Page 55 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

44 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

the general public, promoted by Britain’s class-stratified quality and
popular press. Initially, radio was also organized in a way that widened
social access to political knowledge, although this policy was first
modified and then abandoned in the radio reorganizations of the 1940s
and 1960s.
Some historians point more dramatically to the way in which TV and
radio have, at times, brought into public prominence the plight of the
underclass or facilitated public debate in a form that questioned the
status quo. During the 1930s, documentary radio programmes caused a
political sensation by enabling the unemployed to speak directly to the
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nation about their predicament. During the Second World War, the
BBC staged debates about peacetime reconstruction which, though
carefully policed, called into question the basis of the pre-war political
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order. During the 1960s, radical plays like Cathy Come Home
dramatized the problems of homelessness and poverty in a way that
stirred the conscience of the nation.
This broadening of political representation also had, it is argued, a
cultural dimension. Cultural judgements, which both reflect and
legitimate the leadership claims of the political middle class, have long
shaped the definition of public-service broadcasting in Britain. But this
became a less pronounced feature of public-service broadcasting as it
developed over time. The fictional portrayal of working-class heroes
and heroines for the first time in radio serials in the 1940s, the
projection of ordinary domestic life as an adventure story in 1950s TV
soap opera, the breakthrough of young working-class music in the early
1960s and the greatly increased airtime devoted to working-class sports
like snooker and darts in the 1980s, were only some of the key moments
in the cultural democratization of broadcasting. Implicitly, they
validated popular pleasures and affirmed the importance of preferences
that did not correspond to ‘the social hierarchy of taste’. 42
But although these historical accounts of public-service broadcasting
appear to illustrate the way in which radical and liberal approaches can
be interwoven, they in fact privilege a liberal approach at the expense of
a radical interpretation. The selective nature of this approach is
underlined by a number of sociological studies of TV programmes,
some of which are now almost historical documents. Their common
theme is that TV coverage has tended to be structured in terms of the
assumptions of dominant groups in society, as exemplified by TV
reporting of industrial relations, management of the economy, internal
conflicts within the Labour Party, the Falklands War, images of east-
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west relations and of Northern Ireland. Their implication is that