Page 75 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

64 COMMUNICATION AND CITIZENSHIP

needed a return on their investment. On the other hand there were the
members of the Labour Party who regularly moved that the concessions
to popularity had gone so far as to render the paper useless to their
political aims. The strain became intolerable:

But as time passed the controversies between myself and the
business management of the paper became increasingly acute. I
had certain very positive convictions regarding the responsibility
of a newspaper to give its readers full reports of, and informed
comments on, serious news. These convictions deepened as the
war approached and hostilities began. It appeared to me that even
more than before it had become the duty of a newspaper to devote
its space to a serious and reasoned criticism of the problems
social and economic as well as military that were arising, and
which seemed to me to require serious thought and concentrated
attention on the part of both writers and readers if they were to be
solved. I do not imagine there could have been disagreement on
principle in this. But in the application of the principle there
certainly was. 18

Williams was forced into an intolerable position and resigned. There
had quite clearly been a conflict between the dynamic of producing a
popular paper on the one hand and the commitment to a serious political
paper on the other.
This problem has not disappeared. The desire to create, or to sustain,
large-circulation left-wing papers is pandemic in parts of Europe. In
Scandinavia the widespread use of state subsidies seems to be designed
to perpetuate the life of left-leaning papers in the face of much more
market-oriented rivals. In the UK the very idea of press subsidies is the
stuff of the wildest dreams of Labour Party press reformers, and
considerable energies and capital have been invested in attempts to
produce a left-wing popular press within the confines of the market.
One of these ventures even got off the ground and the disaster
surrounding the attempt to produce a Sunday paper devoted to this
project in 1987, the News on Sunday debacle, demonstrates quite clearly
that, other problems apart, the tension persists and is, if anything,
greater than it was. For much longer than the popular daily press, the
19
popular Sunday press has been a working-class entertainment organ and
the News on Sunday was an attempt to short-circuit that history. It
proved in practice what theory suggested: that the cultural spaces of