Page 65 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

THE MEDIA ENVIRONMENT

When Edmund Burke described the embryonic media of the late
eighteenth century as the ‘Fourth Estate’ (the first three being the
executive, legislative and judiciary arms of the state), he was
acknowledging their importance to the health of liberal democracy.
The media represented an independent source of knowledge, not
only informing the people about politics, but protecting them from
abuses of power.
To realise this role the media had to be free from the threat of
political interference. As Scannell and Cardiff put it, ‘the struggle to
establish an independent press, both as a source of information about
the activities of the state, and as a forum for the formation and
expression of public opinion, was…an important aspect of the long
battle for a fully representative system of democratic government’
(1991, p.10).
For the first media—the press—‘freedom’ was founded on the
principle of independent economic organisation. The early
newspapers were private, commercial institutions, which existed to
make profits for their owners. They were sold as commodities in a
marketplace, initially (because of their high cost) only to wealthy
elites. But as literacy advanced throughout the capitalist world in
the nineteenth century, and as the technology of print production
was developed, newspapers fell in price and became available to wider
and wider sections of the population. Print became a genuine ‘mass’
medium. By the beginning of the twentieth century titles like the
News of the World and the Daily Mail were selling millions of copies.
Excluding the former organ of the British Communist Party —the
Morning Star—by 1999 in Britain eleven daily and ten Sunday
newspapers were being published nationally (throughout the United
Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), by
nine companies. There were in addition several hundred local
newspapers, serving communities varying in size from the countries
of Scotland and Wales to small towns and villages. There had also
come into being by the 1990s a substantial ‘free sheet’ sector of
newspapers distributed without charge to relatively small, precisely
drawn communities. 1
As private institutions the British press have traditionally been
relatively free from interference in their activities by either of the
other three ‘estates’. Having emerged from the oppression and
censorship of the absolutist feudal state, the freedom of the press to
pursue its operations has always been viewed as central to the

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