Page 88 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

THE POLITICAL MEDIA

As was noted at the beginning of this chapter the main purpose
of the press, since its emergence as a mass medium in the nineteenth
century, has been to produce information in commodity form, and
to maximise advertising revenue by selling that information to the
largest possible number of readers. Broadcasting, on the other
hand, for most of its relatively brief existence, has been sheltered in
many countries from naked commercialism. In Britain, the BBC, as
we have noted, was defined from the outset as a ‘public service’ and
given lofty goals of cultural enlightenment and education. ITV, too,
while a commercial organisation in so far as its revenues derived
from advertising, was required under law to broadcast a substantial
proportion of news and current affairs programming, and to make
those programmes within the same rules of impartiality which
guided the BBC.
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, published on 5 July 1994, confirmed that the BBC
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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 in several policy
statements since 1997. 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 rating 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,
2003). On the contrary, with 24-hour news channels provided
by Sky, BBC, and ITN 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 rating 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

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