Page 82 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 61

THE POLITICAL MEDIA
broadcast a substantial proportion of news and current affairs programming,
and to make those programmes within the same rules of impartiality which
guided the BBC.
Since the development of cable and satellite television, however, all of the
established terrestrial broadcasting organisations in Britain, public or
private, have had imposed upon them a much stronger commercial remit. In
March 2005 the culture minister announced that the government would
renew the Royal Charter which provides the BBC with its public service
remit, and protect the licence fee which funds it activities until at least 2017.
The BBC’s senior managers are well aware however that in the longer term
the case for continuation of the licence fee system will depend on the
corporation’s retaining its popularity with an audience which now has access
to dozens of new TV and radio channels, and can be relied upon to exercise
that choice. At the same time, the commercial channels ITV and C4 have,
since the passing of the 1990 Broadcasting Act, been forced to pay much
more attention to the maximisation of their ratings than had previously been
the case. The more recent challenges of digitisation, and the break down of
the terrestrial, advertising-based funding model of commercial broadcasting
which prevailed in the UK has raised further questions about these channels’
capacity to produce high-quality political coverage in the future, especially
in the ITV regions.
In general, journalism has proved to be popular and profitable, and
there is no evidence that the commercialising of British broadcasting will,
as some observers feared in the late 1980s, be accompanied by its exclusion
from the airwaves. On the contrary, with 24-hour news channels provided
by Sky and the BBC and the explosion of breakfast news on television since
the 1980s, there is now more broadcasting journalism available to the
British viewer than ever before. But the need to maximise ratings has been
argued to be driving a shift in content away from the in-depth, often critical
investigative journalism for which British public service broadcasting
has been internationally renowned, towards the racier style characteristic
of the tabloids. Peak-time factual programming slots are increasingly
occupied by real-life crime shows, exposés of sharp practice in the
economy, ‘docu-soaps’ and ‘shock horror’ reportage of various types. Even
Panorama, once renowned (and occasionally mocked) for the seriousness
and depth of its analyses of official policy, party politics and the like, now
frequently addresses such issues as drug abuse and juvenile crime. These
are, of course, the legitimate stuff of journalistic inquiry, but their growing
prevalence in the British media reflects a ratings-driven shift in news values.
The previous section noted the views of those who see these trends as
fundamentally damaging to the democratic process, further relegating serious
or ‘quality’ journalism to the margins of late night BBC 2, Channel 4 or Radio
5. More often than not, it is argued, this type of journalism is crucially lacking
in substance, dealing only with the spectacular, epiphenomenal aspects of

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