A Maturing Telocracy —Observations on the Television Coverage of the British General Elections of 1974

Abstract

A general election campaign ought to provide the ideal testing ground for theories of media influence: an election is a political set piece with skilled performers, an organised audience ready to take concerted and measurable actions at a given moment. The evidence for the ‘who’, the ‘what’, and the ‘to whom’ is virtually public from the start. But elections in practice have been notoriously difficult areas for media study: the lessons from one electoral situation are difficult to transfer to another; the periods between elections are normally long enough for the theories, conceptions and methodologies to shift significantly and the researchers to move on to other fields; the great techniques of propaganda itself are, many of them, inapplicable to the short period of time in which electoral battles reach their peak. ‘A campaign is the simplest, most imperfect form of modern propaganda’, wrote Jacques Ellul, ‘the objective is insufficient, the methods are incomplete, the duration is brief, pre-propaganda is absent, and the campaign propagandist never has all the media at his disposal… the one case in which the measurement of effects is comparatively easy… is also by far the least significant.’¹

From Changing Campaign Techniques: Elections and Values in Contemporary Democracies, edited by Louis Maisel; reprinted by permission of the publisher, Sage Publications, Inc. Copyright © 1976.