Page 50 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

RETHINKING THE MEDIA AS A PUBLIC SPHERE 39

has not been criticized directly (since, though he is a luminous presence
in political science and media sociology, Habermas seems to be largely
unknown to British historians), his central arguments have been tacitly
repudiated in recent historical accounts of the British press.
The radical attack on Whig history has centred on its assumption that
the winning of press freedom from state control can be equated with
popular control. Instead they offer a more complex narrative in which
changes in the press are discussed in terms of how they related to and
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affected the balance of social forces in society. Thus, in some radical
accounts, a sharp contrast is drawn between the first half of the nineteenth
century when the popular press reflected a wide spectrum of interests
and views, and the second half when it became more closely aligned to
the views and interests of the dominant class coalition. This
transformation is explained partly in terms of structural changes in the
press industry. Before the 1850s, the market system functioned in a way
that promoted wide social access to the public domain: newspapers cost
little to start and could be profitable without advertising. But in the
second half of the nineteenth century, increased dependence on
advertising led to the closure of advertising-starved radical papers,
while rising publishing costs led to the steady transfer of control of the
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popular press to capitalist entrepreneurs.
This was followed, in the twentieth century, by the consolidation of
newspaper chains, controlled by predominantly right-wing proprietors,
and by the death of the Labour press—the bureaucratic voice through
which working-class interests came to be represented in the 1920s.
These changes reinforced the drift of the press to the right. By 1987,
Conservative dailies accounted for 72 per cent of national circulation,
even though the Conservative Party won only 43 per cent of the vote in
the general election. Even the non-Conservative press was close to the
political centre, and joined in the stigmatization of dissidents—left-wing
trade unionists, radical councils, militant students, peace and gay rights
campaigners. 20
At first glance, Habermas appears to have anticipated this critique.
Thus he was at pains to emphasize the narrow social base of the early
independent press rather than to portray it as an institution of the
general public. But his analysis never escaped in practice from the terms
of reference of Whig history. This is illustrated by the small walk-on
part assigned by Habermas to the early radical press. Its rise in the early
nineteenth century is briefly hailed by Habermas as part of the process
by which the public sphere was expanded: its fall as marking the
resumption of a more reasoned public discourse in which ‘the press as a