Page 73 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

62 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

the category have in common is that they are products of a similar
technical process of reproduction, and in that they are not at all unique.
We can see this quite clearly if we look at some of the distinctive
features of the working-class press. There is a relatively long tradition
of a working-class political press, in the narrow sense, at least from
Chartism onwards. It does not occupy a single place in working-class
life, nor does it have a uniform weight in the consciousness of the class.
On the contrary, its importance both in terms of its ‘reach’ and its
efficacy has varied widely over the years, but it is true to say that it has
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had a marginal influence at least since the defeat of Chartism. It has,
intermittently, contained ‘unserious’ material, too, but this has always
been secondary to the political material. On the other hand, there has
always also been a ‘popular’ working-class press, although it has not
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always taken the form of the newspaper. The popular press has certainly
often contained a political content, but the nature of that material and
the relative weight it has had compared with other matter has varied
considerably over time. It has always been secondary to the ‘unserious’
elements which have provided the core of the material in these
publications and, it seems likely, the prime reason why large numbers
of workers purchased them. These are two different kinds of newspaper
which have quite a different relationship to their readership, which we
may, in Lukácsian terms, describe as the difference between an
articulation of the empirical and the maximum potential consciousness
of the class to which they are addressed.
It is in the tradition of popular working-class entertainment that we
have to see that section of the modern press which is purchased today
by working-class people—centrally those mass-circulation tabloids with
their readership skewed towards the C2–E Social Grades but also,
increasingly, the mass-circulation tabloids with a C1–C2 skew. The
primary content of these papers is their entertainment material. The
‘serious’ parts of this press are secondary to both their construction and
appeal. They certainly contain overtly political and social material,
although in relatively small proportions compared with the amount of
space they devote to other matters. The skew of their content, however,
is towards entertainment and away from the ‘serious’.
These papers now have a mature history of some fifty years and we
can state with confidence that they are established as a central and
important part of modern working-class cultural life. Over time they
have diverged increasingly in their major news-values from the much
more obviously ‘serious’ quality press and there is really very little
ground today for the claim that they are at all the same sort of cultural