Lingua inglese - How political communication happen

Papers are also partisan: there are detailed rules in television and radio broadcasting to ensure “balance” but

not in newspapers. No political party owns a newspaper but many papers have sympathy with one of the two

major parties, especially with the Conservative Party. Papers don’t want to be too closely attached to a party

if large numbers of their readers are deserting that party. But they also don’t want to fall out with a party if it is

likely to form the next government. Papers are competitive and even when they incline to a political party, it

can’t control what they publish. In fact they report news and comments that are damaging to their party and

they do this for competition: journalists compete for stories and newspapers compete to be first with news.

The competition is especially in the mass market for “tabloid” newspapers and if a damaging political scandal

sells papers it will be reported regardless. Papers are weakly regulated: there is no obligation to provide

“balance” in a story. On the other hand there are powerful legal controls on television and radio broadcasting.

The only formal “self-regulatory” body is the Press Complaints Commission. A more powerful control is

provided by the libel laws in Britain: all national newspapers have teams of lawyers on duty that control

content before publication to warn possible libels. The weak regulation of newspapers includes the regulation

of entry: no licence is needed to publish a newspaper or a magazine, there are indeed powerful barriers to

entry, especially economic. For example establishing and running a national newspaper demands the

investment of tens of millions of pounds before any income is received. It’s much easier to entry at a lower

level, such as through a weekly paper with a low circulation. But there are small circulation independent

magazines of opinion and comment which are read by the most active and politically committed and that

have had effects well beyond their small proportions.

Broadcasting and political communication: We know that there are several important contrasts between

newspapers, which are all commercial enterprises and broadcasting that presents a complex economic

structure. BBC(British Broadcasting Corporation), the longest established broadcaster, is a publicly owned

corporation that has to pay a levy(=imposta) imposed by the state because in possession of a television. Its

role on political communication is immense and it is comprehensible if we know the history of the “mixed

economy” of broadcasting. The BBC operates under a Royal Charter. Each issue of the Charter is for a

limited period of ten years: the present charter dates from 2006. Until now there were 12 governors that

conducted the system of regulation, who have been replaced by a trust. The trust is, in short, a significant

political institution that has been important in keeping the BBC substantially independent of the main

broadcasting regulator, OFCOM. The corporation originated as a commercial company to exploit the new

technology of wireless in the 1920s, but it became a nationalized corporation in 1926. It had a complete legal

monopoly of all broadcasting and radio and it produces its programmes “in-house” rather than buying them

from other providers. Beside of it relied for its income on the license fee. Moreover it not only rejected

commercial advertising but also it paid attention to ensure that no commercial advertising appeared

accidentally in its broadcasters. So its role was to broadcast programmes which would be freely available to

anyone with a receiver. BBC programmes soon approximated a “public good”: a free service available

virtually to all on demand. But the public service broadcasting culture largely shape the BBC report politics.

The content and the style of reporting resembles more the “broadsheet”(=giornale format normale) than the

tabloid press. It is dominated by reporting of public events. There are elaborate rules designed to ensure

balance in reporting, especially reporting debates between the main political parties. There is a mixed

economy of broadcasting because alongside the BBC there has grown up a large and diverse commercial

sector. This includes: three national commercial services; a sector that broadcasts programmes via satellite;

a growing number of national radio stations which offer one kind of output, such as light classical music or

local stations specialized in various styles of pop music. But these stations are very different from the BBC

because they resemble more the newspaper industry. They are often part-owned by large corporations

where commercial broadcasting is only a part of the business. Broadcasting aspires to be impartial in two

sense: first no broadcasting channel admits to support particular political parties (this singles out Britain from

the other countries); second the actual broadcasting of news and current affairs follows rules designed to

ensure neutral reporting events and balanced reporting of different viewpoints. Broadcasting is regulated and

the most important contrast between newspapers and broadcasters is that public bodies regulate the latters.

Moreover commercial broadcasters can only legally broadcast on receiving a licence, while anybody with the

resources can launch a newspaper. The second form of regulation is the control over the entry by Office of

Communications (but only for a fix period, after a competition). The contrast between the two wings of mass

communication corresponds to two sets of problems in government. These are the problem of regulation and

the problem of the bias.

A single regulator for the broadcasting communications’ industries: There is a ‘mixed economy’ in

Britain: a mix of private and public ownership which developed a very mixed system of regulation. Until 2003

there were six important regulators for broadcasting but the Broadcasting Act of 2003 changed all that. It

established a single independent Office of Communications (OFCOM). The establishment of OFCOM as a

single regulator puts pressure on two other parts of the regulatory system: on the system of self-regulation in

the print industry and on the BBC’s owned independent regulation. But this is a very unstable institutional

world: the Conservative entered the 2010 general election campaign committed to abolishing the role of

OFCOM.

Political Communication: the problem of regulation: There are problems of regulation in both

newspapers and broadcasting, but they are different. In newspaper there is only a self-regulation in the

form of the Press Complaints Commission. Self-regulation is a compromise between the need of

regulation and the fear of subjecting the press to state controls. PCC is a permanent body founded by

newspaper industry. It administers a Code of Conduct by which all members agree to be bound. Any

member of the public can complain in writing to the Commission that a publication has breached the Code.

The Commission tries to produce conciliation before issuing a judgement: it advises all complainants in the

first instance to seek an agreement with the editor of the offending publication. If it takes up the complaints, it

tries to secure an agreed settlement between the editor and the complainant; and only then, if the Code has

been breached, does it issue a judgement against the publication. The industry argues not only that self-

regulation protects a free press from the dangers of state control, but also that the Commission’s procedures

are fast and cheap, since they avoid the courts. Criticism of the Commission focus on three arguments: -that

it is reactive, only responding when it receives complaints; -that it has no effective sanctions against powerful

newspapers; -and that its most powerful members are editors of the leading national newspapers, typically

the most serious offenders against the Code. While newspaper are commercial enterprises in competition,

the temptation to breach any code in the search for an exclusive story has often proved great. The political

effect is twofold: first there is now a long established debate about whether the law should replace voluntary

regulation; second many of the problems of the voluntary code have involved figures that are part of the

state. One of the most sensitive issues in press regulation concerns how far newspaper can claim that it’s in

the public interest to report on the private lives of public figures, especially if the reporting is salacious. The

regulation of broadcasting is faced by two diametrically opposed problems: that it may be too effective and it

may be of declining effectiveness. The first exists because there is a difficult line to walk between regulation

and control of what broadcasters do by the state. All politicians try to pressure broadcasters about the

content and the style of their programmes. The fact that Government controls the issue of commercial

licences means that when a governing party puts pressure on, that pressure is not innocent. By contrast,

technological change in recent year has reduced the ability of governments to regulate some broadcasting

services. The most important example is the growth of satellite broadcasting channels, which can easily

broadcast across national boundaries and reach subscribers without the authority of national government.

Technological change in broadcasting is creating a sector that resembles the press in its freedom from

regulation.

Regulating the Internet: the rapid rise of the Internet poses the issue of whether it should be regulated.

Some people believe that Internet is an uncontrolled space where there is a range of illegal and immoral

material that should be suppressed. For example the possession and circulation of material such as child

pornography is already subject to the sanctions of the criminal law. But the sources of Internet are so huge

and global that controls are often impossible. The Internet Watch Foundation works with Internet Service

Providers in 34 countries to try to locate and remove illegal material.

Political communication: the problem of the bias: Politicians are convinced that media shape the

opinions of citizens. For this reason the party leaderships put a lot of time and effort into cultivating the

owners of the national newspapers and their editors in the hope that they will actively support them,

especially at election times. Although regulation itself is designed to prevent biased reporting, bias can

operate in more subtle ways than open partisanship. One important way this can happen is in the way issues

are presented, framed. For example in television the use of images gives a powerful implicit bias to the

reporting of politics in terms of personality because political leaders provide ready pictures. Most television

reporting and debates of complex political issues have to be done in a very short time too. There are so

possibilities of uncertainty and ambiguity. We know 3 common views about the effects of media bias: -The

manipulative view: this view stresses the persistent bias(baies=faziosità)in the printed media and the more

subtle biases in broadcasting. In Britain broadcasting is consumed