Government sources are widely defined as primary definers of news, while politicians are frequently criticised for getting too close to journalists. Meanwhile, party political spin doctors are demonised as distorters of truth. Yet what goes on in the huge black box of official government media relations – typically the biggest single concentration of PR power in any country – has rarely been researched. Taking the UK since 1997 as a case study, I will use data from interviews with government communicators, special advisers and journalists, to examine the question of how government communications has adapted to the transformation in the media political landscape: the growing imperative of media logic (“mediatization”) and its impact on concepts of excellence within the service (“professionalization”); the use of the government information machine to convey party political messages (“politicization”); and “personalisation”, the use of government communications to raise the personal profile of individual ministers.
