Page 84 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

THE POLITICAL MEDIA

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. The government’s White Paper on broadcasting,
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published on July 5, 1994, confirmed that the BBC will survive for
the foreseeable future as a public service body, funded predominantly
by taxation in the form of the licence fee, and the Labour government
has endorsed that policy. 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.
Fortunately, 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 gradual exclusion from the airwaves (McNair,
1999). On the contrary, with 24-hour news channels on Sky and
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
is increasingly concerned with real-life crime shows (such as
Crimewatch UK), exposés of sharp practice in the economy (The
Cook Report), ‘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 commercially driven shift in newsvalues.
The previous section examined the views of those who see these
trends as fundamentally damaging to the democratic process,
further relegating serious ‘quality’ journalism to the margins of
late night BBC2, Channel 4, or Radio 5. More often than not, it is
argued, this type of journalism is crucially lacking in substance,

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