Professional communicators control elections

Professional communicators control the present election campaign.

If you’re not paying a professional to set up your strategy, to create your email list, to come up with the promises that you make to your voters, then you’re way behind the curve.

Professional communicators do what American sociologist Leon Mayhew said they do - they exert enormous influence on the public, and the consequent political rationalisation erodes the social organisation of public opinion.

No wonder Julia Gillard wants a citizens’ assembly to take charge; she must have read Mayhew’s work and knows that the promises she makes can’t possibly be kept.

Mayhew’s last work was his most important.

It was entitled The New Public: Professional Communication and the Means of Social Influence and it explains perfectly how and why professionals have come to control all aspects of the communication process, from politics and elections, to what goods we choose to buy from our supermarkets.

Mayhew reflected on the lost “centre” of society and the consequence that citizens are incapable of understanding its modern complexity due to the work of professional communicators in constantly shifting the ground.

Mayhew was concerned about the serious disconnection that’s developed between politicians, political candidates, and their citizen stakeholders.

He was deeply anxious that the public was unable to comprehend the degree to which it was being influenced and persuaded, but at the same time he wanted to believe that deep down, we knew precisely what was going on.

The professional communicators most reviled by Mayhew are public relationists, advertisers, and marketers, all representing client-based political communication as consumable product, and seeking immunity from any “redemption of tokens” most often associated with solidarity between client and consumer.

Immunity from the redemption of tokens is a complex way of saying that politicians and candidates don’t have to act on the promises they make.

Mayhew wanted the redemption of rhetorical tokens by and for members of the public to include demands that politicians and candidates provide specific evidence about their promises.

But he lamented the capacity of a candidate to make promises on the basis of truth; the promises will never be able to be truthfully redeemed at some point in the future given that they’re contingent upon contestable criteria and unknown future circumstances.

In other words, when circumstances change after the election - say for example the elected government discovers it has fewer dollars in the bank - then the pre-election promises dissolve like sandcastles in the rain.

In the New Public - the space where Mayhew places us in the early 21st century - undifferentiated rhetoric is so widespread that symbolic information and vague assertions have completely replaced discursive contests.

Discursive contests, or open forums, have been replaced by symbolic representation.

Undifferentiated rhetoric - the mass of information that comes to us from all sources that say how “unique” a particular brand or individual candidate is - fills all the available spaces, including microblogs such as Twitter, so that we have no clear view of the future or what we might expect from our elected representatives beyond tomorrow.

Mayhew’s argument is built upon the idea that professional communicators dominate public communication and public opinion, displacing the free public of the enlightenment with a new public subject to systematic persuasion and influence.

This is a public sphere in which the prospect of stakeholder citizens (voters and taxpayers for example) being able to make a connection between themselves and policy, is almost zero.

On each day of the present election campaign candidates, when asked direct questions by the news media, weave and dodge like they’re in the ring with Danny Green.

Which is probably why there is truth in a recent Tweet suggesting that the TV drama character Doc Martin be elected prime minister because we would, at the very least, know where we stand with him.

Mayhew concluded that we need serious rhetorical forums not given over to commerce in rhetorical tokens.

He argued that it is standard practice to advocate a positive position for an issue without specifying exactly how promised benefits from that position will materialise.

Witness health, education and primary industry as examples in the present campaign.

Mayhew invested much time investigating rhetorical tokens and the redemption of influence.

Some of his ideas included deliberative forums such as direct debate, and widespread citizen forums in which competing material is placed in the same medium.

He also believed professional communicators produce anti-discursive models which are filled with dangerously high levels of useless information.

To provide balance in his “new public” he wanted to inject into it a news media with the capacity to filter the specialist rhetoric of professional presentation.

But instead of arguing the news media are objective and thus provide the mechanisms by which the new public can filter information to form objective opinion, he lamented that the news media have the same potential as the average citizen to be persuaded and influenced by sources and the anti-discursive models invoked by professionals.

What he should have added was the need for a clear distinction between the public sphere and the private sphere so that we can understand the relationship between public policy and public opinion.

When politicians and candidates talk about having “private conversations” and doing preference deals they make the mistake of widening the gap between them and the public they so desperately crave.

And the wider the gap, the more outrageous the rhetorical tokens.

If we think about this we might question more seriously whether the conversation over the leadership between Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard has a right to exist as private in a public sphere.

For Mayhew, the electorate is the legitimate bearer of public opinion which in turn is the creator of public policy and thus the source of legitimate governing power.

While professionals control political communication however, offering vague assertions instead of direct engagement on behalf of their client candidates, such a position is an improbability in Australia.