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Telling Stories: Sociology, Journalism and the Informed Citizen 171

advantage to those able to sustain them. This is because these goods require
more than a single expenditure. They must be fed. Computers require updating,
software, add-ons such as printers or modems. Video recorders require blank or
prerecorded tapes. Increasingly with the spread of cable and satellite reception,
purchase of leisure goods is recurrent rather than single and capital only.
Secondly, the 1950s and 1960s, during which the previous generation of domes-
tic electrical goods became commonplace, were periods of boom and declining
inequality. Such economic dynamics are not likely to be replicated in the period
in which the new communication goods are being established (Golding, 1990).
What we have in the misinformed society is, in a cliché which nonetheless
carries an unavoidable truth, the growing gap between information-poor and
information-rich. Where information is only available at a price, we need to
examine carefully from whom and how that information arrives. Research I have
carried out with colleagues in recent years has broadened to address this issue.
This work has focused on the profound changes in, firstly, the structure of the
communications media, and, secondly, the society within which they operate.
The gulf between those with a full citizenship season ticket into the information
society, and those left outside with their noses pressed against the windows,
results from changes in each.

Media Monoliths and the Centripetal Society

We need, at this point, to address two issues: first, shifts in the media; second,
the social changes which are their backdrop.
For over 20 years, in collaboration with Graham Murdock, I have investigated
what we have come to label the political economy of the mass media (Golding
and Murdock, 1991). Mapping the boardroom machinations of the Robert
Maxwells and Rupert Murdochs of this world has its own fascinations. But we
have to recognize the implications of an information market in which three-quarters
of the national daily circulation of newspapers, and over four-fifths of the Sunday
circulation, is controlled by three corporate groups. This is hardly guaranteed to
widen the scope and range of views and voices in the public arena.
Not surprisingly, the last Royal Commission on the Press came to a conclusion
which has been manifestly obvious to any observer of British newspapers, when
it noted that:

There is no doubt that over most of this century the labour movement has
had less newspaper support than its right wing opponents and that its
major beliefs and activities have been unfavourably reported by the major-
ity of the press (cited in Golding and Murdock, 1991: 26).

While it is possible to argue that partisanship has declined as newspapers
remorselessly struggle to survive in an adverse financial climate, it is difficult to
sustain any argument that the press as a whole provides a full range of possible
means of expression and opinion.