Professional communicators control elections

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.