Politics, government and the media: A site of struggle between opposing conceptions of public communication

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Garland, Ruth. 2025. Politics, government and the media: A site of struggle between opposing conceptions of public communication. In: Anastasios Theofilou and Martina Topic, eds. Histories of Political Public Relations: From Propaganda to Public Health. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 95-106. ISBN 9781032500911 [Book Section]

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Ruth Garland Chapter for Histories of Politcal Public Relations final.pdf - Accepted Version
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Abstract or Description

As society faces waves of media change, from the rise of 24/7 media in the late 1980s to web-enabled media in the 2000s, successive governments have navigated between a riskier media/political interface and the institutional requirement to uphold public service core values. Such media change has been identified as ‘mediatisation’, a far-reaching historical meta-process whereby media proliferate and are institutionalised and normalised to the extent that they enable ‘the social construction of everyday life, society and culture’ (Krotz 2009, 24). Such pressures apply to all actors involved in government/media relations, from government press officers and journalists to governing politicians and their partisan advisers. This chapter examines the evolving interface between governments, politics and the media, taking the United Kingdom as a case study. It examines points of interest during the 25 years between the election in 1997 of New Labour under Tony Blair, who faced lasting reputational damage over his promotion of the US-led invasion of Iraq, and the reluctant resignation in June 2022 of Boris Johnson, the Conservative Prime Minister whose government pronouncements could no longer be believed even by his own MPs. The chapter uses contemporary government, media and parliamentary documents, archival sources and interviews with media and political actors to ask who is winning the struggle and what this means for the quality of public communication?

Item Type:

Book Section

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003397199

Additional Information:

“This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Histories of Political Public Relations: From Propaganda to Public Health on 4 February 2025, available online: https://www.routledge.com/Histories-of-Political-Public-Relations-From-Propaganda-to-Public-Health/Theofilou-Topic/p/book/9781032500911. It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.”

Keywords:

Politics, Government, Media, Public Communication, History

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Media, Communications and Cultural Studies > Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy

Dates: