Page 94 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

THE MEDIA AS POLITICAL ACTORS

reluctantly endorsed John Major, ‘warts and all’, in its eve-of-poll
editorial, and since May 1997 has led the way in trying to embarrass
the Labour government), seeks to hold on to and expand its
relatively young, affluent readership with a new right-of-centre
iconoclasm which, like the Sun, is by no means averse to putting
the editorial boot into the establishment.
At the other end of the political spectrum, the Guardian’s editorials
reflect the kinder, gentler views of that paper’s liberal, left-of-centre
readers. The Financial Times speaks with the detached, business-like
voice of hard-headed British capital, and so on.
There is of course no necessary connection between the public
voice of a newspaper’s editorial and the actual beliefs of its readers.
We have already noted the distinction between the Daily Star’s pre-
1997 editorial support for the Conservative Party and the Labour-
supporting views of most of its readers. The Sun’s thundering
endorsement of Tony Blair in the 1997 election neglected the fact
that a substantial proportion of its readers still supported the
Conservatives. But there is a clear commercial motive for a newspaper
to ‘speak the language’ of its readers, or at least to speak in a language
which does not offend them unduly.
It has been argued by some that the commercial status of
newspapers over-rides any political objectives which they may have,
and as I suggested above, the shift in so many British newspapers’
editorial allegiances from Conservative to Labour in 1997 was largely
due to harsh commercial calculations of where the readers were going.
But as James Curran and others have convincingly argued (Curran
and Seaton, 1997), and as the actions and declarations of the media
barons, past and present, make abundantly clear, the benefits of
newspaper ownership, for those few multi-millionaires in a position
to be able to afford it, are not just those of short-term profit.
Corporate giants such as News International and United Newspapers
have an obvious interest in shaping the political environment of the
markets in which they operate. If they can do so effectively, as Rupert
Murdoch and Silvio Berlusconi have shown, the longer-term financial
(and in the latter case, political) rewards can be enormous.

THE JOURNALIST AS PUNDIT
Newspaper editorials, while they are unmistakably subjective
expressions of opinion, are rarely signed by a particular editor or
journalist. Authored political journalism, on the other hand, will be

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