Page 70 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

GOODBYE, HILDY JOHNSON 59

very restricted governing classes gave the press a crucial role in debates
about political decision-making. This political press, partisan in nature
and concerned more with comment than with reporting, was sufficiently
powerful to render even the nascent commercial press, which began to
develop as a daily press at the turn of the century, politicized. However,
the decline of this type of party press was more or less inevitable once a
mass circulation and genuinely popular press developed, along with the
extension of the franchise to ever-wider groups. After the end of the
Second World War the press became decreasingly partisan.
Commercial considerations replaced political motivations and these
meant that, in order to reach as broad an audience as possible, it was
essential to replace the partisan comment which might offend the reader
with news reporting of a kind which all could read with equanimity. 6
A number of observations need to be made about this school of
analysis. In the first place, the notion that the ‘political press’ declined
can only be sustained by insisting on the sharp difference between a
press that is more or less directly owned and ran by a political party or
faction in order to serve their immediate ends and one which is owned
and run by a commercial operator for profit and only incidentally takes
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factional political stands of one kind or another. There is indeed an
important difference between these two kinds of newspapers, and we
shall return to some of its implications below, but it is doubtful whether
this is best thought of in terms of the changes of function of the press
itself. An obvious alternative account would be that it is the nature of
the political function that has changed. The mass-circulation press is no
longer concerned primarily to articulate the different opinions of
competing sections of a narrow political elite but with the general
maintenance of the conditions upon which the continued dominance of
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that elite rest. This, surely, is best seen not as the decline of the political
role of the press but its adaptation to the conditions of bourgeois
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democracy.
Second, and immediately following from such a reformulation, the
perspective of declining partisanship now seems greatly exaggerated if
not plain wrong. Its persuasive power was more a product of the relaxed
atmosphere of the long post-war boom than of a permanent change in a
feature of the British press. As the social and political atmosphere has
become more tense, the contours of continuing partisanship have
emerged more and more clearly. Certainly there is no evidence that
there has been a uniform shift towards more impartial and responsible
reporting. It is difficult to see the qualitative difference in practices
between the fabrication of the ‘Zinoviev Letter’ in 1924 and the