Page 69 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION

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 also 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 news-
papers 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 2002 in Britain eleven daily and eleven
Sunday newspapers were being published nationally (throughout
the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern
Ireland. 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, in the case of the Metro being free newspapers for
urban railway commuters. 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

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