Page 73 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

For Fiske, such journalism is to be welcomed in so far as it
produces a ‘disbelieving’ citizen, exposing suppressed official
information and discrediting establishment shibolleths. ‘The tabloid
press [and increasingly, as noted above, tabloid television] constantly
attempts to incorporate popular tones of voice and popular stances
towards official knowledge…this informed popular scepticism can
be, if all too rarely, turned towards events in the public, political
sphere’ (1992, p.61).
Fiske goes further, asserting that popular journalism is more honest,
less reactionary and more relevant to the world in which most citizens
live than the ‘quality’ journalism regarded as superior by the majority
of liberal commentators. For Fiske, the collision between commercial
necessity and popular rhetoric creates a space where significant
political criticism and dissent can surface. The existence of this space
is independent of the ‘official’ political complexion of a media
organisation. A good example of this phenomenon was the monarchy
debate referred to in Chapter 1. Presented by Trevor McDonald, one
of ITN’s most conservative and reverential broadcasters, and
broadcast at peak-time on the main commercial channel, the
programme was at times fiercely anti-royal, as the following angry
statement by one member of the participating audience shows:

The Queen is…the richest woman in the world. She is
the head of a rotten, class-ridden, corrupt political and
social establishment which is directly responsible for this
nation’s terrible decline.

Carlton TV, which produced the debate, was no hotbed of political
subversion, but in giving space to popular feelings about the monarchy
(and there were pro-monarchy statements too), in what was
undoubtedly a commercially-driven search for high audience ratings,
a kind of subversion was the result.
For other observers, however, the fact that the popular media,
and newspapers in particular, do have political allegiances, is more
important to an understanding of their democratic function than
any acknowledgement, no matter how generous, of their anti-
establishment content. We have already seen that in a capitalist society
such as Britain, the press are permitted to have opinions and are
expected to express them. In a pluralist democracy, ideally, those
opinions should reflect the structure of partisanship in the society as
a whole, serving diversity and promoting rational debate, in the public
interest, between distinct viewpoints. Historically, of course, the great

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