Page 71 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

60 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

numerous fabrications recorded by James Curran in his study of the
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press and the London Labour Councils sixty years later. It may be that
the press has ceased to be the mechanism by means of which different
factions of the ruling class jockey for position amongst themselves, but
it seems that it remains unrelentingly hostile to anyone who proposes to
do something, however feeble, about social inequalities. The fact that
only the Independent of national daily newspapers did not advise its
readers how to vote in the 1987 General Election is not conclusive
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evidence of a general trend towards non-partisanship. The bulk of the
press remains extremely and regularly partisan and it is widely thought
that it is actually getting more partisan. Before the last election a
prominent journalist and Labour supporter was worrying that ‘there is
not a single national daily newspaper that can be expected to give full
support to the Labour Party come polling day’. He cited this as evidence
of a tendency towards a decrease in Labour’s press support, not a
decrease in press politicization, since 1945. 12
The most substantial problem with this account, however, is a
theoretical rather than empirical one. This version of press history is
‘teleological’ in that it assumes that there is an immanent process
working itself out which was present all along and which finds its
fullest expression in the present state of the press. This history is written
around the political and news functions of the daily press as though they
were self-evidently the common yardstick by which it should be
measured. Other types of press activity than that of the non-partisan,
commercial press devoted to giving its audience information about the
political and social world, are effectively marginalized by the
framework of thought itself. Not only is this actually untrue as a
description of the modern British press but it obscures by its very
definition of its object the possibility that other types of press activity
might be at least as significant.
An alternative account of this history would begin by recognizing
that newspapers, like any other cultural artefact, are complex both in
their internal structure and in their relationship to their audiences. They
are inserted into a matrix of cultural practices which are differentiated
along the major lines of division in a society. There is no warrant for
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claiming that one particular type of content, or one particular type of
readership, is the absolute standard by which all and every aspect of the
press is to be judged. On the contrary, it is likely that to speak of a
single unified category of ‘the press’, or ‘newspapers’, or ‘journalism’
conceals very much more than it reveals. We know that there is a
definite sociology of taste in a wide range of cultural practices: music is