Page 69 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

58 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

What I want to argue in this chapter is that it is a mistake to take the
‘serious functions’ of the press and of journalism as canonical, either
from the point of view of understanding the press or its relationship to
society.
The serious functions of the journalist are normally attributed to
reporting of political and social news. The Royal Commission, and
subsequent writers, sustained their position despite the fact that their own
content analysis told them that unequivocally serious news took up
around 15 per cent of the news content of the two most widely read
papers, while sport took up more news space than ‘political, social and
economic in general’ material in every national daily paper they looked
at bar the Financial Times. In the case of the two most popular papers,
there was around six times as much space devoted to sport as this serious
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material commanded. A great deal of what is in the press is not at all
serious, at least in the sense that this has been traditionally defined. This
development in the British press is not a new one: it has been going on
at least since the 1930s. It is high time that this lack of seriousness was
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taken more seriously itself. There are important ideological reasons why
journalists should stress their serious functions, but there are no good
grounds for scholars to follow them. 4
One of the reasons these evident facts have not been taken at all
seriously by academic writers is because of the way in which theories of
the press fit into accounts of the nature of bourgeois democracy. The
function of the press, and its historical evolution towards its supposed
current status, are for many commentators amongst the constitutive
elements of the theoretical framework which allows them to speak of
Britain, or any other society, as a ‘democracy’ at all.
This powerful ideological component in thinking about the press is
particularly clear if we look at the way in which the development of the
press is commonly discussed. In the case of the UK, it is usually argued
that press history may be thought of as having a four-stage development
which closely parallels the extension of the franchise and the ‘maturing’
of democracy. In the period up to 1850, the press was essentially
suborned to state control via subsidies and legal restriction: those
sections which were not were largely the voice of the unenfranchised
poor. After the abolition of the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’, the groundwork
was laid for the development of a commercial press, but the full
flowering of this was somewhat delayed. For the last half of the
nineteenth century the dominant press was ‘political’ in the sense that it
was closely tied into the existing party system, either through ownership
or subsidy. The close relation between some journalists and the still
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