of language in which one entity
represents an idea or concept, conveying rich psychological
and cultural meaning. Symbols include words like justice,
freedom, and equality, and non-verbal sings like the flag or a
religious cross. In America, elected officials frequently invoke
the American flag, the founding fathers, Lincoln, Jefferson,
freedom, liberty, and equality.

Political communication involves the transfer of symbolic

meanings, the communication of highly charged emotional
words that can arouse, agitate, and disgust. Words convey
different meanings to different groups. To conservatives,
freedom conjures up immigrants’ dreams of owning a
business in the USA or practicing religion as they see fit. To
liberals and minorities, freedom calls to mind the opportunity
to display one’s own creed publicly without fear of prejudice.
It also conveys empowerment, the way a previously
victimized group can throw the shackles of oppression,
openly expressing its own cherished values. Political
messages calls up different meanings to different groups, an
inevitable source of friction and conflict in democratic
societies.
 There are three main players in political communication:

 The first is the broad group of leaders and influence

agents. These are the “elites” of politics, who include
elected officials, as well as the plethora of Washington,
D.C opinion leaders spanning members of the
president’s cabinet, policy experts, and chieftain in the
vast government bureaucracy.

 The next player or players are the media. This

increasingly diverse group includes the conventional
news media, bloggers, people armed with a cell phone
camera and an attitude who call themselves citizen-
journalists, partisan promulgators of websites, and the
gaggle of political entertainment hosts and comedians.

 The centerpiece of political communication is the

citizenry. Citizens are a cacophonous combination of the
politically engaged and opinionated, along with the
indifferent and woefully ignorant. The citizenry includes
those who actively partake in civic groups for example,
pro-life and pro-choice; evangelical Christian and
unabashedly atheist wall street investors and blue collar
unions, as well as pro and anti-fur, vegan, and virulently
pro-red-meat.

Political communication effects can be intended or

unintended. A presidential speech is intended to influence,
 and a flurry of favorable emails and text messages received
at the White House after the speech are examples of
intended effects. A negative political advertisement is
designed to cause voters to evaluate the targeted
candidate more unfavorably, and declines in the attacked
candidate’s poll ratings illustrate an intended
communication effect. But not communication effects are
intended by the communicator.

Political communication also encompasses news, relayed on

television and via the internet. It also includes rush
Limbaugh, homer Simpson, family guy’s peter griffin, south
park’s stan marsh, political talk radio, you tube videos,
Facebook posts, and other media content that touches on
what people think and feel about politics. Political
communication involves more than media. It includes old –
fashioned dinner table political arguments, trying to persuade
a friend to join a campus protest, and knocking on doors on
wintery mornings to gather signatures for a state – wide
petition.

Political media exert influence on the micro level, affecting

individuals’ thoughts, candidate assessments, feelings,
attitudes, and behaviour. The first 2012 presidential debate,
in which Obama seemed lethargic, exerted a micro level
impact if it led an undecided voter to rethink her support for
Obama.
Political communication also works on the macro level,
exerting broad-based effect on public opinion, institutional
change or retrenchment, political activism, and public policy.
CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL COMMUNICATION
Political communication involves more than just the words,
“political” and “communication.” Delving deeper, scholar
conclude that there are five core features of today’s political
communication.

1. Political communication involves three key players:

 LEADERS
 MEDIA
 PUBLIC
There are different perspective on which of these three
group exerts the greatest impact. Scholars argue that
under different circumstance, leaders, media, and the
public have the strongest influence.

One view is that elite leaders exert a preeminent

impact on opinions and policy. After the tragedy of
September 11, the nation looked to the president, as it
often does in national crises. Addressing a joint session
of congress and the nation on September 20, 2001 ,
George W . Bush gave a moving speech, in which he
spoke of “a country awakened to danger and called to
defend freedom” and articulated the threats the nation
faced from terrorist groups, while taking pains to show
respect for Muslims in America and throughout the
world. Though his rhetoric and actions, Bush rallied the
country around a new and unsettling war on terror.
More than a year later, the same president was under
siege, accused of using the communicative powers of
his office to launce an unnecessary war on Iraq. As two
scholars noted, critics advanced “the serious and
plausible suggestion that the Bush admin-istration
‘manipulated’ the country into war [with Iraq] through
a variety of techniques: controlled leaks to the press,
exploitation of jingoistic sentiment, cherry- picking of
vital intelligence, and stagecraft designed to reinforce
the government’s daily message at the expense of a full
public dialogue in the question of war”

Not all political observer would agree with this

evaluation of Bush’s action. But there is little doubt
that he aggressively used political language, news
management, and public appearances to advance his
view that the Iraq war was essential to protect U.S
security. Dominate the national agenda.

A second view places the onus on media. It emphasize

that the media exert a preeminent effect on the
conduct of politics. This view point notes that the news
media’s choice of issues, and the way they frame the
news, can influence leaders and public.
For example, some observer argue that the news
media frequently called the press paved the way for
the Barak Obama’s nomination back in 2008. Obama
was attractive and charismatic, qualities that can
captivate a television audience. He was initially an
underdog. The press likes to push underdogs who
challenge the status quo. As he started to gain in the
polls and win primaries, he gained political ground,
creating a bandwagon effect, producing even more
favorable press coverage. Obama also received
substantially more positive press coverage than his
opponent for the democratic nomination, Hillary
Clinton. Some scholars maintained that the press gave
Obama better coverage because he powered together
an unstoppable political juggernaut that captivated so
many young voters, while other pointed to suggestive
evidence of press bias on the part of journalists. In
either case, the favorable press coverage netted him
momentum, a key commodity in primary campaigns
that helps to propel candidates to victory.

A third viewpoint argues that the public calls the shots.

In order to get elected and reelected, leaders have to
be responsive to their constituents, implementing
polices that the average voter supports. For example, in
2012 election, the state of the economy, with the
unrelentingly high unemployment rate, was the most
important issue to the public. The media this is a
preeminent part of its coverage. It formed the
centerpiece of republican attacks against Obama and
provided the backdrop of Obama’s strategy of blaming
republicans for blocking his legislative proposals to
improve the nation’s economy. The electorate or voting
public helped push the issue to the fort and center for
both candidates and media.

In most political context, all three influence agent

elites, media, and public interact in complex way. The
drama of political communication involves a trifecta:
leaders, media, and citizens symbolically jousting
among themselves and framing problems in different
ways. The key, of course, is power: leaders invoke
language, symbols, and the trapping of their offices to
gain and maintain power. Media relay, interpret,
challenge, or reinforce the use of power. Citizens, some
more than others, the richer and better-connected
more than the poorer and less-educated, become
involved in the political process, wielding morden
communication to advocate for causes and candidates,
sometimes wisely, other time foolishly.

2.POLITICS IS PLAYED ON A MEDIA PLATFORM:

Media are our primary points of access to politics…and
the place for political encounters that precede, shape,
and at times determine further bodily participation.
Furthermore, those encounters occur through a
panoply of media forms (books, magazines,
newspapers, newsletters, billboards and
advertisement, direct mail, radio, film, emails,
websites, blog, social networking sites, and, of course,
cable and network television) and across numerous
fictional and nonfictional genres… such encounters do
much more than provide “information” about political
ideas, issues, events, or players. They constitute our
mental maps of the political and social world outside
our direct experience.

3. TECHNOLOGY IS A CENTERPIECE OF POLITICAL

COMMUNICATION :
The technological revolution has had two major
influences. It has vastly increased the supply of the
information, with conventional media, websites galore,
blogs, and politically oriented social media posts
offering a plethora of facts and opinions about politics,
technology has also greatly expanded choices, with a
wealth of source and channels available to people.
Political information that would be formerly kept
inside the recesses of government is now public,
porous, and (for better and sometimes for worse) out
there for citizens to peruse. Thus, WikiLeaks, a non-
profit organization dedicated to releasing classified
documents, revealed classified information on the
conduct of war and foreign diplomacy, obtained from
news leaks and whistleblowers.

MEDIA are technology that intercede between the

communicator and message recipient, filtering the
message through the selection of words, images, and
formats, newspapers, magazines, and television make
up conventional, sometimes called mainstream, media.
They convey a message to the audience, ignoring,
selecting, shaping, and framing information based on a
host of factors. Is the internet media? It is a question
frequently asked, but one that is difficult to crisply
answer.
The internet is not a medium, but a series of
interlocking digital network that convey information
that has been interpreted and mediated by traditional
media like newspaper and television, as well as other
outlets, like blog and websites. The internet is a
technological platform that facilitates direct interaction
between the communicator and message receiver. It
includes sites maintained by the mainstream media, as
well as online news organizations, blogs and partisan
fare. And then there are social media for example, the
ubiquitous twitter and facebook. Some observers say
that all these new technologies constitute the new
middlemen. Rather than simply facilitating mediation,
whereby media come between sources and receivers,
they produce “disintermediation” , whereby people
circumvent media and communicate directly with
leaders.
The internet yanked power from the news media and
gave it to people, enabling ordinary people to
participate more actively in public dialogue. This is all
to the good when it connects citizens with leaders in
civilized dialogues or allows people to communicate
about politics with others via Facebook and Twitter.
The internet’s role in communication is more freighted
and controversial when partisans launce vicious,
prejudiced invectives against public official or other
users with whom they disagree, shielded by the privacy
of a PC in a living room or a cell phone in a
coffeehouse.

4. POLITICAL COMMUNICATION HAS GONE GLOBAL :

the most noteworthy aspect of the globalization of
political communication technology is that any
individual with the technical knowledge to create a
Facebook page or distribute an image on You Tube can
influence politics. The most dramatic example occurred
in 2011 in Cairo, Egypt, or, more precisely, in
cyberspace, when a google executive, Whalm Ghonim,
became frustrated with his country’s abusive autocracy.
Harnessing his marketing skills, he created a Facebook
group that attracted hundreds of thousands of
Facebook users, helping them to channel their
frustration into a series of protests that the Egyptian
government in the winter of 2011. “if you want to free
a society, just give people internet access,” Ghonim
said.

5. POLITICAL COMMUNICATION CAN BE A FORCE OF

GOOD AND EVIL :
Like all weapons of influence, political communication
can be harnessed for positive and negative purposes.
Issues get musky. Manipulation can be morally odious
when it exploits citizens emotions, but a positive force
when it moves individuals to band together for the
collective good. Favor-giving and quid pro quos raise
eyebrows when used by wealthy lobbyists currying
influence with legislators. But they may be morally
justified when implemented by political leaders seeking
sweeping ethical changes, as when Lincoln openly
traded favors with congressmen to pass the iconic
thirteenth amendment banning slavery. In a similar
fashion, negative advertising can dispirit citizens, yet
offer challengers opportunities to unseat incumbents.
The internet can be empowering and offer mechanism
for ordinary people to make their voices known. For
example, in January, 2012, social media flexed its viral
muscle as people deluged Twitter, Tumblr, and
Facebook to protest decision by America’s leading
breast cancer advocacy group to end most of its
financing of planned parenthood. A day after the
protest was widely reported, the organization reversed
its decision and restored its partnership with planned
parenthood. At the same time, social media and the
internet have their down sides, offering and outlet for
vicious posts against female candidates, and racist
directed at the nation’s first Black president.