Page 65 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

54 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

circulation paper when it was given a massive infusion of cash by the
Odhams group in 1929. In other words, what its history indicates is that
working-class access to the public sphere could be negotiated by drawing
upon the collective resources of trade unions and a major publishing
group. But this negotiation entailed a heavy price: acceptance of highly
restrictive, right-wing Labourist editorial control.
27 See, especially, L. Werkmeister, The London Daily Press, 1722– 1792,
Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska, 1963, and Jeremy Black, The
English Press in the Eighteenth Century, London: Croom Helm, 1987.
28 Boyce, op. cit., 1978; Colin Seymour-Ure, The press and the party system
between the wars’, in Gillian Peele and Colin Cook (eds), The Politics of
Reappraisal, London: Macmillan, 1976; S.Koss, The Rise and Fall of the
Political Press in Britain, vols 1 and 2, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981
and 1984; Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1985; Black, op. cit., 1987.
29 Habermas’s thesis on the press can perhaps be reconstructed in two
ways. First, his characterization of the early press most closely
corresponds to the provincial press in England before the bourgeoisie
became politically organized. (See, in particular, John Brewer, Party,
Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.) Second, the decline of
political control celebrated by liberal revisionists was replaced by
conglomerate control, about which they say little.
30 Habermas, op. cit., p. 171.
31 A useful summary of predominantly US research is provided by Alexis
Tan, Mass Communication Theories and Society, 2nd edn, New York:
Wiley, 1985. For a survey of European research, see James Curran, ‘The
new revisionism in mass communication research: a reappraisal’,
European Journal of Communication, vol. 5, nos 2–3 (1990).
32 Asa Briggs, The BBC: The First Fifty Years, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1985; Asa Briggs, Governing the BBC, London: BBC, 1979; Asa
Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vols 1–4,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961–79; Grace Wyndam Goldie,
Facing the Nation: Television and Politics, 1936– 76, London: Bodley
Head; Bernard Sendall, Independent Television in Britain, vols 1 and 2,
London: Macmillan, 1982 and 1983.
33 Philip Schlesinger, Graham Murdock and Philip Elliott, Televising
‘Terrorism’, London: Pluto Press, 1983.
34 Michael Leapman, The Last Days of the Beeb, 2nd edn, London:
Coronet, 1987; Michael Cockerell, Peter Hennesy and David Walker,
Sources Close to the Prime Minister, London: Macmillan, 1984.
35 For example, Joe McGinnis, The Selling of the President, New York:
Trident, 1969.