Journalists need to understand the strategies that political parties use in order to convey their messages through the media. This is important, both in order to ensure that they are not themselves manipulated, but also so that they can uncover and explain these strategies for their audience.

There is much contemporary talk about “spin doctors” and other purportedly innovative media weapons. But although the precise techniques might have evolved in the age of the cellular telephone and the hand-held computer, the approaches that parties take to election campaigns have not changed much over the years. These could be summarized as follows:

• Dictate the agenda. Very often competing political parties or candidates fight the campaign on their own chosen terrain. One party may fight the election on the issue of, say, management of the economy. Another may fight it on national security. The success of their campaign strategy will lie in how far they get the media to talk about the priority issue for their own party and avoid the one that is being stressed by their rival. Journalists need to be alive to these intentions and try to focus on what they see as the genuine priority issues for voters.
• Use soft news to make themselves voter-friendly. This tactic is as old as politics. Politicians shake hands, kiss babies, drink a pint of beer, go bowling – whatever is the culturally appropriate way to show that they are fully paid up members of the human race. Voters know that these soft news opportunities are staged, but they still work as a way of giving politicians a human face. Better still, they use up time avoiding issues that might be potentially damaging. Journalists face a dilemma. These stories are not really proper news – but they risk being scooped by rival media outlets if they do not run them. This is a reason why so much election coverage is superficial and uninformative.
• Change the subject. This is closely related to the previous two points. When there are events that may damaging to a party’s candidates, they will hastily seek to change the media focus elsewhere: kissing babies, the other party’s shortcomings, a different manifesto pledge – anything to avoid negative news. Incumbent parties are especially well placed to do this, since they can create official events or announcements that will themselves constitute diversions.
• Keep their name in the news. But notwithstanding the previous point, all party media managers work on the assumption that there is no such thing as bad publicity. There is an element of truth in this proposition during elections. No one ever voted for a candidate they had not heard of.
• Plant negative stories about the opposition. The attitude towards negative political campaigning varies enormously depending on political culture. However, in most cases frontal assaults on a rival candidate are much less effective than cleverly placed negative stories about a rival party or candidate. It is this art of feeding the negative story that has developed most rapidly with the emergence of “spin-doctoring”. The responsibility of the journalist, when confronted with negative stories, is to ask the question: “Who is telling me this – and why?”