Page 99 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION

et al. noted in Policing the Crisis, seeks to articulate what the
newspaper’s editors believe to be the collective voice of its readers.
Hence, editorials in the Sun and the Sunday Times, although
expressing fundamentally similar political viewpoints, determined
largely by the opinions of proprietor Rupert Murdoch, will address
the issues of the day in completely different terms. The Sun
claims to ‘speak’ for the working classes, voicing their frequently
racist, sexist and xenophobic prejudices, while at the same time
irreverential and critical of the establishment, whether it be in
the form of Royal ‘scroungers’, gay judges or two-timing Tory
politicians. The Sunday Times seeks to hold on to and expand
its relatively young, affluent readership with a 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 news-
paper 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 news-
papers 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 declar-
ations of the media barons, past and present, make abundantly
clear, the benefits of newspaper ownership, for those few multi-
millionaires 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

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