Power Without Responsibility

Press, Broadcasting and the Internet in Britain

James Curran, Jean Seaton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351212267
• Edition: 8
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book attacks the conventional history of the press as a story of progress; offers a critical defence and history of public service broadcasting; provides a myth-busting account of the internet; a subtle account of the impact of social media and explores key debates about the role and politics of the media.

It has become a standard book on media and other courses: but it has also gone beyond an academic audience to reach a wider public. Hailed as 'a classic of media history and analysis' by the Irish Times and a book that has 'cracked the canon' by the Times Higher, it has been translated into five languages.

This edition contains six new chapters. These include the press and the remaking of Britain, the rise of the neo-liberal Establishment, the moral decline of journalism, the impact of social media and a history of attempts to reform the press. It contains new research on the relationship between programmes, institutions and society. It places key UK institutions in the wider context of international affairs and their impact. The book has been updated to take account of new developments like Brexit and the rise of Jeremy Corbyn and the shift in authority and legitimacy prompted by social media. It does this with a clear explanation of how policy can shape media outcomes.

Part I

Press history

Chapter 1

Press history as political mythology

Pioneering Victorian studies portrayed the history of the British press as a story of progress in which newspapers became free from government and served the people.¹ This became an orthodoxy that lasted a hundred years.

According to this Whig account, the press became independent partly as a consequence of a heroic struggle against state censorship, inspired principally by a love of liberty. Key developments in this struggle are said to be the abolition of the Court of Star Chamber (1641), the end of newspaper licensing (1694), Fox’s Libel Act (1792), and the repeal of newspaper taxes in the period 1853–61.²

The winning of freedom is also attributed, in this traditionalist view, to the capitalist development of the press. Indeed some Whig historians place greater emphasis on market liberation than on political struggle as the main driver of press freedom, especially in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. ‘The true censorship’, John Roach writes of the press in the Hanoverian era, ‘lay in the fact that the newspaper had not yet reached financial independence, and consequently depended on the administration or the parties’.³ It was allegedly only when the press was established on an independent commercial footing that newspapers became ‘the great organs of the public mind’ free from both government and party tutelage.⁴

Advertisers are said to have played an especially important role in this process of liberation. As Ivon Asquith argues in relation to the press in the period 1780–1820:

Since sales were inadequate to cover the costs of producing a paper, it was the growing income from advertising which provided the material base for the change of attitude from subservience to independence. It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that the growth of advertising revenue was the single most important factor in enabling the press to emerge as the Fourth Estate of the realm.⁵

The press, in this traditionalist account, became a representative institution by the mid-nineteenth century. Market competition, we are told, ‘forced papers to echo the political views of their readers in order to thrive’.⁶ As a consequence, the press became a great democratizing agency which ‘helped to articulate, focus and formulate the growing force of public opinion’.⁷ The press also contributed allegedly to the maturing of Britain’s democracy in later Victorian Britain by reporting the news in a more responsible manner. This interpretation was once so hegemonic that even a Marxist like Raymond Williams wrote approvingly that ‘most newspapers were able to drop their frantic pamphleteering’ in the period after 1855.⁸ Similarly, the progressive historian Alan Lee portrayed the later Victorian period as a near-golden age of journalism.⁹

Of course, Whig press history was never monolithic even during the period of its ascendancy. While most press historians in this tradition viewed the 1850s as the time when the British press became truly free, some revisionists argued that this happened later.¹⁰ Foremost among these was Stephen Koss who argued, in a celebrated two-volume history, that the full emancipation of the press from authority did not take place until the later 1940s.¹¹ But while the date of the press’s liberation was disputed, the storyline remained the same. The press progressed from being an instrument of government and party to becoming the voice of the people.

This book attacks this Whig narrative on three main counts. The period around the middle of the nineteenth century inaugurated, it is argued, not a new era of press freedom but a system of censorship more effective than anything that had gone before. Market forces succeeded where legal repression had failed in conscripting the press to the social order in mid-Victorian Britain. While market censorship softened in the subsequent period, it still rendered the press unrepresentative. Far from becoming the Fourth Estate of Whig legend, much of the press degenerated into ‘rotten boroughs’ dominated by oligarchs.

Secondly, the struggle against press censorship was not inspired solely by a love of liberty. This is to project contemporary sensibilities on to people with different mind-sets from our own. In fact, many leading parliamentary campaigners against press taxes in the nineteenth century were more preoccupied with indoctrinating the masses than with planting the tree of freedom. How they are remembered, in the Whig account, is different from how they were.

Above all, the Whig projection of press history as an unfolding story of popular empowerment is too simplistic. Of course, the dismantling of repressive state censorship was an historic advance; and up to the 1850s the theme of progress in the development of the press has some substance. But the press subsequently became ever more entangled in the coils of power: not just the influence of political parties that so concerned Whig revisionists but the bind-weeds of power in all its manifestations – economic, cultural, social and political. Much of the press chose to side with privilege, and in some cases to actively bully the vulnerable.

This counter-thesis was first published in 1981.¹² It contributed to a sea-change in the academic history of the press, reflected in recent overviews of the field.¹³ Some thirty-five years and seven editions later, it is clear that Whig press history is in retreat, with few adherents left.¹⁴ No historian now narrates the development of the press ‘up to the present day’ as an unfolding story of progress in the way that Whig historians like Stephen Koss and their Victorian antecedents once did.

Afterlife

Yet if Whig press history has lost favour in universities, it lives on in the pages of the press. Hallowed Whig themes are reverently presented as established truths. ‘It was advertising’, proclaims the former Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, ‘that set the British press free’.¹⁵ ‘Remember, advertisers guarantee press freedom’, echoes John Bird, founder of the Big Issue.¹⁶

Another consecrated theme, the struggle against state censorship, gets a regular airing in a distorted form. Numerous newspaper articles and editorials in 2013 claimed that ‘three hundred years of press freedom’ would come to an end if Leveson-inspired reform was implemented.¹⁷ This implied that the press was already free in 1750 when publication of fundamental criticism of the social order was a criminal offence, and when even the reporting of parliamentary debates was prohibited, and that this long entrenched freedom would be terminated if the press’s self-regulatory system was audited by an independent panel established (like the BBC) by Royal Charter. This is not serious history but crude propaganda based on a total disregard of the evidence, in which the past is being misreported to influence the present.¹⁸

The empowerment theme of Whig press history is also often presented in the press in a simplistic way, stripped of any nuance. Thus, Trevor Kavanagh boasts in The Sun that ‘a traditionally robust newspaper industry … for 300 years … has been the defender of the ordinary citizen against the rich and powerful’.¹⁹ This is a view of press history in which imperialism, anti-semitism, hostility towards migrants, the persecution of gays and lesbians, the bullying of those on benefits, the adulation of ‘wealth-creators’ and cheerleading for right-wing governments has been conveniently airbrushed from the record.

These are all examples of the way in which Whig press history – now long repudiated by historians – lives on in the press. What follows is an alternative, evidence-based account informed by recent scholarship. For the sake of brevity, we will begin our account in the early nineteenth century when newspapers were displaying increasing signs of independence from government.

Notes

1 F. K. Hunt, The Fourth Estate, 2 vols. (London, David Bogue, 1850); A. Andrews, The History of British Journalism, 2 vols. (London, Richard Bentley, 1859); J. Grant, The Newspaper Press, 3 vols. (London, Tinsley, 1871); H. R. Fox Bourne, English Newspapers, 2 vols. (London, Chatto & Windus, 1887).

2 F. Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England, 1476–1776 (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1956); H. Herd, The March of Journalism (London, Allen and Unwin, 1952).

3 J. Roach, ‘Education and public opinion’ in C. W. Crawley (ed.) War and Peace in an Age of Upheaval (1793–1830) (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 181.

4 Ibid., p. 180.

5 I. Asquith, ‘Advertising and the press in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: James Perry and the Morning Chronicle 1790-1821’, Historical Journal, xviii (4), 1975, p. 721. This is an especially scholarly presentation of a once standard view, typified by R. Altick, The English Common Reader (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1957), and C. W. Crawley (ed.) War and Peace in an Age of Upheaval (1793–1830) (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 322.

6 H. Barker, Newspapers, Politics and English Society, 1695–1855 (Harlow, Longman, 2000), p. 4.

7 Barker, Newspapers, Politics and English Society, p. 225.

8 R. Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth, Pelican, 1965), p. 218. He later modified his view in R. Williams, ‘The press and popular culture: an historical perspective’ in G. Boyce, J. Curran and P. Wingate (eds.) Newspaper History (London, Constable, 1978).

9 A. J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press, 1855–1914 (London, Croom Helm, 1976).

10 For example G. Boyce, ‘The fourth estate: the reappraisal of a concept’ in Boyce et al. (eds.) Newspaper History (1978), documented the continuing influence of political parties on the press, extending into the twentieth century. Some historians in this tradition, such as F. Williams, Dangerous Estate ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the authors
• Preface to the eighth edition
• Part I Press history
• Part II Broadcasting history
• Part III Rise of new media
• Part IV Theories of the media
• Part V Politics of the media
• Bibliography
• Index