Media and Power

James Curran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781134900374
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Media and Power addresses three key questions about the relationship between media and society.
*How much power do the media have?
*Who really controls the media?
*What is the relationship between media and power in society?

In this major new book, James Curran reviews the different answers which have been given, before advancing original interpretations in a series of ground-breaking essays.
This book also provides a guided tour of the major debates in media studies. What part did the media play in the making of modern society? How did 'new media' change society in the past? Will radical media research recover from its mid-life crisis? Is public service television the dying product of the nation in an age of globalization? Media and Power provides both a clear introduction to media research and an innovative analysis of media power.

Part I Media history

Chapter 1 Rival narratives of media history

DOI: 10.4324/9780203417744-1

Introduction

In the nineteenth century, pioneer historians of the press laid the foundations of modern media research. They were the first people to take seriously, and study in depth, the organization, content and influence of the emergent media system in Britain.¹ Yet, despite this auspicious beginning, media history has since become marginalized. It is now the neglected grandparent of media studies: isolated, ignored, rarely visited by her offspring.

This neglect is exemplified by a recent, intelligent textbook (Grossberg, Wartella and Whitney 1998). It has a chapter called ‘Narratives of media history’, which makes no reference—even in passing—to any conventional historical study of the media. Instead, it focuses on technological determinist accounts of media development offered by cultural gurus like Marshall McLuhan, and a related account of the transition from modernity to postmodernity heavily indebted to cultural commentators like Jean Baudrillard.

Yet if media historians labour in the shadows, they are themselves partly to blame. In general, press historians stick rigidly to the press; television historians stay rooted in television; and film historians remain wedded to film. Within each of these specialisms, research is often narrow. Press and broadcasting historians tend to focus on institutional development, while film historians concentrate generally on the content of films—mostly within very limited periods of time. Visits to the neglected grandparent are infrequent because they can seem unrewarding.

However, this body of widely overlooked research does have something important to offer. It sheds light on the central role of mass communications in the making of modern society. It provides insights into the influences that shape the media, both past and present. It also offers alternative ways of thinking about the media's relationship to society. An historical perspective provides a critical distance which can make apparent and clarify things that seem blurred when only viewed in a contemporary context.²

This chapter will present media history as a series of competing narratives. Its writing has involved more active reinterpretation than is usual in literature surveys. The histories of each individual medium have been linked or mergedto offer general accounts of media development. These have been contextualized in relation to wider trends in society, and the implications of specialist media research have been actively interpreted. Without this degree of intervention, many of the core themes of media history would have remained buried or obscured.

To make this survey manageable, we have confined ourselves to the last 300-odd years of British media history. While its British focus may seem restrictive, this review has wider implications. Many of the narratives which are identified here have counterparts in the histories of the media in other economically developed liberal democracies.³

Media Freedom and Empowerment: the Liberal Narrative

The liberal narrative is the oldest and best established of the competing interpretations of British media history. It comes out of an historical tradition which celebrates the evolution of ‘constitutional government’ by recording the rise of parliament, the establishment of the rule of law, the erosion of monarchical power, the development of modern political parties and—in the final culmination of this teleological history—the introduction of mass democracy. The right to vote was cautiously extended through five enlargements of the franchise: in 1832, 1867, 1884, 1918 and 1928. This was accompanied by constitutional reforms—secret voting in 1872, a limit on constituency election expenditure in 1883, a curb on the veto power of the House of Lords in 1911 and the culling of hereditary peers with voting rights in 1999—which helped to democratize the political process.

The central thesis of liberal media history is that this process of democratization was enormously strengthened by the development of modern mass media. This thesis is organized around two key arguments, the first of which is that the media struggled successfully to become free of government.

The first medium to be liberated was allegedly the press.⁴ In the seventeenth century, the press ceased to be licensed by government. In the eighteenth century, it acquired greater economic independence and became less subject to legal restriction. However, the key breakthrough is said to have occurred in the mid-nineteenth century when press taxes, intended to price newspapers beyond the means of ordinary people, were finally abolished.

The British cinema is also portrayed as breaking free from state political control.⁵ The British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) was set up by the film industry in 1912 as a way of dealing with the unpredictable nature of local council censorship. This ‘Voluntary’ system of self-regulation developed into a tyrannical system of ideological control, linked to the state. During the inter-war period, the BBFC banned films criticizing the monarchy, government, church, police, judiciary and friendly foreign countries. It also proscribed the depiction of current controversial issues, including in 1939 a proposed film featuring theNazi persecution of Pastor Niemoller. However, a thaw set in during the Second World War. This was carried over into peacetime Britain, when political (as distinct from moral) censorship was effectively abandoned.

Broadcasting, according to liberal historians,⁶ also escaped from the shadow of the state to become independent. The BBC's initial subordination was symbolized by its craven conduct in the 1926 General Strike when it excluded from the microphone both the leader of the Labour Party and the archbishop of Canterbury because they had departed from the government's hymnsheet. However, the BBC subsequently inched its way to freedom, with occasional tactical reverses and pauses. This slow journey was marked by a number of landmarks: the lifting of the ban on radio discussion of controversial issues in 1928; the development of an in-house newsgathering team in the 1930s; the growth of the BBC's prestige and autonomy in the Second World War; and the removal in 1956 of the new ‘fourteen day rule’ restricting broadcast coverage of issues due to be debated in parliament during the next fortnight. The liberal historical consensus is that broadcasting became effectively free of government by the 1950s, assisted by the arrival of commercial television in 1955. This independence was forcibly demonstrated in 1956 when the BBC refused to suppress, at the behest of government, the Labour leader's broadcast against the Suez War even though it was transmitted to troops as they prepared for battle. Broadcasters were leaned on by government on subsequent occasions, even prompting the BBC's staff to mount a one-day strike against political censorship in 1985. However, liberal accounts are agreed that radio and television continued to be free of government control, not least because broadcasters generally enjoyed strong public support when they came under concerted government attack.

When liberal histories of individual media are woven together, they thus provide a coherent narrative in which the core media system became free over a period of three centuries. The second theme of this narrative is that free media empowered the people. This is worth presenting in some detail since it is the crux of the liberal case.

The emergence of a more independent press in the eighteenth century beamed rays of light into the private, aristocratic world of politics. After licensing lapsed in 1695, newspapers grew in number, increased in circulation and extended their coverage of public affairs. Some papers publicized grassroots campaigns to ‘instruct’ MPs in the first half of the eightenth century, and contributed to the rise of the mass petition as a key instrument of politics in the second half. After 1771, newspapers were able to report the debates of parliament (previously a jailable offence). The press, concludes Bob Harris, ‘was a major force behind the increasingly public nature of much politics’ in the eighteenth century (Harris 1996:47; cf. Brewer 1989:243). This, in turn, made the system of government more open and accountable.

The growth of the press also contributed to the expansion of the political community. As newspapers became established in more places, and increasedtheir circulation and political coverage, so they extended the boundaries of the political nation, both horizontally to include peripheral areas distant from London and vertically to include people lower down the social scale. In effect, the rivalries and disagreements of the landed elite who dominated contemporary politics were played out through the press in front of a widening audience. The reactions of this audience began to matter, as is testified by increasing references to public opinion in the later eighteenth century (Barker 1998).

At this point the threads of liberal press history become entangled in a knot and need to be untied. In effect, there are three-and-a-half rival, though overlapping, liberal interpretations. The ‘Whig’ version argues that an increasingly independent press subjected authority to critical scrutiny, and represented the views of the public to parliament and government. It became the ‘fourth estate’, the voice of the people in the corridors of power.⁷ This transformation is said to have occurred in the early to mid-nineteenth century, although another view⁸—the ‘half interpretation mentioned above—holds that it really took place a century later after an unfortunate interlude when the press was little more than an extension of the party system.

A second interpretation argues that the leading section of the press represented primarily the expanding groups of the ‘new’ commercial and industrial society. It gave their reform organizations the oxygen of publicity, sustained an independent political agenda, exerted strong pressure for further democratization and helped to alert the landed elite to the need to make major concessions in order to preserve public order.⁹

The third version appears more descriptive than the other two but in fact adds up to a coherent alternative interpretation. It argues that the ancien régime (before democratic reform) was well entrenched; that the landed elite enjoyed a long period of political dominance after 1832; and that the real structure of power in nineteenth-century Britain was only slowly modified by the extension of the franchise and economic change.¹⁰ In this stable context, the press contributed to the judicious maturing of the democratic system by relaying the concerns of pressure groups to government and enabling society to commune freely with itself.¹¹

Common to all three interpretations is a positive view of the press as an institution that furthered—albeit in different ways—the democratic project. This theme trails off, however, around the 1880s and 1890s when two new themes become prominent in liberal histories of the press—falling editorial standards and the rise of the press barons.¹² However, if the centrepiece of the liberal narrative is lost from sight in studies of the press, it resurfaces in liberal histories of broadcasting where radio and television are portrayed as broadening and deepening democracy during the course of the twentieth century.

Public service broadcasting diminished the knowledge gap between the political elite and the general public because it made informing the public an institutional priority. It consciously sought to offset the ‘two nation’ division of the country (supported by a polarized, elite and popular press) by schedulingflagship news and current affairs programmes in prime time, and developing a distinctive style of journalism that was both popular and informative. This strategy succeeded in the sense that television became the principal source of news for the majority of the population.¹³

A second, more implicit theme is that broadcasting extended the political nation in a new way. The BBC cultivated from the 1930s onwards an intimate, conversational style of ‘talk’ about current affairs which conveyed the important democratic message that politics is about everyday things and within the competence of all (Cardiff 1980). A more aggressive style of television interviewing was introduced in the 1950s, which symbolically asserted politicians’ accountability to the public (Cockerell 1984). The launch of television political satire in the 1960s, and its subsequent development in a more irreverent (though not neccessarily more radical) form, also promoted a more sceptical orientation to the world of power (Wagg 1992; Seymour-Ure 1996). Rather belatedly, in the 1990s, broadcasting began to develop a less diffident relationship to the royal family (Pimlott 1998). Thus, in different and evolving ways, broadcasting helped to roll back the cultural legacy of the pre-democratic past.

The third claim, again more often implied than explicit, is that radio and television served democracy by enabling different groups—including the disadvantaged and unorganized—to speak to each other, and shape the collective conversation of society. For example, unemployed workers caused a political sensation in the 1930s when they described on BBC radio their personal experiences of the arbitrary and heartless means-testing system, regulating their access to welfare (Scannell 1980). The forgotten poor of the swinging sixties gained public attention through celebrated television plays like Cathy Come Home. The marginalized victims of 1980s de-industrialization had their predicament highlighted with angry humour in the television series Boys from the Blackstuff (Millington 1993). From the 1970s onwards, the development of phone-in programmes, access programmes, studio audience participation and the new documentary movement gave increased opportunities for members of the general public to contribute to collective dialogue about the direction of society (Livingstone and Lunt 1994: Corner 1995). More generally, it is argued, public service broadcasting promoted not only socially inclusive debate but a reasoning, evidence-based, policy-oriented style of public discourse (Scannell 1992).

In short, the liberal narrative offers a coherent view of the different ways in which increasingly free media strengthened the democratic process. The media extended the political nation by making information about public affairs more widely available and promoting a culture of democracy. The media also empowered the people by subjecting authority to critical scrutiny and representing public opinion to government. Finally, the media—and in particular public service broadcasting—enhanced the functioning of democracy by encouraging constructive and reciprocal communication between different groups in society.

This liberal tradition thus tells media history as a story of progress in which the media became free, switched their allegiance from government to the people, and served democracy. While this remains still a powerful account it has a number of weaknesses, among them that it is a history mainly featuring men. This is redressed by another narrative which tells media history as her story. This simple shift of perspective produces a remarkably different account.

Advance of Women: the Feminist Narrative

It was a truth universally acknowledged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that women were inferior to men. Women were thought to be less ratio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Media history
• Part II Media sociology
• Part III Media politics
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index