Page 51 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

40 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

forum of rational-critical debate [was] released from the pressure to take
sides ideologically’. 21
This dismissal of the radical press as an ideological pollutant
highlights the problematic nature of Habermas’s conception of reasoned
discourse. The newspapers celebrated by Habermas were engines of
propaganda for the bourgeoisie rather than the embodiment of
disinterested rationality. Their version of reason was challenged by
radical papers which became the circulation leaders in the first half of
the nineteenth century. The more militant of these developed a radical
and innovatory analysis of society going far beyond the bourgeois
critique of the aristocratic constitution (which would have left the
reward structure fundamentally unchanged). They challenged the
legitimacy of the capitalist order, arguing that poverty was rooted in the
economic process and was caused principally by the profits
appropriated by capitalists, as well as by a corrupt state controlled by
the propertied classes. They also proclaimed a public opinion different
from that asserted by the bourgeois press. In effect, the newspapers
dismissed by Habermas as deviating from reasoned debate were merely
repudiating the premises of this debate, and developing a set of ideas
that generalized the interests of a class excluded from the political
system. 22
The conventional categories of liberal history also caused Habermas
to analyse changes in the material base of the nineteenth-century press
in terms of differential individual rather than class access to the public
sphere. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, argues Habermas, the
British press became ‘an institution of certain participants in the public
sphere in their capacity as private individuals’. In other words, the
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press began to be dominated by chain-owning proprietors.
This fails to comprehend the significance of the changes that took
place. In 1837, a great national newspaper like the Northern Star was
established with less than £1,000. By 1918, another national weekly
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paper—the Sunday Express—needed over £2 million to become
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established. Whereas in 1837 a modest subscription in radical northern
towns had been sufficient to launch a national paper, it required the
massive resources of a multinational conglomerate headed by Lord
Beaverbrook to do the same thing some eighty years later. The
escalation in publishing costs in the meantime did not just affect
individual access to the public sphere: it debarred access for large
sections of the community. 26
Thus, radical press history implicitly challenges Habermas’s thesis in
three ways. It relativizes his conception of reason. It draws attention to